Indications of Direction of Travel at UKRI

Posted on March 21, 2022 by Athene Donald

I have been reading the recent publication from UKRI, their strategy document for the next five years. In UKRI’s relatively brief history, this is the first such document it has produced, because it is only now that they have any certainty over their funding for more than a few months: the Spending Review provides them with assurance for three years. The publication is a high-level document and will need to be complemented by a delivery plan. I always get worried when I read documents that state ‘we will [do something fundamentally important]..…’ without clarity over how any of their undoubtedly laudable aims will be translated into practice, but we have to be patient in this case. I am led to believe such a delivery plan will follow in due course, to put flesh on the bones of the aspirations. Thus, in what follows I do absolutely understand the mechanics of making things happen have not been, and in many instances cannot yet be, spelled out, as I raise my questionmarks.

Having known Ottoline Leyser, the current CEO, from before her arrival in Cambridge back in 2010, I know how strongly she believes in diversity and the importance of everyone in a team. In an interview included in the book The Meaning of Success, published (free online) for the University of Cambridge, she said back in 2014:

‘The current system favours the individual agenda, so you wind up with people with big grants and fancy publications, who can be doing very little for the system as a whole.’

She is now in an excellent position to do something about it, by influencing the incentives academia operates under. The incentives which drive processes in every university, too often leading to rewards for those very people with ‘big grants and fancy publications’. Rewards at the expense of those who mentor, do the pastoral legwork, take on the least popular teaching courses and serve on committees, even those which aren’t about allocations of money or space (typically more popular than health and safety, or staff consultative committees), not to mention all those people on the teams who work with the PI with the big grant. We need to see the delivery plan to know how UKRI can start to influence the UK academic culture in the direction she has always wanted.

There are some interesting comments about excellence in the Strategy document, that word whose precise definition is so elusive. Words which tie into the importance of an entire team, not just that bigwig at the top, such as

‘We must escape the constraints of narrow definitions of excellence and excessive focus on the performance of individuals to harness the power of diverse collaborative teams.’

Translating such worthy words into the way a grant-giving panel makes its decisions will be no trivial matter.  How will their standard mental scoresheets be uprooted to encompass a broader definition of excellence? I look forward to seeing what steps are laid out in the delivery plan to achieve this.

There is surprisingly little said in the document about early career researchers and how to resolve the long-standing issues around precarity. I found two mentions of both, with precarity explicitly tied in with the challenges for early career researchers, the first appearance of which says:

‘The career paths people can take through the system are restricted, resulting in precarity, particularly at early career stages, and creating silos between sectors, roles and disciplines.’

These words echo those in last summer’s R&D People and Culture White Paper:

‘we will look to understand and address the impacts of short-term contracts, which particularly impact on the careers and progression of women and those from disadvantaged backgrounds in research.’

Understanding, consultation, are all very well, although I’d have thought there would already be plenty of evidence to inform UKRI. However, what is not spelled out – in either document – is what can be done about the problem. To remove short-term contracts would require a major shake-up on the part of funders such as UKRI, as well as within universities. This is no trivial task, essentially requiring a change to the whole current academic ecosystem (and not just in the UK). When I was first appointed a lecturer at the ripe old age of 32, that was quite old to achieve that status. No more; it would be average-to-young I’d guess. Desirable though such changes to early career trajectories may be, it is not simply going to be a quick tweak and all will be well.

One of the major challenges in this space is the shape of the academic pyramid. As long as a PI trains, say, twenty PhD students over their career (the relevant number will tend to be discipline-dependent), given there is only one of them, unless there is a sudden vast expansion of permanent positions, nineteen of them will not have a position to slot into. Hence many of the nineteen who don’t replace the one at the top when they eventually retire, will feel cheated. Some may always have wanted a career outside academia and be perfectly content. Some may not have anticipated that outcome but also be content when they join a consultancy, a think tank, the civil service, train as a teacher or enter an industrial lab – there are after all plenty of highly desirable and important jobs that don’t involve becoming your boss’s clone. But some will be left struggling through that precarious postdoc experience on a succession of short-term contracts, feeling cheated and increasingly bitter. However, as things stand, that has to be the reality given the structures we have in place. (This has been analysed quite recently in a more scholarly way for US data, but the conclusion is obvious).

