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A University Education and a Lifetime of Debt

Posted on 27 February 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.

 

Posted in Augar Review, careers, education, Further Education, Levelling Up, lifetime loan entitlement | Comments Off on A University Education and a Lifetime of Debt

In Academia, Pats on the Back are Rare

Posted on 15 February 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.

 

Posted in appraisal, mentors, Science Culture, support | Comments Off on In Academia, Pats on the Back are Rare

In which I see the light

Posted on 14 February 2022 by Jennifer Rohn
Viburnum

Viburnum x bodnantense, a winter-flowering shrub

I’m happy, and I don’t know why.

Usually I dread this time of year, the period between demobbing the Christmas tree and the daffodil-studded benevolence of mid-March. It stretches on endlessly, the dreary coldness, the frosts interspersed with rain that pools on pavements and hardly ever coalesces into snow, and above all the afternoon darkness, which on overcast days might as well be twilight.

Last year, my diary reminds me that I was resorting to ordering from flower catalogues to take the edge off – huddled in a chair with candles lit on a mid-winter evening, daydreaming about dahlias whose future blooms felt almost mythical. During this period, probably in late January, I was walking Joshua to school when I registered a deep, hyacinth-like spring scent. Looking up, I discovered a shrub I had never noticed before, spilling over the garden fence of one of the grand Georgian listed houses, its woody branches lush with pink bunches.

What seasonal misfiring could have coaxed such delicate flowers out into a world encased in a hard frost? This singular oddness made it easy to identify online: Viburnum x bodnantense, which blooms from November until March on purpose, not as an accidental aberration of climate change. (Apparently bees and other pollinators can over-winter in gardens, at least in this climate.) Of course I had to order one for my own garden in the hopes that it might cheer me up during midwinters to come, but that just added something more to the long list of things I was waiting for.

Well, that ‘mental health viburnum’ has been flowering for weeks out back this year, but for some reason, I don’t need it. I have been happy, more or less non-stop, since I hoovered up the brittle fir needles from the carpet on New Year’s Day.

It’s so out-of-character to have dodged the winter blues that I’ve been trying to work out why.  The weather is probably part of it – it’s been remarkably fair these past few months. I had a dig around the Met Office pages but couldn’t easily find the sunshine data I wanted. Fortunately Richard’s weather station, its shiny cups spinning tidily on the summerhouse roof like some steampunk NASA apparatus, could at least tell me about the rainfall. Sure enough, this January and February have been drier than any year since he started collecting data in 2018. It’s been so dry, in fact, that I’ve stopped checking the forecast before heading off to London, and have yet to be caught without an umbrella. What little rain we’ve had has tended to be overnight.

A graph of rainfall

But this is just quantitative data, dead numbers on a chart. They cannot conjure up the astonishing beauty of the mornings we’ve had. From the bedroom window, the dawn sky glows a million different shades, each morning subtly different from the last. Venus is tangled in the great sycamore tree lurking over the nearby park, as bright as an incoming aircraft against peachy or coral or golden streaks of cloud. To the left, there are a few minutes each day when the ships on the Thames far below glow like molten lava, until their moment in the sun is gone and they reclaim their drab grey.

Faraway ships on the Thames, set fire by sunrise

Atop Windmill Hill where I walk after dropping the boy at school, the sky changes further, so unique and lovely that my phone has filled up with portraits of the same horse chestnut trees over and over: the silhouettes never change, but each image is infinitesimally different in the colour and texture of its backdrop. I do my normal brisk circuit, puffing at the crest of the climb, crunching frost under my feet, sucking icy air into my lungs, greeting the same dog walkers, taking in the same maritime views of the flat silver ribbon of estuary below, yet it never once feels tired or overly familiar. I understand now that this formerly dreaded period is not a rigid stasis, but a subtly developing season-scape that you only notice if you are amidst it every day. Green shoots push up from the muddy earth, tree buds start to swell, the tenor of the songbirds eases and lifts, dog cherries bloom in the otherwise barren hedgerows.

photos of trees

The same trees, from different angles and days, January and February 2022

And there is light – acres and acres of light, so bright that it dazzles and spangles, colluding with the frigid air to make a tiny joyful headache deep behind the eyes.

I consider my pre-pandemic routine at this time of year. I would leave the house just after 6 AM, in darkness, work all day in a lab and office with no windows, slip out of the hospital around 5 or 6 PM into darkness again. The only time I could ever see the sun was on the weekends – when it was more often than not raining. Last year I didn’t have these routines, because of lockdown, but hadn’t started my morning walk routine, and in January, it was raining almost constantly. So maybe that is the simple answer: I’ve been starved of light.

