Reflections on a Mad Week in Higher Education

Posted on August 20, 2020 by Athene Donald

Readers from the UK can hardly fail to have noticed the confusion across the HE sector caused by last week’s A level ‘results’.  I recall how many people had been voicing fears during the past months that the disadvantaged would be further disadvantaged by the proposed process. It is clear that last month the House of Commons Education Select Committee recognized these anxieties, appreciating that bias and unfairness might result from the intended process for assigning grades, although their concerns appear to have had no effect on those in power. As the head of a Cambridge College, I know how worried the admissions team were about what the knock-on effects would be for our own applicants.

What follows are some personal reflections on the process (not necessarily views representative of the College as a whole; I had no part in any of the decisions made about individual students). The whole system, obviously most particularly for the students involved and their teachers and families, was placed in an incredibly difficult and unsatisfactory situation. Some righting of the wrongs the so-called algorithm imposed has now occurred after the Government did a U-turn: home students’ grades as determined by their schools and colleges (CAGs – Centre Assessed Grades) are now being used, not those that the algorithm spat out. However, reaching this decision so slowly – 5 days after the initial results were made public –  in itself caused huge stress and it now opens up a whole set of new problems that will work their way through the system over the coming weeks, months and indeed years and put huge stress on many thousands of individuals, be they students or university staff.

I feel a huge amount of sympathy for this year’s cohort, who have been so hammered by the process, whose confidence and hopes have been knocked back even if in many cases they are now reinstated, at least in part. For some a considerable period of uncertainty may remain; for others the damage to morale and trust may be lasting. It is hard to imagine there won’t be long-term effects of this tumultuous week for all of them, whatever their final position may be in terms of their aspirations. We are not out of the woods yet either. Many decisions are still to be made as the consequences of the revised results become apparent: on space in labs and lecture theatres; on accommodation; on people trading up; and, of course, universities left with uncertainty about their capacity and/or viability. Remember, all decisions about offers were made earlier in the year having plenty of time to factor in capacity considerations while operating under the many necessary constraints, and this careful thought has now been thrown out of the window by the last-minute changes. The constraints remain; the numbers may end up being wildly out of line with them.

In a college such as my own, admissions are always taken extremely seriously. We scrutinise many different factors in reaching decisions about whom to make offers to in the first place. Churchill has a proud tradition of admitting a high proportion of state school entrants, but we will only admit those who we believe are likely to thrive on their courses. We also feel that interviews have limited use as an indicator of future success. Historically we used AS results as a strong indicator when we decided on who to make offers to. All our analysis showed that there was good correlation between AS and later university exam results. Of course, we no longer have (in England) AS data to look to, which is why many subjects set their own assessments either prior to or at interview.

Although we are proud of the relatively high proportion of state school entrants we admit, the reality is that state versus private is a very crude metric, one which we – and, I believe, the University more widely – would prefer to move away from. We know there are students who attend private schools up to GCSE and who then move to state schools for A levels. We know there are scholarship students from disadvantaged backgrounds who attend private schools. We know state schools vary hugely in their intakes and their facilities. Some are grammar schools, some comprehensives and some are 6th form colleges and so on. Each school will have different strengths and weaknesses. The admissions team in my college know the schools intimately, as it were, and can factor in these different considerations along with every other piece of information we have to hand – submitted work, any subject-specific tests taken, teacher reports and predicted grades etc – when considering individuals before we decide whether (in January) to make an offer or not, along with the precise details of the offer we make.

However, we naturally make more offers than we expect to be fulfilled. This is true every year. In most subjects the so-called ‘cover ratio’ – the number of offers to places we wish to fill – is little greater than one. This is not true in mathematics where many more offers are made than there are places. Let me pause and consider maths in a little more detail, because it makes a huge difference to the picture of why we didn’t immediately accept all offer holders from the state sector (#honourtheoffer as it was termed). For the Cambridge maths course (unlike Oxford) there is an additional hurdle to entry: the STEP exam (Sixth Term Entrance Paper), which comes in several parts. This is because the Maths faculty do not believe A levels provide sufficient differentiation to identify the students who will thrive here. STEP exams have been in use for many years. This exam was sat this year by all maths offer holders via proctored online sessions. These results are safe, not determined by algorithm, and so we have always been confident that those offer-holders – state school or not – who failed to meet the required standard in STEP were treated fairly in not having their places confirmed.