Another strand of thinking, more prominent in Ottoline’s words since her appointment and indeed in the People and Culture document than in the recent UKRI Strategy, is the idea of porosity between sectors: that people may move to and fro between different sectors over their lifetimes. The most obvious example (in STEM at least) would be to move between academia and industry, maybe several times during a career. Currently that is a real challenge, since determining the ‘excellence’ of someone who has worked in industry as part of a team and not had the opportunity to publish a stream of first author (or, indeed, last author) papers, for instance, may not be recognized as having an adequately superlative track record by any grant-awarding panel when that person attempts to move back into academia and secure funding.

Even sticking within these quite narrow themes of diversity and excellence, there are many other points I could have made. For instance, UKRI’s diversity statistics do not currently make pretty reading, particularly when it comes to black scientists. What concrete steps are going to be taken to overcome this apparent significant bias against such researchers? If you want to know more about these problems, I’d recommend following @TIGERinSTEM and @profRachelGaN (Rachel Oliver) on Twitter, who are fantastic at keeping this topic in the public eye, and who recently spoke to the Commons’ Science and Technology Select Committee about the issues. Then when it comes to bullying, another of Ottoline’s bêtes noires, I’m afraid the Twitter feed of UKRI’s chosen service for reporting outcomes and impact,  ResearchFish has rather blotted the copybook, with the hostile, indeed somewhat threatening tweets they sent out last week:

“We understand that you’re not keen on reporting on your funding through Researchfish but this seems quite harsh and inappropriate. We have shared our concerns with your funder.”

In summary, there are major challenges to address if the desired outcomes laid out in the Strategy are successfully to come to fruition, but even modest steps in any of these directions might lead to a more healthy work environment for many. I look forward to seeing these.

 

 

 

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Accrual of Disadvantage

Posted on March 8, 2022 by Athene Donald

Another year, another International Women’s Day. Sometimes I get frustrated that so much action happens on this one day of the year, and isn’t distributed uniformly throughout, so that the discussions, the highlighting, the signposting – all those necessary actions – percolate the full twelve months. Of course there is much going on, but often below the radar of many academics, so that only those who are already thinking about these matters participate. There is no point in only preaching to the converted. Perhaps having this one day to celebrate the amazing women in our midst does indeed make sense, even if they should be celebrated as often as the men.

Change does happen and will happen. The more companies recognize that board diversity leads to better financial outcomes, the more they will be willing to throw away their old prejudices requiring all board members to look like the Chair and open up their executive suites. Diversity also helps the generation of disruptive science and technology but, as a 2020 PNAS article by Hofstra et al put it

‘demographically underrepresented students innovate at higher rates than majority students, but their novel contributions are discounted and less likely to earn them academic positions.’

The authors called this the ‘diversity paradox’. Being innovative doesn’t mean academic progress if you don’t fit in.

Wherever you look in academic science there are still inequalities baked in. Be it in how CVs are read according to your name (see here and here), or how long papers take in Review and what their success rates are (as evidenced by a study from the Royal Society of Chemistry); from how lecturers are assessed by their classes to how often academics’ work is cited (see here for a specific example in neuroscience, but there have been other studies too). The Matilda effect – a term coined by Margaret Rossiter back in 1993 – is alive and well, whereby women’s work may be inaccurately attributed to a male.  Awarded grants are typically smaller for women; they rarely lead the largest grants, both as shown in data from UKRI. HEI’s have significant gender and ethnicity pay gaps, as can be found by looking at each university’s published results (my own university’s is published here). At every stage disadvantage can build up. The evidence base is accumulating. Albeit a particular study may look at only a single (sub-) discipline, yet it is hard to believe the trends do not apply across the board. Organisations talk a lot about this, yet the biases persist.

