British Academy | Cash for Questions: Research funding, policy and development

Adam Golberg announces new post about Ministers inserting themselves into research grant announcements

“You might very well think that as your hypothesis, but I couldn’t possibly comment”

Here’s something I’ve been wondering recently. Is it just me, or have major research council funding announcements started to be made by government ministers, rather than by the, er, research councils?

Here’s a couple of examples that caught my eye from the last week or so. First, David Willetts MP “announces £29 million of funding for ESRC Centres and Large Grants“. Thanks Dave! To be fair, he is Minster of State for Universities and Science. Rather more puzzling is George Osborne announcing “22 new Centres for Doctoral Training“, though apparently he found the money as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Seems a bit tenuous to me.

So I had a quick look back through the ESRC and EPSRC press release archives to see if the prominence of government ministers in research council funding announcements was a new thing or not. Because I hadn’t noticed it before. With the ESRC, it is new. Here’s the equivalent announcement from last year in which no government minister is mentioned. With the EPSRC, it’s being going on for longer. This year’s archive and the 2013 archive show government ministers (mainly Willetts, sometimes Cable or Osborne) front and centre in major announcements. In 2012 they get a name check, but normally in the second or third paragraph, not in the headline, and don’t get a picture of themselves attached to the story.

Does any of this matter? Perhaps not, but here’s why I think it’s worth mentioning. The Haldane Principle is generally defined as “decisions about what to spend research funds on should be made by researchers rather than politicians”. And one of my worries is that in closely associating political figures with funding decisions, the wrong impression is given. Read the recent ESRC announcement again, and it’s only when you get down to the ‘Notes for Editors’ section that there’s any indication that there was a competition, and you have to infer quite heavily from those notes that decisions were taken independently of government.

Why is this happening? It might be for quite benign reasons – perhaps research council PR people think (probably not unreasonably) that name-checking a government minister gives them a greater chance of media coverage. But I worry that it might be for less benign reasons related to political spin – seeking credit and basking in the reflected glory of all these new investments, which to the non-expert eye look to be something novel, rather than research council business as usual. To be fair, there are good arguments for thinking that the current government does deserve some credit for protecting research budgets – a flat cash settlement (i.e. cut only be the rate of inflation each year) is less good than many want, but better than many feared. But it would be deeply misleading if the general public were to think that these announcements represented anything above and beyond the normal day-to-day work of the research councils.

Jo VanEvery tells me via Twitter that ministerial announcements are normal practice in Canada, but something doesn’t quite sit right with me about this, and it’s not a party political worry. I feel there’s a real risk of appearing to politicise research. If government claims credit, it’s reasonable for the opposition to criticise… now that might be the level of investment, but might it extend to the investments chosen? Or do politicians know better than to go there for cheap political points?

Or should we stop worrying and just embrace it? It’s not clear that many people outside of the research ‘industry’ notice anyway (though the graphene announcement was very high profile), and so perhaps the chances of the electorate being misled (about this, at least) are fairly small.

But we could go further. MEPs to announce Horizon 2020 funding? Perhaps Nick Clegg should announce the results of the British Academy/Leverhulme Small Grants Scheme, although given the Victorian origins of investments and wealth supporting work of the Leverhulme Trust, perhaps the honour should go to the ghosts of Gladstone or Disraeli.

Leverhulme Trust to support British Academy Small Research Grant scheme

BA staff examine the Leverhulme memorandum of understanding

The British Academy announced yesterday that agreement has been reached on a new collaborative agreement with the Leverhulme Trust about funding for its Small Grants Scheme. This is very good news for researchers in the humanities and the social sciences, and I’m interrupting my series of gloom-and-doom posts on what to do if your application is unsuccessful to inflict my take on some really good news upon you, oh gentle reader. And to see if I can set a personal best for the number of links in an opening sentence. Which I can.

When I first started supporting grant-getting activity back in the halcyon days of 2005ish, the British Academy Small Grants scheme was a small and beautifully formed scheme. It funded up to £7.5k or so for projects of up to two years, and only covered research expenses – so no funding for investigator time, replacement teaching, or overheads, but would cover travel, subsistence, transcription, data, casual research assistance etc and so on. It was a light touch application on a simple form, and enjoyed a success rate of around 50% or so. The criterion for funding was academic merit. Nothing else mattered. It funded some brilliant work, and Ken Emond of the British Academy has always spoken very warmly about this scheme, and considered it a real success story. Gradually people started cottoning on to just how good a scheme it was, and success rates started to drop – but that’s what happens when you’re successful.

Then along came the Comprehensive Spending Review and budgets were cut. I presume the scheme was scrapped under government pressure, only for our heroes at the BA to eventually win the argument. At the same time, the ESRC decided that their reviewers weren’t going get out of bed in the morning for less than £200k. Suddenly bigger projects were the only option and (funded) academic research looked to be all about perpetual paradigm shifts with only outstanding stuff that will change everything to be funded. And there was no evidence of any thought as to how these major theoretical breakthroughs gained through massive grants might be developed and expanded and exploited and extended through smaller projects.