For everyone else, there was a huge amount of individual scrutiny last week if their offer was not met under the government’s original algorithm. We certainly did not at any point follow this algorithm blindly. Any college whose position I am aware of has done the same thing: acted with great flexibility, thoughtfulness and care. Admissions teams will have talked to individuals and tried to help them understand the outcomes.

Another practical matter that is now going to be played out as we receive the CAG scores is limits on numbers and hence on accommodation. First of all, before the U-turn, we were mindful of the numbers cap that the government had imposed on universities – again this was in conflict with #honourtheoffer as we, collectively across the University, would have massively exceeded our cap by accepting all state school offer-holders. Along with the U-turn on grades (although not actually simultaneously, thereby leaving an hour or so of ‘what now?’ in admissions’ teams minds) the cap was removed. But we do have space limitations. In some cases, this applies to courses; in medicine, in particular, numbers are set by the government at national level across the sector and, as I write, discussions are underway on this figure but a cap (although possibly higher) seems likely to remain. In other cases it may be due to space limitation in teaching spaces across the university (laboratories are a particular concern even without factoring in social distancing due to the pandemic).

In this College, as opposed to these issues across the whole University, we promise every student accommodation on site for the duration of their course if they want it – not all colleges are able to do this, but we have invested in accommodation to make this possible ­ – and we are not going to renege on that promise. It matters to many students. That practicality obviously puts an upper limit on numbers, made trickier this particular year by PHE guidance on household sizes and how to cope with the pandemic for the next academic year. Again, because of the nature of our accommodation that has fortunately barely affected the numbers we can admit, although some colleges are facing more severe limitations on accommodation than we are.  Some students may need to be asked to defer; some may even prefer to do so given the uncertain position we are currently in.

We are also concerned, although we are now in a position where we have less ability to do anything about this, that there are conflicting commitments to different cohorts which we would wish to try to balance. With larger numbers being admitted this autumn than we would expect (although, again as I write, we don’t yet know exactly how many above our preferred target) the knock-on effect next year is a substantial concern for us.  As others have written in the press, next year’s UCAS applicants – whose education, we should recognize, has been severely impacted already due to the loss of a whole term of school attendance  – are not only directly impacted through the lack of recent teaching, but are now potentially up against those in the year above who may be guaranteed deferred places in universities across the country. This is a position none of us wanted to be in: intergenerational justice is definitely at risk.

I am deeply perturbed and angered by the stresses the A level students of 2020 have been put through, as well as the consequences for 2021. Any individual institution, such as my own, will have been doing the best they can under these circumstances, with an extended period of furiously hard work for all concerned. For Churchill College we could see that our careful scrutiny of all the information we had under the original set of results meant that we would have had a cohort starting this October which is academically strong, but also very diverse. Moving away from the crude state/private sector divide, there are other measures of disadvantage which we can see we are ‘scoring’ (as it were) well against. One of these is the so-called POLAR4 quintiles, which is a measure of postcode disadvantage. POLAR quintiles 1 and 2 represent those areas (40% of the total demographic sit between these two quintiles) which have the lowest number of university attendees; admissions from these quintiles are particularly high this year. There are other so-called ‘flags’ of multiple deprivation which we care greatly about; admitting students with two or more of these flags is another way of ensuring we are not simply reinforcing prior advantage. Churchill will continue to work hard on all these fronts whatever crises are thrown in our direction. More statistics about the initial cohort that we were expecting to admit can be seen on our web pages, but there is absolutely no doubt we had a group which demonstrated, once again, our commitment to widening participation. We cannot yet know what the composition of the final class of 2020 will look like.