Of course, some of the actions and actors are not down to the HE Institutions themselves, but individuals and, as is so often said, they may be (still) entirely unconscious of the bias they exhibit. I know I am never consciously aware of the names (let alone genders) of the authors of papers I read or cite – unless I know the authors. You can see the biases creep in there. I am no more free of them than anyone else, but I do at least try to think about these things. I am, however, sure that I cite a paper because it is relevant, not because it’s written by someone with particular characteristics. That this is not so, with men apparently systematically citing men more than women I find bizarre. But, as the authors of the study about neuroscience I cite above hypothesise, this may all be connected to the way our social networks operate. Men may ignore women at conferences, and so never realise they should talk to them about their science, which would perhaps interest them greatly if they did. On the other hand, they may of course be more interested in acting as predators at these same conferences, for which there is only too much evidence, but that’s another story for another day.

In science research, as in just about every other sphere, the playing field has a significant tilt to it which we are only slowly beginning to rebalance. Work to do – but not just on IWD, but on every day of the year!

 

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A University Education and a Lifetime of Debt

Posted on February 27, 2022 by Athene Donald

Finally, the response to the Augar Review, for which we have been waiting for the rather splendid number of 1001 days, has been released. I will not accuse the Government of choosing a good day to bury bad news, because its publication on Thursday had been trailed for several days in advance. Nevertheless, it has received much less air-time than might have been expected (indeed hoped for) had it appeared on a day without a horrendous Russian invasion of Ukraine occurring. The implications of the published response, for students, universities and further education colleges, are substantial and far from universally positive.

Writing (albeit in a personal capacity) as someone who is the head of a Cambridge College which has always prided itself on its focus on widening participation, I read the details with unease. Cambridge is constantly being challenged to do more about reaching out to the socially and financially disadvantaged from all over the country and not just the prosperous south-east. What will this response do to help us in our work? As many commentators (see e.g. here and here) have pointed out, the changes being proposed – to reduce the level of income at which graduates start to pay their loans back and to extend the period over which payments are made from thirty to forty years – will hit hardest those with the lowest earnings (disproportionately women) rather than those who go on to highly paid careers, for instance in the City. There were plenty of analyses and models published by a variety of bodies in advance, which pointed out such moves would be regressive. These have been ignored, as has the proposal of maintenance grants for those from families with the lowest incomes, a crucial issue that simply wasn’t mentioned, let alone addressed, in the response.

It would seem that the Treasury’s view of finance (which I will paraphrase as ‘we need to get more of the student loan off our books’) has trumped the Levelling Up agenda. Only a couple of weeks after the Levelling Up White Paper was published, the actions implied by the Augar response go directly against its direction of travel. Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and Minister for Intergovernmental Relations said, in introducing the White Paper

‘For decades, too many communities have been overlooked and undervalued. As some areas have flourished, others have been left in a cycle of decline. The UK has been like a jet firing on only one engine. Levelling Up and this White Paper is about ending this historic injustice and calling time on the postcode lottery.’

Those areas which are suffering from this ‘historic injustice’ will be those with a lower number of graduates (which is likely to contribute to lower local productivity and poorer local economic indices) and with struggling schools; struggling in terms of budgets and teacher skills as well as the numbers of students from disadvantaged families, however one wants to measure them, via indices of multiple deprivation, free school meals, children in the care system….. Levelling up should mean ensuring that all who have the aptitude to go to university are able – and that includes having the financial means – to do so, and that appropriate training and career paths are open to those for whom university is not the right place.

There may have been a brief moment of hope after the White Paper (albeit there seemed to be no new money associated with it), which the Augar response has probably dashed. A regressive policy, which is going to saddle those with least social and economic capital behind them with the highest total repayments during their entire working life, is not going to encourage those students to take on that debt, even if they simultaneously know that a university education is what they desire and what would most benefit them. Even if the university system, and colleges such as mine, wish to admit those who would thrive with that education and go on to deliver benefits to their community and the economy overall, they are likely in many cases to be deterred by the lifetime financial implications. It should be noted that universities too (and hence the College) are also being hit, in this case by a freezing of the fee level we receive.

