Compilation of press articles about the REF and impact agendas

Compiled by NCCPE, November 2009

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009 Impact debate

THE Feb 2009 Article: Scientists call for a revolt against grant rule they claim will end blue-skies research

THE Leader Feb 2009 Leader: Short-term outlook, no blue skies

REF launch Reuters news story about the REF consultation launch: "Mickey Mouse" degrees face funding battle

Independent 8th Comment from the Independent online: Let’s preserve the dotty, dying don. October THE 1st Oct 2009 Opinion piece by Claire Fox, the Institute of Ideas: Academy strikes back: the fight for 'useless' knowledge starts here No10.gov petition Petition to No 10: Promote discovery and innovation in UK science. Oct 2009 UCU petition UCU Petition: Stand up for Research

Don and dusted debate ‘Independent’ comment

THE Oct 2009 Article about David Mitchell’s Observer coulmn: The mirth-making candidate? Peep Show star's REF critique the right stuff for councils THE Letter OCt Letter from Martyn Hammersley, OU: Curious and curiouser THE Oct 2009 Article: Rethink impact plans, think-tank tells Hefce HEPI Press release Oct Press release - Proposals for the REF - a critique 2009

THE Oct 2009 Letter from Adam Corner, Cardiff University: Academic knowledge must be socially useful 1

THE Oct 2009 Alan Thorpe article: Research intelligence: 'You must spread the word' The Open letter Nov Open letter to RCUK: Only scholarly freedom delivers real 'impact' 1 2009 THE Response from Alan Letter in response from Alan Thorpe, RCUK: Impact is created in immeasurable ways 2 Thorpe

THE Article Nov 2009 Article: Managers and scholars divided as resistance grows to impact agenda THE Nov 2009 Letter from James Ladyman, University of Bristol: Impact is created in immeasurable ways 1

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009 Scientists call for a revolt against grant rule they claim will end blue- skies research http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=405350 12 February 2009 By Zoë Corbyn

Letter blames research councils' policies for fall in number of UK Nobel laureates, reports Zoë Corbyn

A "revolt" against the requirement that academics demonstrate the economic impact of their research was called for this week by 20 eminent UK scientists, including Nobel prizewinner Sir Harry Kroto.

In a letter in this issue of Times Higher Education, the group calls for academics to rebel against new rules that state that the potential financial or social effects of research must be highlighted in a two-page "impact summary" in grant applications.

The requirement to provide a summary, answering questions about who might benefit from the research and how a financial return could be ensured, is being phased in by the UK's seven research councils. The summary will be used by peer reviewers as a factor when determining which applications receive funding.

But in the letter, the group, which includes eight fellows of the Royal Society, "urges" the peer reviewers to ignore the summaries - arguing that it is impossible to predict the economic impact of "blue-skies" research in advance.

The letter says peer reviewers "should confine their assessments to matters in which they are demonstrably competent. In research worthy of the name, we are not aware of anyone who would be competent at foretelling specific future benefits and therefore in complying with the request in any meaningful and substantive manner."

The letter also criticises the research councils for policies over the past 30 years that it claims have subjected academics to "withering barrages of control" and turned researchers' lives into "bureaucratic nightmares". The letter blames these policies for "almost a tenfold decrease" in the rate at which UK researchers have been winning Nobel prizes.

"(The research councils) must become more courageous in dealing with the Government or they will not have an enterprise worth protecting," it warns.

It also rounds on the Government for driving academics to increase the economic impact of their work while ignoring the "serious problem" of low-level investment in research and development by British companies.

"What is the point of having a second-to-none academic sector if its commitment to innovation is not matched by commerce and industry? Academics are, of course, a much easier target," the scientists write.

The letter was organised by Donald Braben, a visiting professor at University College London, and Philip Moriarty, a professor of physics at the University of Nottingham. Professor Braben told Times Higher Education that the academics had reached "the last straw" with the councils. One signatory said he would happily sign "in blood", he added.

"The academic community must stand up," said Professor Braben, adding that history showed that even the most seemingly inapplicable of scientific discoveries could yield huge economic benefits, such as the development of lasers.

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009 "You cannot command developments at the frontier, it is not possible," Professor Braben said.

He added that the new policy spelt the end for blue-skies research. "As soon as you identify a beneficiary for research ... the councils are going to turn it around and say, right, deliver. And then it is applied research ... You can't have blue-skies research if you put caveats on it."

Philip Esler, chief executive of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, speaking on behalf of Research Councils UK, said: "The description of impact that the research councils work with is broad, encompassing not only the contribution research makes to the economy but also to society as a whole.

"It covers not only economic benefits, but also those related to public policy, quality of life, health and creative output. Research councils will not be disadvantaging blue-skies research, nor stifling creativity.

"The impact statement is not designed to ask peer reviewers or applicants to predict future benefits. It is intended to allow the applicant to highlight potential pathways to impact, especially through collaboration with partners, and to help the research councils support them in these activities.

"Research councils recognise that impact cannot be solely recognised by the researchers, but requires collaboration with user communities. Where applicants feel that their research is not likely to have an immediate or obvious impact, then they should state that in the application. Excellent research without obvious or immediate impact will not be disadvantaged. We remain committed to supporting excellent research and ensuring that it benefits as many individuals, organisations and nations as possible."

Professor Moriarty said: "No one has attempted this type of grassroots boycott before."

Lord Drayson, the Science Minister, said the UK is committed to increasing the amount invested in research and development by firms, as evidenced by its R&D tax-credit scheme for business.

The 20th signatory of the letter, Herbert Huppert FRS, was added after the letters page of Times Higher Education went to press.

[email protected]

Readers' comments

 Mark Bretscher, FRS 12 February, 2009 The suggestion by Don Braben and supporters that grant applicants simply ignore the new requirement of providing a 2 page "impact plan" has an alternative. An all-encompassing "impact plan" could be drawn up and used by all who regard their research as basic but don't have anything helpful to add to their scientific proposal. This would allow the all-powerful bureaucrats to fill their files with that which they think they need. Of course, it might conflict with the Government's green posture......

 Professor Mike Glazer 12 February, 2009 Here we go again. This is substantially the same argument we went through during the Thatcher period. Then the catchphrase was "wealth creation". The latest policy is as much misguided as the it was then. It resulted in the Save British Science movement and in the rejection of Mrs Thatcher for an honorary degree in Oxford,as well creating turmoil amongst research scientists. It is high time that scientific research was recognised for what it is: it may be inefficient in terms of directly leading to applied results, but history has demonstrated time and time again that the the really important discoveries, the ones that have transformed our world, have not come about through guided programmes, but instead have turned up accidentally. As always with these government inspired schemes there is a basic confusion between scientific research and technology. It is vital that able scientists are allowed to follow their instincts in research rather than to be dictated to from above. Otherwise, the likely outcome will be the stifling of major discoveries.

 Professor Lee Cronin 12 February, 2009

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009 The political establishment presently has an obsession with control, and hides behind the fact the tax payer ultimately funds a large percentage of the scientific endeavours in UK Universities, to exert this in areas which they have no business or understanding. Right now, chemists, like many disciplines may be able to contribute to solving some of the greatest problems of our generation associated with energy, health and pollution. But we must not lose sight of the scientific research process that requires chance, inspiration, free thinking, and the need to embrace the chase of finding out what is possible without justification. Also, I believe fundamentally that scientists, even those funded by the tax payer, should be able to research areas that have no immediate economic value. Ironically, these are the areas which yield incredible insights that can have economic value, or win a noble prize (or both!). Therefore the need to write an impact summary requires a crystal ball that we do not have, unless you are Lord Drayson who apparently has claimed he has a 6th sense; in that case we do not need an impact statement, we just need Lord Drayson sit on the funding committees and tell us which grants are going to generate vast sums of cash.

 Ken 13 February, 2009 Let's talk within the context of the sciences - physics, chemistry, biology and medicine. The core of the problem lies in the education and immigration systems in the UK. The education system does not encourage diversity, i.e., too provincial, focusing only on the immediate interests of the nation. The Nobel Prize, afterall, betokens a significant contribution that has a profound impact on human lifes everywhere. Also, much money is wasted on insignificant research and endeavors which have no immediate use to society (RAE is an example). The UK needs to have a more open policy in terms of recruiting brilliant and talented international students, as well as having a more immigrant-friendly environment to retain talented people, many of whom will eventually become citizens. To set up a system that will make winning Nobel prizes a high possibility requires a change of mentality, money and time. The UK needs to focus on the long-term benefits of building such a system. And by the way, talk is cheap.

 Professor James Ladyman 14 February, 2009 Given that the majority of the world's experts failed to predict the economic impact of the house price bubble, what chance do researchers outside of economics have of predicting the impact of their research. The RCUK protest that they are not just interested in economic impact but in wider social and cultural benefits. Either way are we supposed to look at benefits over a 5 year, 10 year or 20 year period? The idea of funding academic research on the basis of impact as opposed to its academic merits is absurd because the best predictor of the good consequences that will flow from research is academic excellence.

 Ken 14 February, 2009 Professor James Ladyman, research in areas such as energy and medicine would have both economic impact and academic merit. As for what defines long-term, that would depend very much on the consensus of the scientists and researchers in your country.

 Dave 14 February, 2009 "research in areas such as energy and medicine would have both economic impact and academic merit." - okay, so we can take that as read, then. So no need to quantify such impacts in a grant application. That confirms that this new directive is a pointless and time consuming exercise.

 F Kovacs 16 February, 2009 Making scientific research a subject to money/making is no wonder at all. That has been expected for some time, when universites have been reorganized to emulate business ventures. Today there is no way to come up with a new idea and put in practice, unless somebody else can make a lot of money on that. Science is not focused on solving problems but on finding new ways of making money. Everybody accepts the primacy of money, so why be surprised? Not that I like it, but cannot change it either.

 Editor's comment

Steven Hill, head of Research Councils UK's Strategy Unit, has responded to the scientists‟ letter and the Times Higher Education articles via his blog. Seehttp://hypotheses.wordpress.com/2009/02/13/a-nobel- effort/

Ann Mroz Editor, THE

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009  John D. 18 February, 2009 What would Watson and Crick have written in their grant application? Wouild they have said: we plan to discover the structure of DNA, which several decades from now will become the basis for the science of genomics and the industry of biotechnology, as well as the source of many important discoveries and applications in medicine.

 Martin Sahlén 24 February, 2009 It is worrying to see the stance of the UK government on this important issue, however they might protest that no-one will be disadvantaged. All of academic research cannot, to fulfil its full functional potential, be made to oblige under typically short-sighted or simply ill-defined socio-economic cost-benefit analyses. A crucial part of academic research is that of re-imagining the frameworks within which society operates. If reduced to a set of cogs in the already-existing machine, the crucial function of creating new machines (or whichever analogy may appeal to the reader) will be significantly hampered. At a time in history when creative transformation is crucial to our survival, traditional universities and their researchers should be allowed and encouraged to foster new, sustainable solutions as freely as possible. I fear that the direction suggested by the UK government will rather align funded research to a vision of technocratic tinkering with a fundamentally unsustainable system, and we shall all be the poorer for it - whatever economic impact analyses may proclaim. Let's not waste our creative potential that way.

 Matthew Karlsen 24 February, 2009 In addition to the overall argument that it is "impossible to predict the economic impact of "blue-skies" research in advance" the question of how you measure "economic impact" and what it really means for society as a whole are also very important. Even if you could accurately predict the economic impact of a particular project (both the direct impact *and* the benefits of all the future research that the initial research leads to) economic impact is a very poor measure of overall benefit to society. For instance, GDP provides a very bad measure of the overall success of a society (thus the proliferation of alternative measures of well-being such as GNH and HPI). Goods and services developed as a defensive measure against the negative impacts of economic/industrial activity can be said to have an "economic impact" but overall people are out of pocket with little improvement to their lives (this relates to the "parable of the broken window"). Research of real benefit to society does not necessarily show up on the bottom line.

 Paul Healey 27 February, 2009 Imposing or not imposing a new economic impact criteria trivialises the problem. What I would like to see addressed, is the basis for decisions on research funding. That is, what is the legal basis for either recognising, or not recognising different schools of thought doing research on the same topic? I think such schools should be recognised; fairly represented, else, democracy becomes a bad joke. For without the choice to think differently, the idea of a majority becomes a direct attack on the notion of freedom itself; it becomes a contradiction: the government‟s freedom is based on the denial of the researcher‟s freedom. Freedom should mean the freedom to think differently. Freedom, should not mean conformity to a set of unmediated and or abstract standards of excellence, else, it is not freedom. By reducing the problem to the case of imposing or not imposing, the issue can be made to look like one of control versus anarchy, where as, it should be be about how decisions are mediated for the benefit of others rights and interests.

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009

Leader: Short-term outlook, no blue skies http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=405363 12 February 2009 By forcing academics to do R&D for industry, ministers stifle the type of curiosity-driven work that delivers the biggest bangs

The scientists who have put their names to a letter published in this issue calling for an end to the research councils' overemphasis on economic impact are taking a brave stand.

While we all want to ensure that taxpayer-funded research benefits our society and economy, it is muddled thinking to make funding for blue-skies research contingent on the economic and social benefits it might deliver. As the letter points out, who on earth is in a position to predict where cutting-edge research will take us? In fact, a Russell Group report issued late last year found that the commercialisation of blue-skies research generated twice the average returns of applied research.

Such a policy also ignores valuable lessons from the past. This is eloquently illustrated by the example of laser devices cited by Donald Braben, one of the letter's signatories. Lasers are used today in everything from surgical procedures to light displays, but it was not until 20 years after the technology was invented by the Nobel prizewinning scientist Charles Townes that industry began to see its potential (Professor Townes certainly did not). What would happen today if a scientist sought funding from UK research councils to pursue inquiry on similar lines?

The scientists' letter also notes the failure of industry to invest in its own research and development - still the most tried-and-tested method of delivering short-term economic impact. Data show that British companies spent far less as a proportion of their profits on R&D than the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development average (1.1 per cent in 2006 against an OECD average of nearly 1.6 per cent). The UK figure has been declining since the 1980s (although data from the Government's latest business scorecard do show an increase in top firms' expenditure).

The unpalatable truth is that industry is increasingly seeing it as academia's role to undertake its R&D. Rather than trying to force academics to deliver market gains, government policy should focus on raising the sums British companies spend on R&D. But as the letter points out, academics are far easier to take on than big business. Yet such a stance is unlikely to bring big returns for UK plc quickly. Unlike academic research, industrial research can be directed from the centre: Britain can decide on the areas in which it wishes to excel and then create policies that deliver.

This is, admittedly, no easy task. Yes, there is a recession and yes, science and business policy come under different government departments; but if the aim is wealth creation from research, it is the only sensible policy. Lord Drayson, who controversially called for a debate on narrowing the research effort to areas that boost the economy, would do well to remember this.

The research councils are in a difficult position. In light of government requests for proof of value for money, they are trying to make scientists think about how their research can be used. But the letter writers want a little more courage from the councils in dealing with Government: researchers need to know that the councils are on their side.

The scientists' cause is a worthy one: arguing for the need to retain a spirit of adventure and unbridled optimism that can produce the chance discovery that leads to something that we cannot even conceive of today. That freedom to pursue unfettered the research that will drive innovation should never be constrained, especially as the economic gloom descends and it becomes harder than ever to see the blue skies beyond. [email protected]

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009 Readers' comments

 Andrew Turberfield 12 February, 2009 Members of prioritization panels, who are drawn from the same community as peer reviewers and who use reviewers' reports to rank research proposals, could join this revolt. Whether they revolt or not, they should disregard impact statements if they believe that reviewers' assessments of them are unreliable.

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009 Being a humble servant to business will be a disaster for everyone

THE 4 June 2009 http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=406815

By insisting our universities' sole role is to fire the economy, we have lost sight of their more civilising purpose, says Thomas Docherty

For some time now, the fundamental aims of a university education have been in jeopardy; and, in this time of financial crisis, the betrayal of those aims needs to be addressed. The threat comes from a Government that closed the Department for Education, and from a supine Higher Education Funding Council for England and Universities UK, who see their role as managing government priorities rather than representing, within those priorities, the realities of education. Behind all this lies the mantra that universities are a form of "business". That way disaster lies.

In 1929, just before what we must now learn to call the First Great Depression, A.N. Whitehead wrote The Aims of Education. Whitehead, mathematician-turned-Harvard-professor-of-philosophy, built his case on his experience in senior university management in London, undertaken while he was doing his most imaginative mathematical work. He argues that the university exists primarily as a site for the free play of imagination. "The university imparts information, but it imparts it imaginatively," he wrote, emphasising that "the atmosphere of excitement, arising from imaginative consideration, transforms knowledge. A fact is no longer a bare fact: it is invested with all its possibilities." For Whitehead, the university exists to open new possibilities. It was most certainly neither an instrumentalist nor a utilitarian servant of a purely mercantile economy.

This is important: a university contributes to the commercial and mercantile economy, certainly; however, that is but one tiny part of what it does. It actually contributes immensely more to the economy of civic wellbeing, acting as a servant to wider aims of civilisation. These cannot be reduced to what Thomas Carlyle used to call the cash nexus. Those who claim that the university is a business are complicit with a massive act of deskilling, for they eliminate the vast majority of what we do from material consideration.