Whenever the dust settles, I hope many will look at the whole process to work out how such a fiasco can never be allowed to happen again. Many universities will have been, and will continue to be, under enormous strain. This is, let us not forget, on top of a pandemic, when the delivery of teaching has already had to be completely rethought, and we can expect more changes as the conditions change. All staff have had to make huge conceptual leaps – for instance how does an establishment such as mine cope with quarantine, feeding students safely and with social distance, preserve sufficient community to ensure students’ mental health is protected and comply with the public health guidelines as they evolve. Underlying many institutions will be concerns about financial health and long-term viability. To have such a bungled exam results’ season on top of these other massive concerns will have felt like the last straw to many, but the camel’s back must not be broken!

 

 

 

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Active Silencing

Posted on August 9, 2020 by Athene Donald

Aggressive. That’s such a useful put-down. As in

“I think there were several very vocal, dare I say aggressive residents that, in my opinion, regardless of what work was being carried out or not, they still would have had reason for complain.”

In this case, the aggressive folk being referred to are Grenfell Tower residents who were complaining about, guess what, fire safety. These words were apparently spoken by one of the leads for Rydon, the contractors charged with replacing cladding and looking after fire safety when he gave evidence to the ongoing enquiry. Aggressive, as in, we needn’t worry about what is being said, these people are just out to cause trouble so we can safely ignore them. An analysis of the way people making complaints can be silenced and ignored was recently posted on the Bennett Institute for Public Policy blog. Written by Gill Kernick, a Safety and Management Consultant, it is a searing indictment of what went wrong in the run-up to the catastrophe at Grenfell Towers, but the parallels with so many other sorts of incidents and silencing – not just in safety aspects – are manifest.

There is a list of damning tropes that are used to put down inconvenient people, male and female, black and white. Sometimes these comments do, specifically, refer to gender or skin colour. Think of the phrase ‘angry black woman’, possibly more commonly used in the USA, but certainly also used against women in this country, as model Naomi Campbell or campaigner Reni Eddo-Lodge can testify. Michelle Obama discussed this in her leaving interview with Oprah Winfrey, carefully saying

‘”You think, that is so not me! But then you sort of think, well, this isn’t about me, this is about the person or the people who write it.”

That’s a useful way to try to distance oneself from the pain of the accusation, but hard to do. Eddo-Lodge, in her book Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race spells out

“The ‘angry black woman’ phrase says more about whiteness and maleness than it does about black women. It speaks to a status quo that recognises its own simultaneous suffocating dominance and delicate fragility – of the reality of its increasing irrelevance over time, and a compulsive need to stop that looming change.”

But, until that dominance disappears, that trope will be used in an attempt to silence the women who should. in the accuser’s view, merely smile and submit.

Silencing of women – as Mary Beard has so powerfully argued in her book Women and Power ­­ – has a long history. It is still going on. Harvey Weinstein notwithstanding, when it comes to powerful men using their dominance to harass and bully, their victims, typically but not necessarily women, are usually too frightened to complain formally. After all, the aggressors are relying on being able to provoke that terror and response. It applies in academia too. I heard this week of yet another powerful (white) man who has a string of informal allegations against his name, but not a single person is willing to come forward and lodge a grievance with the authorities.

One can hardly blame the victims. They know full well that it is only too easy for them to be labelled as troublemakers – another convenient put-down which will have the effect of silencing them. But, possibly even worse, they may have their future careers blighted. Where there is a power imbalance or the possibility of a quiet word being said to the perpetrator’s cronies, it has to be a very determined or angry person who will speak up. As the National Academies’ Report on Sexual Harassment of Women reported, one victim was told by the person investigating her complaint that

“I sounded just like his ex-wife…maybe if I stopped whining so much I would have more friends…And then he started giving me failing grades…”.

Not a very supportive statement! The Report went on to list other fears

“perceived threats to tenure prospects; ability to freely pursue research and scientific stature opportunities; and threats to physical, emotional and mental health were significant factors for women who have been sexually harassed in weighing whether or how to disclose the incident.”

