Levelling up for Whom?

Posted on May 31, 2021 by Athene Donald

A recent HEPI report, written by Sarah Chaytor, Grace Gottlieb and Graeme Reid, all from UCL, considered aspects of levelling up and regional policy. Amongst their conclusions was that, despite what other commentators have said, the UK is not particularly regionally concentrated in its research funding, and that what is meant by research concentration isn’t even particularly well-defined. Despite the authors disclaimer

‘This report is not a surreptitious attempt to get a better deal for Bloomsbury at the expense of the rest of the country’,

it was nevertheless hard not to feel that they were choosing their analysis in order to demonstrate that London was not unfairly advantaged. This suspicion was highlighted by what appeared at the very least to be confusion when it came to some of their figures. Were they talking about all research funding, public, charity and private, or were they simply talking about public funding? Kieron Flanagan first highlighted this confusion over Twitter, and it was stressed again by Andy Westwood in his response, on the HEPI blog. Clearly which is being discussed makes a significant difference.

If one turns to an earlier report from last summer on regional R+D funding imbalances by Tom Forth and Richard Jones (both Manchester based), The Missing Four Billion, they make a very clear distinction between public and private funding. Looking explicitly at the relative amounts of public (government, university and charity) and private research funding per head of population in NUTS1 regions, London – including Bloomsbury – is seen to be an outlier, with less business income than the West or East Midlands for instance, but around three times as much public funding as those regions. The East of England, including my home city of Cambridge, is an outlier in the other direction, with far more private research income than any other region (about twice as much as either area of the Midlands, nearly three times as much as London), but only about half the public income of London.

However, as Reid et al make plain, granularity matters. The East of England’s figures will be dominated by the Cambridge economy, with so many tech and life science companies thriving on the various science parks, and the recent arrival of Astra Zeneca from the North West. That single move will, as Tom Forth has further analysed, have led to a significant shift in the total private funding from the North West, where the company was historically based, to the East of England. Cambridge is, in terms of business research funding, thriving.

But for the people who live here, does it feel like that? No analysis would suggest the region needs to be levelled up, if the gross research income figures are considered, and yet there are extensive problems in the East of England. The reality is that the overheated Cambridge economy, the soaring house prices, mean that for many people life in the city is an impossible dream. It is, according to the Centre for Cities, the most unequal city in the UK as judged by the Gini Coefficient based on individual incomes. Having attended a webinar organised by the Bennett Institute for Public Policy during this spring’s University Cambridge Festival, I was struck, indeed horrified, by some of the stories told with respect to this inequality. As was said there are two very different worlds, which may barely overlap:

“the knowledge intensive businesses attracting global talent, and those who found it difficult to afford the bus fare into town.”

That is just the city, of course. To look at the wider region covered by the NUTS1 classification, reaching out into the agriculturally-dominated fens and beyond to the impoverished coastal towns, there isn’t even a thriving economy or plentiful jobs of any description. These are left-behind regions, whatever the gross R+D figures for the East of England might suggest. The reach of the economic success within Cambridge and its University do not extend significantly towards Wisbech, let alone Kings Lynn. How could the University do more? In fact, their sights are set on the Oxford-Cambridge Arc  which barely reaches east into the fens. In terms of pure productivity and growth, this no doubt makes sense. As the Government website put it earlier this year, it is

“An ambitious plan to unleash the economic and cultural potential of the Oxford-Cambridge Arc, to transform it into one of the world’s premier growth corridors and a world-leader in sustainability.”

Towns and cities like Kettering, Corby, Peterborough and Northampton certainly could benefit from major investment if this corridor goes ahead as proposed. But to the east of the city, the benefit may be very limited indeed.

From this single perspective I am left pondering is it ‘better’ to look westwards from the city to our friendly rivals in Oxford, or east towards the coast? How should one determine better? Just like my last blogpost with its hesitation about what excellence means, better is a word that sounds so promising but without qualification – better for whom, for how many, better in economic or social terms – it is hard to know where I might opt to put my money, were I in the position to put money anywhere. A recent article by Michael Kenny and Thomas Kelsey from the Bennett Institute highlights this conundrum about what better might mean if Johnson’s government pursues their levelling up agenda without any additional clarification. Kenny and Kelsey show that R+D income, introducing a new anchor industry or building improved large-scale infrastructure such as roads may be of far less interest to many living in disadvantaged areas than much smaller scale projects such as sports and leisure facilities and centres for young people. Such items may deliver better political capital from the electorate than economic growth for the region or the country. These are not the sort of thing that the promised £22bn funding for R+D is going to deliver, and perhaps are too small-scale to feature largely in the so-far ill-defined UK Shared Prosperity Fund (which replaces EU Structural Funds), but perhaps would be better able to deliver a country that felt less divided between the haves and have-nots.