One of the key features of the original Augar Review was to look at the whole education system, Further Education Colleges as well as Universities, to attempt to make a coherent whole. That aspiration, like quite a number of the other recommendations including maintenance grants for the least financially secure, is not dealt with. The current system pits the two strands of education substantially against each other in unhelpful ways, and traversing the further education landscape is a complex, unwieldy path for employers and students alike, with inadequate funding in most instances. The Lifelong Learning Entitlement would look like a good solution to some of these issues, providing an entitlement to students for loans

‘for post-18 education to use over their lifetime. It will be available for both modular and full-time study at higher technical and degree levels (levels 4 to 6), regardless of whether they are provided in colleges or universities.’

These plans are now out for consultation. However, the issue of the lifetime cost of these loans, if the same as in the latest revisions for loans already available for university courses, may remain a real turn-off to potential beneficiaries, whatever the good intentions behind this new move.

I feel dismayed by the regressive nature of the plans, the lack of support for the most disadvantaged, the damage this will potentially do to the work of institutions such as mine which are serious about widening participation, and the lack of any joined-up thinking between this latest document and any serious commitment to levelling up, the White Paper notwithstanding. There are so many ways in which plans could have been introduced which genuinely benefitted those whose start in life was tough. Instead, the new system seems set to put more, rather than less, burden on these students. Simultaneously, those who probably (but not invariably) already had a financially secure background and who progress to the highest paid jobs, will fare better under the new scheme of things. Universities, meanwhile, will be expected to make the same amount of money go further.

 

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In Academia, Pats on the Back are Rare

Posted on February 15, 2022 by Athene Donald

How are you doing? I don’t mean either mentally or physically, but are you keeping up with the Jones’? Are you doing as well as you should for the stage of career you’re at, and how do you know? The reality is, in academia we’re not very good at helping each other understand how we’re faring. Certainly, in Cambridge over my career, it has seemed that silence is the norm on this front.

I am reminded of this while preparing for an interview about what my life was like ‘mid-career’. Of course, that term is indeterminate: my mid-career might be someone else’s later or earlier depending on a whole range of individual circumstances. After all, if you’re like Carol Robinson and take a seven year career break to have three children immediately after your PhD, you would be starting your first postdoc considerably later than the average. (I’ve just been reminded of her unusual yet spectacularly successful career trajectory, having been listening to my own interview with her from a few years back.) It isn’t simply a question of age, that is irrelevant, it is also about experience and maturity, so that those seven years are likely to have made a big difference in ways other than simply publication output.

Thinking back to the stage I think of as ‘mid-career’, that bit between my first permanent position and becoming a professor, I remember a survey being done of the (still relatively few) women academics across the University on behalf of the University. It was never published, too damning I think, and of course I don’t still have a copy 25 or so years on, but I do remember the surprise with which the interviewer reacted to being told time and time again, by women, that they found the lack of feedback on their progress disconcerting or worse. Unlike the business context in which the interviewer worked (I guess they came from a consultancy), such feedback just didn’t occur in the normal run of things. Perhaps if they’d interviewed men they’d have heard the same anxiety expressed.

I well remember struggling with the concept of what was ‘good enough’, be it in terms of research outputs, looking after my students, attendance at conferences or teaching and ‘service’. It was an eye-opener to be told, during one of my infrequent appraisals that, as a rule of thumb, I shouldn’t expect to referee more papers than I myself submitted. That it was OK to decline some requests. Naively – is this a gendered thing, or merely down to personality? – I had felt a sense of obligation to accept all papers or grants to referee as long as I felt competent. (Actually, ‘competent’ itself raises all sorts of issues derived from impostor syndrome, but that’s another story.) I always suspected – because no one told me otherwise – that I wasn’t up to the mark in my service, not doing my ‘bit’. I’m sure this was exacerbated because I felt I was cutting corners while I tried to bring up two small children.