Now Spring is nearly here: our garden blooms with hellebore, snowdrops, and the first crocuses and daffodils. It’s good to see them, but they slipped in without me realising they weren’t there. Because somehow, I’m not waiting for anything anymore.

Crocus

Joshua presents his first crocus of the year

Posted in Domestic bliss, Gardening, Nostalgia, work-life balance | Comments Off on In which I see the light

Let’s Hope We Can All Stick to Science

Posted on 8 February 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.

Posted in ERC, Horizon Europe, Science Funding, Switzerland | Comments Off on Let’s Hope We Can All Stick to Science

Januaread

Posted on 31 January 2022 by Henry Gee

This year’s pile of books got off to a promising start, and the ones I’ve read this month will set a high standard for the year. So, here they are, in order of reading.

J. R. R. Tolkien (ed. Carl Hostetter) – The Nature of Middle-earth. The postmortem publication of J. R. R. Tolkien’s work now far exceeds this output in life (he died in 1972). This is partly due to the fact that Tolkien never threw anything away, but mostly due to the tireless efforts of his son and literary executor Christopher, whose monumental efforts of literary excavation included the 12-volume History of Middle-earth, a collection of drafts, notes and other unpublished marginalia connected with his father’s vast and ever-growing legendarium. Christopher died in 2020, and the seemingly endless task has moved to leading Tolkienist Carl Hostetter, whose Nature of Middle-earth can be seen as Volume 13. In the late 1950s, after The Lord of the Rings was published, Tolkien (sensu J. R. R.) decided to revise fundamental aspects of his invented Universe. By that time the stories that became to be known as The Silmarillion had been revised at least three times and existed in a fairly advanced state. But still he did not rest. He decided to recast essential aspects of the life histories of humans and elves, which would have had important ramifications for the stories at the heart of the legendarium as it then existed. He also decided to re-make the invented world to accord with what we now know of the Universe. So, rather than having the Sun and Moon remade from the final fruits of the Two Trees of Valinor (as they had been hitherto), they would have existed from the beginning as astronomical objects. To my mind this would have been a great shame, and The Silmarillion as published by Tolkien (sensu Christopher) in 1977 adheres to the older (and, by now, canonical) scheme. The Nature of Middle-earth only includes preliminary notes for the reshaping, a lot of which come only as hints or digressions in extensive notes on the etymology of various words in the elvish languages. Language was always the primary driver for Tolkien’s creativity – he was, first, last, and always, a professional philologist, and created languages in the way that other people write music. Some of the material for The Nature of Middle-earth is republished from scholarly articles on Tolkien’s invented languages, which is in itself a terrific resource as some of these will be hard to obtain for most people. It is not clear, however, whether Tolkien actually undertook the necessary revisions. That is, whether he re-wrote parts of The Silmarillion to take them into account. Perhaps there is more Tolkien gold yet to be mined. As for The Nature of Middle-earth, it has to be said it could never be anything other than a hard read, and will appeal only to Tolkien obsessives. I count myself as one, so I found it repaid the effort. Fans who come from, say, the Peter Jackson movies, will be either disappointed or, frankly, baffled. There are some fragments of Tolkien’s beautiful writing in here, but as someone once said in another context, one has to kiss an awful lot of toads before one meets one’s handsome prince.

J. R. R. Tolkien (ed. Christoper Tolkien) – The Silmarillion. Having ploughed through the often stony ground of The Nature of Middle-earth my appetite was whetted for revisit to The Silmarillion, which, in its 1977 form as edited by Tolkien (sensu Christopher) can be seen as an abstract of J. R. R.’s invented mythology, in the same way that Darwin regarded The Origin of Species as the abstract for a longer work. In a sentence, The Silmarillion is the story of the Elder Days, the canvas against which The Lord of the Rings is set, and in which some of its characters, such as Galadriel, Elrond, Sauron and Gandalf, played more or less tangential parts. Having read all of the alternatives, reworkings, recastings and various published drafts since published in The History of Middle-earth, I have to say that the work of Tolkien fils in producing a coherent text from his father’s stories is nothing short of a masterpiece. And whatever you might say about Tolkien père, he was a truly wonderful writer. His prose is rich, yet spare: perfectly balanced, with not a word out of place. Just what you’d expect from a philologist who knew the meaning and history of each and every word he used, and that words have power.