One of the women who spoke up against Berkeley’s (former) star performer Geoffrey Marcy – who was ultimately sacked – told how, in every faculty interview, she was asked about what happened. In her case, it did not stop her getting job offers – although not from Berkeley – but she was, as she put it, afraid.

Anyone who is in a senior position – such as a head of department – who does follow up on an allegation, may also find themselves harassed.  After I wrote an article for the Guardian about bullying and harassment in academia, I received emails, not just from those who had suffered at the hands of senior staff, but also from heads of departments who had not received support from their institutions when investigating such allegations. These people, who are doing what is manifestly the right thing, may also be labelled ‘troublemakers’, and themselves hounded out or forced to step down, as my correspondence proved. (At least when I spoke up publicly about one individual, I merely was made to feel as if it was me that was the guilty party, but I don’t think it hampered my career or standing, as I’ve written about at length previously.)

The most recent case I read about from the academic world – concerning the Provost at the University of Michigan –  is perhaps not atypical. When, ultimately, a university acts – in this case the professor was fired as Provost and, some months later, stepped down from all his roles – what comes out is a litany of historical complaints. Complainants discouraged from taking things further, or complaints that were either not handled correctly at the time, or got somehow mislaid en route to the appropriate authorities. Maybe there was no active silencing, but there will undoubtedly have been people who wanted to look the other way or sweep things under the carpet. Until, finally as in this case, everything comes tumbling out and a formal investigation details the catalogue of missed opportunities to put a stop to things earlier and – very often – the failure of the authorities to act appropriately.

The ultimate form of silencing is of course the NDA – the Non-Disclosure Agreement. These permit a pay-off in return for silence, and they have featured significantly in the Weinstein and, in the UK, the Philip Green cases. Academia is no different. One victim, Emma Chapman, has initiated a high profile campaign to stop the use of NDAs in the case of sexual harassment. In part this is to prevent the cover ups but, importantly, also to stop a perpetrator being allowed to leave quietly and move on to some other institution without a blemish on their formal record, when the harassment may start all over again. Furthermore, as Chapman has written

“Retaliation and reputation damage are also commonplace, with the enforced silence leaving you defenceless as close colleagues wrongly assume your complaint was malicious, minor or not upheld, or the perpetrator spreads false rumours about you or their false innocence. The career of the complainant, not the perpetrator, is too often forfeit.”

Silencing by NDAs in these cases harms the whole system. The only person who wins is the perpetrator. To quote Chapman again

“When you have university processes that result in women and minority groups being pushed out of academia for complaining, then this is not just unfair, it is a violation of the Equality Act 2010. Breaking the silence not only empowers victims and prevents perpetrators from falsely claiming innocence, but it also brings the spotlight back on the institution’s role by allowing whistleblowing. Universities should not be free to ignore warning signs, to settle complaints informally and, without victims’ involvement, to avoid paperwork and confrontation.”

We need to find ways in which victims feel safe to speak up and in which universities – and every other organisation too – know that investigation and action are the only way to go. Silencing is not an adequate response to complaint, formal or otherwise.

 

 

Posted in Equality, Women in Science | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Remembering Rosalind Franklin

Posted on July 25, 2020 by Athene Donald

ROSALIND FRANKLIN 1920-1958 Pioneer of the study of molecular structures including DNA lived here 1951-1958.jpg
By Spudgun67 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Everyone knows a little something about Rosalind Franklin, whose hundredth birthday it would be today. Some may have little sense of her beyond the belief that she was cheated out of a Nobel Prize by the dastardly actions of Maurice Wilkins at Kings London and, even more, by the cavalier attitude of Jim Watson aided and abetted by Francis Crick. But her life is much more interesting than that mythological potted history would imply. It also has strong resonances today, with women in science still in a minority and many – both men and women – feeling that there is a hard-core establishment, predominantly pale, male and stale which controls funding and hence researchers’ lives.