Whitehead was aware of business, too. He explicitly argued for the opening of a Harvard Business School; but he did so on the grounds that business, especially in fragile economic times, requires the imaginative atmosphere of a free play of imaginings and possibilities. Decision-making in business, he thought, would benefit from the presence of poetry. Like William Blake, he thought that imagination was not only creative, but also materially transformative. His maths had already shown that imagination is not the pure preserve of arts and humanities, but is rather at the core of the preservation of those huge possibilities that we usually denominate as "the future".

And while Whitehead and others would unlock imagination, Gordon Brown and his ilk (ministers, grovelling quangos and so on) would "unlock Britain's talent". For Whitehead, read Simon Cowell.

Ah, business: the very word is like a Keatsian bell that tolls me back to my forlorn self. It is a bell, however, that tolls for itself in this Second Great Depression. For the university is not, cannot be - and should not try to be - a business. Let us consider it seriously for a moment: it won't take long. What kind of business takes in raw material, works on it for a number of years, radically transforming its power and potential - and then gives it away, free, to industries that seek to make massive profit from the transformed product? If we are a business, we should sell our graduates; we should not be charging them for subjecting themselves to the possibility of transformation.

Ridiculous? Yes: every bit as ridiculous as saying that it is our task to produce what business wants. As Freud may have asked in our time, "What does business want?" Business is massively diverse, but in general, it needs people whose imaginations can cope with - indeed can generate - possibility. In short, it does not want those with alleged transferable skills, but those fired with an imagination that has been enlarged through their immersion in one or more disciplines.

In the 1970s, we turned to "business" as the new metaphor and presiding principle around which to organise the academy. It replaced earlier, more organic models in which we had fields of study, areas of inquiry, yielding relative degrees of cultivation or growth. Now, instead, we have transparent accounts and bottom lines. This recent crisis, however, shows the limitations of the business model as its bottom falls out of its trousers. Is it time to ask for some spirited leadership that would re-engage the broader aspect of our aims in education? Should we look to major groups for this? How about the Russell Group? Of course, if they think in

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009 business terms, they may call themselves the Russell Brand; at least that may awaken a satirical and critical wit that would open a dialogue and help start to reskill a civilisation that can think beyond the parable of the unlocked talents.

Postscript :

Thomas Docherty is professor of English and comparative literature, University of Warwick.

Readers' comments

 Clive R. Boddy 5 June, 2009 Treating a University as a Business Thomas, you clearly already know what taking an academic approach means, as eloquently described in your article. However, business may be a dirty word in academia but in business, taking a business approach often means making something streamlined, efficient, productive and sustainable in terms of resources used. The question then becomes, do you think that universities could gain time and resources for academics, students and administrators by making things more streamlined, efficient, productive and sustainable? University management processes have grown and developed over the very many years of a university‟s existence. Indeed, the age of universities as institutions is recognised in the academic literature as a factor in their reluctance to change their well established habits and work practices (Comm and Mathaisel, 2005a, Comm and Mathaisel, 2005b). Understandably then, university personnel are very established in their ways and it is a leap of faith for them to accept that although they feel that current systems are too demanding and onerous in terms of time spent on administration, teaching and research, this is merely a by-product of their historically implemented management processes, processes that may have worked very well in the past but are no longer efficient. It is evident from experience, that applying a business oriented philosophy involving a process-reengineering technique like a Lean Six Sigma approach to a university bureaucracy is a viable and effective strategy to improve the pace and quality of efficiency improvements in such settings, leading to lasting and permanent improvements in efficiency. Suggestions have been made that universities should be using the approach much more to help them streamline the increasing administrative load that academics and managers face (Bandyopadhyay and Lichtman, 2007). I strongly support such suggestions. One example of such an approach can be seen from treating a university library as a business. The “business” of university libraries is to act as resource facilitators, with a large focus on students and academic researchers borrowing and externally removing books and journals. Using a process-reengineering approach to measure and analyse the pre-existing process used for university library returns may result in a 52% reduction in the number of individual process steps involved. (Process steps being in this case, the things that library staff do to get books back on shelves). This may in turn mean that library books and journals are now returned to shelves on average, a day earlier than they previously were, equating to a ten percent improvement in the availability of these important teaching and learning resources. A ten percent increase in resources would otherwise have involved buying 200,000 more books and journals and at an average cost of A$35 per book or journal this would have cost A$7m. Streamlining university library operations like this frees up learning and teaching resources, physical space in the library, and library staff time. A final benefit is that of transfer of skills to library staff, who have now adopted the evidence based management decision criteria from the Lean Six Sigma methodology in their approach to managing their own work. Looking at other areas that a university is involved in, as a business, may lead you to conclude that having undergraduate drop-out rates of 15% to 40% and postgraduate drop-out rates of 50% to 60% was more than a bit wasteful of time and resources. Such failure rates would not be deemed acceptable in business and measures would be put in place to manage them out of existence. This issue of undergraduate and postgraduate student withdrawals is the subject of much concern to academics themselves and of huge amounts of discussion in universities around the world and has been studied and researched extensively. There is a substantial and growing body of literature on the subject (Wetzel et al., 1999). Indeed, it has been called one of the most widely studied topics in higher education and the number of academic papers on the subject has been described as voluminous (Danaher et al., 2008). Applying a business improvement model to the situation may have business managers coming up with management strategies, student intervention strategies, teaching and learning methods and other methods of maximising student commitment and involvement with universities so as to slash drop-out rates significantly, at the same time reducing bureaucracy for students and university staff alike. I could go on with many further examples of where treating the university as a business would have beneficial effects to all concerned but I think you get the message. As a former business person who has previously turned companies around, and who has subsequently become involved with academia, I would humbly suggest that treating a university as a business would lead to service and academic excellence at world class levels for the institution involved. It would free up academic resources, reduce the time that academics have to spend on administration, increase student completion rates at all levels and enable resources to be directed towards research, teaching and such initiatives as increasing university participation rates among the disadvantaged. Thanks for your time in reading this. I look forward to your response. Clive R. Boddy. References BANDYOPADHYAY, J. K. & LICHTMAN, R. (2007) Six Sigma Approach to Quality and Productivity Improvement in an Institution for Higher Education in the United States. International Journal of Management, 24, 802 - 807. COMM, C. L. & MATHAISEL, D., F. X. (2005a) An exploratory study of best lean sustainability practices in higher education. Quality Assurance in Education: An International Perspective, 13, 227 - 240. COMM, C. L. & MATHAISEL, D., F. X. (2005b) A case study in applying lean sustainability concepts to universities. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 6, 134-146. DANAHER, P. A., BOWSER, D. & SOMASUNDARAM, J. (2008) The student departure puzzle: do some faculties and programs have answers? Higher Education Research & Development, 27, 271 - 280. WETZEL, J. N., O'TOOLE, D. & PETERSON, S. (1999) Factors Affecting Student Retention Probabilities: A Case Study. Journal of Economics & Finance, 23, 45 - 55. Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009  Irina 5 June, 2009 Thank you, it was very interesting to read both opinions. To my mind university combines in inself a lot of features and tasks. It has many roles and functions in the society. Some of them dominate in particular period of time, but unversity need them all and can't do without them. University is a business, but it insn't only business enterprise, it is far more than that. In brief I would describe its main roles, functions as such: - providing higher education and preparing specialists for a variety of industries - preserving and distributing knowledge - doing research work and introducing innovations - functioning as a business enterprise (making profit, optimizing the use of resourses and ensuring the quality of the products and services produced, creating workplaces, paying taxes) - functioning as a charity (granting scholarships, sponsoring research projects and other activities which doesn't aim to make profit) University shouldn't forget that it serves high goals developing new knowledge and technologies, but it also can gain a lot of benefit applying business approach. So I think all functions should be considered as equally important and harmoniously combined.

 Thomas Docherty 15 June, 2009 Dear Clive R. Boddy, Thanks for your response to my piece. I'm a little tempted to say that 'I rest my case'; but that would be too cheap, given the time you have put into your reply. This said: your description of a library, for example, is not something that any scholar would recognise; and it is this kind of thinking that has, in my view, poisoned university education. My point is not that Universities schould eschew efficiency; rather, it is that by thinking of themselves in terms of the business model, they have become precisely much less efficient at doing their job. In short, they have (in common parlance) lost the plot. And, as before, the University is not as business: this may be hard to hear for VCs who like to talk tough or who think of themselves as CEOs. As I said in my jocular observation about selling our graduates: the business-plan that they are presenting would not pass muster with the managers at the bank of Toytown.

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009 "Mickey Mouse" degrees face funding battle Wed Sep 23, 2009 5:16pm BST Reuters UK

http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE58M46V20090923

[-] Text [+]

LONDON (Reuters) - University departments offering so-called "Mickey Mouse" degrees in subjects such as surf science, golf management and winemaking may face a greater battle for public money under proposals published by funding chiefs on Wednesday.

The Higher Education Funding Council for England, which distributes money for teaching and research to universities, said departments would have to show their work helps the economy and society if they want to secure the biggest grants.

"The Research Excellence Framework will recognise and reward excellent research and the sharing of new knowledge for the benefit of the economy and society," said David Sweeney, HEFCE Director for Research, Innovation and Skills. "It will also ensure the effective allocation of public funds."

The moves are aimed at increasing the quality of higher education research, the HEFCE said.

The government's target to get half of all young people into higher education has in the past been criticised for dumbing down university degrees and encouraging less academic courses on subjects such as the life of David Beckham.

There are more than two million higher education students in Britain and more than 50,000 courses.

Earlier this month Higher Education Minister David Lammy told university vice-chancellors that current levels of public investment were unlikely to be sustainable and funding would be reformed to ensure universities make a greater contribution to Britain's economic needs.

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009

Christina Patterson: Let's preserve the dotty, dying don

Independent Thursday, 8 October 2009 http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/christina-patterson/christina-patterson-lets-preserve-the-dotty-dying-don-1799227.html If I were rewriting Dante's Inferno, I'd ensure that the catalogue of punishments included a PhD. Perhaps for the bankers – the men in Armani, seeking instant fortunes from hot air – a seven-year sentence, in corduroys, in libraries, on semi-colons in Finnegans Wake. There'd be no Starbucks. No Blackberries. No shrieking or baying or bragging. Nothing except piles and piles of lit-crit, time stretching out to an invisible, distant horizon, and silence. For many Eng lit graduates, of course, this would be paradiso. Silence! Words! Books! Nothing to do but gaze out of a window and dream. Time to think, muse, watch the dance of semi-colons on a page, spend hours – weeks, months, years! – formulating your response to them, crafting the ultimate, perfect, definitive word on them, knowing that, having done so, you could finally rest in peace. Somewhere, in a library (or perhaps the store-room of a library), there would be a slim, self-published volume bearing your name. For some of us, however, it would be purgatorio. Take me to a library and I instantly want coffee and cake. I want a chat. I want a sofa. I want a break. Put a book on a desk, and it metamorphoses from friend to foe. Those words that looked so alluring on the sofa are now marshalled against you, swarming in hostile formations, plotting to catch you out. Bad enough for a morning, but for a year? For five years? For a lifetime? The life of a scholar, I think it's fair to say, is not for me. Sure, I love books, but I like to gobble them up, like a tasty chocolate muffin, not pore over them, like forms for the Inland Revenue. Sure, I like to write about them, but in little chunks, to regular deadlines, and not to a whopping great mountain of a deadline looming years ahead. Luckily for me, there's this thing called journalism, where you can do exactly that. You can immerse yourself in the worlds of politics, arts or books and respond to things as they happen. Journalism, as we all know, is in jeopardy. But scholarship's in jeopardy, too. "I'm going to be making an impassioned plea," said a Cambridge professor of classics on the Today programme yesterday, "for the sort of boffin-style, library-based, very badly dressed research that you associate with us traditional dons". The "don" was Mary Beard – a classicist, incidentally, who also writes for newspapers, including this one – and she was talking about a debate due to take place at the British Library last night on "whether the age of the scholar is now over". She planned to argue, she said, that the goal-oriented "evidence-based" bias of the funding structures for higher education was leading to a research environment in which "curiosity research, Darwin research" was in danger of turning into "a jumped-up version of A levels". "I'm quite happy," said Beard, "that research ends up being useful, but we don't know if that's going to be in 200 years' time, or for what. I think that research contributes to human civilisation and happiness and almost everything that makes life worth living." She is, of course, right. The truth, even for those of us who might well choose hara-kiri over research, is that we all need all the thinking we can get. We need quick thinking and we need slow thinking, the kind of thinking that stews, and brews, and bubbles away in the unconscious and emerges one day with a "Eureka!" shriek, or doesn't, because that's the risk of research – it may, or may not. We need people who know stuff properly, and in depth. We need people to say to prime ministers, "you don't know your history, please learn some history before you send more teenagers to die" and people to say to chancellors, and bankers, and regulators, "you don't know your economics, please learn something about bubbles and cycles and boom and bust before you allow our economy to implode". We need people to distinguish between the people who know, and the people who bullshit, and these people are called voters. And so we all need to know more, much, much more. We can only know more if other people know more than us and we are willing to learn. And the semi-colons? I don't know about the semi-colons. But I do know that life would be poorer without Joyce, poorer without poetry, poorer without the mad tumble of words on a page that makes you feel that this is what it's like to be alive.

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009

Academy strikes back: the fight for 'useless' knowledge starts here

1 October 2009 Scholars have too long acquiesced to policy agendas. They must reassert the value of scholarship for its own sake, argues Claire Fox http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=408474

When I spoke recently on a panel organised for the new group of American Fulbright Scholars, I warned them not to mention their official title in public. In the UK, being a scholar is considered "a bit dodgy"; expect to be derided as outmoded, aloof, irrelevant. Politicians belittle bumbling boffins and self-indulgent bluestockings ensconced in libraries, surrounded by dusty books on the Ming dynasty or trilobites: what a waste of public money. Forget being a "curiosity-driven" scholar; become a thoroughly modern "impact" researcher, contributing to the economic and social wellbeing of the nation.

Was I caricaturing British academic life? As if on cue, the next day the Higher Education Funding Council for England issued a 56-page document announcing that academics wishing to secure the biggest grants will need to prove the "relevance" of their research to the real world and evaluate its impact on the economy, public policy or society. Watch as medieval historians try desperately to show how their research can solve the financial crisis. What's the point of thousands of years of philosophy if it contributes nothing to the economy?

This has led to an outcry. Sally Hunt, general secretary of the University and College Union, declared: "Academic research should never be at the behest of market forces." Many academics are already aggrieved about government pressure to focus on research with demonstrable economic benefits. They don't like Lord Mandelson's superministry treating them as instruments of business.

But it's easy to turn on philistine politicians. Have academics really been fighting for disinterested research? They may object when told that their research should service UK plc, but they have been far more compliant when politicians have talked up worthy-sounding social policy outcomes. Too frequently, academics have fallen over themselves to prove their worth as social includers and community coherers, or to sell academic study as good for students' self-esteem and employability.

Why was there not a backlash against projects such as Beacons for Public Engagement? It is a bit rich to whinge about academic freedom being compromised by knowledge transfer to the corporate world while heeding the call to focus on "reaching out", "listening to" and "learning from" local people, and forming partnerships with organisations ranging from "local sports clubs and cultural venues" to "community groups and media organisations". If a multinational company dictated the issues scholars should focus on, there would be outrage. But when told by the research councils or Hefce that the key public engagement research themes are energy, the environment, climate change, social inclusion, social justice, ageing, healthy living and obesity, many academics acquiesce. These topics may be right-on, but is it right to tie academic inquiry to a government agenda?

Many dons appear to have been wooed by the fashion for "evidence-based" government, thinking this means their research is taken seriously. Unfortunately, it can mean academia prostituting its independence to deliver "advocacy research" endorsing policies. When ideas-lite politicians insist that their policies are "evidence-based", they hide behind scholarship to avoid political arguments. Everything from assaults on civil liberties to illiberal behaviour-change programmes are justified by (selectively) citing peer-reviewed journals. Why do scholars allow complex research to become soundbites?

Academics have been too easily flattered by new Labour's "knowledge society" rhetoric, which has tended to stress the need for ever-changing new skills and trendy courses rather than deep scholarship or subject specialism. That's why it's particularly galling that Hefce's proposals have been presented in the media as a counter to dumbing down. We are told that "Mickey Mouse" degrees will be culled. In truth, these courses exist only because of academia's collusion in making studies "relevant" for ever-expanding numbers of students and to fit the "knowledge society" model, regardless of intellectual merit.

So what is to be done? Dare I suggest an intellectual fight for speculative research, experimentation, serendipitous discovery and "useless" knowledge. This is not a call to arms for fuddy-duddies or a literal defence of dusty books. Scholars should get excited by the British Library's vision of looking "beyond the physical space and into the changing high-tech research environment ... to access information in more interactive and Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009 seamless ways", to quote its head of higher education, Joanna Newman. But however we access knowledge, that knowledge is what matters. It's time to mount a battle of ideas - in academia and in the public sphere - to defend scholarship per se, and turn it into a beacon of human achievement and aspiration - freed from its subordination to pragmatic, immediate objectives. Let battle commence.