It was only when the department introduced a workload model, possibly on the back of its Athena Swan application, that I realised that my service load was far higher than most people’s – but by then I was a senior professor and I suspect already deputy head of department at the time. It was a bit late for me, although a sense of guilt about whether I was doing enough was still never far away from my thoughts. I am glad that people can get some sense of their contribution through such models, albeit how a department weights teaching versus serving on a university committee, or turning up for open days versus organising lab classes, will always be debatable. There is unlikely ever to be a standard ‘scoring’ system for such a model.

However, it is the question of ‘good enough’ in terms of issues related, not just to service but to research, that is likely to eat at people most early in their careers (possibly later too). It is good that the tyranny of journal impact factors appears to be receding, but that doesn’t stop people – namely promotion and appointment committees – silently valuing a Nature or PNAS paper higher than one appearing in other journals, however relevant and appropriate such a journal might be for a particular piece of work. When I was mid-career I felt the appropriateness of a journal was far more important than having to go through the hassle of arguing with an editor/referee multiple times, but that is a luxury the ECRs of today probably do not feel they have. There are plenty of other metrics that an early-mid career academic may fret about. How many grants, from where and worth how much, are ‘enough’? Who is the judge? Is my sub-discipline sufficiently comparable to Dr Bloggs down the corridor that the fact that they have two minor grants from (insert funder of choice) trumps my one large grant from (insert another funder)? I would guess that, male or female, most of us have worried about ‘enough’ in this sense.

The trouble with academia, as has been said over and over again, is that it is inherently competitive. We are unfortunately only too likely always to be looking over our shoulders at those coming up behind us, as well as our peers, to try to work out how we’re doing. I know how much I would have benefitted from someone telling me that I was well within the bounds of ‘acceptable’ and, given I had two small children if I wanted not to gad all around the world presenting my research at international conferences, that was fine. If my grant applications failed this round, just keep going and try again. A single (or even multiple) failure was not terminal, particularly if elsewhere the students I acquired, through whatever route, were producing good stuff. But no, such messages were rarely given to me in the normal run of things or even at appraisals.

I’m sure people are now better prepared to carry out such conversations than those who appraised me ever were, in that training about how to do this is likely to be provided by the institution, and mentors may more routinely be allocated to new staff and postdocs. I don’t think I ever fared quite as badly as the colleague who went to his appraisal with a list of issues on their mind to raise and came out saying their appraiser had indeed agreed this was a list to worry about, without offering a single word of constructive advice.

On the other hand, I was very taken aback by the reaction I got from my own appraiser (possibly the same professor) when I raised the fact that my scientific credibility had been publicly and totally inappropriately trashed at a departmental meeting. I felt, both that others at the meeting should have pointed out the unreasonableness of the criticism laid against me, and that the person who’d been out of line should have apologised thereafter. It was perhaps, as has been said more recently in another context, only the ‘normal cut and thrust’ of (departmental) politics, regretted thereafter. Instead, I was told I was the one who should have apologised. I never worked out for what and it seemed strange advice.

I hope early-mid-career researchers now do get much better advice and mentorship regarding their progress and standing. We don’t all need to be superstars, but everyone wants to know they’re not lagging unreasonably behind, in that other, much feared word, failing . More feedback and support can only benefit us, at any stage in our career. Why should academia be quite so niggardly in providing this? Maybe the world has moved on from my day, and everyone, whatever their gender or skin colour, gets this support automatically and professionally. Unfortunately, I don’t believe that.

 

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Let’s Hope We Can All Stick to Science

Posted on February 8, 2022 by Athene Donald

There was a collective sigh of relief when it was announced that the UK would commit to Association for Horizon Europe. We knew the details had to be worked out, but we assumed the commitment was as good as a signature. Not so. Somehow science has got tangled up with completely different issues and association appears to be being held as hostage in the negotiations. It isn’t just the UK that is entangled, but also Switzerland. It isn’t the first time that Switzerland has lost access to a Horizon programme. This also happened back in 2014 when there was a period of total exclusion from Horizon 2020 followed by a partial re-entry until full association was agreed in 2016. Now Switzerland is back in the same wilderness as the UK.