Also hidden in the story of how her own X-ray photograph was shown to others, enabling them to solve the double helical structure of DNA before she herself could, is any insight into how the science progressed to enable such a stunningly improved photograph to be taken. The way of science in the research lab is not at all the same as the kind of science school children encounter. It can therefore seem mysterious and too often told as the ‘heroic’ story in which one person’s efforts suddenly and miraculously lead to a Eureka breakthrough. Think of the ‘myth’ around Isaac Newton watching an apple fall and immediately coming up with the idea of gravity. Thinking of science in this way does the practice of science a disservice and is unlikely to encourage children to think more seriously about what needs to be done, why they might want to do science themselves, or to reassure the public about the validity of scientists’ claims. Unfortunately, too often, this is how the history of science is presented and, by extrapolation, the idea that that still applies, despite the importance of collaborative team science and interdisciplinarity. In the 21st century we are more than ever dependent on science, as recent months have proved, and the trust and confidence of the public in the scientific endeavour is crucial.

Too often science is seen as an arid landscape, where people, emotion and creativity have no real place. This is so wrong, so wide of the mark of what a life in science is actually like. The concept of the lone scientist, typically in a white lab coat and quite likely holding test-tubes containing some noxious smoking liquid, does not equate to reality. We are part of a flourishing network of committed, cooperative individuals, interspersed with a few real jerks.  (Many people would throw Jim Watson into that last category.) We have our highs and lows during the course of our daily life just like any other kind of worker. We are as interesting or as boring as those in any other profession. There are many challenges to be addressed on the way to being entitled to call yourself a professor, many places where the aspirant may fall by the wayside or lose motivation. However, the bottom line is that working in science is just like the rest of life, the tensions and pleasures of working with others in a scientific laboratory are not really that different from working in an office.

Rosalind Franklin never got to be a professor – in fact far fewer scientists rose to those dizzy heights back in the 1950s than now – and her life was cut miserably short by cancer. During her relatively brief flowering she encountered many obstacles: she was a woman, she was a Jew, and for a number of years she was surrounded by people with whom she felt she had little in common to name three factors that had absolutely nothing to do with the quality of her science. During her life she did have time to demonstrate the versatility of scientists, moving between fields – from the structure of coal to DNA, albeit using X-ray diffraction in both cases – another feature that is often overlooked in the public’s view of experts who are imagined as dedicating their entire life to a single topic, as they beaver away in their alleged ivory tower.

One can tell Rosalind Franklin’s life story in many ways. To Jim Watson she

“was not unattractive, and might have been quite stunning if she had taken even a mild interest in clothes”,

to quote from The Double Helix. He appears to have been as just misogynistic then as in more recent utterances. However, others also found Franklin difficult, just as she also found many of her colleagues. A schoolfriend of hers was quoted as saying

“She was straightforward, even forthright, and not inclined to be diplomatic.”

In adult life, in different labs, her behaviour which, in a man might have been hailed as confident and assertive, in her was seen as aggressive and unattractive. That parsing of assertive compared with aggressive is one that women still face today.

What I find most interesting, when reading some of the key books about this seminal period when Franklin, Wilkins, Crick and Watson were all interacting, is the comparison not of personalities, but of approaches to resolving the structure of DNA. To Franklin, the model building of Watson and Crick seemed child-like, playing with toys. For her it was the detailed, thorough analysis of Paterson functions that was required to interpret her beautiful X-ray diffraction patterns. Crick described her in his own memoir, That Mad Pursuit, as lacking panache. He explained this by “she felt that a woman must show herself to be fully professional.” Or, as Brenda Maddox expressed it in her biography The Dark Lady of Science

“Rosalind had been trained, as a child, as a Paulina [a student at St Paul’s School for Girls], as an undergraduate, as a scientist, never to overstate the case, never to go beyond hard evidence. An outrageous leap of the imagination would have been as out of character as running up an overdraft or wearing a red strapless dress.”