Postscript :

Claire Fox is director of the Institute of Ideas.

 With the British Library, Times Higher Education is supporting the debate, "Don and dusted: is the age of the scholar over?" on 7 October. See: http://www.battleofideas.org.uk/index.php/2009/session_detail/2589/.

Readers' comments

 Andreas Hess 1 October, 2009 Spot on and well said ! May I suggest though that there is something deeply troubling and very UK-ish about all this evidence rhetoric (strange enough that it has already made it across the Irish Sea). Let me add here how surprised I am that some of that 'hands-on' jargon is seen as coming from America. This could not be further from the truth as any closer look at how the top American universities function will reveal. When it comes to defending 'purposeless' knowledge I am all for standing up and being counted. But where are the troops? They all seem to be waiting for the next promotion round!

 Philip Moriarty 1 October, 2009 I don't know about a battle, but there was a call for a "modest revolt" a little while ago. See Ann Mroz's leader on this subject in the THE back in February ("Short term outlook, no blue skies"). And although I've previously "advertised" this on the THE comment pages, there's a petition to promote discovery in UK science posted at the Number10.gov website. I hope I can be excused if I post the link just one more time before the petition closes on Oct. 3. It's "http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/honest-discovery/" (without the quotes of course). Written by John Allen (QMUL), the petition neatly sums up the key problems with the research councils' impact agenda. More than 2100 people have signed to date.

 Michael Pyshnov 1 October, 2009 The issues are bigger, much bigger. First, the "scholarship for its own sake" is never for its own sake only. Choosing the subject of research a (good) scholar is driven by the perception, (based on the experience, etc.) that it is important, that it will broaden USEFUL knowledge. Second, dictating the subject simply cannot result in fundamental research because a direction to fundamental research can only be spelled as "go there nobody knows where and get this nobody knows what", because discovering something fundamental is discovering unknown. Of course, I exaggerate but basically it's correct. The big issue is whether you want to trust the doer or the administration. Remember also that in Manhattan project the basic answers existed before it run into production.

 Mike Glazer 1 October, 2009 I have been arguing for so long now that it is time to resurrect that dirty word in the UK, namely "scholarship", and so it was refreshing to read Claire Fox's article. I absolutely agree that we have a fight on our hands but the problem as always in this country is the general supine nature of academics. I wish it were not so, that people here were more active and willing to stand up for the cause. Unfortunately I know so many who just take the view that "if these are the rules then we just have to follow them", even when I know for sure that they don't really believe in them. Impact is the watchword these days, alas, and it will take a lot to convince the higher ups (and the general public for that matter) that "impact" is just short termism and cannot be assessed in the simplistic way that many think. I am all for the fight, but it would be nice to have the support of the majority of the academic community. Perhaps Claire's article could act to jolt people out of their complacency.

 Michael Pyshnov 2 October, 2009 You can turn the tables very easily. Make a motto yourselves - "A good administrator is one who trusts the doers!" And promote this as a standard requirement. Ask them personally and in public - "Do you trust the doers? If so, make this your pledge!"

 beetjewaarheid 2 October, 2009 Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009 If you read through British government and European Union strategic documents, you will discover that it is their firm intention to destroy any possibility or hope of the kind of academia which Claire Fox is talking about. The ruling classes (yes, there are ruling classes) have finally abandoned their interest in or commitment to high culture and intrinsic academic principles. Capitalism - remember capitalism? well, it's all around you, in every nook and cranny of private and public life - undermines every attempt to conserve anything of other than strictly monetary value. "The combination of conservatism with wealth and inequality was relatively easy to sustain in a pre-capitalist society, but, when inequality became capitalist inequality, the combination of conservatism with wealth and inequality became untenable, among other reasons because capitalism so comprehensively transforms everything, including itself: in the phrase of the Communist Manifesto, under capitalism, 'all that is solid melts into air'." (G.A. Cohen, recently deceased professor of political theory at Oxford). So the university is finished, gone, basta, to be replaced - the process has long been underway - by learning factories, serving only "the market".The sociopaths have won.

 Sean Whitton 2 October, 2009 I am a mere undergrduate but I feel I must take issue with Mr Pyshnov's exceedingly limited view of academia. There are subjects that are intrinsically about usefulness, in an economic or social sense - applied Mathematics is by its definition about solving problems in the real world. There are subjects that end up being useful as a byproduct of curiosity - theoretical Science and some pure Maths may lead later to powerful practical applications. But both of these fail to include the academia that faces the scorn of so many: that which has no practical use, that probably never will and that more importantly /simply doesn't care/. Why must we support the material needs of such thinkers, it is commonly asked. A romantic, airy answe is given. It is perhaps not what we do and say that matters, but what we /are/ at the end of it. And who leads us, who fires us with ideas, who is willing to undergo great mental suffering for the mental freedom of the rest? Only our academics, driven by little more than curiosity.

 James Stanfield 5 October, 2009 Dont forget that academics are also driven by self interest. If they can get an article published or get a large research grant that will help their career, then I'm sure many will do it. The nature of the research and whether it has any value may be secondary. Unfortunately as long as academics look to governments to take money from other people, including those on low incomes, to help support their work then it is inevitable that governemnts will want to increasingly interfer. Governments should instead refuse to do academics dirty work for them and instead get them to appeal to the public for money directly. If their work is so important, as they suggest it is, then im sure the public will be happy to make donations. For those who refuse then the academics can employ bailiffs to confiscate private property as and when required. Therefore instead of the funds going from the taxpayer to the government and then to the academic, it simply goes from the taxpayer to the academic. Much more efficient and democratic!

 Done Quixote 5 October, 2009 Just remind me: what actually IS "useless" knowledge? - I can think of plenty of knowledge that I personally don't have a use for right now, but that's not the same as it being intrinsically useless. Further, I can think of knowledge that I do need, but its very existence rests on the existence of some other knowledge that I personally don't want. Sometimes, I might not even realise this, and then the "wanted" knowledge can be said to be contingent on someone, somewhere "wanting" the knowledge that I personally regards as "unwanted". But I still can't see my way clear to embracing the conept of "useless" knowledge, and further, would regard anyone fo whom such a concept looms large as good ol' boys that shouldn't come within miles of any decisions about academic matters.

 Michael Pyshnov 5 October, 2009 I don't know, but I would think that industry can employ people who create "useful" knowledge, and by the way, prove that it is really useful and that it is not unprofitable. The proposed here direct funding from the taxpayers, donations, would not be that straightforward: it would involve, as it is now, tax deductions. The tax deductions are the major source of corruption. The one university that I have some knowledge about, became a slave of the group of donors, especially one multi-billionaire who donated over hundred millions of dollars. For him it's a tax shelter, for the university it's a dictated political line, for me personally it was impossibility to have elementary justice as my professor happened to be a "business associate" of this donor.

 Don Quixote 5 October, 2009 Ah! from what you say Michael, what we seem to mean by "useless knowledge" is that which no-one wants to pay for, right now (or rather, the recoprocal: "useful knowledge" is defined as that which someone, somewhere IS prepared to pay for; in other words, usefulness is defined in relation to market forces). By definition, then it becomes contingent knowledge. Not quite what we think of as academic activity, perhaps.

 Michael Pyshnov 6 October, 2009 It just occurred to me that the future model being prepared is the one where a doctor is doing an extremely useful study for the drug company and then, you know it has been proved, everybody is happy. But you, being quixotic, do you see this practical paradise?

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009  Don Quixote is right 6 October, 2009 The divison between useful and useless knowledge is untenable. Don Quixote is right. There was a piece on this earlier in the year. Here's the link http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=405052

 Don Quixote 7 October, 2009 Michael - absolutely! - I love making practical things out of what we do; actually, we're reasonably active in Knowledge Transfer. However, behind the practical stuff, there's the other stuff - and you don't get one without the other. Really, we're just talking about the timescales. What I'm saying is that many organisations just want to pay for the end bit, the outcomes that have measurable impact. That's fair enough - suppose, for argument's sake, I'm a businessman - a retailer of computing equipment. A scruffy researcher in corduroy comes along and says "we're working on technologies that one day will be so advanced as to make these technologies seem like stone age tools - will you fund our research?" - the first question I'm going to ask is "when?" - if they come back with some airy-fairy answer "30 or 40 years" - then in all honesty there's no possible business case I could entertain. I might do it out of philanthropy, but that's a different consideration. But, as a businessman, I still expect that other activity is going on somewhere, in the background. Now, I've asked lots of businessmen this - and it turns out that they almost universally (but naively) assume that IS what universities are supposed to be doing. Interestingly, they're only slightly less unanimous (you know what I mean) in their disdain when they hear that universities are trying to be businesses. One or two perk up as they sense an opportunity - with universities as prey. So even if pigs could fly, I don't think they'd be very good at it. Let academia be academia, and business be business, then let them find their own ways of communicating

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009

Petition to promote discovery and innovation in UK science.

Submitted by John F. Allen of Queen Mary, University of London, closed Oct 3rd 2009 [Signatures: 2,295] http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/honest-discovery/#detail

Petition

We request the reversal of a policy now being applied by the UK Research Councils. This policy directs funds to projects whose outcomes are specified in advance.

Science has never worked in this way, and never could. The real world is blind to our hopes, fears, and aspirations. Scientific research seeks to describe this world, replacing ignorance and error with knowledge and understanding. Where a specific outcome can be predicted with confidence, then there is no research.

Practical and economic benefits arise from scientific discoveries. Science has economic impact precisely because curiosity-driven research reveals patterns and features of the natural world that we did not know, and did not expect.

The UK taxpayer should not support investigations with foregone conclusions, however beguiling. UK research must not be guided by wishful thinking, nor relegated to producing footnotes for ground-breaking discoveries made elsewhere.

We call upon the Research Councils to return to their mission of advancing the frontiers of human understanding. Public support for science must renew its investment in discovery if it is to create prosperity and well-being.

Govt response

World-class research in the U.K. is crucial to maintaining economic prosperity and responding to the challenges and opportunities of globalisation. The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) annually invests over £3 billion to support world-class research through the seven Research Councils. Each Council funds research and training activities in a different area of research ranging across the arts and humanities, social sciences, engineering and physical sciences and the medical and life sciences.

The excellent research funded by the Research Councils has a huge impact on the wellbeing of the UK. Working together with their wider communities and other partners, they want to ensure that these impacts are effectively demonstrated and supported, throughout the research lifecycle.

The introduction of impact plans is not designed to ask researchers to predict the outcomes of their research in advance. Impact plans encourage and enable researchers to consider the potential impact and user communities of their research at the earliest opportunity, alongside research creativity and scientific discovery and for Research Councils to support them in this endeavour. This is intended to enhance and enrich the research funded by the Councils, but does not signal a change in policy in the type of research they fund. It will not disadvantage basic research - excellence will continue to be the primary criterion for funding. The highest quality research will, over time, have the greatest impact.

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009

Stand up for research – UCU petition https://www.ucu.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=4207

The latest proposal by the higher education funding councils is for 25% of the new Research Excellence Framework (REF) to be assessed according to 'economic and social impact'. As academics, researchers and higher education professionals we believe that it is counterproductive to make funding for the best research conditional on its perceived economic and social benefits.

The REF proposals are founded on a lack of understanding of how knowledge advances. It is often difficult to predict which research will create the greatest practical impact. History shows us that in many instances it is curiosity-driven research that has led to major scientific and cultural advances. If implemented, these proposals risk undermining support for basic research across all disciplines and may well lead to an academic brain drain to countries such as the United States that continue to value fundamental research.

Universities must continue to be spaces in which the spirit of adventure thrives and where researchers enjoy academic freedom to push back the boundaries of knowledge in their disciplines.

We, therefore, call on the UK funding councils to withdraw the current REF proposals and to work with academics and researchers on creating a funding regime which supports and fosters basic research in our universities and colleges rather than discourages it.

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009

Don and dusted debate

7th October British Library http://www.battleofideas.org.uk/index.php/2009/session_detail/2589/

‘The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must be an university of knowledges.’ Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The American Scholar’

What does scholarship mean today? The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is often viewed as outmoded. A recent education minister infamously dismissed ‘the medieval concept of a community of scholars seeking truth’ as a ‘bit dodgy’. The scholar ensconced in a library, surrounded by dusty books, has given way to the a results-focused researcher, contributing to the economic and social well-being of the nation. This goes beyond the traditional two cultures divide: ‘curiosity- driven’ arts and humanities research and pure science are both belittled as self-indulgent, trumped by ‘impact’ projects. Some fear now universities are just part of Lord Peter Mandelson’s super-ministry, whose title contains neither the word education nor universities, every academic will be beholden to business. Already intellectual inquiry is justified in terms of outcomes and consequences. Scholars must prove themselves as social-includers, skills-brokers, community coherers and contributors to UK Plc, and demonstrate how their subjects make students employable.

But are these trends as philistine as critics imply? Perhaps it is mere romanticism to yearn for the days of bumbling boffins. The modern world faces urgent problems that cannot be resolved in musty archives. As the competition for public funding intensifies, surely publicly-funded scholars have an obligation to make their work relevant. And the fact that all political parties share an enthusiasm for evidence-based policy surely shows at last they value academics’ contribution to society.

Is evidence-based research in the humanities and social science inching out theoretical work? Is output-driven research in the sciences limiting experimentation and serendipitous discovery? Or will the ‘new’ targeted research mean less waste and more public support for academics’ work? Is scholarship still essential to ‘an university of knowledges’, where ideas about what it means to be human are developed and contested? What – if any – is the distinction between the old- fashioned scholar and the 21st century researcher? And how do scholars and researchers preserve the contributions of the past, inspire the hopes of the future and unearth new knowledge in the present?

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009

The mirth-making candidate? Peep Show star's REF critique the right stuff for councils http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=408490 1 October 2009 By Zoë Corbyn

He has made his name as a cutting-edge comedian in hit television shows such as Channel 4's Peep Show.

But now David Mitchell, one half of the comedy duo Mitchell and Webb, is being spoken of as research council leadership material after penning an analysis of the research excellence framework.

Steve Fuller, professor of sociology at the University of Warwick, told Times Higher Education that he was campaigning to get Mr Mitchell on to the board of one of the research councils because he had offered a "sensible" argument that academics had failed to make.

In his regular column in a Sunday newspaper this week, Mr Mitchell takes aim at the proposals to rejig research funding to focus on the economic and social impact of work.

He argues that "pointless studies" should be prioritised for public spending rather than cut, because this is the very research the private sector is unlikely to fund.

"Academic research with a demonstrable economic goal is not the sort that most needs government help," he writes.

"In fact, it's the very place that public money should never go - it'd be like spending the Arts Council budget on profit-making pantos instead of opera."

Professor Fuller said that while research council boards were traditionally manned by business people and academics rather than comedians, Mr Mitchell's "spot-on" articulation of the arguments, albeit to comic effect, was enough to recommend him.

He added: "He is saying such sensible things, why not? Especially when academics won't say them."

Professor Fuller is launching his campaign through his blog and on websites to encourage Mr Mitchell to stand for an upcoming position on either the board of the Arts and Humanities Research Council or the Economic and Social Research Council.

However, when contacted by Times Higher Education, Mr Mitchell said that while he was flattered that his musings on research funding "made sense to people in academia, 1,000 words in The Observer has more than exhausted my wisdom on the subject".

Indicating that he would not act on Professor Fuller's suggestion, he said: "For the academics who tried to teach me at university, that would be a joke too far."

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009 The REF proposals, released last week for consultation, call for an assessment regime based on three elements: "output quality" (weighted at 60 per cent); "impact" (25 per cent); and "environment" (15 per cent).

The results will determine the allocation of about £2 billion in quality-related research funding each year.

The University and College Union has already voiced its opposition to the impact element of the REF regime. The union argues it is a threat to universities' academic freedom and risks restricting the chances of significant research breakthroughs.

[email protected].

Readers' comments

 Richard 1 October, 2009 Yes, he's a comedian but he makes an excellent point that 'public money should be put to the things that the private sector won't fund, not the the things it will'. It's not just the private, but also the public sector that funds 'outcome' focussed research - including rafts of government funding initiatives, which keep university commercial offices busy. The move towards 'impact' in REF seems to simply be a way of reducing the need to fund policy-focussed research in other ways (such as seperate funds I've mentioned) - and simply cut back on costs, while getting some useful results to support existing government policy (eg; we think it's important we have child tax credits, therefore we'll put money into research that helps support that policy position) The problem is that impact-based funding, encourages gullible, cash-starved universities to create systems that drives that in its staff - meaning that the already quickly disappearing resources for independent research (such as simply things, like time) will increasingly disappear - threatening our work even further, and driving us towards being an army of cheap trainers and policy researchers for government whims and their need for findings that back their own policies, rather than independent scholars. Yet more anti- intellectual meddling from our political masters.

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009

Academic knowledge must be socially useful 1

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=408598 8 October 2009 Last week, Times Higher Education made a spirited defence of the importance of university research being independent of political or economic goals. The University of Warwick's Steve Fuller supported comedian David Mitchell's suggestion that "pointless studies" should be prioritised for public spending ("The mirth-making candidate? Peep Show star's REF critique the right stuff for councils", 1 October), while the Institute of Ideas' Claire Fox suggested that scholarship should be "freed from its subordination to pragmatic objectives" ("Academy strikes back: the fight for 'useless' knowledge starts here").