Richard Osman – The Man Who Died Twice. This continues where Osman’s first novel, the Thursday Night Murder Club, left off. If you haven’t read that (and why haven’t you?) it doesn’t really matter. The Thursday Night Murder Club is a group of four seemingly ill-matched pensioners living in an upmarket retirement village set somewhere in the Home Counties. They meet each Thursday to solve murders. And sometimes the murders come to them. For what is basically a sitcom involving a cast largely made of septuagenarians, the body count is high, and the action sometimes gruesome. It’s also pin-sharp, heart-warming, and laugh-out-loud funny. And, yes, Richard Osman is That Man on the Telly.

 

 

 

 

Francesca Stavrakopoulou – God: An Anatomy. The God of the Bible is a musclebound, physical, jealous street-fighting brawler. He has feet, and hands, and legs, and arms, and a head, and viscera, and dangly bits. This physicality is hard to see, as it has been progressively airbrushed out in successive reworkings of the canonical texts that eventually became the Bible, largely as a result of Christianity which, with its constant worrying about the nature of the Holy Trinity has to pour the corporeal essence of God into Christ, leaving God as no more than some indefinable essence or pneuma, the smile of an ever disappearing Cheshire Cat. The author digs into the original Hebrew of the Bible texts and interprets them as products of the politically turbulent times in which they were written – the closing centuries of the last millennium BCE, when the tiny Yahweh-worshipping kingdoms of Israel and Judah were progressively despoiled, reorganised, destroyed, reorganised again and finally destroyed by waves of Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Hellenic Greeks and Romans. She also traces Yahweh back to his roots among a wider Levantine pantheon, as a storm god and son of the High God El, and who eventually took over El’s consort for his own — and shows how Yahweh fits in to the patterns of religion and worship characteristic of the region back to the earliest times. It should be a deeply scholarly work — and it is — but it’s also racy and engaging, and will give pause for thought to anyone who takes the King James Bible literally. Yes, the Bible should be interpreted literally. But in its original Hebrew, which I know from experience, is a very slippery fish, the translation of which will depend a great deal on the moral stance of the translator. If this doesn’t make my Top Ten at the end of the year I should be most surprised.

Ehsan Masood: The Greatest Invention – the economic health of a nation is measured using a simple formula called Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which summarises how much producers produce, and consumers consume, and in economic and political circles it’s seen as a Good Thing that GDP is always going up. Indeed, when GDP goes down for more than a certain length of time, there is an economic recession, which is seen as a Bad Thing. The flaw in this argument is that on a finite planet, GDP cannot keep going up without limit. In this small but engaging book, Ehsan Masood suggests that GDP was one of those temporary measures that seems to have become ingrained in the psyche of political economics — invented to measure the recovery of European nations after the trauma of World War II. But GDP doesn’t measure many things that are increasingly seen as essential to life, such as volunteering, or work-life balance. Should be not be more contented with less? In answer to this, Masood discusses two alternative measures in particular. One is Gross National Happiness, a metric peculiar to the Himalayan state of Bhutan. Another is the Human Development Index (HDI) which has achieved a measure of traction. But — for the moment — GDP reigns supreme. But for how much longer?

Posted in Carl Hostetter, Christopher Tolkien, Ehsan Masood, Francesca Stavrakopoulou, God An Anatomy, J R R Tolkien, Richard Osman, The Great Invention, The Man Who Died Twice, The Nature Of Middle Earth, the silmarillion, The Thursday Night Murder Club, Writing & Reading | Comments Off on Januaread

Getting the Skills Right for Successful Levelling Up

Posted on 30 January 2022 by Athene Donald

We await the Levelling Up White Paper. It is not easy to read the tealeaves of this turbulent political time to work out when the delay is likely to be terminated, although the last rumour I heard has it down for Wednesday. It has been on the cards for publication for some months, although not as long as the response to the Augar Review. In both these documents one may expect the word skills to be much in evidence. It is a term that, rather like levelling up itself, does not lend itself to a simple definition, but can mean different things to different people in different contexts. That can be handy for politicians of any complexion.

Skills – and adult upskilling – both matter if levelling up is to be achieved. As Thomas Aubrey wrote in a recent blog for the Bennett Institute

‘Many studies indicate that the main driver of productivity growth is the ability of an education system to improve human capital to make the most of new technology.’

Multiple studies and reports have examined variations in attainment levels between different parts of the country. If the above statement is correct, then any variations – and there are plenty – will have knock on effects for the local economy.  To give a specific example of such education variation, based on data for 2019/20 looking at the percentage of under 19s who have obtained a Level 2 qualification (i.e.5 GCSEs at grade 4 or above, or A*- C in old money), it has been shown that nine out of ten of the best performing local authorities lie within the Greater London area. However, the tenth, indeed the highest in ranking of all, is Rutland, no distance at all from Nottingham, which across all the local authorities has the worst overall score. Rutland, with a score of 93.5%, is a full 25% above Nottingham (67.7%).

