When I first started writing this blog in 2010, I imagined I was going to write about the science that interested me, the latest papers in my field that caught my eye, and specifically highlight the excitement and challenge of working across boundaries in interdisciplinary areas. I was troubled by the difficulties scientists who worked, as I did back then, in areas that crossed research council boundaries faced in obtaining funding. Specifically, I worked at the interface between physics and biology and saw, despite the good intentions of those working at EPSRC and BBSRC (there was no UKRI back then), who regularly assured me that every grant would find a home, that what was meant by a ‘home’ was a panel that would evaluate an application. And this was not, and would not be now, the same thing as finding a panel that was able to judge it fairly because of the breadth of their expertise. I saw a grant I had written for EPSRC be rejected by them and sent to a BBSRC panel for which it was totally unsuitable, something I knew full well as I was the chair of that particular panel. Of course it failed, as I wrote about previously.
In time, my vocal raising of this issue wherever I could, did not lead to any more success in grant funding, but it did lead to me chairing the REF2021 Interdisciplinary Advisory Panel where I hope we were able to do a little to change the monoculture of panels involved in decision-making during the process. In particular, we stressed that excellent research could be done which did not need to be cutting edge in all or indeed any of the component parts: the excellence could lie in the overall integration. I hope some similar approach will inform the current REF round, in which I will play no part.
It is a long time since I last wrote a grant proposal, successful or not. During the last decade I served on the European Research Council’s Scientific Council (across the Brexit referendum) and discovered that a single overarching research council does not solve the problem of grants that transcend any particular boundary imposed between panels. UKRI faces exactly the same issues only now with two tiers: gaps between research councils and gaps between panels within a single research council. In an attempt to solve this problem, there is now an explicit interdisciplinary research strand, the cross research council responsive mode pilot scheme which has recently closed its second round. Although I was involved in training panel members for the interdisciplinary college for this call, I have no information on how well the first round progressed or was received. I would be interested to hear from any readers who know more.
But the disjunction that occurs when people work in silos can be found in many places far beyond academic research. Now much of my work is in the policy arena, rather than research science, I have been rereading Roger Pielke’s classic text The Honest Broker. I was struck by the following text inserted into a section on the failure of the so-called linear model, in which it is naively assumed that basic/pure research leads to applied research leads to product in the market. Apparently a reviewer of an early draft of the book said there was no need for a discussion of this because ‘the STS (science and technology studies) audience know all this already’. I remember I got a similar comment regarding my own draft manuscript in which I presented data about gender and science from the social science literature and was told this was all well-known to social scientists (although I cannot immediately lay my hands on the exact quote). The idea that an author might be writing for those who already know the stuff seems to me to be a strange way to approach a book draft where, surely, the whole point is to reach those who don’t know the stuff. But reviewers can be narrow-minded – as anyone who has ever received a referee’s report will know only too well – and not appreciate that an important point of working across disciplines is to bring solid facts to new audiences and to new problems. In my case, I wanted practicing scientists to learn about what the social scientists could tell them about gender issues in the classroom and whether specific interventions might work. I was not aiming my book at the social scientists who knew their own literature already.
However, the reality is, any organisation – be it a university, a UKRI, a business or a government – has to structure itself into some sort of units, and there will always be joins with friction or gaps between them. A recent HEPI blog by Gavin Miller took exception to the whole of the concept of silos as being inappropriate, claiming ‘The term ‘silo’ invokes a mystifying metaphor – that of the university as a living, intelligent organism’ (I’m not sure most readers would claim a university as intelligent, although they are often organic). But nevertheless, whether an organisation is considered to be living or not, there can be no doubt that junctions between units can be problematic and the need for keeping them as frictionless as possible is vital.
In a different guise, but arguably a far more important space, the new Government has recognized this in identifying its five cross-departmental missions, instead of relying on individual departments to solve the myriad problems of the day (subject, of course, to Treasury approval). There is no doubt that science will have a major role to play in just about all these identified areas, but how easy it will be for different teams to share enough of a common language (often a problem in interdisciplinary university research, where local jargon and acronyms can rule the day), or shared goals of both a short and long term nature, will remain to be seen. In the not-too-distant past, universities benefitted from having a minister (notably David Willetts and Jo Johnson at different times) who had a foot in both BEIS, now of course defunct, and the Department for Education. Sometimes a minister who sat in Cabinet. Now that formal linkage is gone, but if the ‘opportunity for all’ and ‘growth’ missions are to succeed the linkages will be more important than ever across different groupings of departments (issues far beyond universities themselves). Breaking down silos, departments, disciplines, whatever language you want to use, does really matter.