Their comments will find a receptive audience among scholars frustrated by having to match their research to prevailing political and economic trends, dictated by innocent-sounding "themes" or less subtle "grand challenges". But while they make a compelling case for not allowing university research to become the Government's evidence-gathering arm, their comments will infuriate most non-academics.

Their arguments are couched in anti-establishment language and position academics as the guardians of truth-seeking. But the golden age of academia they long for was far from a meritocracy where independent inquiry ruled. Their desire to see research prised away from pragmatic objectives risks a return to intellectual elitism.

While economic impact is clearly a bizarre metric to assess university research, social relevance is not. Fox may wish that research did not have to bother with pragmatic realities, but for those whose quality of life is contingent on them, there is no choice. Even if academics ought to be free from government priorities or market forces, surely they should be responsive to social needs?

Most academics no doubt will feel that they are responding to a societal need of some sort. But Adair Turner, chairman of the Financial Services Authority, recently surprised the City by conceding that parts of the financial sector have become socially useless. In seeking to protect academia from becoming an extension of the capitalist marketplace (an honourable goal), we must not forget that the purpose of our research should be the advancement of socially useful knowledge - not simply the satisfaction of our own curiosity.

Adam Corner, School of Psychology, Cardiff University.

Readers' comments

 Steve Fuller 8 October, 2009 I've blogged a response to this: http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/swfuller/entry/the_debate_over/

 peter 8 October, 2009 OK cheers Steve

 Don Quixote 8 October, 2009

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009 Adam - you seem to imply that a researcher should be entirely motivated by social concerns. Many of us are, but that cannot be the only or main criteria! - actually, you say "..simply the satisfaction of our own curiosity" as though this, by definition is selfish and therefore wrong. Now, love it or loathe it - the selfish concern (even if it leads to so-called altruistic behaviour) is at the heart of capitalism, in the Ayn Rand scheme of things. If you're going to ask researchers to justify their selfish interests in social terms, they're only going to lie - just as universities throughout the land are doing now when they try to point their research towards the REF terms of reference - it's not really that they actually, deep down, do care about whatever it is that Funding councils now think happens to be relevant - it's just a business decision, straight prostitution (I'm not actually making a moral judgement about prostitution here). It actually would be far better for a selfish person to be honest than someone pretend to care just because that's where the funds lie just now. What we actually want is not social policy enacted through the coercive medium of funding - we'd be far better off with straightforward 'spread betting', so that different funds have different interests. this might seem dreadfully random - but better that than the pernicious followers of fashion.

 SIndhuja 12 October, 2009 Wouldnt the outcome of the research depend primarily on the area of research? A direct impact might not be apparent on the society, if the researcher specializes in molecular biology - an impact is established nevertheless. A certain degree of curiosity indeed leads to effective research, even if it treads on the lines of misrepresented social usefulness. In fact, I'm nowhere close to being engaged in 'intellectual elitism', but if I were given an option between engaging in a project where there are good funds with societal usefullness and the project that I WANT to do (lets say to satisfy my curiosity?!) without sufficient funding, I'd choose the latter. (The bright side is, I'm rather certain that my project is of considerate social relevance)

 mcdonagh 13 October, 2009 SIndjuja's response captures why academics need managers, or at least critical friends to save them from themselves. Who else but an academic would choose to do something without usefulness and without enough funding to do it properly just because they felt like it. The Micawberishness that assumes something will turn up to provide sufficient funding to finish the work and the implicit assumption that if the funding does not materialise, it's someone else's fault. It's an odd definition of academic freedom.

 mcdonagh 13 October, 2009 SIndjuja's response captures why academics need managers, or at least critical friends to save them from themselves. Who else but an academic would choose to do something without usefulness and without enough funding to do it properly just because they felt like it. The Micawberishness that assumes something will turn up to provide sufficient funding to finish the work and the implicit assumption that if the funding does not materialise, it's someone else's fault. It's an odd definition of academic freedom.

 mcdonagh 13 October, 2009 ps Isn't contributing to the economy simply a subset of being socially relevant? Isn't money one of the biggest factors in achieving social good? Or are we just happier talking about social goals and think money is a bit beneath us?

 Helio 17 October, 2009 The *point* of the "REF" exercise is not to introduce any kind of sensible or even vaguely defensible criteria of good work into academic life (that's why it's not worth debating questions of various alternative criteria) but rather further to extend the power of the managerial (non-academic) strata - serving their paymasters - over the academics themselves. As long as these managers - and not the researchers, or better, scholars - hold the decision-making power, especially the financial levers, in their hands, it doesn't really matter whether "impact" or "esteem" or even "pointlessness" is used as an "indicator" (a toxic term) of "excellence" (an equally toxic concept) - the crucial question is: who runs the system, who applies the (obviously multiply silly) descriptors of "quality" (yes, yet another toxic category) - that is: who decides and who must follow and obey? Or, in other words: stands the clock at ten to three - and are we academically free?

 Don Quixote 18 October, 2009

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009 Mcdonagh - I remember over a decade ago, having a chat with a friend - a businessman. At that time I was researching, along with a couple of score researchers around the world, a particular area which involved the relationships between human perception and technological imlementation. It seemed to him very obscure - largely because he couldn't see any relevance - he asked "but is there a demand for this?". Indeed, I could understand his objection, since, to solve the existing problems, it was necessary to consult with philosophers! - years later, the results are ubiquitous, embedded in current technology - and in ways we could not have forecast with any degree of confidence. Had we used relevance criteria based on market demands, or provable short-term benefits, we could not have proceeded. So, it all depends on who is assessing relevance. I put it to you that the last people to be able to make those judgements are managers, who must make decisions on short term survival criteria

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009 Curiouser and curiouser 2 http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=408862§ioncode=26

29 October 2009 In his letter commenting on Times Higher Education's "defence of the importance of university research being independent of political or economic goals" (8 October), Adam Corner argues that the purpose of research should be "the advancement of socially useful knowledge", otherwise we risk a return to "intellectual elitism".

It's certainly true that research is not about satisfying personal curiosity or pursuing pointless knowledge, but part of the problem is how the "socially useful" is to be judged and by whom. Indeterminacy is a feature of the relationship between the production and use of research knowledge: it's often hard to know what will turn out to be useful and what won't.

In order to build knowledge, it is necessary to work on problems that do not appear to have any immediate, socially useful pay-off. Furthermore, the problems tackled must be viable: it is no good tackling socially important issues while failing to provide worthwhile knowledge. Insisting that researchers are in the best position to decide what problems should be investigated is not intellectual elitism, or if it is then elitism is a good thing.

Allowing research to be controlled by those who purport to speak on behalf of "societal need", or wish to assess it in terms of "impact", risks undermining its capacity to produce worthwhile knowledge of any kind.

Martyn Hammersley, Professor of educational and social research, The Open University

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009 Rethink impact plans, think-tank tells Hefce

15 October 2009 By Zoë Corbyn http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=408672

Hepi criticises the REF's 'untested' procedure and plans to cut subject panels. Zoë Corbyn writes

A number of the proposals for assessing impact in the research excellence framework need to be "rethought", an influential think-tank has argued.

In the first detailed critique since the proposals' release, the Higher Education Policy Institute adds that there is no "compelling" reason to halve the number of assessment panels. Hepi unveiled its analysis of the plans tabled by the Higher Education Funding Council for England at a Times Higher Education-sponsored conference this week on the future of research funding.

The REF, which will replace the research assessment exercise as the mechanism for allocating about £2 billion in annual quality-related research funding, resembles the RAE in that the assessment of academics' work will be based largely on peer review rather than metrics.

However, for the first time, "impact" will be included as a distinct element, counting for up to 25 per cent of assessment.

The proposals are currently in the consultation phase.

In its report, Proposals for the REF: A Critique, Hepi urges Hefce to tread carefully, asking whether the weighting is wise given the "serious methodological questions" facing the assessment of impact.

It says that, pending the results of a pilot, it seems "unnecessary and probably unwise" to place so much emphasis on an "untested and experimental process".

The report's author, Bahram Bekhradnia, director of Hepi and one of the architects of the RAE, warns that impact assessment will be a "serious additional burden" for universities.

Dr Bekhradnia is also critical of the suggested reduction in the number of subject panels from 67 to 30. He says it is "extraordinary" that Hefce is not consulting the sector on this change and calls on academics to give their views anyway.

"The proposal to reduce the number of panels would, on average, increase the amount of work that each remaining panel had to review," the report says.

"That is the reason for the proposal made in the (Hefce) consultation paper possibly to reduce from four to three the number of outputs submitted, but that would be at the expense of even less rigorous assessments."

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009 The report goes on to argue that panels should determine impact weightings, rather than use a figure handed down from on high.

And it urges Hefce to widen the definition to include "academic impact", suggesting that the failure to do so would leave it open to charges of "philistinism".

Under the present proposals, it says, a historian could be valued more highly for researching and presenting a television series than producing a book that changes the way peers see their subject.

Graeme Rosenberg, Hefce's REF manager, said the plans were a work in progress, although a standard-impact weighting across disciplines was preferable for simplicity's sake.

"Decisions on the weightings will be taken after the consultation and pilot exercise concludes," he said.

He added that Hefce had not committed to a precise number of subject panels, although it did not want to keep the smallest ones. [email protected]

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009 Press release - Proposals for the REF - a critique 15 Oct 2009

HEPI welcomes the recently published HEFCE proposals for the new Research Excellence Framework but calls for a re-think on the "impact" requirement In a critique of the recently published HEFCE proposals for the Research Excellence Framework (REF) published today (15 October) by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI), Bahram Bekhradnia, HEPI's Director, argues that these represent a considerable improvement on what was proposed previously but that there are a number of points about the proposal for impact that need to be re-thought - in particular that the academic impact of a piece of research will not be able to counter wider impact; and that the weight given to societal and economic impact should be the same in each subject. HEPI argues it seems unwise to attribute so great a weight to a feature that is in effect experimental- the HEFCE consultation paper itself acknowledges that the method for assessing wider impact has yet to be developed. Commenting on the proposals published by HEFCE for the design and conduct of the REF, Bahram Bekhradnia said:

"The Government's original proposal was to replace the Research Assessment Exercises (RAE) with an assessment process based on measuring how much Research Council and other external income universities had earned. While the Research Assessment Exercise had been based on peer review - the assessment of the quality of research by experts in the disciplines concerned - peer review was entirely absent from the proposals: assessment was to be entirely quantitative. The process now proposed is radically different, and will recognizably be a development of the previous Research Assessment Exercises. The new proposals are a very great improvement on what was previously proposed, and the funding bodies are to be congratulated. Most important, as with the RAE, it is now proposed that assessment will be by peer review.

However, the major new factor is that the assessment of "impact" is now an important separate and explicit element - impact had not been mentioned in the earlier proposals. That has been added as an entirely new element that it is proposed should have major bearing on the overall quality assessment of a submission's quality. Panels are now required to assess ‘impact' separately, and the funding bodies' initial proposal is that 25 per cent of the final score that will be used for determining funding will be based on the impact score. And the proposals are clear that by impact is meant impact beyond the academic environment - specifically economic and social impact: impact is here defined explicitly to exclude academic impact. Nor is there any acknowledgement that the impact criterion may be more appropriate in some disciplines than others. Indeed, there is an explicit statement that it is expected that in all disciplines the impact factor will count for a similar amount.

This proposal needs to be handled extremely carefully. While it is understandable that those in government who provide funding for research wish to see some economic and societal benefit, it seems unduly limited not to be able to value outstanding research that, for example, may change the face of a particular, but perhaps narrow, aspect of an academic discipline as highly as other research whose academic impact may be less, but whose societal impact is greater. Despite the fundamental continuity with previous exercises, the extent of the change that the introduction of "impact" introduces is significant, and greater than any changes made previously. In the same way as the 1992 changes gave the message that it was not sufficient to produce good research if it was not communicated widely through publication, so the addition of "impact" as a requirement to achieve top grades will mean that producing and disseminating excellent research will not be sufficient if it cannot be shown to have had impact beyond the academic community. And in the same way as the 1992 changes fundamentally altered both the productivity and the publication behaviour of academic staff, so the proposed impact requirement will influence behaviour in ways that can only be speculated about at present."

Full text http://www.hepi.ac.uk/files/43%20Proposals%20for%20the%20REF%20-%20a%20critique.pdf

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009

Research intelligence: 'You must spread the word' http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=408780 22 October 2009 By Zoë Corbyn

RCUK head warns that people need to know the benefits of public investment in research. Zoë Corbyn reports

The research community has been urged to "redouble" its efforts to communicate what taxpayers get for their investment in the uncertain times ahead. In an interview with Times Higher Education, his first since taking over as chair of Research Councils UK, Alan Thorpe pleaded with researchers to "get behind" the councils as they make the case for sustained investment.

He said: "This is the single most important goal that we have got. The case has to be made - it can't be taken for granted that continued investment will be there."

Professor Thorpe, who is also chief executive of the Natural Environment Research Council, took over the reins at RCUK from Ian Diamond, chief executive of the Economic and Social Research Council, on 1 October. His appointment coincides with the release of a two-page document, Framework for the Future, which backs up the benefits of UK research with hard data. For example, it says that research on the bluetongue virus, which affects livestock, has saved £485 million and protected 10,000 jobs country-wide by preventing outbreaks. And it says that research into the fundamental properties of the immune system has created international markets for new drugs, such as the breast cancer treatment Herceptin, expected to be worth £26 billion by 2012.

Professor Thorpe said that the RCUK partnership was stronger than ever. But he acknowledged that it had been forged in times of plenty, when there was confidence about the upward trajectory of funding. Under the Science and Innovation Investment Framework 2004-14 funding has doubled, but dark clouds now hang over all public-sector finances. "I am coming in as chair at a point when there is substantial uncertainty about the future: a change of government, potentially, within a few months, the economic crisis and pressure on public-sector spending," Professor Thorpe said.

"I have got to redouble our efforts to articulate clearly what the point of this investment is. We have got to communicate it even more effectively than we have done. We are going on the front foot to demonstrate to government and society what this investment is for, how virtuous it is and why we need to continue it."

Investing in the future

He stressed that, in the case of research, he saw government funding as public investment, not public spending. "It gives a return to the economy and it is actually the way we are going to get out of these problems," he said. Professor Thorpe predicted that the 2010-11 budget would hold few surprises, but said the investment available thereafter was a worry.

On the growing frustrations among researchers over the "excellence with impact" agenda, under which they are being asked to demonstrate the economic and social impact of their research, he said there was a danger that detractors could harm the case for investment. "If it looks like we don't collectively have the same vision ... then I think it will lead to potentially detrimental outcomes," he said. "We all need to work incredibly closely together to give a persuasive argument to government." Impact, he stressed, was broadly defined by the councils and did not compromise excellence.

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009 "It is the job of the councils to get researchers on board. We have to demonstrate to the taxpayer that this is an investment, and we do want researchers to think about what the impact of their work will be." He added that there were also "real opportunities" for researchers who embraced this idea. "Think about who your research might impact on, and you start thinking, 'Are there people who might want to come on board to join in funding it?'," he said.

On other issues facing the councils he said that plans for two new cross-council research themes - around food security and connected communities - were under discussion, and that the councils were looking at how to tackle falling grant application success rates. He also said that the business case for the so-called Outputs and Outcomes Collection Project - a plan to track grant winners' output - had been approved. The councils are now considering its structure, and a set of discussions with focus groups are scheduled for the autumn. Professor Thorpe said the aim was to get the system operational by late 2010. Often we have not been good enough at getting a stack of examples together of how research has led to outcomes, particularly in the blue-skies line," he said.

[email protected].

Readers' comments

 David Colquhoun 22 October, 2009 Certainly it is reasonable for the public to ask how money is spent. They see that every day in their cars, mobile phones, computers, antibiotics, scanners and so on. But to ask people to guess in advance what the benefit of basic research might be 20 years away is simply dishonest. The justification can be done only historically.

 Guy Rowlands 24 October, 2009 Professor Thorpe may have a point with applied scientific research, but for the arts and humanities in the UK - which are not only world-leading but **indirectly** contribute a lot to society, the potential for catastrophic results is very real. "Impact" is in ways very hard to measure and identify in advance or even over a single REF cycle in the humanities, and it is subject to the whims of intermediary forces such as TV, newspapers, magazines, museum curators. Moreover, the excellence with impact agenda is potentially disastrous if too much weight is placed upon impact in a mechanistic assessment framework. World-ranked humanities departments will suddenly see their headline rankings plummet because newspaper editors and TV producers have shown no interest in their staff. One hopes sense will be seen, and impact be downplayed so as to avoid terrible unintended consequences. Thorpe's arguments, however, suggest he has not even begun to understand what the effect of "impact" is going to be if we try to impose it as a yardstick of achievement in the humanities in the manner currently proposed.