Those students who don’t get a Level 2 qualification are inevitably going to be disadvantaged in the job market, and are likely to be unable to take advantage of higher-level skills, whatever they might be. This area is where the response to Augar should be coming into its own, along with the Lifetime Skills Guarantee for post 18 education, intended to facilitate access to higher technical qualifications as much as degrees. Thus the lifetime ‘skills’ will cover a wide potential range, and who will be doing the teaching where, will likewise be very varied. The present mishmash of qualifications from apprenticeships to BTECs and T Levels – aimed at 16-19 year olds primarily – are enough to baffle anyone (employer or putative employee). While so much is up in the air, cohort after cohort of students is being disadvantaged. In regions where job prospects are low, or at least skilled and well-paid jobs are in short supply, the motivation to apply oneself to get decent skills may be hard to find, the more so if children have only ever seen their parents struggle and they cannot imagine a better life and better prospects. The connection between levelling up and skills is obvious, although the trap of an area being caught in a low skills equilibrium is pervasive and persistent.

Amidst all this, there is no doubt that increasingly many jobs require a sufficiency of numerical and statistical fluency, as well as the ability to read graphs and use spreadsheets. More so than ever before. Whether going into retail or building trades, or more professional settings such as environmental science or law, these skills have never been needed so much. For those students who do get their Level 2 qualification and proceed to Level 3 (A Levels or the vocational qualifications), they may well drop maths and think they never need it again, only to find later on that their lack of numeracy and mathematical confidence catches up with them. The Royal Society, jointly with the British Academy, has just put out a commentary spelling out the importance of pursuing some maths at Level 3, even when that is not one of the subjects (e.g. A Level) taken. Core Maths is designed to fill this gap.

Back in 2011, I was Chair of the Royal Society’s Education Committee and hosting a speech given by the then Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, when he said

‘I think we should set a new goal for the education system so that within a decade the vast majority of pupils are studying maths right through to the age of 18’

a sentiment with which the audience at the Royal Society was totally in agreement. A year later, I was representing the Royal Society at an event about quantitative skills at the British Academy, at which the importance of statistics for social scientists and humanities’ scholars was stressed – and also brought home at a personal level by the then Science Minister David Willetts, who encountered the mysteries of regression analysis during his PPE course at Oxford without having the tools to handle them. More and more jobs require this literacy – and this most certainly includes politicians. Core Maths is meant to be the answer to the problem, but it has not necessarily penetrated as far as it should into the education system. The commentary the Royal Society has just published is explicitly encouraging universities to expect Core Maths qualifications for admission to a much wider range of courses, far beyond those for which Maths would be a natural subject to take at A Level.

It will be seen that levelling up and numeracy are definitely related when skills are discussed. Levelling up, like skills, means different things to different people, but most certainly it should mean an improvement in local economic conditions where things are currently bad, so that inequality is reduced across the country and those living insecure financial lives have better opportunities.  Furthermore, to revert to the Aubrey quote I gave before, if more money is being committed to research and innovation (as in the latest Spending Review) it requires that there are workers in companies able to get hold of that innovation and turn it into profit and productivity, even if they have not been involved in the innovation itself. If there are insufficient such workers – insufficient absorptive capacity – then the full advantage of developments cannot be taken. This too will have a strong regional component, building on educational disadvantage.

In this category of workers I am not talking primarily about university graduates in technical areas, vital though they are, I am talking about those with intermediate skills who will do much of the practical improvements, putting ideas into practice and making sure the logistics work.  Within universities, the Talent Policy Commission has been looking at the crucial role technicians play, often insufficiently recognized, in higher education. Their full report will be published this coming week, but an earlier report from last autumn specifically looked at the role technicians play in knowledge exchange activities. Similar analysis applies within companies; intermediate technical skills are too often overlooked by those considering training needs and employment and the pipeline of talent not taken into account where it needs to be, a point clearly made in a report by Paul Lewis in 2019 for the Gatsby Foundation 9 (Technicians and Innovation).

Joining these different strands – more money in the innovation system, more absorptive capacity with a more highly skilled workforce, including in what may now fall under core maths – are all crucial strands in levelling up. If inequality is to be reduced across the UK, then ensuring that educational outcomes are comparable in Rutland and Nottingham, in Barnet and Blackpool, is one key step on which to build. There is a long way to go in making the current systems integrated and coherent.