Although it was great to see the BA SGS scheme survive in any form, the reduced funding made it inevitable that success rates would plummet. However, the increased funding from the Leverhulme Trust could make a difference. According to the announcement, the Trust has promised £1.5 million funding over three years. Let’s assume:

that every penny goes to supporting research, and not a penny goes on infrastructure and overheads and that it’s all additional (rather than replacement) funding
that £10k will remain the maximum available
that the average amount awarded will be £7.5k

So…. £1.5m over three years is 500k per year. 500k divided by £7.5k average project cost is about 67 extra projects. While we don’t know how many projects will be funded in this year’s reduced scheme, we do know about last year. According to the British Academy’s 2010/11 annual report

For the two rounds of competition held during 2010/11 the Academy received 1,561 applications for consideration and 538 awards were made, a success rate of 34.5%.Awards were spread over the whole range of Humanities and Social Sciences, and were made to individuals based in more than 110 institutions, as well as to more than 20 independent scholars.

2010/11 was the last year that the scheme ran in full and at the time, we all thought that the spring 2011 call would the last, so I suspect that the success rate might have been squeezed by a number of ‘now-or-never’ applications. We won’t know until next month how many awards were made in the Autumn 2011 call, nor what the success rate is, so we won’t know until then whether the Leverhulme cash will restore the scheme to its former glory. I suspect that it won’t, and that the combined total of the BA’s own funds and the Leverhulme contribution will add up to less than was available for the scheme before the comprehensive spending review struck.

Nevertheless, there will be about 67 more small social science and humanities projects funded than otherwise would have been the case. So let’s raise a non-alcoholic beverage to the Leverhulme Trust, and in memory of founder William Hesketh Lever and his family’s values of “‘liberalism, nonconformity, and abstinence”.

23rd Jan update: In response to a question on Twitter from @Funding4Res (aka Marie-Claire from the University of Huddersfield’s Research and Enterprise team), the British Academy have been said that “they’ll be rounds for Small Research Grants in the spring and autumn. Dates will be announced soon.”

A visit from the British Academy….

The British Academy

Ken Emond, Head of Research Awards of the British Academy, came to visit the University of Nottingham the other week to talk about the various and nefarious research funding schemes that are on offer from the British Academy. To make an event of it, my colleagues in the Centre for Advanced Studies also arranged for various internal beneficiaries of the Academy’s largesse to come and talk about the role that Academy funding had had in their research career. I hope no-one minds if I repeat some of the things that were said – there was no mention of ‘Chatham House’ rules or of ‘confidential learning agreements’, and I don’t imagine that Ken gives privileged information to the University of Nottingham alone, no matter how wonderful we are.

Much of what funders’ representatives tend to say during institutional visits or AMRA conferences is pretty much identical to the information already available on their website in one form or another, but it’s interesting how many academics seem to prefer to hear the information in person rather than read it in their own time. And it’s good to put a face to names, and faces to institutions. Although I think I shall probably always share Phil Ward‘s mental image of the BA as an exclusive Rowley Birkin QC-style private members club. But it’s good to have a reminder of what’s on offer, and have an opportunity to ask questions.

I met Ken very briefly at the ARMA conference in 2010, and his enthusiasm for the Small Grants Scheme then (and now) was obvious. I was very surprised when it was scrapped, and it seems likely that this was imposed rather than freely chosen. However, it’s great to see it back again, and this time including support for conference funding to disseminate the project findings. It seems the call is going to be at least annual, with no decision taken yet on whether there will be a second call this year, as in previous years.

It seems much more sensible than having separate schemes for projects and for conference funding. It’s unlikely that we’re going to see a return of the BA Overseas Conference Scheme, but…. it was quite a lot of work in writing and assessing for really very small amounts of money. Although having said that, when I was at Keele those very small amounts of money really did help us send researchers to prestigious conferences (especially in the States) they wouldn’t otherwise have attended.

One of the questions asked was about the British Academy’s attitude to demand management, of the kind that the EPSRC have introduced and that the ESRC are proposing. The response was that they currently have no plans in this direction – they don’t think that any institutions are submitting an excessive number of applications.

Although the British Academy has some of the lowest success rates in town for its major schemes, they are all light touch applications – certainly compared to the Research Councils. Mid-Career and Post-Doc Fellowships both have an outline stage, and the Senior Research Fellowships application form is hardly more taxing than a Small Grant one. Presumably they’re also quick and easy to review – I wonder how many of those a referee could get through in the time it took them to review a single Research Council application? Which does raise the suggestion from Mavan, a commenter on one of my previous posts, about cutting the ESRC application form dramatically.

But… it’s possible that the relative brevity of the application forms is itself increasing the number of applications, and that’s certainly something that the ESRC were concerned about when considering their own move to outline stage applications.

I guess a funding scheme could be credible and sustainable with a low success rate and a low ‘overhead’ cost of writing and reviewing applications or a high success rate with a high overhead cost. The problem is when were get to where we are at the moment with the ESRC, with low success rates and high overhead costs.