Watson had none of these inhibitions, nor did Crick. The first chapter in Watson’s book The Double Helix starts with the sentence “I have never seen Francis in a modest mood”. They may have been briefly embarrassed – and apparently were – when Franklin pointed out the fundamental mistake regarding the level of hydration of DNA they had made in their penultimate model, but it did not stop their model building and imagination. You might call it panache, or confidence to blag their way through. Still, that gender differential between the stereotypical solid 2.1 sort of woman who writes essays with reams of evidence but allegedly no originality, and the ‘brilliant’ man who writes a wonderful, unsubstantiated account and gets a 1st, persists. There are many contributing factors to the well-documented gender attainment gap at university, particularly in essay-writing subjects. As a Cambridge University Student Union report put it

“When it came to producing work within the arts and humanities, many women respondents talked about a style of essay writing – fast-paced, aggressive, and argumentative for argument’s sake – that they felt was valorised over more considered and expansive pieces, and that women in general found more difficult, or were less inclined, to write.”

As we celebrate the centenary of Rosalind Franklin’s birth, we may reflect that our education system still facilitates a gendered assessment of what is valued; this is supported by the difference in success rates for UKRI grants (and their size). We cannot tell if different educational practices would have enabled the needed leap of imagination for Franklin to construct the double helical structure without deriving it through detailed analysis, or if her character and upbringing would inevitably have held her back from model-building. She knew what she could do well, and worked flat out with those tools. She was someone who undoubtedly faced multiple hurdles by virtue of being a determined woman surrounded by men who thought of her as ‘Rosy’ (Watson), ‘a fool’ (according to Peter Pauling), ‘incompetent in interpreting Xray pictures’ (Watson),and that she ‘looked beautiful when she was angry’. Unfortunately, for many women in science today, those or similar epithets may still be tossed in their direction as they are judged unfavourably, unreasonably and unfairly.

 

 

 

Posted in History of Science, Women in Science | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Uncertain Times

Posted on July 21, 2020 by Athene Donald

We live currently in a world of great and sometimes terrifying strangeness, where the rules and customs by which we have lived for so long have been turned upside down. Some people may be focussing on whether they need to don smart shirts and make-up on their Zoom calls (the media seems very hung up on our changing dress code in the virtual meeting world), and others whether ‘science’ is going to get the blame for the unfolding crisis in the face of Covid-19.  As you might expect, I would be closer to the latter camp. I put ‘science’ in inverted commas since it isn’t ‘a’ thing, a unitary discipline which in and of itself contains all the answers. No, sadly not. There isn’t going to be a single way of tackling a disease that has, as fellow head of house and former Chief Medical Officer Sally Davies said at a meeting in Cambridge ‘upended the textbooks’.

This is not a disease which manifests itself in a single way, nor one whose course can simply be predicted, as those who had it apparently mildly but then have suffered protracted symptoms and after effects can attest. Epidemiologists and modellers are still trying to make sense of its progression through the population (and models are only as good as the information you can feed in and the assumptions you make); biomedical researchers are working flat out to come up with a viable and safe vaccine; and all of us have to make decisions each day about how to live our lives safely – for ourselves and for others.

The situation is uncertain, the ‘science’ is far from ‘known’, fixed and definitive. Around the world we are all battling the same uncertainties and it is crucial those without a scientific training are not misled into thinking that there is a unique right answer which will rapidly fall from the scientist’s lips and which will enable us all speedily to return to normal life. That this strange beast known monolithically as ‘science’ regardless of discipline (or possibly even ‘Science’, to give it appropriate gravitas with a capital letter) will suddenly provide a solution which enables us to put Covid back in its vinegar bottle and move on.

Thinking like this, I read with dismay the following sentences (written long before the pandemic) in Clarissa Farr’s mainly excellent, if slightly structurally contrived, book The Making of Her about her life as a headmistress at a leading private girls’ school. “If art helps us understand and express ourselves, helps us lead an ethical life through respecting and recognising the essential fragility of human nature, its exploratory nature also allows us to accept and live with the fact that some aspects of life are unknowable. In a world dominated by STEM, we are less comfortable with that which cannot be predicted and measure, yet so many of aspects of our lives are set about with uncertainty.”

