Category: University culture

Best wishes for 2013, via the medium of my favourite university-related youtube clips of 2012….

Yes, I know I used the same picture last year. You can write to the usual address for your money back....
Yes, I know I used the same picture last year. You can write to the usual address for your money back….

Hello everyone, and happy new year’s eve.  Or probably more likely by the time you’re reading this, happy first day back at work of 2013 and a prosperous new email backlog from people who had less time off over Christmas than you, and are anxious to demonstrate their productivity.  My last new year’s message was a bit of a whingeathon, so I’m going to be more positive this season and share some youtubes that I’ve enjoyed over the last year.  I know you’ve got a lot to do today, but why not leave this page open and watch the clips over lunch?

1. John Cleese, Jonathan Miller – Words… and things

This is a sketch from 1977 starring John Cleese and Jonathan Miller, which I think I’ve tweeted before with the title “Philosophers preparing their REF Impact statement”.  And while there’s a bit of that, what I like most about this is the superbly well observed and subtly exaggerated academic mannerisms.  Are those mannerisms a peculiar philosophy affectation, or are they more widespread?

2.  Armstrong and Miller Physics Special

In which Ben Miller (who I think has a PhD in physics) demonstrates how not to do public engagement/media work.  Watching this, it’s hard not to appreciate the effort that does go into communicating very complex science to the general public, particularly the efforts to explain the search for the Higgs via the medium of rap, when I suspect that the reality is pretty much as Miller’s character says.  Special hat tip on the science public engagement front to m’colleagues from the Periodic Videos team at the University of Nottingham’s School of Chemistry, though apparently they prefer Dubstep (whatever that is) to rap music.

3. A Very Peculiar Practice

I finally got round to watching this late 1980s TV series about a medical practice at a university.  It’s both very current (debates about research v. teaching; working with industry; student finances; university politics; the role of the university; the place of the arts/humanities) and very dated (haircuts; weird theme music and opening credits; accents – some weird London accents that have either died out or never existed at all).  On the down side, it does require the viewer to accept the premise that a university medical practice is a department of the university (was this ever the case anywhere?), and the overall tone and level of (sur)realism uneasily shifts between sitcom and comedy-drama.  On the up side, it’s an interesting view of 1980s campuses (Birmingham and Keele – my former stomping ground) and has a superb cast – Peter Davison, Barbara Flynn, John Bird, plus small early roles for Hugh Grant and Kathy Burke.  It’s worth a look – I’ve embedded the trailer for the DVD complete box set, though a fair bit of it is also on youtube if you want more of a taster before investing.

4. “Don’t wanna work in admin”

I’ve been a fan of Nick Helm’s brand of on-the-edge-of-a-breakdown stand-up and musical comedy since seeing him in Nottingham a few years back – hilarious and terrifying at the same time.  What I remember most about that performance was a song that will resonate with anyone who has or has had a basic admin job.  It’s very sweary and therefore not work safe, so I’m only going to link it rather than embed it.

Enjoy.  But probably not in the office.

ESRC “demand management” measures working….. and why rises and falls in institutions’ levels of research funding are not news

There was an interesting snippet of information in an article in this week’s Times Higher about the latest research council success rates.

 [A] spokeswoman for the ESRC said that since the research council had begun requiring institutions from June 2011 to internally sift applications before submitting them, it had recorded an overall success rate of 24 per cent, rising to 33 per cent for its most recent round of responsive mode grants.  She said that application volumes had also dropped by 37 per cent, “which is an encouraging start towards our demand management target of a 50 per cent reduction” by the end of 2014-15.

Back in October last year I noticed what I thought was a change in tone from the ESRC which gave the impression that they were more confident that institutions had taken note of the shot across the bows of the “demand management” measures consultation exercise(s), and that perhaps asking for greater restraint in putting forward applications would be sufficient.  I hope it is, because as the current formal demand management proposals that will be implemented if required unfairly and unreasonably include co-applicants in any sanction.