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009

Only scholarly freedom delivers real 'impact' 1

5 November 2009 An open letter to Research Councils UK

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=408984

The research councils have decided that research proposals should include details of their "potential economic impact", a term that they stress embraces all the ways in which research-related knowledge and skills could benefit individuals, organisations and nations.

Peer reviewers will be asked to consider whether plans to increase impact are appropriate and justified, given the nature of the proposals. However, academic researchers are primarily responsible for the impartial pursuit of knowledge. Richard Haldane acknowledged this many years ago, and the application of his famous principle, by which governments did not interfere in scientific policymaking, was spectacularly successful for decades.

Science is global, of course, and until relatively recently policies of non-interference flourished everywhere. The result was an abundance of unpredicted transformational discoveries, including the structure of DNA, the genetic code, the laser and magnetic resonance imaging, almost all of which came from pure research. These discoveries also stimulated unprecedented economic growth.

Earlier this year, some of us wrote to Times Higher Education (Letters, 12 February) expressing our concern with this requirement. We urged peer reviewers to stage a "modest revolt" by declining invitations to take potential economic impact into consideration. Our correspondence indicates that many more supported our recommendation than would publicly admit it. Researchers were concerned that participation in such a revolt might damage their careers.

However, by way of further encouragement, we would draw attention to this Russell Group statement (Response to the RCUK consultation on the efficiency and effectiveness of peer review, January 2007): "There is no evidence to date of any rigorous way of measuring economic impact other than in the very broadest of terms and outputs. It is therefore extremely difficult to see how such panel members (those expert in the economic impact of research could be identified, or the basis upon which they would be expected to make their observations. Without such a rigorous and accepted methodology, this proposal could do more harm than good."

This opinion from a body comprising the UK's leading research universities is a damning indictment. We the undersigned seek to persuade the research councils that their policies on potential impact are ill-advised and should be withdrawn. The research councils are, of course, striving to ensure continued public support and government funding for research. However, while UK academic research has substantial economic potential, hobbling it with arbitrary constraints is counterproductive. We urge, therefore, that the councils find scientific ways of convincing the public and politicians that fostering academic freedom offers by far the best value for taxpayers' money and the highest prospects for economic growth.

Donald W. Braben, University College London; John F. Allen, Queen Mary, University of London; William Amos, University of Cambridge; and 45 others in a personal capacity, including ten Nobel laureates.

 For the full list, see right.

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009 Readers' comments

 Svetlana Pertsovich 6 November, 2009 Another attempt to talk with deaf wall... :( Useless, of course.

 Nimish Shah 7 November, 2009 Let's not be negative here Svetlana. Mandelson has asked for a consultation due in December. Be fair to him, he only took over in June 2009!

Open-letter to Research Councils UK – full text

The research councils have decided that proposals should include a plan of their “potential economic impact”, a term that they stress embraces all the ways in which research-related knowledge and skills could benefit individuals, organisations and nations. Peer reviewers will be asked to consider whether plans to increase impact are appropriate and justified, given the nature of the proposed research. However, academic researchers are primarily responsible for the impartial pursuit of knowledge. Haldane acknowledged this many years ago, and the application of his famous Principle, by which governments did not interfere in scientific policy-making, was spectacularly successful for decades. Science is global, of course, and until relatively recently policies of non-interference flourished everywhere. The result was an abundance of unpredicted transformational discoveries, including DNA structure, the genetic code, holography, the laser, magnetic resonance imaging, almost all of which came from academic research. These discoveries also stimulated unprecedented economic growth.

Earlier this year, some of us wrote to Times Higher Education (Letters, 12 February) expressing our concern with the new requirement. We urged peer reviewers to stage a “modest revolt” by declining invitations to take potential economic impact into consideration, confining their assessments to matters in which they are demonstrably competent. Our correspondence indicates that many more supported our recommendation than would publicly admit. Researchers are concerned that participation in such a revolt might damage careers. However, by way of further encouragement, we would draw attention to the Russell Group’s statement (RCUK consultation on the efficiency and effectiveness of peer review, January 2007):

“There is no evidence to date of any rigorous way of measuring economic impact other than in the very broadest of terms and outputs. It is therefore extremely difficult to see how such Panel members (those expert in the economic impact of research) could be identified or the basis upon which they would be expected to make their observations. Without such a rigorous and accepted methodology, this proposal could do more harm than good.”

This opinion from a body comprising the UK’s leading research universities is a damning indictment. We the undersigned seek to persuade the research councils that their policies on potential impact are ill-advised and should be withdrawn. The research councils are, of course, striving to ensure continued public support and government funding for research. However, while UK academic research has substantial economic potential, hobbling it with arbitrary constraints is counterproductive. We urge, therefore, that the research councils find scientific ways of convincing the public and politicians that fostering academic freedom offers by far the best value for taxpayers’ money and the highest prospects for economic growth. Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009

Donald W Braben, UCL, and the following who also sign in a personal capacity:

John F Allen, Queen Mary, University of London; William Amos FRS, University of Cambridge; Michael Ashburner FRS, University of Cambridge; Jonathan Ashmore FRS, UCL Tim Birkhead FRS, University of Sheffield; Mark S Bretscher FRS, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge; Peter Cameron, Queen Mary, University of London; Richard S Clymo, Queen Mary, University of London; Richard Cogdell FRS, University of Glasgow;

David Colquhoun FRS, UCL; Adam Curtis, Glasgow University; John Dainton FRS, University of Liverpool; Michael Fisher, University of Liverpool; Leslie Ann Goldberg, University of Liverpool; Pat Heslop-Harrison, University of Leicester; Dudley Herschbach, Harvard University, Nobel Laureate; H Robert Horvitz FRS, MIT, Nobel Laureate; Sir Tim Hunt FRS, Cancer Research UK, Nobel Laureate; Herbert Huppert FRS, University of Cambridge;

H Jeff Kimble, Caltech, US National Academy of Sciences; Sir Aaron Klug FRS, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, Nobel Laureate; Roger Kornberg FRS, Stanford University, Nobel Laureate; Sir Harry Kroto FRS, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Nobel Laureate; Michael F Land FRS, University of Sussex; Peter Lawrence FRS, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge; Angus MacIntyre FRS, Queen Mary, University of London; Sotiris Missailidis, Open University; Philip Moriarty, University of Nottingham; Andrew Oswald, University of Warwick;

Lawrence Paulson, University of Cambridge; Douglas Randall, University of Missouri, US National Science Board member; David Ray, BioAstral Limited;

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009 Venki Ramakrishnan FRS, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, Nobel Laureate; Guy P Richardson FRS, University of Sussex; Sir Richard J Roberts FRS, New England Biolabs, Nobel Laureate; Ian Russell FRS, University of Sussex; Ken Seddon, Queen’s University of Belfast; Steve Sparks FRS, University of Bristol; Sir John Sulston FRS, University of Manchester, Nobel Laureate;

Harry Swinney, University of Texas, US National Academy of Sciences; Iain Stewart, University of Durham; Claudio Vita-Finzi, Natural History Museum; David Walker FRS, University of Sheffield; Eric F Wieschaus, Princeton University, Nobel Laureate; Glynn Winskel, University of Cambridge; Lewis Wolpert FRS, UCL; Phil Woodruff FRS, University of Warwick.

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009

Impact is created in immeasurable ways 2

12 November 2009 http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=409072&c=2

In their open letter to Research Councils UK, Donald Braben and his co-signatories urge peer reviewers to stage a "modest revolt" by declining to "assess" potential economic impact. It is worth being clear about what RCUK is asking applicants for and why. The primary assessment of proposals to RCUK continues to be research excellence. Impact plans are not designed to ask peer reviewers or applicants to predict future benefits; they are intended to ensure that applicants consider potential pathways to impact.

Not every piece of research will lead to impact in the short term. RCUK recognises that impacts from research can take many forms, come at different stages in the research life cycle and beyond, as well as being promoted in many different ways. Our impact plans will support researchers in identifying potential opportunities for deriving and achieving impact wherever possible.

As part of our ongoing interaction with the research community, I will be delighted to meet with Braben and his colleagues to further discuss the importance of impact.

As I have indicated in a previous article, "'You must spread the word'" (22 October), it is vital that we work together to make a strong and persuasive case for continued investment in research by the taxpayer. After a decade of sustained investment in research, we are facing a much more uncertain future, so making our case is crucial. The UK research community has a superb record of excellence with impact.

Alan J. Thorpe, Chair, Research Councils UK.

Readers' comments

 Andrew Colman 12 November, 2009 Well, yes. But the UK has an even more superb record of excellence without impact -- at least without impact forseeable at the time. Think Newton, Darwin, Rutherford, Turing.

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009

Managers and scholars divided as resistance grows to impact agenda http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=408972 5 November 2009 By Zoë Corbyn

Senior figures discuss shortcomings as letters and petition reveal growing dissent. Zoë Corbyn reports

Academics have stepped up their campaign against the Government's push to fund research on the basis of its impact on society and the economy, as institutions admit they have failed to sell the agenda to staff.

There is growing opposition to both the use of impact in the forthcoming research excellence framework and the research councils' requirement that the potential economic impact of work be listed in grant applications.

In Times Higher Education this week:

- Forty-eight academics, including ten Nobel laureates and 26 fellows of the Royal Society, write an open letter to Research Councils UK calling for the withdrawal of the "ill-advised" policy;

- Almost the entire philosophy sub-panel from the 2008 research assessment exercise write voicing "deep concern" about the Higher Education Funding Council for England's proposed use of impact as a measure of research quality in the REF.

More than 2,300 academics have also signed a petition to the Prime Minister requesting the reversal of both research council and Hefce policies to "direct funds to projects whose outcomes are determined to have a significant 'impact'". It cites particular concerns for the humanities and social sciences.

However, resistance to the plans is also causing frustration among universities and funders. A policy round table last week hosted by the 1994 Group of small research-intensive universities and the British Library, "How can we maximise the impact of the UK's research base to meet national priorities?", revealed the extent of the frustration.

The event was attended by 25 senior sector figures who spoke under Chatham House rules - comments could be reported, but not attributed. They expressed a growing impatience with those who think impact is a "dirty word".

One attendee said the varying degrees to which academics spoke out against the impact agenda could be described as "the James Ladyman Index", a reference to the University of Bristol professor who began the petition to Number 10.

"You feel you are on a different side of the debate," he said. "The problem is not with the young people who are starting out or early-career researchers, but there is a middle territory which has rather lost the plot."

There was also agreement among attendees that universities had failed to convince staff of the virtues of the shift. "I have completely bought in to the impact agenda ... but it is very hard for us, from a institutional point of view, to convince researchers," another attendee said.

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009 One suggestion put forward for managing those radically opposed to impact was "to take a large number of academics into a room and ask them to put their hand up if they wish their work to have no impact whatsoever ... I have yet to see a hand," the speaker said.

There was also a stark warning: if the academy fails to grasp the impact agenda, the round table heard, "it will not get a good settlement in the next spending round. Full stop."

The open letter to RCUK agrees that UK academic research has "substantial economic potential", but says that "hobbling it with arbitrary constraints" by requiring impact plans is "counterproductive".

Its signatories urge the councils to "find scientific ways of convincing the public and politicians that fostering academic freedom offers by far the best value for taxpayers' money and the highest prospects for economic growth".

The second letter, signed by 15 of the 16 members of the philosophy sub-panel, does not oppose measuring and rewarding impact, but derides its use in the REF to assess research quality.

The REF will replace the RAE as the method to distribute nearly £2 billion a year in quality-related research funding.

The letter argues that to apply an impact rating in a largely theoretical area such as philosophy - "where research aims are pursued for their intrinsic worth" - would harm the subject and lead to "seriously distorted" assessments.

The petition on the Number 10 website notes that although the arts and humanities have an impact, it is nearly impossible to judge it in the short term: "Academic excellence is the best predictor of impact in the longer term, and it is on academic excellence alone that research should be judged," it says.

Meanwhile, learned societies in the humanities and social sciences met at the British Academy last week to shape their responses to the REF consultation. There was widespread agreement that the impact weighting - which it is proposed will account for 25 per cent of REF scores - was too high, especially when the methodology was unclear.

"I haven't heard anyone who says this weighting is not too high," said Peter Golding, chair of the Media, Communications and Cultural Studies Association.

The impact agenda will be debated on 30 November at an event sponsored by Times Higher Education: "Blue skies ahead? The prospects for UK science".

[email protected]

Readers' comments

 Lerner Lone 5 November, 2009 I've read about Impact now for perhaps a year or more. I've been to events about it, some sponsored by the THE, indeed. I've heard Arts and Humanities people, Social Scientists, Scientists speak about it. I've heard the Research Director of HEFCE. I've talked to colleagues at subject associations, and in universities around the UK. . . . "Impact" has already had more impact on my life than it ever could in an REF entry! And yet, still we have not addressed the fundamental issue: what kind of knowledge do universities support, develop and enhance? And if some of this knowledge has immediate, and immediately discernible "impact" then let us say what it is and how and for what purpose. And then let us define those elements of human knowledge that universities develop and support that do not have immediately discernible impact, and let's outline how important these elements are too, and not prejudice them because of some momentary public policy confusion about higher education. In all: I admire and support the impact debaters, the detractors, even the supporters: but surely the time has now come for policy makers to recognise that the notion was poorly released, that it is not properly defined, and that is not doing the job (already) that it was supposed to do - and will not do that job from the position we are currently in. Place the debate in the longer term strategy, and release the forthcoming REF to truly appreciate and reward excellence!

 William 5 November, 2009 Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009 "but it is very hard for us, from a institutional point of view, to convince researchers" probably because you constantly lie to them.

 Damien 5 November, 2009 I cannot speak as to whether or not the idea has been successfully 'sold' to staff here, but the reaction to the REF in general does seem to be very mixed. I am highly against assimilating research and general academic activity to what is essentially the generation of revenue.

 Seiriol Morgan 5 November, 2009 I'm proud to go all the way to eleven on the James Ladyman index. Just what are these Chatham House captains of the sector talking about, and how dull do they think people are? Quite obviously, no one opposing the impact agenda is arguing that we should be perfectly happy for academic research to have no impact. On the contrary, we think that it should and does contribute very positively to society, including work done in the arts and humanities, and we're very happy about that. Our claim is that it is not possible to measure and quantify that impact, especially within the very short timeframe of the REF exercise, and especially within the arts and humanities. Consequently, if we insist on including the impact component in the REF, what it will actually be measuring is who can come up with the most elegant and superficially convincing tissue of bullshit. The insinuation that it is only out-of-touch stick-in-the-mud mid-career professors who oppose impact also seems highly suspect to me. What's the evidence for that? Lots of postdocs and early career people I know have signed the Ladyman petition. More generally, why won't these very important and powerful people own their own comments, rather than hiding behind rules of secrecy? Due to their positions of power, they surely can't be concerned that anything bad might come of it for them if we knew who had said what. Instead, one can't help suspecting that they are well aware that if we knew who they were they would find it harder to make baseless and disingenuous assertions, because they'd soon find themselves embarrassed when people called them on them.

 James Doyle 5 November, 2009 'One suggestion put forward for managing those radically opposed to impact was "to take a large number of academics into a room and ask them to put their hand up if they wish their work to have no impact whatsoever ... I have yet to see a hand."' So: opposition to the "impact agenda" implies that one is entirely indifferent to the actual impact of one's research. This disingenuous non-sequitur is typical of the managerial cretins who are trying to impose this nonsense. It's exactly the same verbal manipulation that leads US politicians to name their legislative proposals "the Patriot Act" or "No Child Left Behind." Opponents are at an immediate rhetorical disadvantage: "You're not a patriot? You want to leave some of the children behind?" I work on the dialogues of Plato. The only impact I can hope this research to have is an improvement in our understanding of a great philosopher. In any decent US university -- which these people claim to want to emulate in so much -- this would be sufficient, as a kind of aspiration, to put me in fair competition with other researchers for funding. But according to the ideology of the "impact agenda," my prospective funding should immediately be slashed by 25%, because I cannot demonstrate a quantifiable positive social or economic impact. Message: If you want to work on Plato, go to the US. I need hardly add that the same applies to an enormous amount of intellectually valuable research (eg pure mathematics). The likely destructive consequences of these insane proposals should frighten anyone who cares about UK universities.

 Don Quixote 5 November, 2009 I think that the Impact debate highlights an important gap between managers and academics. From an academic point of view, the concept epitomises all that is mendacious in politics and management - the insistence on using Impact as a yardstick, when it is poorly designed, there is no clear way it actually could be defined sufficiently for the application of metrics without missing out important ingredients (e.g. long- term impact, secondary and sometimes unintended benefits - which can on occasions dwarf the original and intended benefit) - all points to a kind of decision-making that is simply alien to academics; based on speculative declarations with little substantiation. What governemnts and management are actually saying, then, is that they wish academics would simply evaporate, there should be no such thing as this quaint concept of academia, only business. So, how's this? - it's common, when one finds difficulty measuring something, to measure instead something which is amenable and is close coupled to it. So, if we can't measure impact of research, would we actually be able to at least get an idea of it by looking at what happens if you simply stop all research? - the impact of lack-of-impact, as it were. No, that doesn't really help, does it?

 educatedonlooker 5 November, 2009 I think the key issue here is how impact will be measured, specifically in what timeframe. Given the desire of government to measure everything in very short (i.e. political) timeframes, I think those who are concerned are right to be. Much of Newton's work did not have immediate commercial 'impact' for many years, decades and in some cases centuries after he completed it. Yet surely there is no-one who would deny the profound impact his work has had. The best thing to do would be to evaluate any proposed 'impact' measures against the most significant research of the past and determine whether, under the 'impact' rules, the greatest researchers would have received funding. If we find, as I suspect we might, that Einstein, Newton, Watson and Crick and others would 'fail' the impact test, then there is a very real need to think again.

