Pockets of good practice

New universities receive less state funding for research than old ones. Is it time for a change, asks Clive Booth. It is time for new universities to take the offensive in asserting their role in the national research effort. For too long the traditional university research lobby has had the field to itself.

Public funds should encourage research in new universities. The new universities welcomed the opportunity to enter their research into the 1992 Research Assessment Exercise. Although the RAE had been designed for assessing research in a more narrowly based range of institutions, the former polytechnics demonstrated substantial areas of national excellence in a surprisingly large numbers of areas - surprising because the polytechnics had historically received much less financial support for research than the old universities.

The absolute sums of money for research received by new universities following the 1992 RAE were small, but they have been put to good use. The short period between the start of this funding in 1993/94 and the latest RAE in March 1996 - only two and a half years - means that the full impact of this funding in new universities has yet to make itself felt. It would thus be irresponsible to judge the research performance and potential of new universities solely on the basis of the 1996 RAE. This is an important consideration in renewing DevR funding for a further four-year period from 1997/98.

The new Technology Foresight policies should help reverse past failures to deliver sufficient high quality strategic and applied research. New universities are well placed to assist the Government achieve the objectives of Technology Foresight: this is a natural part of their mission. Research can and should be defined broadly, spanning a spectrum ranging from basic research, through strategic and applied to near market research. Yet existing policy for university research concentrates almost exclusively on the basic research end of the spectrum. This means that much university research in the United Kingdom at the strategic and applied end is denied public funding. This is in sharp contrast to some of the UK's competitors, such as Japan, and is a reflection of our very low level of gross funding for research and development as a percentage of gross domestic product (less than 2.2 per cent in 1993/94).

Departments in new universities perform important work on the boundary between pure and applied research. It is not given the recognition it deserves because of the traditional orientation of the RAE. Such work would probably not be done at all, were it not for the very basic and limited research resources provided through the modest RAE funding received by such departments.

Policy mistakenly assumes that academic notions of excellence equate with the national interest. Yet there is a strong case for dual funding to support applied research. This is because the flow of company funding for research is as uneven and lumpy as research council funding. There is therefore a need for "continuity funding" in highly applied or developmental work. The absence of this is a flaw in the whole British approach to research funding.

Research funds should continue to be distributed selectively but no more selectively than in the 1992 Research Assessment Exercise.

There is no evidence at all that increasing selectivity beyond the levels of the 1992 RAE would secure value for money. A department rated 5 already receives for each research active member of staff four times as much as a department rated 2. Is there any evidence that the large increases in funding to top-rated departments have had a beneficial effect? It is just as likely that an extra pound spent on the margin would generate better value for money in a department rated 2 than a department rated 5.

Selectivity is essentially an approach derived from "big science" and expensive disciplines. In many subjects, however, no case exists for high levels of concentration and selectivity. Selectivity should be applied differentially according to subject area.

Proposals to limit funds allocated after the 1996 RAE to units of assessment graded 3 and above would result in the redistribution of only very modest sums of money in relation to the RAE as a whole. Grade 2 departments have achieved national excellence in as much as half of their areas of activity. It cannot be in the national interest to lose the research strengths of these individuals and groups for the sake of sums so marginal that, if transferred, could not transform other departments into world-class departments.

The Harris report on postgraduate education recommends that departments rated 2 in the RAE should cease to qualify for funding for research students via the RAE. The report offers no evidence that departments rated 2 are a less suitable environment for research students than higher rated departments: indeed this is another example of the inappropriate use of the RAE ratings. Even the survey commissioned by Harris fails to provide evidence for the recommendation: it indicates that research students from ex-polytechnic made more mentions of the positive features of their academic programmes than those in former Universities Funding Council institutions in the specific areas of library, teaching, organisation and materials.

The approach to research assessment requires further refinement. It relies on a concept of excellence that is too narrow, a tendency to overlook small research groups to over-rate large ones. Even more alarmingly, RAE ratings are now used by bodies other than funding councils as a short cut to discriminating between research groups or departments for purposes quite unrelated to the RAE. This is likely to result in a rapid ossification, loss of dynamism and stifled initiative.

Existing funding council policy is to discriminate at the level of the unit of assessment, rather than to base selectivity on whole institutions. This is as it should be, because research performance and promise can be very unevenly distributed across institutions. Within a diverse higher education system, it should be possible for a university not well funded overall for research to be funded for pockets of good research.

Collaboration between research groups in different institutions should be encouraged. Concentration in physical locations is becoming outdated because researchers are part of an increasingly international community, using information technology for regular, fast communication and shared facilities through sabbaticals, etc. Research funding needs to support collaboration.

The Dearing committee should devise policies that reflect the positive role of the new universities in research. If they accept the propositions outlined in this article they will be on the right lines.

Clive Booth is vice chancellor of Oxford Brookes University.