I’ve written before (and others have added very interesting comments) about how I think we arrived at the situation where social science research units were flinging as many applications in as possible in the hope that some of them would stick.  And I hope the recent improvements in success rates to around 1-in-3, 1-in-4 don’t serve to re-encourage this kind of behaviour. We need long term, sustainable, careful, restraint in terms of what applications are submitted by institutions to the ESRC (and other major funders, for that matter) and the state in which they’re submitted.

Everyone will want to improve the quality of applications, and internal mentoring and peer review and the kind of lay review that I do will assist with that, but we also need to make sure that the underlying research idea is what I call ‘ESRC-able’.  At Nottingham University Business School, I secured agreement a while ago now to introduce a ‘proof of concept’ review phase for ESRC applications, where we review a two page outline first, before deciding whether to give the green light for the development of a full application.  I think this allows time for changes to be made at the earliest stage, and makes it much easier for us to say that the idea isn’t right and shouldn’t be developed than if a full application was in front of us.

And what isn’t ‘ESRC-able’?  I think a look at the assessment schema gives some useful clues – if you can’t honestly say that your application would fit in the top two categories on the final page, you probably shouldn’t bother.  ‘Dull but worthy’ stuff won’t get funded, and I’ve seen the phrase “incremental progress” used in referees’ comments to damn with faint praise.  There’s now a whole category of research that is of good quality and would doubtless score respectably in any REF exercise, but which simply won’t be competitive with the ESRC.  This, of course, raises the question about how non-groundbreaking stuff gets funded – the stuff that’s more than a series of footnotes to Plato, but which builds on and advances the findings of ground-breaking research by others.  And to that I have no answer – we have a system which craves the theoretically and methodologically innovative, but after a paradigm has been shifted, there’s no money available to explore the consequences.

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Also in the Times Higher this week is the kind of story that appears every year – some universities have done better this year at getting research funding/with their success rates than in previous years, and some have done worse.  Some of those who have done better and worse are the traditional big players, and some are in the chasing pack.  Those who have done well credit their brilliant internal systems and those who have done badly will contest the figures or point to extenuating circumstances, such as the ending of large grants.

While one always wants to see one’s own institution doing well and doing better, and everyone always enjoys a good bit of schadenfreude at the expense of their rivals benchmark institutions and any apparent difficulties that a big beast find themselves in, are any of these short term variations of actual, real, statistical significance?  Apparently big gains can be down to a combination of a few big wins, grants transferring in with new staff, and just… well… the kind of natural variation you’d expect to see.  Big losses could be big grants ending, staff moving on, and – again – natural variance.  Yes, you could ascribe your big gains to your shiny new review processes, but would you also conclude that there’s a problem with those same processes and people the year after when performance is apparently less good?

Why these short term (and mostly meaningless) short term variations are more newsworthy than the radical variation in ESRC success rates for different social science disciplines I have no idea….

ESRC success rates by discipline: what on earth is going on?

Update – read this post for the 2012/13 stats for success rates by discipline

The ESRC have recently published a set of ‘vital statistics‘ which are “a detailed breakdown of research funding for the 2011/12 financial year” (see page 22).  While differences in success rates between academic disciplines are nothing new, this year’s figures show some really quite dramatic disparities which – in my view at least – require an explanation and action.

The overall success rate was 14% (779 applications, 108 funded) for the last tranche of responsive mode Small Grants and response mode Standard Grants (now Research Grants).  However, Business and Management researchers submitted 68 applications, of which 1 was funded.  One.  One single funded application.  In the whole year.  For the whole discipline.  Education fared little better with 2 successes out of 62.

Just pause for a moment to let that sink in.  Business and Management.  1 of 68.  Education.  2 of 62.

Others did worse still.  Nothing for Demographics (4 applications), Environmental Planning (8), Science and Technology Studies (4), Social Stats, Computing, Methods (11), and Social Work (10).  However, with a 14% success rate working out at about 1 in 7, low volumes of applications may explain this.  It’s rather harder to explain a total of 3 applications funded from 130.