 David Trotter 5 November, 2009 Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009 Or we could put all these Chatham House-armoured dudes in room, and ask them to put up their hands if they argree with the statement that "universities are about increasing and transmitting human knowledge". Academics would have to be as dim as this lot seem to be to think it was acceptable to allocate 25% of the total QR funding on the basis of an undefined and untested system. This is an old, old rhetorical trick: we are the realists, academics do not not understand. My magic is stronger than your magic.

 Anna 5 November, 2009 I find the comments of the 25 "senior figures" rude, bulling, simplistic and overall outrageous. Is this all the proponents of the "impact" can come up with? How can they possibly expect us to buy into their agenda after spouting such insensitive nonsense? Time for a revolution.

 simone duca 5 November, 2009 I'd like to share the following in order to make clear that also early career people (I'm in the third year of a PhD in Philsophy) are **not** in agreement with the core ideas of the 'impact agenda'. A couple of weeks ago, the Graduate School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Bristol advertised the meeting 'Bright Ideas - Innovations & the Arts'. The information on the leaflet read as follows: "New ideas, new connections and seizing opportunities are all critical elements in producing ground-breaking research and in delivering impact from that research. This half-day event is all about doing things a little differently to produce really valuable results. Come along and find out more about how enterprise can transform your research and your career prospects." "Enigmatic" I thought, but I didn't realised straight away the link between the event and the 'impact agenda'. When later, it was pointed out to me that the event was indeed part of the 'impact agenda', my curiosity about what these people had to say to young researchers grew exponentially. The fact that lunch was kindly offered did the rest of the job for convincing me to attend. I don't mean to give a report here, but I'd just like to point at a few **deeply misguided** messages that were conveyed during the meeting. 1) "Commercial entrepreneurs" and "Intellectual entrepreneurs" share the same goals. Now, apart from the fact that, the italian (my mother tongue) translation of 'entrepreneur' ('imprenditore') makes me cringe, since it inevitably - at least in Italy - refers to Berlusconi, I find that claim just false. Indeed, "Commercial entrepreneurs" (name such as Richard Branson and Alan Sugar were given) have one goal, i.e. money. Usually the method to reach that does not matter, as long as it delivers the result. However, what usually "Commercial entrepreneurs" mean by 'money' is in fact 'accumulation of money' and so they get stuck in a circle where they just accumulate more money. Now this may sound a very naive or unrealistic view about "Commercial entrepreneurs", but wait, the best is still coming. "Intellectual entrepreneurs", whatever one may define them, on the other hand, should be committed to a methodologically clear (the method **does** matter) enquiry into truth, which usually would involve a systematic accumulation of knowledge. Anything would **not** do, they should like truth! It's just not about finding "your niche in the market of ideas"!! 2) Good research must be "Socially valuable" First, this is just very vague. Second, how on Earth is it supposed to be measured? When pressed on this question, one of the speaker of the meeting said something like "There aren't any computationally accurate matrix to measure it at the moment". What? I don't think he was very clear himself about the issue, but I might be wrong. 3) Analytical and critical thinking/creative thinking Dichotomy This idea was supported with claims on the line of "It's too easy to tear apart ideas. How about instead *really* contributing to the process of creating ideas? After all, the more ideas the more likely is to find good ones among them" Now, everyone with some academic experience would know that that's just a load of old bollocks: Maths is analytic and creative for instance. Furthermore, NOT ANY IDEA WOULD DO!! Funds are *not* supposed to be allocated to people just because they can cook up nice stories. I could go on even more, but I'll stop here instead. According to me, GOOD research should be as free from constraints as possible. I've always thought that one of the goal of academia was to guarantee that. Sorry for the long rant, Simone Duca

 David Trotter 5 November, 2009 Well said, Simone. The anonymous claim that "The problem is not with the young people who are starting out or early-career researchers, but there is a middle territory which has rather lost the plot" is interesting. Firstly, it is of course a typically imprecise formulation, evidence-free (as you demonstrate). Implication: anyone who is not in favour of the new order is reactionary, fuddy-duddy, unrealistic or (gratuitous insult from sneering senior manager) has "lost the plot". So that's all right then. Won't have to listen to them. Anyone who thinks there isn't a "them and us" mentality in HE, or who still imagines that people like these upstanding "senior figures" are on the side of science and scholarship, needs to read this THE account.

 Abahachi 5 November, 2009 Quite. Alternative interpretation: young people and early career researchers are, on the whole, in far too insecure a position to risk disagreeing openly with the agenda being pushed by government and senior management; the troublesome 'middle territory' are sufficiently well established to express dissent. Of course, the fact that we even contemplate the possibility of more than one interpretation of the available evidence, some of which may not wholly support the onwards and upwards enterprise agenda, is a clear sign that we're untrustworthy and divorced from the real world.

 Seiriol Morgan 5 November, 2009

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009 Incidentally, I expect there are other readers finding themselves less than reassured about the impact agenda by the thought that some anonymous powerful people are wildly enthusiastic about it, for no good reason they've been able to intelligibly articulate. If so, and you haven't already done so, why not score yourself a slight increase in your personal ranking on the James Ladyman Index (also known as the Academic Sanity Index) and go and sign the petition on the Number 10 website:- http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/REFandimpact/

 KA Flood 5 November, 2009 The way we scholars are being treated in this country is simply disgusting. Our research is looked down upon in contempt. Everything is about money. Universities are no longer universities, they are money-making institutions. Something has to be done. I have decided not to include the name of my university in any of my publications, which I write in my personal time (weekends and evenings) and I finance with my money. I encourage everyone to do the same

 David Colquhoun 5 November, 2009 Generally I dislike arguments from authority in scientific discussions. But this isn't really a scientific argument. It is an argument between people who have had some success in research and a lot of managers who haven't had success in research, but nevertheless think they can give lessons to Nobel prizewinners in how to do it. The managers are about as insensitive as homeopaths to matters of evidence and measurement, and show a similar fondness for ill-defined buzzwords. Anyone here who uses Twitter might consider using the hashtag #impactbollocks

 Robert Williams 6 November, 2009 Just to add my voice to the chorus. On what basis are the Chatham House 25 saying that early career researchers support the impact agenda? As one myself, I'm not happy with it. (And part of the unhappiness is: if the funders want to increase overall social relevance of academic research, I can think of so many better ways of achieving it than the current hamfisted proposal). I hope they were quoted out of context, because otherwise I despair of the quality of discussion going on among "senior sector" figures. Really, honestly, looking themselves in the eye in the mirror in morning, do they think the complaints are solely from people who would like their research to have zero impact? It's incredibly disrespectful. "proud to go all the way to eleven on the James Ladyman index".

 John 6 November, 2009 Purporting to speak in another's name (in this case early career researchers) is one of the oldest trcisk in the book to shore up a fradulent sense of the legitimacy and value of one's ideas. I am (or was) an early carrer researcher and, given that my work touched on the various fantasies that underpin neoliberal ideology and practice in particuar sites (global governance in my case, but you could very easily study university management along exactly the same lines), my research would be deemed to "lack impact" - i.e. it threatens the entrenched, comfortable positions of well-paid but utterly clueless senior management types, and thus "lacks impact".

 Paul 6 November, 2009 I can't see an intellectual argument developing here, other than 'kicking the cat'. If you're spending taxpayers' money on your research during an economic crisis, just at the point when a massive amount of s**t is about to hit the fan in HE funding cuts, you need justify the value of your research to the public good. This value is not 'intrinsic'. I'm sure the public good can be much enriched by understanding more about Plato but that's not going to happen if only seven people read about it in some dusty journal. Why would anyone have a problem with providing an impact plan when asking for public money in grants? Surely we all strive to generate new knowledge and to disseminate that knowledge as widely as possible to greatest effect.

 James Doyle 6 November, 2009 By the way, does everyone get the chronology here? Because it's actually pretty funny. When the Anonymous Captains of Whatever were aping their political masters by smearing James L as a jaded mid-career researcher, it hadn't yet been revealed that the blinkered, plot-losing opponents of the Impact Agenda included ten Nobel laureates and twenty-six fellows of the Royal Society! "I have completely bought in to the impact agenda ... but it is very hard for us to convince researchers." Mmmm. Memo to Captains: "Now that you see who the unconvinced researchers really are, maybe it's time to reconsider the original decision to *completely* buy in? If, on the other hand, you'd like to pick a public fight with the laureates and fellows about the true nature and point of academic research, please go ahead: I imagine the results might be instructive for everyone." These jackasses are supposed to be guardians of our intellectual culture and themselves have a massive impact on our working lives, but they can barely rub two ideas together and can't even practice the dark arts without performing the improbable contortion of stabbing themselves in the back.

 Philip Moriarty 6 November, 2009 Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009 @Paul. The argument you put forward - which is the well-worn HEFCE/RCUK/BIS response to criticism of the impact agenda - has been previously addressed many times and in quite some depth. See "http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~leslie/impact/impact.html" for a list of the appropriate papers. Let's, for a moment, turn the impact issue on its head and consider whether a focus on short-term impact might actually *reduce* return (in the broadest possible sense) on taxpayers' investment. For example, is sinking large sums of public money into the private sector - be it via PFI, to the bankers, or through university-industry "strategic" partnerships involving multinational corporations (and boosted by the RCUK/HEFCE focus on economic impact) - always in the best interests of the taxpayer? Is a focus on short-term market impact and entrepreneurship in academia actually in the best interests of the taxpayer? (Particularly if there is little or no market for the products developed by the spin-off companies that RCUK/HEFCE/BIS are so keen that we set up!). In any case, and despite HEFCE/RCUK claims to the contrary, this is not about responding to taxpayers' concerns. Have you seen evidence that the general public is clamouring for academics to put aside exploration, discovery, and curiosity-driven research to focus on near-market product development and R&D? (Perhaps I missed the headlines in the Mail?) The impact agenda is *entirely* about ensuring alignment with government policy. (And Mandelson's "vision" of a business-led academy clearly indicates just which part of "socio-economic impact" is of most concern to BIS and, therefore, RCUK and HEFCE). Kudos to Zoe Corbyn for giving us this fascinating insight into the muddled thinking of "senior sector figures". Whatever happened to "speaking truth unto power"?

 Angry taxpayer AND Academic 6 November, 2009 I'm not happy at having a previous commentator lecture us about how we must justify the use of taxpayers money as though we were some form of low life social pariah! Just don't get me started on how tax payers have been bounced into supporting the failure of private financial managers who were relentlessly following the same goals that are now being waved at us! ANGRY!

 Philip Moriarty to Angry taxpayer AND academic 6 November, 2009 Hi, Angry. Just to clarify, are you angry at my lecture on justification of taxpayers' money or Paul's lecture above?! I hope it's clear from my lecture that I'm just as angry as you about the abuse of public money in supporting private financial managers! Philip

 Ocassional Thinker 6 November, 2009 The concern that academics have is not about whether their research has impact on other individuals (or society as a whole) as is implied by the members of the Chatham House Group, but how such impact is measured. Research conducted on Aristotle or Kant or Wittgenstein may appear to be irrelevant or totally 'academic' to those measuring impact, but it might spark someone else into another area of research which, in turn, ignites other's thoughts, etc. Research done for its own sake does have an impact, it's just impossible (with the resources and timescale that is being proposed) to quantify exactly how. That is the problem.

 evelyn preuss 6 November, 2009 oh, i‟d love to rant about the esoteric nature of some of academia‟s blossoms (which, at times, gives me the impression the author himself didn‟t understand entirely what he wrote), the scholarly habit—or rather demand—of endlessly reciting maculature (after all, this defines the scholarliness of the product) and, yes, the limited reach—or let‟s call it „impact‟—of scholarly debate into stratas below and above in the caste system (hm, is that actually what the chatham house folks want?). and yes, i‟d love to rave about that curious reflection of dominant ideology in scholarly production (of what use is academic freedom, if you don‟t use it?!). but what it comes down to is whether my liberty is worth £3.50 today. what does putting an exchange value on ideas do to the ideas? „the human is only entirely human where he plays,‟ an exceptionally hard-working academic with an immense impact on society decreed some two hundred years ago. play means being removed from the necessity of creating exchange value. if ideas such as liberty are what makes us human, shouldn‟t we be happy to play? if play, in a societal form, is a waste of tax payers money, my liberty today is worth £3.50. with regard to the timing that ideas require to take some effect, some academics who made a indelible impact such as kant or frege were dead by the time their ideas became the coinage of discourse. the logic of the day trade, which makes any long-term investment seem non-sensical, surely would have killed them before they even set the pen to the paper. finally, what‟s the impact of the current business valuation? the breathless imperative of market performance, which has emerged as the principal creation of economic value, has spelled ecological disaster for our planet (which, incidentally, is also an economic catastrophe) and might take humanity to the brink of extinction. is your life, or that of your children, worth £3.50, or how much that stock or bond has gained today (if it didn‟t plunge to unforeseen depths, that is)? perhaps it‟s time business learns from the humanities instead of trying to colonize the latter with its short-sighted assessments of value. the ideas of schiller, kant and frege are still around after two hundred years. yesterday‟s profit evaporates with melting polar caps. the arctic ice is supposed to be gone next summer.

 evelyn preuss 6 November, 2009 dear editor, do you suppose your readership cannot articulate thoughts as structured as to require paragraph breaks? sincerely, e. preuss

 The view from Wales 6 November, 2009

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009 As a mid-career researcher I have to point out that I *have* bought into the impact agenda. There are certainly questions around how to measure it, and there obviously must be a place for 'blue skies' thinking, especially in the physical sciences. But as an economist, I've always wanted my research to be both relevant (including in relation to policy) and practical. I think it is, and am happy to be judged against impact metrics, whatever these might turn out to be.

 Pauline 6 November, 2009 What a shame Hegel, when filling in his AHRC funding application, couldn't see into the future and claim that one day his lectures on history would feed into the forces that would eventually produce the Russian Revolution. Or that Wagner, applying for leave to write Parsifal, couldn't assure the AHRC review panels that his ideas and music would one day be highly congenial to Hitler and thus help to bring about WW2! How's that for Impact? Politicians would do rather well out of it. When you consider the Impact their decisions have, maybe funding councils should be asking us to prove our research will not have any life-threatening consequences and will be 100% harmless, benefiting only human knowledge and understanding.

 Angry taxpayer AND Academic 6 November, 2009 To Philip Moriarty - To clarify, I cerntainly got your message and accept we sing from the same hymn sheet. My remarks were directed to Paul who I felt went too far in suggesting we should be hauled over the coals of value for money and transparency. This at a time when other parts of our society consume exponential amounts of public cash with little or no accountability. When did any of us last bring a society to its knees?

 Don Quixote 6 November, 2009 Well, I thought Paul's point was interesting! Actually, Plato said plenty that was (eventually to become) entirely relevant to advanced technological implementations, neuroscientific studies and, of course, ethical discourse. But, what Paul is asking is whether one should have to be an academic and a salesman? - is the business of the academic as much about dissemination as it is about discovery? I'm reminded of the difference in thinking between academics and businesspeople. Once a year, some chaps from our business opportunities unit wander round in fine, powerful charcoal grey suits (with red ties, of course) asking academics (who appear almost indistinguishable from students, delivery drivers and so on) about the spin-out possibilities. They think we must have, in the 12 months since the last visit, come up with at least something they can flog. Naturally, we answer quite positively: "this could lead to a revolutionery new power supply" "this might produce images in a noisy environment of a resolution and scale we previously thought impossible" "here we are heading toward a method of displaying massive datasets in an intuitive way" "we're hoping to be able to measure complex multifactorial emotional states" and so on. But the business guys are inevitably disappointed that we don't have a nicely packaged product all ready for market, complete with studies of market potential and price point. They go away, shaking their heads at the unworldly head-in-the-clouds academics. of course, I've tried chasing after them to explain that we don't directly do products, we do science, and that i'm sure there's good stuff i there, it just needs some business bods to take it from the string-and-cardboard stage to the proper product stage. It never grabs them, though. Now, likewise, is the person who does the research and the person who disseminates the research necessarily the same? Surely, the person that assesses impact should be a specialist? - otherwise, you're just asking for some amateur utterances which, let's face it, probably won't be worth the paper it's written on?

 Nafsika Athanassoulis 6 November, 2009 There are only three possible responses to the latest round of managerial interference into and mismanagement of what was once, and without doubt, one of the greatest higher educational systems in the world (and I say this as a foreigner who worked her butt off as a student to get into it): - collective disbedience and refusal to comply with any aspect of this rubbish - immigration - early retirement

 Karin D 6 November, 2009 I'm not surprised mid-career researchers have bought into the impact agenda. Other things being equal, research by established researchers has a higher impact. It is more likely to be published, cited and indeed to influence policy - after all, not many postdocs have access to the policymaker's ear.