Levelling up needs definition. What are we trying to level up – infrastructure, jobs, R+D or community life? Different funds for different purposes. But we should not let politicians get away with such glib phrases without qualifications nor muddle up different pots of money.

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Do you know Excellence when you see it?

Posted on May 23, 2021 by Athene Donald

Politicians toss around phrases like ‘levelling up’ and ‘build back better’, not to mention ‘freedom of speech’, with gay abandon. Such words sound so positive and authoritative, what could be the problem? As many people have pointed out, however, there tend to be internal inconsistencies, exemplified by the University Minister Michelle Donelan’s statements about holocaust deniers being acceptable under proposed free speech legislation, a position swiftly contradicted by the Prime Minister. As for ‘build back better’, one has to dig down into that to see who it’s better for (property developers or the environment, to take two perhaps extreme categories of ‘end users’) and levelling up seems to mean different things to politicians from local communities (see this recent article for a discussion about the politics of this).

Academics aren’t likely to fall into the same traps, are they? Well, I fear they are. To take two words often found on referees’ lips: excellence and impact. The ERC is well known for only using the former, and not the latter, unlike UKRI grants in general. No doubt referees feel they know excellence when they see it (Wikipedia’s first example of the use of this phrase interestingly refers to obscenity in a US Supreme Court decision in 1964) but, guilty though I’m sure I’ve been in that direction when I’ve sat on panels to judge grants, that somewhat subjective measure is of course exactly where bias can set in. As I’ve frequently written before, if not quite in those words, that has been one of the challenges for interdisciplinary research. Panel members tend to like what they know and have confidence in (see eg here). Interdisciplinary research may make them feel uncomfortable if only half the words make much sense to them; that makes it harder for them to recognize excellence even if it is there.

I will await the analysis of outputs marked up as interdisciplinary to the REF with some trepidation, given I’ve chaired the panel responsible for trying to devise appropriate guidance both for institutions to have confidence in submitting such outputs and for the sub-panels – containing their named interdisciplinary advisers – equally to have confidence they can judge such outputs fairly. However, it is not just when grant submissions are interdisciplinary that the challenge of comparing apples and oranges arises. How does one compare a project on spins of quantum dots versus nano-electronic insulation (to take two topics at random from my own department’s website)? Some grant applications can be thrown out swiftly, probably when a department hasn’t done a good enough sift beforehand, although who knows which excellent ones have been thrown out for political rather than scientific reasons. Perhaps they are seen as being flawed, incremental, lacking the equipment or done by someone else already. Straying into the territory of the excellence (or otherwise) of the PI certainly risks not only the Matthew Effect, but also bias. Maybe the referee or panel speaker has had a run in with said PI and bears a grudge….or (and I saw this once) the panel did not want to offend the person concerned – an overwhelming conflict of interest would be declared these days – so it was hard to be appropriately objective. Excellence is not quite as simple as we might all wish to believe.

What about excellence in a career? It’s a question on which I’m personally reflecting post-retirement, since I’m not sure (not least because of the Matthew Effect) that I should be judged by grant income, let alone by the letters after my name. Those criteria seem insufficient to define a life well-lived. Nor am I at all sure that phrase amounts to the same thing as excellence. When I was living in the USA, Jimmy Carter became President, with his implicit motto the title of his book Why Not the Best? published in 1976, the year before he took up the mantle. As a young idealist, it struck me at the time as a wonderful tagline (although I never read the book), but ‘best’ like ‘excellence’ is a hard word to capture.

