Thank you for the invitation to present at this fascinating symposium – especially this part, which is addressing the thorny question of whether academic work can be managed. I am going to focus particularly on research and whether it can and should be managed at an institutional level. I stress ‘institutional’ because I don’t think there would be anyone who would question that the majority of research has to be managed at an operational level in departments and research groups. I strongly believe that it can be managed institutionally and that universities have a public duty to ensure that research is prosecuted in the most effective way. I also do not believe that this transgresses academic freedom in any way.
Let me start by quoting Sir Charles Harington, a Director of the National Institute for Medical Research in London giving the annual Linacre Lecture in Cambridge addressing the need for organization in scientific research:
‘. . . . it may well be felt that original investigation must remain purely an intellectual activity that can only be pursued in conditions of complete freedom, inconsistent with any form of organization.” He believed, however, that this feeling ‘is based on a nostalgia for a time when the body of scientific knowledge was such that one branch at least could be fully comprehended by an individual, when techniques were simple and when the practical applications of scientific research were less urgently sought after. That era is past, and scientists as well as others must accept the conditions imposed by the more highly organised society of today.’
What I omitted to mention was the date of that quote – 1958. It was evident nearly half a century ago that physical and biological scientific research was no longer a singular activity, that it needed teams and that such teams would inevitably need organising or even managing. This can only be truer today in a world where the research questions being addressed are more complex, more interdisciplinary and require more and more expensive logistics. Furthermore, I would argue that much Social Science research is no longer the province of single individuals. Problems such as the inter-generational persistence of poverty require a multi-disciplinary approach which includes anthropology, sociology, social policy and politics and crosses into genetics and human biology, to name but a few of the relevant disciplines. I will explore these issues in more detail later, but my primary position is that it is inevitable that modern research does need organising or managing institutionally and that we have a duty to ensure that is done as effectively as possible.
Before I start, however, I would like to address the issues of academic freedom and research. Academic freedom is an oft-quoted term in the UK and is used to cover a multitude of behaviours, many of which, in my opinion, have nothing to do with academic freedom. It is commonly said that trying to manage and organise research, particularly at an institutional level, is antithetic to academic freedom. As head of an institution I will defend the right of our academics to explore whatever course of intellectual enquiry they wish, and will ensure they are not constrained in articulating their thoughts by the prevailing attitudes of society, government or the university leaders as long as they remain within the law and their statements are consonant with the values of our university.
However, academic freedom brings with it duties. It does not include an inalienable right to speak pejoratively in areas in which the individual has no special skill or knowledge; it does not include the right to publicly and objectionably criticise a colleague; it does not exonerate colleagues from the consequences of public criticism of non-academic issues in their institutions; and finally and most importantly, it does not give a right to request open-ended public funding with no management of that resource.
And it is this issue of funding that lies at the heart of the matter about management of research. In Europe, universities are predominantly funded from the public purse and all over the world the majority of research funding comes from the public. I will exemplify this with Bristol. In 2004/5 Bristol had a total income of 370 million Euros, of which 260 million Euros (about 70%) came from the public either through their taxes, their fees or their donations to charities that support research. In research terms, Bristol’s income in the same year was 140 million Euros and 112 million Euros (about 80%) came from the government, government agencies or the charitable sector – all supported from the public purse. It is simply inescapable that we owe the public a duty to spend that money as effectively as possible; it is, after all, their money.
I am clear that one effective way of spending part of that money is in ensuring there is an environment that allows academics to think freely and laterally, because from those thoughts come great insights that will benefit society. This is particularly relevant in theoretical scientific disciplines, in the arts and humanities and in parts of the social sciences. In general, these areas are not resource hungry. However, most research is furiously expensive and no institution can support all academics doing whatever research they wish to – they must marshal their resources so that they can support the most effective research in that institution. I believe this is achievable and will discuss the issue later.
But this is not all simply driven by financial resource. As I suggested earlier, a single institution obviously has a limit to its intellectual capacity and that is further constrained by the complex and interdisciplinary nature of much of our research activity. In order to ensure maximal intellectual productivity, institutions will have to think carefully about those areas of enquiry they can pursue and those they can’t.
So, if one accepts my argument that research can and should be managed both intellectually and through resource allocation, how does one go about doing that? The first question I ask any university leader is whether their institution has a research strategy. If they respond negatively, I follow that up by asking how they distribute their resources effectively. Some decry research strategies, but such a document does ensure that an academic community has articulated its research aims. It also facilitates an objective assessment of strengths, creates a framework for future developments and identifies operational actions that will maximise research output. It is axiomatic that a research strategy cannot be a top-down document – it begins with a series of policy postulates that come from senior leaders, but these are then debated, changed accordingly and agreed. Full consultation must then follow to dig beneath the top-level aims and create the more detailed plans and operations. If the strategy is not owned by the academic community, it is worthless. This is a time-consuming business – for example, it took us nearly a year to define the research strategy at Bristol after I arrived.
I will use parts of that strategy to exemplify what I mean. We started with the overall vision for the university; a statement of the characteristics that we decided would define our university in the future. Two statements in that vision are relevant to research:
We then set an overall aim for research namely:
We then set eight main objectives, which have action points underneath them. I will not read those out, but simply highlight some:
I will take two of those and give you a flavour of the action points below:
Create a positive research environment to maximise the potential of staff:Action 2.10
Departments will review research leave mechanisms, working, over time, to achieve a University standard of enabling each member of staff to focus exclusively on research for extended periods equivalent to at least 25% of their time in any four-year cycle.
Action 2.11
Heads of Department will ensure that members of the academic staff in the early stages of their career have support and training and sufficient time embedded in their work plan to enable them to develop their research appropriately.
Action 2.13
Faculties will ensure that travel funds are available for staff to bid for grants to attend international conferences. This is particularly important for staff at the beginning of their careers who may not have access to grant funding.
Focus investment in the strongest research and into a relatively small number of key themes:
Action 2.14
In setting budgets, priority will be given to building up and maintaining capacity in areas of research that have or will have world-class potential.
Action 2.15
The Research Committee will develop a schedule of key research themes, which will become priorities in terms of resource. Research Directors, together with Deans, will propose a core group of consolidated intra- and inter-faculty research themes to the Committee in which the University already has or can attain world-class critical mass. These themes will usually be interdisciplinary and will clearly have to be limited in number to have an effect. The number of such themes will not be prescribed in advance and will be kept under active review. The fostering of internationally excellent research outside the scope of the themes will continue to be an important component of the University's research activity.
Action 2.16
Identify activities that should be discontinued to enable us to focus on our strengths.
Action 2.17
Transparent and efficient procedures will be developed to ensure that strategic capital investment decisions made by the University are aligned with the University’s Research Strategy.
Action 2.18
The Chair of the Research Committee will hold a Research Strategy Fund to support, at its discretion, the implementation of the Research Strategy.
I stress that each of those actions has an identified member of staff responsible for leadership and completion and a completion date.
So how has this affected us operationally – how do we manage this strategy and action plan? We now have the following in place:
Has it worked? Well, we shall see. We certainly now have well-established and accepted research themes, and the research leave has worked very effectively. The strategy has also been a powerful document when entering further debates with staff about our research aims and major mechanisms for keeping our staff on our central mission of research intensity.
In summary, management of research at the institutional level is essential if we are to ensure maximum creativity and productivity in knowledge generation. It is part of our duty to society to spend our money wisely and research can be led, managed and operated very successfully and inclusively without impacting on academic freedom.