 Dr Truth 6 November, 2009 "Research conducted on Aristotle or Kant or Wittgenstein may appear to be irrelevant or totally 'academic' to those measuring impact, but it might spark someone else into another area of research which, in turn, ignites other's thoughts, etc" INTERESTING. I once wrote a good pysics paper that was inspired by watching two drunks in a bar beat the living daylights out of each other. But, I would hardly propose that such actvity be funded (or even encouraged) on that basis.

 Dr Truth Tp Paul 6 November, 2009

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009 "I can't see an intellectual argument developing here, other than 'kicking the cat'. If you're spending taxpayers' money on your research during an economic crisis, just at the point when a massive amount of s**t is about to hit the fan in HE funding cuts, you need justify the value of your research to the public good. " Good to see a bit of common senses here. Most academic are engaged in "research" activities that are not and will never be of any use to anyone. SOME of that sort of thing can be funded when times are good, but NOW? And it doesn't help their case when they all suddenly want to claim or imply that they are the next Kant, Einstein, Nobel Prize winners, etc.

 Jimmy Lenman 6 November, 2009 “One suggestion put forward for managing those radically opposed to impact was "to take a large number of academics into a room and ask them to put their hand up if they wish their work to have no impact whatsoever ... I have yet to see a hand," the speaker said.” This argument is fatuous in numerous ways. Most conspicuously, it ignores HEFC‟s own small print which tells us: “we do not intend to include impact through intellectual influence on scientific knowledge and academia”. And impact on teaching is to count only in restricted ways which do not include impact on the “content” of teaching. I‟d like to suggest taking a large number of doctors into a room and asking them how they feel about having their performance assessed on the basis of the impact of their work, but making it clear that “impact” here is not to include the prevention and treatment of illness. Or perhaps policeman could be assessed on their impact on society but expressly excluding their impact on the prevention and detection of crime. I cannot comment on other disciplines, when it comes to academic excellence in my own area of philosophy, the United Kingdom can credibly be said to come second in the world only to the United States. There are not many spheres of activity left where the UK ranks top 2 in the world and it would a shame to mess things up. We can hope to stay that way by having an academic culture that is focused on (as Tony Blair might have put it): three things: research quality, research quality and research quality. The more we do to sustain a focused culture of excellence, the more confident we can be confident that impact will take care of itself. The more we dilute our preoccupation with excellence with hair-brained agendas cooked up by Whitehall hacks with too much time on their hands, the more we confident we can be of having very little impact indeed. A lot of philosophy certainly has impact. The work of the American philosopher John Rawls in the early 1970s has had massive impact on social and political thought way beyond academia. The work of Gottlob Frege and other pioneers of modern logic around the turn of 20th century is the reason there is a computer on your desk. But if anyone had set out, a few years after the first publication to measure such impact outwith they would have found, in the case of Rawls, virtually nothing and in the case of Frege, precisely nothing. The main likely consequence of the so-called impact agenda will be that academics will spend considerably less time doing academic research and considerably more engaged in meaningless efforts to measure and document the “impact” of their work. The result will be, exactly as Seiriol Morgan observes, elegant and superficially convincing tissues of bullshit.

 David Trotter 6 November, 2009 Dr Truth: you have a strange way of missing the point (I'd like to think, deliberately, because the alternative is even more worrying). "Most academic[s] are engaged in "research" activities that are not and will never be of any use to anyone." The whole point is: how do you know? What a lot of people on this thread have been saying is precisely that we do NOT know in advance whether what might look useless, is in fact useless. No- one as far as I can see claims to be Kant or a Nobel prize-winner in what is said here. What they do point out, time and again, and what you either don't want to see or can't see, though God knows why because it really isn't too hard to grasp, is that the work of those people would not have been highly scored in terms of impact when it was produced. Impact is not predictable. That as far as I can see is the main reason why many academics object to the idea of measuring it and funding research on the basis of an umeasurable.

 I predict a riot 6 November, 2009 I vote for collective disobedience!

 Dr Truth To Trotter 6 November, 2009 "Impact is not predictable". TRUE. That is why the request is for past impact, not what the impact might be. The proposal is not one for funding any warm body that claims they might do something useful in the future---as we can see from this blog, that would be just about every academic---but one to fund those who have already shown that they can do useful things. As it is, a great deal of funding is already made on the basis of "track record", and "impact" would be just another dot-point in that record. Money is tight and must be spent wisely; so I would, for example, cut off all research funding to the humanities until those who do useful things manage to turn things around.

 David Trotter 6 November, 2009 Trotter to "Truth": impact won't be just another dot-point (whatever that is). It will be 25% of the total QR funding. That is one mighty big spondulick-laden dot. Let's assume I have "already shown I can do useful things" (as you put it, though obviously I won't ever do anything useful in your myopic view of things because I work in humanities and as we know, only that of which Dr Truth approves, gets the dosh). Why on earth should my department be prospectively funded in 2013 for five years into the future on the basis of something "useful" which I did in oh I don't know 1995 or even for that matter 2005? Though the latter is highly Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009 unlkely because (and I won't go on about this because I'm beginning to have serious doubts that you bother to read anything) it takes longer than that. You say that "a great deal of funding is already made on the basis of "track record" ..." but that is absolutely not treu in the RAE except for the period of the review itself. If you wrote nothing between 2001 and 2007, you could have won the Nobel prize in 2000, but for the RAE2008 you had no outputs = no QR (in respect of outputs) on your behalf.

 shelley 6 November, 2009 Where are Philip Moriarty and Carl May when we need them?

 Fed up academic 6 November, 2009 What a bunch of jokers !! I write a great article 1 year/2 years. I wait for a referee report 1 year = reject. I resubmit to a journal 1 year later = reject Finally, I resubmit to a top journal 1 year later accept ( after revision)!. Now 4 year laters I am asked to assess its impact !!!!!!! What a bunch of Jackasses !!

 Dr Truth, Yet Again 7 November, 2009 Trotter scribbles: "Why on earth should my department be prospectively funded in 2013 for five years into the future on the basis of something "useful" which I did in oh I don't know 1995 or even for that matter 2005?" IS THAT A SERIOUS QUESTION? You want to know why someome with an excellent track record (PAST TENSE) should be given money to do something (FUTURE TENSE)? What world are you living in?

 Dr Truth, Yet Again 7 November, 2009 "you could have won the Nobel prize in 2000, but for the RAE2008 you had no outputs = no QR (in respect of outputs) on your behalf." I doubt that any Nobel Prize winner is starved for funding. Once again, I must remind whiners here to stop implying that they are in one super-league or another; most are simply objecting to the prospects of their snouts being pulled out of the feeding trough.

 Dara 7 November, 2009 Someone further up the thread uses the spectre of the Daily Mail, asking are its readers clamouring for 'impact.' Those that live by the Mail can die by the Mail, as a man I much respected once told me. I would hazard a guess that the Mail reader on the Clapham omnibus would actually, if asked, quite like impact. The problem with impact is not per se impact - it is that the current proposals are just not clear. My background is in pure mathematics which has little direct, short-term impact, but over a very long period is exploited to great impact. I have no idea how contributions could be separated in any meaningful way. That being said - academics are not the ones who need to ask the public, in a deep recession, for a few billion to keep the show going. The problem with the comments here is not the opposition it impact. It is the sense that academics are rapidly heading down the road that doctors did - a profession that moaned and whined so much that everyone just stopped caring. A profession that looked (and in some cases, was) detached with a pretty nasty sense of entitlement. I would hate to see that happen to a profession I have thought highly of for two decades.

 Karin D 7 November, 2009 @Dara: you say you are working in pure mathematics. How would you like to be forced to work in applied mathematics in order for your department to have more impact? Wouldn't you be slightly tempted to moan, at least a little bit? I know I would.

 Dara 7 November, 2009 KarinD - I wouldn't like it at all, however that does not mean that the impact agenda has no relevance or application to pure mathematics does it? What I am getting at is that my view is that academics are not best served by giving out the message that they want to be given cash and left alone. That may misrepresent the above, and I am sorry if some are put out - but that is how it comes across. Impact is a legitimate concern to those who fund academics - I am sorry, but that is inescapable. Instead of going off on one, what is needed is thinking about how credible gauges of impact can be presented. If pure mathematics is a pain, think how English Lit academics are going to get on! My point is not to defend impact as such, what I am getting at is that impact is real and it is something that those who fund universities are entitled to look at. Denial of that serves no one.

 David Trotter 7 November, 2009 I am sorry to keep scribble, Dr Truth,although an unintended impact (and benefit) seems to be that I have managed to annoy you. I don't quite see why opposition to a scientifically silly policy has to be classified as whining. And your suggestion that I am implying I'm in a super-league is gratuitous and downright silly. I think you'd better get back to the bar, and let's hope this time the drunks decide to have a more direct impact.

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009  evelyn preuss 7 November, 2009 Dear Dr. Truth, I agree that much of academia is useless and most of the humanities at that. Yet, academia shares this distinction with the most revered institutions of contemporary society. Industry, for the greater part, churns out completely useless consumer commodities. (Really, who needs all this junk? It‟s only there for throwing away, so we can buy something new and keep the jittery markets happy.) The military, its well- paid ranks and its state of the art weaponry cannot subdue Vietnamese, Afghans or Iraqis fighting with little more than their bare teeth. Or the school system with all its expenditures and experts, which produces minds scoring up to 50 percentiles below their cheaply and amateurly homeschooled peers. What sets academia apart from the rest is that it is relatively harmless. It doesn‟t bury our planet in waste and overheats it through the dispensable use of energy. It does not send other civilizations back to the Stone Age and does not shred babies into minced meat with cluster bombs. It does not dumb down the general population to become mindless consumers and willy-nilly political subjects, making a mockery of the democratic system. If, as you say, „money is tight and must be spent wisely‟, then why don‟t we simply do so? With „cutting of funding to the humanities‟, as you suggest, you not only start with the least expensive item, but also with the least damaging. „Money is tight‟ for a reason, and academia is not a part of that. Look at the list above and you see where the money goes. By saying that much of academia and most of the humanities is useless I do not mean all, and I am sure you will agree with that. Do you have crystal ball to see what ideas growing on the academic playing field will bloom and be fertile? A Kant or a Frege would have, as I already pointed out, been nixed by the „impact standard‟—their impact notwithstanding. „Cut funding to the humanities‟ and the future will be barren. Sincerely, Evelyn Preuss

 evelyn preuss 7 November, 2009 paragraph breaks please!

 Dr Truth--Still At It--To Evelyn Preuss 7 November, 2009 Arguments such as your show exactly what is wrong with the academics: Out there, the people with the money are demanding to know how their money has been and will be used. Rather than wake up to the dawning reality, the response from academics is to whinge, moan, and think of a million unhelpful arguments, all of which only serve to reinforce the need to haul academics into the world they supposedly live in. Let me try to help: (a) there are funding cuts coming; (b) individuals and universities that can the ability to use money wisely will be spared the brunt of the cuts. Whinge and moan, by all means, but also think of a Plan B.

 Maja 7 November, 2009 evelyn preuss - 'What sets academia apart from the rest is that it is relatively harmless.' Well..... One thing about impact that no one seems to have thought about is whether impact has to be positive. I would argue that the greatest impact over the past two years is from the person who came up with derivatives risk modelling and monoline insurance profiles. Similarly, take chemistry - I would say that there is great scope for impact in chemical weapons. As your post amply demonstrates the greatest impact of humanities over the past few years has been the development of self-loathing internet strops which have had a severely deleterious effect on our media.

 David Trotter 7 November, 2009 Undoubtedly Dr Truth is correct that cuts are imminent. And I don't agree with Evelyn Preuss about defending humanities because they are cheap and harmless. So's knitting. The future would or will be barren without the humanities, not least because there is a continuing need to understand not just that future but perhaps more pressingly, the past, the study of which can actually be quite easily 'sold'. I'm not about to be lectured to by Dr Truth about impact or my responsibilities to the taxpayer: I am very conscious that I have been consuming taxpayers' money for a long time now, both in terms of my salary and in terms of research grants, and it is as far as I am concerned a given that we should do try to make what we do of value to society beyond academia. I have spent hundreds of hours doing just that. Whether the impact of this effort is measurable, is another matter altogether; and to subordinate my research to so intangible an outcome would be not responsiveness to the taxpayer, but irresponsibility because that isn't primarily what I was funded to do. My other point is more general. Since the early 1980s, the exasperated voices of the Dr Truths of the university world have been very strident and they have often been the voices of our so-called leaders in all this (which is where this discussion started). It has not been a matter of speaking truth to power so much as trading (and traducing) truth for power. For all the Daily Mail sermonizing we get subjected to, and at which Dr Truth is such a dab hand, this is in fact a profoundly corrosive form of intellectual dishonesty. We have been propelled head-first into a bureaucratic Elbonian quagmire of asinine regulation and interference such that a huge proportion of academic time is misspent on distractions from the job in hand; and now into a situation where universities are apparently seriously considering remodelling their research agenda to meet the short-sighted and often ignorant requirements of business and politicians who claim to be able to do things which leading scientists are repeatedly telling them are impossible. (And no, Dr Truth, I don't count myself amongst their number, but I am capable of understanding the calibre of people like Moriarty, May and Colquhoun.) Dr Truth and his ilk cry "realism". He may have recourse to telling us we're whingeing and moaning. These are just cheap insults: resistance is whingeing, criticism is moaning, Has he not read or heard of "la trahison des clercs"? It‟s very revealing that the anonymous senior figures talk about “buying into” this agenda. They're wrong: they haven‟t bought in, they‟ve sold out.

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009  Dr Truth Again 7 November, 2009 The wake-up bell has rang. If academics wish to even stand a chance in what's coming, I suggest waking up. Long-winded arguments about the quality of the brass from which the bell was made, how clear the sound was, whether the ringing was at the right time or by the person, that people have been known to wake up without bells being rang... are unhelpful. WAKE UP!

 David Trotter 7 November, 2009 Dr Truth: You may not like the arguments, but you don't seem able to do much of a job of answering them. Since when was capitalization a substitute for thought? I suppose it is a variant on the stereotypical Englishman abroad: shout louder.

 TO DAVID TROTTER 7 November, 2009 David Trotter - To be clear, I am not getting at you, so please don't go off at me. I am sure that everything you put in your comment is true to a greater or lesser extent, however there is a clear tension in the heart of what you say. You comment that you are cognisant of the imperatives of 'serving' (I wish I could think of another word) the taxpayer that funds you. In the next breath you appear to suggest that your impact and measuring it is something of a burden. I, and most others, do not think that you are playing fast and loose with tax money - far from it. My view is that the REF/RAE is not the best place to gauge impact, but surely you must see that wider accountability demands some measure, and some thought on your part? What worries me about these threads is not so much what they say - no one seems to be saying that impact is a bad thing, just not on the REF's terms. However what is emerging is a rather creepy collective group think that hectors and kicks at any even slightly dissenting voice. Like it or not, academic freedom does have a cost and at some stage the impact of that freedom should be looked at. This is exactly what happened with doctors (and teachers in a different way). Lots of keyboard warriors, lots of threats and lots of internet froth - but when it came to it, it was all froth and no beer. The doctors believed their own hype and forgot that looking good and being good are not the same thing, Impact in the REF is not great - but then neither is the spectacle of stroppy academics demanding money with menaces on a popbitch website. Money demands accountability and I can not see why academics seem to be taking the view that they are something of a special case.

 David Trotter 7 November, 2009 Dr Truth (I take it): Well, we seem to be getting somewhere now. I'm perfectly happy actually with "serving" the taxpayer (or better: society). But "stroppy academics demanding money with menaces on a popbitch website"? You've lost me there. As has been pointed out on innumerable occasions here and elsewhere, academics are pretty accountable for just about everything they do, including for the research money they get through either QR or RCUK. A couple of months ago, I was written to about a grant I had (for £2300!) in 2003, to ask for an update on any further publications arising from it. It's fine by me if statistics are collated on who does what for how much, and it is at least perfectly straightforward -- but it does gives a flavour of the sort of accountability which is already in operation. So arguing that opposition to (even REF-style) impact measurement = refusal to be accountable is a pretty flimsy straw man. As to impact: yes, I have thought about it, quite a lot in fact, but I'm getting nowhere fast. I think we could develop measures but I really do not see what the timescale is going to be and I genuinely do not believe that we will be best serving the interests of the taxpayer by succumbing to the short-termism which the proposed mechanism implies.

 Dr Truth to Trotter 7 November, 2009 No, that was not me. Given that we live in extraordinary times, requiring strong and direct action, my message is more direct: cut off funding to time-wasting disciplines, fire parasite academics (who believe we owe them a living), strongly rein in unaccountable academic pests (e.g. one Trotter), etc.

 David Trotter 7 November, 2009 @To David Trotter: I owe you a sincere apology for confusing you with the disagreeable Dr Truth. I should have realized that your post was far too well-reasoned to come from him. @Dr Truth: welcome back -- that's a more familiar tone. "Strong and direct action", eh? Now where have we heard that before, Obersturmbannführer Truth?