Next least successful were ‘no lead discipline’ (4 of 43) and Human Geography (3 from 32).  No other subjects had success rates in single figures.  At the top end were Socio-Legal Studies (a stonking 39%, 7 of 18), and Social Anthropology (28%, 5 from 18), with Linguistics; Economics; and Economic and Social History also having hit rates over 20%.  Special mention for Psychology (185 applications, 30 funded, 16% success rate) which scored the highest number of projects – almost as many as Sociology and Economics (the second and third most funded) combined.

Is this year unusual, or is there a worrying and peculiar trend developing?  Well, you can judge for yourself from this table on page 49 of last year’s annual report, which has success rates going back to the heady days of 06/07.  Three caveats, though, before you go haring off to see your own discipline’s stats.  One is that the reports refer to financial years, not academic years, which may (but probably doesn’t) make a difference.  The second is that the figures refer to Small and Standard Grants only (not Future Leaders/First Grants, Seminar Series, or specific targeted calls).  The third is that funded projects are categorised by lead discipline only, so the figures may not tell the full story as regards involvement in interdisciplinary research.

You can pick out your own highlights, but it looks to me as if this year is only a more extreme version of trends that have been going on for a while.  Last year’s Education success rate?  5%.  The years before?  8% and 14%  Business and Management?  A heady 11%, compared to 10% and 7% for the preceding years. And you’ve got to go all the back to 9/10 to find the last time any projects were funded in Demography, Environmental Planning, or Social Work.  And Psychology has always been the most funded, and always got about twice as many projects as the second and third subjects, albeit from a proportionately large number of applications.

When I have more time I’ll try to pull all the figures together in a single spreadsheet, but at first glance many of the trends seem similar.

So what’s going on here?  Well, there are a number of possibilities.  One is that our Socio Legal Studies research in this country is tip top, and B&M research and Education research is comparatively very weak.  Certainly I’ve heard it said that B&M research tends to suffer from poor research methodologies.  Another possibility is that some academic disciplines are very collegiate and supportive in nature, and scratch each other’s backs when it comes to funding, while other disciplines are more back-stabby than back-scratchy.

But are any or all of these possibilities sufficient to explain the difference in funding rates?  I really don’t think so.  So what’s going on?  Unconscious bias?  Snobbery?  Institutional bias?  Politics?  Hidden agendas?  All of the above?  Anyone know?

More pertinently, what do we do about it?  Personally, I’d like to see the appropriate disciplinary bodies putting a bit of pressure on the ESRC for some answers, some assurances, and the production of some kind of plan for addressing the imbalance.  While no-one would expect to see equal success rates for every subject, this year’s figures – in my view – are very troubling.

And something needs to be done about it, whether that’s a re-thinking of priorities, putting the knives away, addressing real disciplinary weaknesses where they exist, ring-fenced funding, or some combination of all of the above.  Over to greater minds than mine…..

News from the ESRC: International co-investigators and the Future Leaders Scheme

"They don't come over here, they take our co-investigator jobs..."I’m still behind on my blogging – I owe the internet the second part of the impact series, and a book review I really must get round to writing.  But I picked up an interesting nugget of information regarding the ESRC and international co-investigators that’s worthy of sharing and commenting upon.

ESRC communications send round an occasional email entitled ‘All the latest from the ESRC’, which is well worth subscribing to, and reading very carefully as often quite big announcements and changes are smuggled out in the small print.  In the latest version, for example, the headline news is the Annual Report (2011-12), while the announcement of the ESRC Future Leaders call for 2012 is only the fifth item down a list of funding opportunities.  To be fair, it was also announced on Twitter and perhaps elsewhere too, and perhaps the email has a wider audience than people like me.  But even so, it’s all a bit low key.