So I’m left pondering, have I done enough for society, whether or not it is called impact? Does the fact I haven’t invented a wonderful widget outscore on the negative side any positive points I might have scored through my work as gender champion? Was it ‘better’ or ‘worse’ (for whom, one might ask) that my research career faded out somewhat accidentally when I became gender champion simultaneously with chairing the Royal Society’s Education Committee? Both those were immensely rewarding roles, if also frustrating upon occasion, but how should I have weighed up at the time the cessation of my research, particularly as I was so busy that I didn’t spot for a long time that I had failed to apply for further grants? One can torture oneself indefinitely along these lines!

Questions, questions, there are undoubtedly more questions in this blogpost than usual, because it seems to me these are all important if unanswerable questions. As we, in the UK, hope we are emerging from the worst of the pandemic, as vaccinations (now there’s some work no one needs doubt was excellent!) take hold and more and more of the adult population have some protection, there is much of which to take stock. Of the way our lives, teaching, meetings and so on have changed. I agree with all those who say we are working even harder now than ever. I may not have had the burden of recording lectures, for which I am duly grateful, but there have been far too many days of non-stop meetings, with barely time for mugs of coffee, lunch or the requisite comfort breaks.

My levels of exercise have plummeted now I no longer cycle into town for meetings (or dinners!) let alone further to the railway station on the other side of Cambridge once or twice a week. I am sure I am not alone in living a life apparently glued to my computer chair. Yet I seem to have no more time because of that travelling time I’m saving. On the contrary. Somehow, in this Covid life, intensity increases but well-being does not. What of this changed life should we carry over to the brave new world we may be lucky enough to face at the start of the new academic year. I sense everyone is hedging their bets about how much will be face-to-face. For instance, I do wonder if our colleagues much further from London will decide that getting on a train (let alone a plane) from the further flung parts of the UK to attend a two hour meeting just isn’t worth the effort. For them zoom may continue to be a major part of their life. Alternatively they may feel trains continue to offer – as I have regularly found – a great space away from other people to sit and read a thesis or thick wadge of committee papers.

Who knows how things will settle down in a year or two! And will that way of life be ‘excellent’, better than what we had before, or will it simply be another botched job as we move from crisis to crisis?

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How Best to Tackle Bullying?

Posted on May 17, 2021 by Athene Donald

How can we make the university sector a more pleasant place to work? Bullying and harassment (whether of a sexual nature or not) are, it would appear, endemic across the higher education sector, for staff and students alike. Every survey highlights the issue as a major problem, deterring many from continuing in the path they had set their heart on and perhaps expended many years of effort in an attempt to find their niche. Both Amanda Solloway, the Science Minister, and Ottoline Leyser, as CEO of UKRI, have placed research culture prominently in their respective agendas, although that phrase obviously encompasses far more than these behavioural aspects, most notably extending to the precarity of employment endured by many early career researchers.

Universities need to find ways of ensuring that that those at the receiving end of unacceptable behaviour feel confident in the system available to them to come forward and report abuse and, equally, that offenders are identified and sanctioned appropriately. I fear few institutions would currently have confidence their processes satisfy either of those statements, even if they have plenty of optimistic sentences on their websites.

The University of Cambridge has launched a new ‘Change the Culture’ strategy today, with the aim of moving this agenda forward within the University. The full policy runs to many pages of definitions and detailed steps to be undertaken, but the key points are simple enough:

  • A new, confidential reporting system (Report and Support) where any staff member or student can report inappropriate behaviour of other staff or students either anonymously or formally with contact details. By collecting data and anonymous case studies it will be possible to get a better idea of what is going on.
  • The University has had for many years a so-called Dignity at Work policy, and this will be morphing into the new staff Mutual Respect Policy and Code of Behaviour. No one should be any doubt about the University’s expectations around behaviour.
  • Grievance Policies will be stream-lined to provide clearer and quicker process for resolving incidents of inappropriate behaviour. Alongside this there will be enhanced support services for those who have either experienced or exhibited inappropriate behaviour and new staff training resources.

This is all well and good, but of course the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Time will tell how well these new policies work. I believe the ‘Breaking the Silence’ campaign, launched here four years ago, has had some significant impact across the University as regards the incidence, reporting and handling of sexual harassment cases. A more recent campaign has provided bystander training specifically aimed at students, teaching them how and when to intervene, in particular with regard to such sexual harassment and assault. I attended one of the training sessions and was tremendously impressed by the thought-provoking films, demonstrating where intervention could have made all the difference. For student attendees the initial briefing was followed by role plays, so that they could practice different ways of stepping in before matters got out of hand.