 Dara (Apologies David Trotter) 7 November, 2009 David Trotter - I was the person who wrote the earlier comment, I write on here as Dara and in error I forgot to identify myself - apologies. I mentioned earlier that the problem I have with REF impact is more about it having a differing effect on different disciplines. The unspoken on here of course is that I can very easily see some discpilines wanting impact to be weighted at greater than 25%. Things like pure mathematics do have an impact- the PageRank algorithm for example, often at many years removed and not in isolation. Impact has a place, the clear undertone of the thread above is that some just want to totally disengage and feel measurement of impacts has no place in funding. Working in in the context of disciplines with the organisations that ask the taxpayer for a few billion would, to my mind, be more credible than coming onto talkboards and getting it all off the collective chest. But what I am seeing here is a path well trodden by doctors in particular. It would be wonderful if money came with no strings or wider concerns, but academics have to treat the world as it is, not as they would wish it to be. And I do worry that in all the froth, academics are heading for a fall. I for one would hate to see that. Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009  David Trotter 7 November, 2009 Dara -- thank you. I don't think we are basically at odds. Mathematicians and humanities scholars often have a lot in common. I'm a medieval French specialist and actually, yes, I think we do have some impact (for example, medieval French had a huge impact on the development of English, and I guess I could show how that matters and indeed, I have tried to do so at http://www.anglo-norman.net/dissem/ ...). The problem is: how long did the PageRank algorithm take to be measurable in "impact" terms? Or: how long will it take before a different view of the history of English matters to anyone except academics? I think money probably should come with some strings attached. But ... how long is the piece of string?

 Dara 7 November, 2009 David Trotter - Thank you for your reply. Yes, in short. The PageRank algorithm (aka Google) has probably had the biggest impact of many academic developments, it just is not impact in the terms of the REF. It took decades. The problem with the impact agenda is just that the REF is not the place for it - the impact agenda has very little wrong with it. Medieval French is studied for a reason - the terms of that need to be spelled out, just not in the REF. What I am against is the knee-jerk internet froth. Those academics are against impact basically because they think they don't have one. So I find myself in an odd position, yes to impact, no to it being in the REF - frankly I can't reconcile that. But I'm not going to flaunt the chip on the academic shoulder as too many others have done.

 Dr Truth Calling Trotter 7 November, 2009 "medieval French had a huge impact on the development of English". I suspect the REF will be interested in more recent times. But good luck anyway!

 Karin D 8 November, 2009 @Dara We all agree that research ought to have impact. I am sure that a lot of research in pure mathematics will end up having a huge impact, but how can one tell in advance which it will be? Research on prime numbers didn't have much of an application for thousands of years until prime numbers were used to encrypt e-mail messages (I think; I may be wrong). Some pure mathematics research, perhaps most of it, may never be of any use at all. I suspect trying to determine in advance which part of the pure mathematics research is going to be useful would be a waste of time. Of course, the result of this reasoning may be that one ought to give up all research in pure mathematics and concentrate funds on, say, engineering. This is not my view at all, but one can understand people coming to that conclusion.

 Karin D 8 November, 2009 @Dara: re-reading the last posts I realised that I was preaching to the converted - you do not want impact to be in the REF. But then I am struggling to understand why you seem to suggest that there must be something wrong with other academics who also do not want impact to be in the REF... By the way, I guess the inventor of the metaphor "chip on the shoulder" did have a lot of impact... no thread goes by without somebody mentioning a chip on some shoulder or other ;-)

 David Trotter 8 November, 2009 Dr Truth: do you know anything about modern English dialects, or is that also a branch of study you'd shut down? Ignorance is bliss, I suppose. To Dara: I suppose the problem is that the REF (like research grants) is regarded as about the only way of getting impact in, in a way that puts a direct, monetary value on it. I can see why that might be attractive; like you, I just don't see how it will work without wrecking the process. At the moment, the "impact" agenda is at risk of bringing the whole REF into direpute, and fundamentally, for all its shortcomings, the RAE/REF is not a bad idea. (Compared, for example, with how it's done elsewhere e.g. in France.)

 Dr Truth Calling Dr Trotter 8 November, 2009 Modern or ancient, take your pick. These influences of one language on another are undoubtedly interesting, but for almost all taxpayers just knowing that is enough. We certainly don't care to fund all sorts to dig up obscure connections that are irrelevant to the business of everyday living. The only language departments worth funding are those that train people to read, write, and speak well enough to communicate with fellow human beings. Regardless of what connections one might make to what, that people can make a decent living (atthe taxpayer's expense) by devoting time to such things as "medieval French" only underscores the need to measure the impact of what university academics do. Additionally, there is no need to study "modern English dialects": once basic, proper English has been learned adequately (usually no later than the end of secondary school), any variant can easily be picked up on the streets.

 David Trotter 8 November, 2009

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009 As I say, Dr Truth, ignorance is bliss. Self-evidently language departments dealing with these things you so despise like medieval French also "train people to read, write, and speak well enough to communicate with fellow human beings". Though there are always some of our fellow human beings, some of them apparently in universities, with whom it is simply not possible to communicate because their minds are so closed.

 old lag 8 November, 2009 Dara, I have to say that I loved the phrase "stroppy academics demanding money with menaces on a popbitch website" It made me smile.....not bad on a grey November afternoon.

 John 8 November, 2009 How many taxpayers actually give a genuine toss as to what gets funded in academic research? And of those that do, how many do we think are sufficiently well-informed of the precise nature of the research to make an intelligent decision regarding its worthiness? It's all very well to go down a Daily Mail populist route, but I don't believe an ill-informed public should be in direct charge of the academic research output of the UK any more than they should be in direct charge of the nuclear red button. Be careful what you wish for, Dr. Truth.

 John 8 November, 2009 For example, at one point 4 or 5 years ago, the public might have given a green light to pouring substantial amounts of funding into researching whether there was any connection between the MMR vaccine and childhood autism, even though there was absolutely no reason (other than a hysterical tabloid storm in a teacup) to credibly view any potential link between the two (we might as well research the link between foemting whiskey at particular times of the year and the outbreak of conflicts in Africa). Would such Bad Science have been an acceptable use of taxpayers money, Dr. Truth? Even if taxpayers had clamoured for it?

 John 8 November, 2009 Finally, what if we take the view that taxpayers should be allowed to determine the desirable results of research in advance? So, for example, some taxpayers might express a strong desire for a scientific study that backs up their view that immigration destroys cultural cohesion - and might decide that the taxpayer should be reimbursed personally from the pockets of the academics conducting the study if they happen to reach the "wrong" conclusion. This, surely, is the end logic of your constant bleating on about taxpayers, Dr. Truth.

 David Trotter 8 November, 2009 John, I agree; with the proviso that I think I'd trust many taxpayers further than I trust our bigoted friend Dr T. I'm afraid that my experience has been that many of the nastiest and most prejudiced critics of academic research in areas they don't understand are to be found in universities. For all that Dr T. thinks he's arguing for impact to be part of REF, he's making such a bloody awful job of it that he has ended up showing exactly why there is such a good case against the idea.

 John 8 November, 2009 Indeed. But the course of public sector managerial ideology in the 21st century has become to presume to speak for taxpayers who are invoked as a spectre to justify overbearing management, rather than given any sort of actual voice in the proceedings.

 Dr Truth to John 8 November, 2009 The proposal to determine impact and the support for that proposal did not come from the hoi poloi; they come from those of us who speak on their behalf and who also know exactly what goes on in the academy. Dismissing, as "Daily Mail route", serious concerns by serious people will not work. Similarly, getting all worked up and emotional, as Trotter is, is not very helpful. The way forward is for academics to give up their sense of entitlement and start accounting for the taxpayers' pounds.

 John 8 November, 2009 You haven't really answered my points though, Dr. Truth. If we're going to be all concerned about taxpayers, then why shouldn't research grant applications be evaluated by members of the general public, drawn at random in the manner of a jury? We live in a well-developed, educated society; I don't see why taxpayers should have you speaking on their "behalf" when they are quite capable of doing so themselves. And you still, to my mind, haven't really "got" the core point, which is that opposition within the academe is not opposition to having an impact per se, it is opposition to the criteria by which something is judged to have "impact" being determined entirely by non-academics. Current proposals skewer impact toward short-term timescales that are often highly inappropriate, and which are oriented not to serving the taxpayers that you eulogise (but caricature), but toward university profits.

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009  David Trotter 8 November, 2009 Dear John, The hallmark of Dr T.'s interventions, alas, is never to answer any points that anyone makes. I really don't think he can, so he doesn't bother to try. What is more disturbing (and although I'm not, I could I think legitimately get "worked up" about this) is his enthusiasm for "strong and direct action" (supra) and his now completely fatuous claim to speak for taxpayers. Unless he is an MP, which I suppose is always an option, that can't really be true. Not so much the "real world" of the 21st century, as the 1930s. And elsewhere on this site, he clearly reveals his contempt for what he insists on calling "the hoi poloi". So I think, all in all, we can see where he is coming from: and "serious concerns by serious people" it ain't.

 John 8 November, 2009 I think where Dr. Truth is "coming from" is from a position in which all funding currently directed toward Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences is redirected toward his own discipline area (Physics, if the above comments are to be believed). This makes me very suspicious that Dr. Truth may really be a Physicist whose was refused a grant application of some sort in the past and is sore about it to this day, feeling that if only more funding were available to Physics then it would have been OK. Pure speculation, of course, but we all know how much of academia is defined by professional jealousy,

 Dr Truth to Trotter 8 November, 2009 Once again, I encourage you to stop being emotional. BTW, given that I was writing to a dead-languages guy, I used "hoi poloi" to mean exactly that.

 Dr Truth to John 8 November, 2009 The general populace is not as well-educated as you appear to imagine; that is why they cannot be entrusted with certain tasks. But there is no reason why their enlightened representatives should not speak for them. I hope that answers your question. Regarding discipline-based funding, I was quite clear and objective in my statements: In times of plenty, there is no reason why we should not spend a little on people to do useless things; at the very least, it keeps them off the streets and off mischief. But in times such as these, it is only right and proper and money be directed to where it actually does something useful. I think most level-headed people would agree with that.

 spot the fake 8 November, 2009 Everyone, stop getting worked up about Dr. Truth. It's a fake post. He/ She is doing this for their own amusement. No-one of any intelligence could possibly expect the rantings of this bullish middle Englannd mind set to be taken seriously. It's brilliant satire designed to stir everyone up. And if he/ she denies it that will only add to the effect. It's genius. Sheer genius.

 David Trotter 8 November, 2009 Dr Truth: Aha, the "level-headed people" again.But why do you surmise that your nonsense makes me "emotional"? Very odd. "Enllightened representatives"? Strewth.

 Philip Moriarty to Dara 8 November, 2009 Dara, you state: "What I am against is the knee-jerk internet froth. Those academics are against impact basically because they think they don't have one." I'm afraid I don't quite get what you mean by "Those academics" in this context. Could you clarify this for me? As you no doubt know, over 8,000 academics have signed the UCU petition. The signatories include Nobel laureates, FRSs, fellows of various learned societies, and RAE2008 sub-panel members and Chairs. I doubt that you're suggesting that all of these academics are "against impact because they think they don't have one", so I'd appreciate a clarification. In addition, while you mention my throwaway Daily Mail remark in an earlier comment, you don't address the more substantive comments. In particular, have you considered that the HEFCE/RCUK impact agenda, when coupled with Mandelson's business-led academia "vision", may well be detrimental to return on taxpayers' investment?

 Dr Truth 8 November, 2009 "It's a fake post". There's nothing fake about it; it's up there for all to see. There's no drilling sense into some heads here; so I willnow give up.

 Don Quixote 9 November, 2009 Although I disagree strngly with most of what Dr. Truth says, I defend his right to say it. I don't know if it is ever likely to be possible to reach agreement, but it's important to hear unpalatable views. The view that, in times of less-than-plenty, we need to be careful how we spend our money - what's not to agree about? But underneath that, I think Dr. Truth holds the view that some research is valueless, or at least not very valuable. again - I think I have to agree - has anyone here ever observed research being advocated not on the basis of an important question that needs solving, but on the basis that some research income would benefit the

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009 department/faculty/university? I've even known of some academics seeking research income on the basis that they desparately need to buy time out of teaching because the workload is grindingly impossible and they feel it is destroying their ability to be a 'proper academic'. In fact, I'd even go so far as to surmise that a huge percentage - possibly more than 50% - of research activity is undertaken for flaky reasons. This is analogous to the situation where many people want to start a business (and obtain money from the bank to do so) not because they want to provide a better service at a better price, but because they want a bigger house and nicer car! - hardly the 'right' reason at all! Now, these people will sometimes moan that the bank don't understand, will only lend an umbrella when it's not raining, etc. But... and here's the rub - if the selection process the banks or the research bodies use is less than competant, - that is, the system cannot identify what might be a success and what might be ill thought-out, then everyone has a right to feel aggrieved. Might just as well throw a dice (a lot cheaper, too). Certainly, the assumption that a good researcher will naturally be better at making the case for social impact needs to be jolly well substantiated before spending hundreds of thousands of valuable research time on it. And researchers have the right to demand detailed evidence. Moreover, anyone who insisted on proposing a scheme without substantiation should be off down the jobcentre double quick. Incidentally, citing "commonsense" doesn't constitute substantiation.

 Bella Millett 9 November, 2009 Watching a Japanese TV series online this evening, I came across a scene which effectively put into words my uneasiness with the Government's current proposals for the universities . The terrifying teacher who is the central character of 'The Queen's Classroom' tells her 12-year-old pupils that there is no point in their studying simply to get into a good university or company. In that case, they ask, why should they study? 'You still don't get it? Study is not something you have to do, it's something you should want to do. In the future you'll come across a lot of things you won't know or comprehend. Beautiful things. Fun things. Mysterious things...When that happens you'll want to know more. Humans naturally want to study. People who are neither curious nor inquisitive are not humans...If you don't try to understand the world you live in, what can you do?...Studying---it's not something you do simply to pass tests. It's something you do to become a great person.' (http://www.mysoju.com/the-queens-classroom/episode-10/part-3/). This really goes to the heart of the issue: the Department for Business, Innovation, and Skills sees study as a means, academics see it as an end. No wonder we feel devalued...

 David Ganz 9 November, 2009 Professor Caroline Bynum, Director of the School of History at the Institute for Advanced Study in princeton, and a scholar who regularly reads some 300 applications to the Institute and so is rather better qualified to evaluate 'impact' than HMG's runningdogs, has said 'To say this is not to deny the deleterious effect that governement imposed standards and requirements can have. An example is the academic assesment procedures imposed in the United Kingdom. Awareness of such pressures however, makes it all the more important that scholars resist rather than exaggerate or collude with them' (Daedalus winter 2009) I note that those who extoll impact remain silent, and do not have the intellect, courage or integrity to defend their position.

 Don Quixote 10 November, 2009 Quick request: is there, anywhere, a comprehensive-yet-succinct summary of the substantiating arguments for the notion of "Impact"? - might the editors be able to dig it out for us?

 Philip Moriarty to Bella Millett 10 November, 2009 @Bella: That's a great quote. It puts me in mind of the words of Drew Faust, President of Harvard (during her inaugural address): "“A university is not about results in the next quarter; it is not even about who a student has become by graduation. It is about learning that moulds a lifetime; learning that transmits the heritage of millennia; learning that shapes the future" [quoted in "What are universities for?", Geoffrey Boulton and Colin Lucas; League of European Research Universities (2008)]. Or, after running those beautiful and inspiring words through the BIS translation software, the key contribution of universities to the innovation ecosystem is human capital.

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009 Impact is created in immeasurable ways 1 http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=409071 12 November 2009 How ironic that the "senior sector figures" should be protected by Chatham House rules, when the powerful rulers single me out as a powerless ordinary academic ("Managers and scholars divided as resistance grows to impact agenda", 5 November).

How ridiculous that they should attempt to undermine the movement against impact by picking on me as its representative with my utter lack of distinction compared with all the fellows of the Royal Society and fellows of the British Academy who have signed my petition and/or the University and College Union one, or the ten Nobel laureates in the open letter to the research councils. How typical that they should, without evidence, claim that the young are happy with the impact agenda but the "middle territory" has "lost the plot". On the contrary, many young doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers have signed the petitions, as have many senior figures.

How sad that we cannot expect those who lead universities to argue more fairly than the politician who characterises an opponent of detention without trial as someone who wants to see terrorists roam free. Those opposed to the impact agenda do not want universities to not contribute to society. We know that universities contribute massively to society, and we believe the impact agenda threatens to undermine this contribution by rewarding and encouraging a particularly narrow kind of short-term impact. That academics want their research to have impact is beside the point. Of course we do, but we also expect that impact to come in many small and immeasurable ways, not least through the indirect effects that research-led teaching has by fostering independent critical thought in students. The only evidence we have that the senior sector figures have any brains at all is that they are not willing to have their names associated with the nonsense they spout.

James Ladyman, Department of philosophy, University of Bristol.

Compilation of REF and Impact press articles www.publicengagement.ac.uk November 2009