As is so common with the media, this non-scientist who makes very clear throughout her book that she was a dunce at science and never cared for it as a pupil, is tempted to stray into seeing the world of education as a binary divide: STEM versus non-STEM. Worse, she believes that STEM subjects are all about certainty, fixed answers and the knowable as opposed to the unknowable, ineffable and creative domain that, to her, represents the arts and humanities. This false division of our education is a dangerous trap, made all the more treacherous in the current uncertain world in which scientists are barely allowed to say ‘we don’t know’. And, manifestly, we don’t.

The disease we are facing is new and hence inevitably unknown. We, the scientific community, may collectively have tools and frameworks in which to set to work to learn more of the virus’s secrets, but we know how much we don’t know. Scientists – unlike Farr’s beliefs – are comfortable with the uncertainty, of not knowing facts, because our job is to devise ways of discovering them. Science is not some cold, organised way of getting from A to B. Albert Einstein expressed it as ‘To these elementary laws there leads no logical path, but only intuition, supported by being sympathetically in touch with experience.’ Would Farr associate sympathy and intuition with scientists? I somehow doubt it. Of course, school science is not like research science. School science does tend to be taught as if the facts are all known, and as if there is nothing to be curious or creative about. But good school teaching should still be able to introduce the ideas of the amazing, the uncertain, the curious and the limitations of what we know. If we cannot instill these emotions in the student, we are failing.

Too many people believe like Farr that there is always a right answer and if a scientist can’t provide this, they are in some sense failing. This was as true in the days of ‘Mad Cow Disease’, when the science profession was hesitant to put a firm number on how many deaths would ultimately derive from the human version vCJD. More than ten years after the first death in the UK in 1995 as a result of this disease, scientists were still debating what the final tally of deaths might be. In fact, the second wave feared never seems to have materialised, at least as yet.  A politician can use the fact that scientists are understandably reluctant – when they lack hard facts and evidence – to give a precise number of future expected deaths (as I recall, the predicted ranges covered at least two orders of magnitude from the less than two hundred that have actually so far occurred to tens of thousands) – to suggest they are somehow incompetent. Not to ‘follow the science’, as we have heard so often in recent months, but to blame the science.

There is another interesting analogy between the current pandemic and Mad Cow Disease: the absence of test and trace. When a few animals were found to harbour the disease, via post-mortem brain studies, their calves were not initially tracked. They were instead allowed to breed further, thereby potentially spreading the disease across the farm population. There were those who, at the time, spoke up about keeping records – and they were ignored. Sound familiar? With Covid, things moved at a much faster rate in the (human) population, but this country did not follow others’ lead in isolating the early sites of infection. We are all now paying the price: literally and emotionally, if not with our lives, and almost certainly for years to come.

Politicians who don’t understand the science are too prone to do what is electorally convenient. It has not passed unnoticed that Germany, with a leader trained in science to PhD level, has performed significantly better in dealing with the current crisis. We, as a nation, suffer from a culture that makes science only suitable for alleged eggheads (and not for typical politicians), and which believes that science is some sort of monolithic, rigid set of rules that don’t teach us about uncertainty, or allow us to respond with compassion and flexibility. It is dispiriting to see our leaders and our education system failing us all, not least by casting science in this inappropriate light.

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Is Bigger Always Better?

Posted on June 28, 2020 by Athene Donald

Social distancing may have been reduced to 1(+)m – whatever that may mean – but that is still going to impose significant constraints on what a bench scientist can do. Fume cupboards in a line – how many of them can be accessed in a given session? How many shifts can you safely fit in during a day, with appropriate technical support to hand? How easily/safely can you clean a microscope between users, each of whom may only require a short time on the instrument? Can you train a new user to use some fancy piece of kit by Zoom and be sure they will have mastered all the intricacies so that the data gathered will have meaning?