The story of what happened to Switzerland previously has always been an indicator of what fate might face the UK. The negotiations dragging on just cause more and more concern: all the collaborations that might have been happily forged are placed – possibly permanently – on ice; the Europeans who might have brought their talents to the UK will be thinking even harder about how wise such a move might be; the early career researchers for whom the ERC Starter Grants have provided such an important leg-up at the start of their career have lost that route to early funding independence. The UK science base (and equivalently Switzerland) is already losing scientific ground and it may get much worse.

George Freeman, as Science Minister, has suggested we need a Plan B, ready to come into operation in April in case Association fails. The implication is that, since the cash is on the table, UK scientists won’t care whether it comes from within the UK or beyond its borders. I feel this is missing the point, certainly about the ERC, for the following reasons:

  • EU citizens have come to work in universities here in the past, knowing they would be as able to obtain funding from the ERC as if they stayed in their home countries. They came, because they saw other advantages in being in the UK. Now, those who might have been thinking of moving will feel (never mind visa costs etc) much less reason to come. Those who are already here will be less willing to stay, as a prestigious source of funds will be denied to them. Just last week the THE wrote about an expected ‘exodus’ of EU researchers if we fail to associate. Last summer they wrote about EU researchers ‘losing interest’ in UK jobs.
  • I use that word ‘prestigious’ advisedly. There is no doubt that holding an ERC grant is held in more esteem than any sort of UKRI grant. The reason for this is obvious. The competition is fierce and the refereeing highly international by experts from around the world. In my experience, a promotions panel looks much more favourably on an applicant with an ERC grant than on a standard UK-based responsive mode grant.
  • International referees are, moreover, willing to spend days in Brussels (or at least, they were pre-pandemic) doing a thorough job. It is a big commitment, yet one researchers from way outside the EU are willing to take on. I’ve watched them in action, back in the days I was an ERC Scientific Council member. Do they come to the UK for UKRI panels? Are they even asked to referee proposals pre-panel? The answer is, not much.

Ultimately, we may have to have a Plan B. Of course, that has always been the danger and the money has been committed. However, there has been plenty of time to think this one through, since long before the Brexit agreement was signed, and the reality is that it is far from trivial to think how to construct and operate a large-scale new scheme that would deliver anything comparable. I find it unconvincing to imply such a thing could be up and running in a couple of months. UKRI itself is under the current scrutiny of the Grant Review and might feel now was not the moment to take on another huge responsibility.

So, let’s Stick to Science, say a large number of individuals and bodies. Initiated by the wider European community and launched today, this online campaign urges individuals and organisations to sign up to

‘request that the European Council, Parliament, Commission, as well as European Union (EU) Member States, and the governments of the UK and Switzerland, recognise that advancement in R&I is best achieved when all actors in science and innovation work together across geographic boundaries.’

They – and all who sign – are

‘calling for open and barrier-free collaboration among Europe’s research and innovation (R&I) actors, who all share the same values. The initiative is an active response to the delayed  progression of association agreements with Switzerland and the United Kingdom (UK), which are being held up by political barriers that have nothing to do with science.’

That last sentence is key. As a former ERC Scientific Council member, I was pleased to be invited to be one of the first signatories. This isn’t just a campaign that matters to the UK and Switzerland; it is one that has impact across Europe and affects researchers in every country. Beyond the ERC itself, collaborations funded under different EU instruments of Horizon Europe (and its predecessors) are hugely important in solving the pressing problems of today. Excluding any country weakens what can be achieved, since the key scientist may be ineligible to be involved.

I hope many of the readers of this blog will consider signing up (here), to demonstrate the belief they share in the importance of international science and its relevance to achieving important societal ends.

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