Practice in such situations does indeed make perfect, and I’m sure we could all practice intervention to good effect when it comes to the more minor but intensely damaging types of bullying that too often goes on. As I’ve said before, observing bullying and doing nothing amounts to being complicit. Of course gender may sometimes play a part – too often young girls are taught not to be confrontational however shocking the behaviour they are facing – but bullying can just as well be carried out on males, by both men and women. Whatever the new University policy does and does not say, it really is down to all of us to ensure that there is zero tolerance for unacceptable behaviour.

I have written often enough about bullying in the past, most notably here, where I followed up on a piece I had written in the Guardian. Any policy will stand or fall on whether people feel safe coming forward to report behaviour. Too often I have been approached by people – typically staff – who feel that, even if they have complained to their line manager, their grievances have not been adequately addressed. Usually these people are not complaining about a single instance of someone losing their rag or behaving aggressively towards them, but long-running and systematic demeaning behaviour which undermines the individual’s confidence and ability to act. There is always the suspicion that the powers-that-be will support the more established individual, perhaps the one with the big reputation who brings in the funding. Those at the receiving end of bullying can end up feeling they are dispensable and unimportant. Letting such behaviours continue, however, permits that toxic culture to persist.

So, I will watch with interest to see if this new policy turns out to have teeth. I certainly hope that it does. But, aside from individuals having the confidence to come forward, what will be done to perpetrators? As long as bullies find that bullying pays, they are not likely to change their ways. Does being sent to a speed awareness course make it less likely a driver will speed the next time they hit the motorway? I don’t know the answer to that, but if it does, is there any way of introducing ‘bullying awareness’ classes. Can we introduce the equivalent of points on a license – 6 points and you can’t be promoted for a year or two, say? Or (for full professors) not allowed to apply for any funding for twelve months? That would cause people to sit up and think, but I’m sure it’s a policy that would be hard to get through the requisite committees.

It seems to me, too often, investigations end up hurting the putative victim far more than the perpetrator and, if the new campaign is to work, that must change. Wellcome have introduced a policy whereby anyone with an allegation of bullying upheld against them may find their grant applications rejected. It would be good if other funders followed suit with something similar, because that kind of sanction is exactly the sort of thing that would directly impact on potential aggressors and might lead to a change in behaviour. I don’t know how many instances of this policy being implemented have been recorded. The only case that I’m aware of led to the resignation of the person concerned, a woman of colour. It strikes me as an unnatural coincidence that this is the case. Why was she singled out when it is hard to believe there weren’t white men who were at least as guilty? Is it simply that people are less likely to raise a complaint against that majority than a racialised minority?

Agreeing on the problem, and the scale of the problem, is insufficient to solve it. I will watch what happens as a result of today’s launch at the University of Cambridge with great interest and fingers crossed for real progress to be made.

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Where are the Women of Yester Year?

Posted on May 12, 2021 by Athene Donald

A few weeks ago I wrote about Mary Astell, a woman from the seventeenth century whose interest and reading in natural philosophy/science was, as has recently become clear, much greater than had previously been attributed to her. I am intrigued by how women in different spheres are now being rediscovered, or their efforts being accorded more respect, than previously. We can’t reinvent the past, or create women who never existed, but it does seem a bit tough that some of them have simply been forgotten, despite all they did in their own day and, in many cases, the recognition they received for those efforts at the time. The campaign to ensure more women – across many different spheres of activity – are recognized by the ‘blue plaque’ scheme, particularly in London, is an indication of belated awareness of many different sorts of contribution by notable women who ceased to be noted. Next month, for instance, the nutritionist Elsie Widdowson will be celebrated with a blue plaque in the village of Barrington just outside Cambridge.

BBC Radio3 has now made a ‘thing’ out of playing music by women composers only on International Women’s Day each year. I am sure as little as 20 years ago one might have found BBC producers saying such an event would have been impossible as there were only one or two women whose music was up to scratch (or perhaps whose names they knew at all). When I was growing up, the names of Fanny Mendelssohn (Felix’s elder sister) and Clara Schumann (Robert Schumann’s wife) would have been the top two women mentioned in this context, although I believe they were primarily seen as performers rather than composers in their day. And they were always referred to (e.g on Radio 3) in relation to their more famous family members, in the way that I have just described them. These days their music is quite often heard, and pretty impressive I, for one, find it. But there are far more female names heard regularly on the radio now, just in the regular occurrence of things, not simply on a single day each year. That, I suppose, is progress!