I’ve not got much to add to what I said last year about the Future Leaders Scheme other than to note with interest the lack of an outline stage this year, and the decision to ring fence some of the funding for very early career researchers – current doctoral students and those who have just passed their PhD.  Perhaps the ESRC are now more confident in institutions’ ability to regulate their own submission behaviour, and I can see this scheme being a real test of this.  I know at the University of Nottingham we’re taking all this very seriously indeed, and grant writing is now neither a sprint nor a marathon but more like a steeplechase, and my impression from the ARMA conference is that we’re far from alone in this.  Balancing ‘demand management’ with a desire to encourage applications is a topic for another blog post.  As is the effect of all these calls with early Autumn deadlines – I’d argue it’s much harder to demand manage over the summer months when applicants, reviewers, and research managers are likely to be away on holiday and/or researching.

Something else mentioned in the ESRC is a light touch review of the ESRC’s international co-investigator policy.  One of the findings was that

“…grant applications with international co-investigators are nearly twice as likely to be successful in responsive mode competitions as those without, strengthening the argument that international cooperation delivers better research.”

This is very interesting indeed.  My first reaction is to wonder whether all of that greater success can be explained by higher quality, or whether the extra value for money offered has made a difference.  Outside of the various international co-operation/bilateral schemes, the ESRC would generally expect only to pay directly incurred research costs for ICo-Is, such as travel, subsistence, transcription, and research assistance.  It won’t normally pay for investigator time and will never pay overheads, which represents a substantial saving on naming a UK-based Co-I.

While the added value for money argument will generally go in favour of the application, there are circumstances where it might make it technically ineligible.  When the ESRC abolished the small grants scheme and introduced the floor of £200k as the minimum to be applied for through the research grants scheme, the figure of £200k was considered to represent the minimum scale/scope/ambition that they were prepared to entertain.  But a project with a UK Co-I may sneak in just over £200k and be eligible, yet an identical project with an ICo-I would not be eligible as it would not have salary costs or overheads to bump up the cost.  I did raise this with the ESRC a while back when I was supporting an application that would be ineligible under the new rules, but we managed to submit it before the final deadline for Small Grants.  The issue did not arise for us then, but I’m sure it will (and probably has) arisen for others.

The ESRC has clarified the circumstances under which they will pay overseas co-investigator salary costs:

“….only in circumstances where payment of salaries is absolutely required for the research project to be conducted. For example, where the policy of the International Co-Investigator’s home institution requires researchers to obtain funding for their salaries for time spent on externally-funded research projects.

In instances where the research funding structure of the collaborating country is such that national research funding organisations equivalent to the ESRC do not normally provide salary costs, these costs will not be considered. Alternative arrangements to secure researcher time, such as teaching replacement costs, will be considered where these are required by the co-investigator’s home institution.”

This all seems fairly sensible, and would allow the participation of researchers involved in Institutes where they’re expected to bring in their own salary, and those where there isn’t a substantial research time allocation that could be straightforwardly used for the project.

While it would clearly be inadvisable to add on an ICo-I in the hope of boosting chances of success or for value for money alone, it’s good to know that applications with ICo-Is are doing well with the ESRC even outside of the formal collaborative schemes, and that we shouldn’t shy away from looking abroad for the very best people to work with.   Few would argue with the ESRC’s contention that

[m]any major issues requiring research evidence (eg the global economic crisis, climate change, security etc.) are international in scope, and therefore must be addressed with a global research response.

The ARMA conference, social media, the future of this blog, and some downtime

The Association of Research Managers and Administrators conference was held in Southampton last week, and I’ve only got time to scribble a few words about it.  It’s a little frustrating, really – I’ve come back from the conference with various ideas and schemes for work, and a few for the blog, but I’m on annual leave until the end of July.  While I’ve always written this blog in my own time, I’m going to have a near-complete break (apart from perhaps a little Twitter lurking) so my reader will have to wait until July at the very earliest for the second instalment of my impact series.