Posted in A levels, Core Maths, education, michael gove, qualifications, technicians | Comments Off on Getting the Skills Right for Successful Levelling Up

FAIR data in practice

Posted on 26 January 2022 by Frank Norman

Introducing the next Open Research London event, which will be about FAIR data. 

It’s easy to agree that making research data FAIR is A Good Thing. Of course research data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. But is it imperative that all research data should be FAIR? If not, how do we identify those subsets that do need to be FAIR? What exactly do we need to do at a micro level to ensure that our data is FAIR?

Realising the aim of FAIR data in practice is challenging – it can take time and resources – and the benefits to the researcher of making their data FAIR are not always apparent. It’s important therefore to minimise any barriers to making data FAIR.  Research institutions should put systems in place to make FAIR data easy to manage and should explain clearly to researchers what they need to do.

Top-down

Since the FAIR data concept was launched in 2016 there has been a great deal written and talked about it but mostly that has been pretty high-level. We are seeing more practical guidelines emerge but I believe we still need more concrete explanations for both institutions and researchers.

The EOSC Expert Group developed an overarching FAIR Action Plan, published in 2018, but stressed that there was also a need for individual countries to put in place national action plans for FAIR. The plan was called Turning FAIR into Reality and it talks about the need to create policies, build a FAIR ecosystem, develop researcher skills, provide repositories and craft incentives. It also emphasises the need for PIDs (Persistent Identifiers) and standards, and the importance of machine-actionable data management plans. Skills development was identified as a major gap to be filled.

Some of the presentations at the launch event have useful summaries if you want to learn more about the plan.

To me it all feels a bit high-level still. The plan doesn’t quite bridge the gap from the high-level ideals of FAIR data down to quotidian research practice.

Creating infrastructure

The FAIRsFAIR project (Fostering Fair Data Practices in Europe) is endeavouring to create “an overall ​knowledge infrastructure on academic quality data management, procedures, standards, metrics and related matters”, based on the FAIR principles.

It aims to supply “practical solutions for the use of the FAIR data principles throughout the research data life cycle”. I do like the sounds of this.  Its emphasis is on “fostering FAIR data culture and the uptake of good practices in making data FAIR.”

The project started in March 2019 and is due to complete this year.  Recently they released a  training handbook, coordinated by Claudia Engelhardt.

Institutions, publishers, repositories

The Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) is the first research institution to dedicate itself to Open Science. Its director, Guy Rouleau, was interviewed about MNI’s approach to open science in Genome Biology in 2017. MNI provides  some practical guidelines on FAIR data for its researchers.

A recent article by JB Poline (from MNI and McGill University) and others in Neuroinformatics considers how organisations can work towards making new neuroscience data FAIR, and calls for increased international collaborative standardisation of neuroscience data to foster integration and efficient reuse of research objects.

Iain Hrynaszkiewicz and colleagues from PLOS recently published the results of a survey of researchers, quizzing them on their needs and priorities for research data sharing. Their article in Data Science Journal highlights the role of publishers and repositories and the importance of linking research data and publications.

Sharing data in a repository is key requirement for data to be FAIR. Repositories such as Dryad can help to spread awareness and best practice.  Dryad has a page listing Good Data Practices.

Researchers

Some researchers support FAIR data for ethical reasons. Philippa Matthews wrote in the Journal of Global Health in 2019 about the need for FAIR data in order to help overcome the health problems caused by Hepatitis B virus.

Questions.

As a service provider in a research institution, I have these questions about FAIR:

  • what do I need to put in place to support researchers?
  • what should I be telling researchers they need to do?
  • what skills do I need to ensure researchers have?
  • do I really understand what each of the components of F-A-I-R means?

The event

Open Research London is holding a free virtual event called FAIR data in practice on Tuesday 1 February 2022, 3-4.30pm GMT.

The event will be chaired by Iain Hrynaszkiewicz, Director, Open Research Solutions at Public Library of Science (PLOS) and hosted online by the Francis Crick Institute.

There will be four short talks followed by a Q&A and discussion.

The speakers are:

  • Jen Gibson (Executive Director, Dryad)
  • Philippa Matthews (Group Leader at Francis Crick Institute)
  • Jean-Baptiste Poline (Montreal Neurological Institute and McGill University)
  • Claudia Engelhardt (Göttingen State and University Library)

They will be joined in the discussion panel by James McRae (Head of Metabolomics platform at Francis Crick Institute)

The event is free but please register at Eventbrite.