There are of course many contemporary composers whose music could be played, ranging from Judith Weir, the first female Master of the Queen’s Music (though there has never yet been one of the King’s Music), appointed in 2014, through someone I overlapped with at my all girls’ school, Sally Beamish, to Erollyn Wallen, who composed a fanfare for Churchill College when she attended a Feast in the College a few years ago; all women working in the UK (though the last was born in Belize). Women composers from the wider world include Bulgarian Dobrinka Tabakova, and the Russian-born Australian Elena Kats-Chernin, both of whose music I have recently listened to with great pleasure having previously been unacquainted with them. That is, unless you count the music from a Lloyds TSB Bank advertisement which the latter wrote as part of her ballet Wild Swans; that ad seemed to get a lot of airtime some years back. However, the more you look the more of such women you find, and it is good to hear them turning up regularly on Radio 3. And turning up in the general way of things, without comment about how exciting or rare it is to find a woman composer after all.

However, it is the fact that women from the past are now being played so much more that I am fascinated by. Their music was always out there and yet it clearly wasn’t regarded as ‘manly’ enough to warrant being played. The grande dame of these must be Hildegard of Bingen, whose religious chants and plainsong are so simple and yet so moving. The Baroque composer Barbara Strozzi, also a singer, seems to have been regarded as a bit dubious over the centuries because she was suspected of being a courtesan. Thus, despite having published more music than any of her contemporaries, her name seems to have languished for generations.

Americans Amy Beach and Florence Price were appreciated in their day, in the late nineteenth and early 20th century, but then seem to have been forgotten about for years. The latter, who was black, was the first American woman to have a major work played by a first rank orchestra (the Chicago Symphony Orchestra), in 1933. The UK could boast Rosalind Ellicott, from the late Victorian period, and the suffragette Ethyl Smyth a little later, whose anthem The March of the Women became the movement’s anthem. Perhaps she was regarded as dubious because of that association with those tiresome, militant women but she seems to have been dubbed with the ‘too manly to be a decent woman composer’ label, so reminiscent of the modern double standard for professional women: behave like a man and be frowned upon, behave as a woman ‘should’ and be trodden upon or regarded as likeable but not competent.

I don’t know how many other professional areas there are, in which there were many women active in the past whose names have simply been written out of the record. Some professions were of course formally closed to women, such as the law and medicine from the 18th century on. Before, no one thought to codify such a formal forbidding since it wasn’t expected women would ever try to enter such professions. The move away from early female midwives to professional men who attended childbirth, may well have led to many more maternal deaths than necessary because of the way they felt obliged not to touch women or carry out proper examinations. The battle to get the medical profession to accept women  as nurses (Florence Nightingale had quite a hand in that), let alone as doctors, was long and hard fought. Some of these struggles are described with verve by Julia Boyd, my predecessor-at-Churchill-but-one’s wife, in her enjoyable book The Excellent Doctor Blackwell. I feel embarrassed for describing her in that relative way, because she’s an author of note, but that’s how I’ve met her. Of course, before Blackwell came the army doctor who ‘passed’ as a man throughout her professional life, James Barry, no mean feat to fool so many military folk for so long, with her secret only discovered at her death.

All of this shows how short-changed women have been over the years. For all those composers (and music was at least acceptable for a woman to spend time on, unlike cutting up dead bodies to learn anatomy) who are resurfacing, whose music is being heard and enjoyed, how many more are still unknown and are yet to be (re)discovered? And what of other spheres of activity?

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Giving Due Credit

Posted on April 25, 2021 by Athene Donald

Due Credit

When I was setting out as a young PI, the standard thing to do (on acetates, once we’d moved on from 35mm slides) was to acknowledge co-workers – students or postdocs, or wider collaborators – via a simple list at the end, with affiliations as appropriate. These days, mini mugshots on the relevant slide are de rigeur. It is very nice to see the human face behind exciting results.