I co-presented a session at ARMA on ‘Social Media in Research Support’ with Phil Ward of ‘Fundermentals‘ and the University of Kent, Julie Northam (Bournemouth University Research blog), and David Young (Northumbria University Research blog).  Phil has written a concise summary of the plenary sessions, and our presentation can be found on the Northumbria blog.

I have a slight stammer that I’m told that most people don’t notice, so I’m not a ‘natural’ public speaker, but I’m very pleased with the way that the session went.  I’m very grateful to my three co-presenters for their efforts and for what really amounted to quite a lot of preparation time, including a meeting in London.  I’m also very grateful to the delegates who attended – I think I counted 50 or so, which for the final session of the conference and scheduled against a very strong line-up of parallel sessions, was pretty good.    It was a very warm afternoon, but energy and attention levels in the room felt high, and this helped enormously.  So if you made it, thank you for coming, thank you for your attention, and most importantly of all, thank you for laughing at our jokes.

David opened the session by asking about the audience’s experience with social media, I was surprised at how much experience there was in the room.  We weren’t far short of 100% on Facebook, probably about 20% or more on or having using Twitter, and four or five bloggers.  Perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise, as perhaps the title of the session would have particularly appealed to those with an interest or previous experience.  But it was good to have an idea of the level to pitch things.

The session consisted of a brief introduction and explanation of social media, followed by four case studies.  Phil and I talked about our motivations in setting up our own blogs, our experiences, lessons learnt, and benefits and challenges.  Julie and David talked about their experience in setting up institutional research blogs, and how they went about getting institutional acceptance and academic buy-in.  It was interesting to see that the Open University had a poster presentation about a research blog that they’ve set up, though that’s internal only at the moment.  ARMA itself is now on Twitter, and this was the first year that the conference had an official hashtag – #ARMA2012.  While there’s no need for an official one – sometimes they just emerge – it’s very helpful to have an element of coordination.  I don’t think blogging or social media are going away any time soon, and I can only see their usage increasing. – though I do have reservations about scalability and sustainability.

As I said in the presentation, my motivations in setting up a blog were to try to join in a broader conversation with academics, funders, and people like me.  We get to do a lot of that at the annual ARMA conference, but it would be good to keep that going throughout the rest of the year too.  A secondary motivation was to learn by doing – I’m expected to help academics write their pathways to impact, which almost inevitably involve social media, and by getting involved myself I understand it in a way that I could never have understood as a mere bystander.

My blog is now a few weeks shy of its first birthday, an auspicious event marked by a birthday card invoice from my hosting provider, and a time for reflection.  I’ve managed reasonably well to hit an average of 2-3 posts per month – some reactions to news, some more detailed think pieces, and some lighter reflections on university culture and life.  That’s not too bad, but looking into the future I wonder whether I’ll be able to sustain this, and whether I’ll want to spend my own time writing about these things.  While I’m hopeful that I might be able to shift a little of the blog into my ‘day job’ (discussions on that to follow), one other option is to share the load, and I think the future for most blogs is multi-author.  Producing semi-regular, consistent quality content is a challenge, and I’m going to be soliciting guest posts in the future to feature alongside my own – whether that’s semi-regular or one off.  So, if you’d like to write occasionally but don’t want a whole blog, this might be a good opportunity.  Happy to discuss anything that’s a good fit with the overall theme of the blog.  Please drop me an email if you’re interested – I don’t bite.

One issue that came up in the questions (and afterwards on Twitter), was the question of the personal and the professional.  My sense was that a fair few people in the room had their own Twitter accounts already, but used them for personal purposes, rather than for professional purposes, and were concerned about mixing the two.  Probably there was little or no reference to their job in their bio, and they tweet about their interests and talk to family and friends.  This issue of the personal and the professional was something we touched on only very briefly in our talk, and mainly in reference to blogs rather than Twitter.  But it’s clearly something that concerns people, and may be an active barrier to more people getting involved in Twitter conversations.  Probably the one thing I’d do differently about the presentation would be to say more about this, and I’ve added it to my list of topics for blog posts for the future.

Unless anyone else wants to write it?