 

 

 

Posted in Research data | Comments Off on FAIR data in practice

In which I imagine a dystopian future

Posted on 23 January 2022 by Jennifer Rohn

Book cover: Vital Signals

Despite my dedication to promoting the Lab Lit genre, I’ve always been an avid science fiction fan too. I admire how a good dystopian tale can transport you into a terrifying alternative future so convincingly that when you emerge from the spell, the relief of having escaped this fate (so far) can linger for days.

I felt a little bit like that after seeing the film “Don’t Look Up” (spoilers follow). It had its flaws, but the agonising run-up to the loss of our beautiful world – and then its terrifying execution – were so well portrayed that, weeks later, I’m still wandering around on my morning walks giving quiet thanks for the sky, the trees, the birds, and everything else we humans haven’t quite managed to ruin.

(As an aside, “Don’t Look Up” also had some nice lab lit qualities at the beginning. We see the world-weary astronomy PhD student clock into her telescope session, headphones on and utterly blasé – until she discovers the new comet. Then she claps her hands together and gasps with joy like a child. I think all scientists have been there.)

I’ve got a lot to learn about mastering the art of dystopian fiction, but I had the chance to practice when I was invited to take part in the anthology Vital Signals, from NewCon Press. Out on 25 February and available for preorder now, the collection offers visions of our potential future and draws attention to how science and technology might alter us as a species. There are lots of great authors in the collection and it’s been beautifully produced and edited.

I contributed to the “Disease” section of the anthology with a new story called “The Needs of The Few” (my early geeky childhood TV viewing showing through there). This short fiction imagines one possible extreme consequence of antibiotic stewardship, which is our current policy of not over-using the antibiotics that still work because we are running out of alternatives. The global antimicrobial resistance (AMR) crisis, predicted by Alexander Fleming back in the 1940s, is still a serious issue to this day and growing worse. The crisis was caused by flagrant abuse of these miracle drugs over many generations – taking antibiotics for non-bacterial illnesses, not finishing the full course of an antibiotic prescription, dosing livestock wholesale to prevent infection. Each inappropriate dose selects bacteria that are naturally resistant to the drug, and allows them to thrive and take over until inevitably, the drugs we have no longer work. Add to this the stalled pipeline of antibiotic discovery and the sheer difficulty of devising new ones, and you can see why stewardship is deemed necessary. This tenant means that all antibiotics, and especially any newly discovered ones, must be used sparingly and only when absolutely essential.

Stewardship is a sensible policy in principle, but its rigorous interpretation already denies people antibiotics who genuinely need them. I’m thinking in particular of people who suffer from chronic urinary tract infections that don’t register on the old-fashioned diagnostic tests, either because they are low-grade or because the tests themselves can be very insensitive. Many such people with genuine symptoms of infection are sent home from clinical consultations without a prescription, and continue to suffer, some so terribly that they cannot work, cannot leave their houses, cannot sustain a relationship – or, in some tragic extreme cases, cannot face living any longer. In this unfortunate situation, a disease with suboptimal diagnostics has collided with the idealogical force of a stewardship policy that is, in my view, too rigorously enforced.

But what, I wondered, would happen if the need for rigid stewardship suddenly became species-imperative? What if a deadly bacterial pandemic swept the world (I wrote this story before COVID19 came on the scene), and only one newly-discovered antibiotic could cure it? And what if you were a scientist who had dedicated her life to curing diseases, and had the means to break the law to help people with infections that weren’t “important enough” enough to risk treatment?

If you want to find out more, do pick up a copy.

Posted in Lablit, Science-fiction, Writing | Comments Off on In which I imagine a dystopian future

Strong Women, Wise Words

Posted on 23 January 2022 by Athene Donald

Today I read two interviews with academic leaders, strong women both working in decidedly male-dominated fields. Their experiences are salutary and their advice worth taking to heart, much of it applying regardless of gender.

Firstly, and more famously at least in the UK, was an interview with Minouche Shafik, the Egyptian-born economist and Director of LSE. Economics is a notoriously male-dominated discipline. I was struck by the comments Diane Coyle made about the subject in her recent book Cogs and Monsters.

‘Economics stands out as one of the least diverse disciplines, even as it wields great practical influence, particularly over government policies that affect everyone in society. The subject’s gender and ethnicity record is unacceptable.’

In my own research into the problems of gender bias in publishing, the most striking evidence I ever came across was from Economics, not from any of the sciences (see also here and here).

Minouche is under no illusions about the burdens on women in modern society. She is quoted as saying in the Guardian interview

‘… the way our whole social contract was predicated on women looking after the young and the old for free – now there are more women going to university than men, globally, not just in the UK, and they are employed, and the cost of them not working is really high, so you want them to work. Yet we haven’t found a way to adjust – a way to look after the young and old without women providing free labour.’