However, whichever way it’s done, what matters is that it is done. Because upon occasion, even if the whole act of acknowledgement doesn’t get omitted, individuals may do. Too often, that implies bad behaviour, bad faith, on the part of the senior scientist. Let me give a couple of examples. I once observed a senior scientist, now dead, give his talk in honour of a prize he’d just been awarded, carefully listing every person he’d collaborated with in whatever capacity – bar a couple. Both female as it happens (although in my experience gender is not necessarily a contributing factor), and substantially more junior than him, albeit already independent researchers. Both people he had had pretty public fallings out with after extended and fruitful collaborations starting during their student years. It was noted by others in the audience with some revulsion. It was shocking behaviour, and yet there were – of course – no consequences for him. He was the one winning the prize; they were ‘merely’ being short-changed.

I find this kind of behaviour deeply depressing. It is just one way in which the established scientist feels they are untouchable, as they indeed almost invariably are, and can get away with whatever they feel like. It involves no active aggression, bullying or harassment, and yet the damage may be substantial. It does not have to involve women or even junior scientists. On another occasion I watched a different (male) senior scientist give a conference talk about his work with industry. He was very proud his fundamental work had such relevance to manufacturing; indeed, that was rather the thrust of his talk. Yet the industrialist I was sitting next to, who was funding the work, someone I too had collaborated with, turned to me in disgust at the tenor of the talk in which team members – both from industry and academia – were being written out of the presentation. No acknowledgements to the wider team, it looked as if the work was almost entirely down to this single senior scientist. The industrialist felt such dislike of the behaviour, which was clearly of a long-standing pattern in his eyes, that he admitted follow-on funding for the project from his company had all but been cancelled because of the professor’s behaviour.

Why do people do this? Why do they feel it necessary to take all the glory, or withhold other’s fair share, when they – as senior professionals – don’t need it. Furthermore, no one is going to be fooled that the professor was spending long hours in the lab, rather than sitting on committees, running a department or devising new teaching courses. Few professors are going to be doing the legwork of lab or computational work, even if they are the ones who have to write the grants to fund the work and exhort their team to better things. In an ideal team, everyone plays their part, even if not necessarily equally. And everyone should be appropriately credited.

Ottoline Leyser, as UKRI’s CEO, and Amanda Solloway, as the Science Minister, talk a lot about research culture. What will and should they do to stop this particular sort of inappropriate and unattractive behaviour? How will whistleblowing be made easier and less painful for the whistleblower? Should my industrial colleague have stood up in the Q+A and challenged the professor’s behaviour, pointing out how Joe Bloggs and Jane Doe should have been credited with carrying out the finite element analysis, and Ann Smith and Tom Brown the experimental studies? After all, he was close enough to the project to know exactly which students and postdocs had done which part of the work. If he had, no doubt an embarrassed silence would have fallen upon the room. That sort of thing simply isn’t ‘done’. When the first professor I mentioned had omitted the names of Dr X and Dr Y from their credits, when many in the room knew this, should I have stood up and challenged him (goodness knows, I’d challenged him enough in private on other matters) and said how come those names were omitted?

In this particular case, I had indeed raised the issue behind his back in a different context, by pointing out to a (different) prize-giving committee he had a reputation of not giving due credit. My intervention was not appreciated – even though I did it privately and discreetly to the chair of the committee – and I was brushed off, essentially told that it didn’t matter. But it did and does. Not giving credit where it is due means those written out lose street cred, impact and citations, and hence their own prospects are damaged. Said professor duly won the highly prestigious prize.

The trouble is, our cultural norms make silence the name of the game, so that the victims continue to suffer. Speaking up when one knows the truth of the matter should be everyone’s responsibility. Yet, even for those of us with standing, there is a cost to such speaking up. Without such matters falling necessarily under the usual terms of whistleblowing – although in some cases omissions, particularly on papers, will be straying close to research integrity territory – we who call out bad behaviour are in danger of simply being dismissed as troublemakers. I don’t know what the answer is. I wish I did. I do feel more noise should be made about those who don’t always give credit where credit’s due. I think, given a room sprinkled with people who can spot what is going on, it should be possible to introduce a scientific form of sending to Coventry, of marking down future grant applications and refusing to allow such people conference slots. I fear this is just a pipe dream of mine.

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