Group leaders around the country will be pondering these questions – and many more of a similar ilk – as they try to reopen labs safely and ensure all their team can get back to the bench so the papers and theses can be put on track. There are many extremely anxious researchers anxiously waiting to get properly underway again. Theorists/computationalists will be in better shape. They may miss the evenings down the pub, the daily chatter and social contact that a departmental environment may provide scientists of most types, but they are probably – broadband permitting – still able to get on with their research. Zoom/Teams/Googlemeet (according to taste) works fine for exchange of ideas, even for sharing data or sketching diagrams (stylus or fat finger permitting), but I’m not convinced drinks (alcoholic or not) and chat over these same platforms offer great satisfaction. We are, after all, social creatures and human contact means more than viewing through a screen.

But, for experimentalists, the challenges remain severe. As labs start to reopen in Cambridge, the restrictions on who can enter a building to do their work remain substantial. So, which groups will find this hardest? And, if the coronavirus is not going away anytime soon, in the medium term, which groups will continue to be affected? In other words, can we get away from the fact that some large groups may find their students can’t get to the bench as often as anyone would like.

I would like to propose that – sticking with the adage not to waste a crisis – now is a good moment to think about whether bigger really is better. Journal impact factors – as a figure of merit – have become devalued, but group size and group income remain significant in decisions about people’s careers and, the tendency has been that bigger must mean more successful and therefore better. However, the evidence does not particularly back up that assumption. Maybe universities should reconsider policies at a fundamental level. Not just because of space limitations, not just because universities are going to be in financial straits and most research intensive universities have substantially relied on international students to cross-support their research teams, but also because the most original work does not, in practice, come out of the biggest groups.

Think about what is arguably the most successful lab in the country, Cambridge’s Laboratory for Molecular Biology, colloquially known as the LMB. I believe it has more Nobel prize winners than any other establishment (although not everyone would agree that that in itself is a useful figure of merit), but it has always restricted the size of group any group leader could operate.  Research also shows that small groups tend to be more innovative and disruptive, whereas large groups may do work that could be described as incremental. This finding may be seen as counterintuitive, since often large groups are conceived as being more productive, but I guess it depends on how you measure productivity: sheer numbers of papers written may be an inadequate measure.

It is also worth noting that the incoming UKRI CEO, Ottoline Leyser,also based in Cambridge and up till now Director of the Sainsbury Laboratory (studying plant biology) has recently told me that under her leadership this lab also sets a firm upper limit on group size. Maybe, as she takes up the reins at UKRI she will want to implement a smaller is better mantra across the funding bodies. She has a long track record of being concerned about well-being and support for researchers, and I look forward to seeing this awareness of the needs of the individual translate into policies around research culture that in turn translate into better support (pastoral rather than financial) for early career researchers.

I worry that large research groups allow bullies to flourish, because there is less oversight. The bully may be a fellow PhD student or postdoc who hogs equipment to the detriment of others; the one who sneers at someone because their first degree came from a ‘lesser’ university or exhibits egregious racist or gender attitudes in unseen ways. The bully may be the supervisor who expects a researcher to be at the bench 24/7 and refuses to admit that work-life balance has any place in a scientist’s life. But even without bullying, a large group may mean few opportunities for support, advice or mentoring to be given to each member individually.

I once had a postdoc who told me of his PhD supervisor who typically managed to catch up with him once a term. The trouble, I was told, was that the supervisor was so charming that all the list of grievances and problems stored up during that term were disarmed by the smile and words, without any rectification ensuing. That sort of charismatic remote figure is not particularly likely to deliver a useful training programme, albeit a layer of first-rate postdocs in the team might be able to substitute something of worth. Nor is such a group leader apparently giving any consideration to mentoring. In this particular case, once removed from his supervisor’s charm, the postdoc became very bitter about the treatment he had received and the lack of support.

Now, as labs reopen and thought must be given to how every group member can literally be fitted in, it seems appropriate to reflect on the larger existential question: is bigger really better for either science or the scientist?

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