As has been made only too clear, the pandemic has made the situation worse, in academia as elsewhere, with the evidence steadily accumulating, on publications and in just about every other part of our professional lives. My concern is that this will continue to play out for years, the disadvantage of these years never being eradicated on those who’ve had to take the domestic load.

The other point that strongly resonated with me in her interview regards the role of luck versus intrinsic merit in an individual’s life. She says

‘The idea that you are successful because you are smart and hardworking is pernicious and wrong, because it means everyone who is unsuccessful is stupid and lazy’.

Luck impacts on all of us: the good fortune of which family you were born into, when and where to start with. Of course, they always say you make your own luck, but if you are born into war-torn Sarajevo, your circumstances are necessarily going to be rather different from being born into a family that can pack you off to Eton. Merit is not the distinguishing mark between two such children. It behoves us never to forget this. Even two kids born in the same London borough may have utterly different life chances due to their different social capital. Many people have noted this – widening participation is, for instance, part of Churchill College’s bread and butter as they examine admissions – but overcoming these disadvantages is never helped by those academics who somehow believe (as I fear some do) that their successes are purely and solely down to their great intrinsic ability and willingness to work hard.

The second interview was in the THE with Rama Govindarajan, who is dean of the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bangalore. She studies monsoons and is an expert in fluid dynamics. Trained as a chemical engineer, she was the only woman in a class of about 54 in chemical engineering in the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. However, she was not going to let a little thing like that stop her.

‘In the olden days, gender bias was more explicit. My school and teachers tried to make me “ladylike” and to focus more on homemaking skills than on other subjects. I learned to rebel against the former and benefit from the latter. Decades ago, I faced discrimination in terms of unfair job and promotion interviews, in being blocked from facilities and opportunities available to men, and once in a while in comments from colleagues. I learned the art of repartee, to fight directly for my rights, and did win some of these battles. It made me braver and more confident.’

Many women will recognize that ‘blocking’ she describes, often intangibly hard to put one’s finger on, just the sense that things hadn’t turned out for you, as a woman, the same way as for the bloke on the next bench, or who was sitting next to you waiting for an interview. That intangible disadvantage is likely to apply whether or not you can (and are willing) to master ladylike behaviour; I’m sure I’ve not managed to tick all those boxes. Bias is subtle now, as opposed to the explicit gender bias Govindarajan encountered early on, but it doesn’t make it any less real.

Govindarajan now has a major academic leadership role, and continues to speak up on these issues.

‘In these [meetings] and elsewhere, I strongly advocate for speaking up and speaking out against sexual harassment and against unfairness. I speak for equality and symmetry of treatment.’

She believes the family is the place to start, stating that daughters-in-law have a particularly hard time in India. I suspect cultural aspects make that more important there than perhaps in the West, but equality should be equality everywhere.

Finally, when asked what she would like to be remembered for, she says it’s for her training of students and postdocs. I’m sure that is something that will strike a chord with many readers. We can’t always know what impact we have had far down the line, when students may have gone off into very different spheres and contact has been lost, but it is always moving when someone – be they still a scientist or not – reminds you of what you’ve done for them. I had just such an instance this weekend, and I’m very grateful to hear that my advice meant this former student ‘felt less alone’. Life continues to be tough for all of us, but reading these interviews should remind all of us that life is rarely easy, whatever one’s background, luck or skill, but good things can transpire. Furthermore, that each of us can make a positive difference to someone less well placed than ourselves and to wider society around us.

 

 

Posted in economics, luck, Minouche Shafik, Rama Govindarajan, Science Culture, Women in science | Comments Off on Strong Women, Wise Words

Unconscious Bias 2.0

Posted on 15 January 2022 by Athene Donald

‘Unconscious bias’ has become very much part of the conscious process that many organisations try to bring to bear on their decision-making, be it with regard to promotions or appointments. However, what do they mean by it and how do they go about it? Often the advisory notes (or equivalent) don’t go beyond reminding everyone they should think about the issues and be aware they may impact on outcomes if each and every member of the panel doesn’t focus on it. The trouble is, unconscious bias turns up not just in the individuals involved in the decisions, but also in many of the component parts of the paperwork that need to be deconstructed if a panel is to recognize how hidden influences may play a part. I was reminded of this as I was putting together my submission to the recent call for evidence from the Commons Science and Technology Select Committee on Diversity in STEM, while simultaneously observing various committees engaged in decision-making.

One of the more comprehensive videos I’ve seen, in that it highlights a number of different but specific traps we may all fall into, is this one the ERC uses to make its panel members aware (I believe it is still current for them; it is certainly still on their Working Group for Gender Issues webpages ). When I first watched it, I realised that ‘affinity bias’ was not a form of unconscious bias I had myself previously taken on board. Finding something in common with an applicant for a job had previously only meant to me that it was easier to get someone talking, not that having a shared mutual interest or background experiences in common might influence my decision. I should have realised; we hear enough about old Etonians ending up with Government jobs, but I had not extended it to someone sharing a common taste in music or something more obscure. The link I give above to affinity bias refers to five sorts of bias. Googling the topic, however, points to sites describing variously three to sixteen different types of bias. There are plenty of pitfalls in recruitment.

However, I want to remind people of the biases that other people will be introducing into the paperwork, which don’t get discussed enough in these situations.  These may turn up in different parts of an application, ranging from the publication list to letters of reference – as well as to other figures of merit which a panel may choose to search out. The danger of letters of reference being gendered is becoming much more widely appreciated, with sites devoted to helping you identify where words may subtly be conveying things other than what you intended. I’ve discussed this topic previously on this blog. This website from Arizona State University highlights the importance of emphasising accomplishments not effort. Hard-working is not exactly praise if applying for an academic position, even though it could hardly be described as inherently negative. Tom Forth, a data scientist, has produced a site where you can even insert your draft letter and see just what kinds of words you’ve introduced – to check if the implications are what you meant.

This topic, as I say, is by now quite well known (although that doesn’t mean it’s always dealt with appropriately). I am increasingly worried by the less obvious concerns. Let me start with double standards (neatly summed up in the Goethe quote I wrote about before

‘Girls we love for what they are; young men for what they promise to be.’).

It isn’t always obvious unless you’re concentrating really hard. I watched a committee debate whether a senior woman who had many last author placements in author lists was little more than the purse holder, the implication being she should have been first-named author. This seemed bizarre, as the first author place is usually reserved for the PhD student/postdoc who’s done the actual experiments much more than the initiator of experiments. I didn’t hear the same comment raised about any of the men under consideration. Was that bias? I fear it was, but cannot prove it.

What about the fact that women’s papers are less cited? Many committee members will delve into Web of Science or Google Scholar to analyse citations (‘this person has even fewer than me’, was an unhelpful comment I heard recently). Leaving aside the fact that sub(-)disciplines vary hugely in their practices of both publication and citation, there are well-recognized gender differences in citation. A recent study of citations of papers published in elite Medical journals found a very significant difference. As the Nature commentary on the paper said

‘papers with women as primary authors had one-third fewer median citations than did those with men as primary authors, and that papers with women as senior authors received about one-quarter fewer citations than did those with men as senior authors. And papers whose primary and senior authors were both female received just half as many citations as did papers whose primary and senior authors were both male.’

This indicates that checking on citations is not the objective metric evaluators may imagine. (Women are also less likely to cite their own papers than men.)

Then there is the problem women face in even getting their papers published in the first instance. Melinda Duer and I highlighted this as a potential issue a few years back, based on the experience of women we knew and work analysing practice in other non-scientific disciplines (notably economics). The work of the Royal Society of Chemistry analysing their own publications, in part stimulated by our article, demonstrated that at every stage from submission on, women were indeed disadvantaged. As the report put it

‘Biases exist at each step of the publishing profile. Many of these biases appear minor in isolation, yet their combined effect puts women at a significant disadvantage.’

Another nail in the coffin of using publication metrics as a valid quantitative criterion in making decisions. But how many panels actually bear this in mind as they compare Dr Joe Smith and Dr Jo Smith?

I worry that these additional hurdles introduced due to bias creeping into the development of a career are not yet feeding into decision-making committees. And this is just about gender. Studies on how CVs are read have demonstrated just how much the name at the top affects how people read it, and this has been shown to be true for ethnic minority ‘names’ in the same way as for female ‘names’, although there are variations according to the precise apparent heritage (see this paper for instance, or here). How the other sorts of disadvantage impact I describe here on ethnicity will need further study. However, in the UK there is no doubt that ethnic minorities do worse in grant allocation, compounded by intersectionality, as UKRI statistics make plain.

There is still a long way to go in ensuring grant-awarding panels and appointment and promotion committees really do make the best decisions, and that all members are sensitive to a multitude of possible sources of bias. Let us hope these wider aspects filter through as fast as possible if equity is to be achieved.

 

Posted in appointment committees, CV, Equality, promotion, publishing, Science Culture, Women in science | Comments Off on Unconscious Bias 2.0