Corruption of scientific integrity? - The commercialisation
of academic science.
The Council for Academic Freedom and Academic Standards
and the Council for Academic Autonomy are holding a conference on Wednesday
2 May 2001 at the British Academy, London. Details in the forms of a double
sided A4 leaflet and an A4 poster are attached to this issue of Update.
Please circulate them as widely as possible. If you would like them in electronic
form (email with Microsoft Word 97/98 attachments) please email D.E.Packham@bath.ac.uk
The CAFAS/CAA conference is timely. It is
becoming apparent to nearly everyone in education that the market impacts
negatively on teaching and research but it nevertheless requires open, rigorous
debate if solutions are to be found. The contributions in this issue illustrate
that commercialisation is irreconcilable with academic freedom. One reason
for the corrupting influence of the market on academic freedom, standards
and democracy is that it imposes the goal of augmenting wealth over education's
role to meet social need.
But, as our contributors - and many elsewhere
- are demonstrating, we do not have to accept it.
Autonomy row hits LSE as sponsor axes
research
Phil Baty
12 January 2001
A row over the commercialisation of university
research and academic freedom has erupted at the London School of Economics
following the decision of a major research sponsor to prematurely pull the
plug on a £250,000 contract.
Travel industry lobby group the World Travel
and Tourism Council withdrew funding from the LSE in April last year, mid-way
through a three-year contract with the school. The WTTC claimed that the
LSE's work was of poor quality.
Researcher Thanos Mergoupis and his research
assistant lost their jobs as a result of the decision. Mr Mergoupis claims
that the pulling of the money was not just breach of contract, but breach
of his and the LSE's academic freedom.
Mr Mergoupis has a number of grievances
against the LSE for failing to enforce its contract with the WTTC and stand
up for the research done in its name.
He claims the LSE's failure to act decisively
denied him the protection he is entitled to under the 1988 Education Act.
The law allows academics to put forward unpopular and controversial opinions
without putting their jobs in jeopardy.
The WTTC commissioned research from the
LSE's Centre for the Philosophy of Natural and Social Science to examine
the economic and social impact of tourism. A contract was signed to release
the £250,000 over three years and work began in 1998.
In September 1999, WTTC vice-president Rick
Miller told the LSE's team that one of its research papers was "completely
inadequate in its review of... the WTTC's research".
But the WTTC said that suggestions that
it withdrew the funds because the LSE was not coming up with the findings
it was looking for are "absolutely spurious".
WTTC vice-president for strategy and development,
Graham Watson, told The THES that it was not the findings that
the WTTC objected to - it had already made some methodological changes on
the advice of the LSE's papers - "it was more the nature of the output and
some of the methodology that wasn't quite hitting the spot".
The WTTC withdrew funding in April 2000.
Last May, formal legal advice to the university
confirmed that the LSE had had good grounds to seek damages to compensate
for the premature loss of funding. However, the LSE's failure to dispute
the WTTC's decision at the time, it was confirmed, meant that any potential
action was almost inevitably doomed.
The Campaign for Academic Freedom and Academic
Standards is supporting Mr Mergoupis. It said in a letter to LSE director
Anthony Giddens that the independence of research is protected in the constitution
of every British university by the principle of academic freedom.
An LSE spokesperson said: "Mr Mergoupis
has taken up this matter under the school's internal grievance procedure
and it is currently being investigated.
"It would be unfair to comment until this
process has been concluded."
(Published in the Times Higher Education
Supplement 12 January 2001)
FROM WARWICK UNIVERSITY LTD. TO BRITISH UNIVERSITIES
PLC
Hugo Radice 6.11.00
Thirty years ago this spring, British higher education was
convulsed by a wave of occupations and protests centred at the University
of Warwick, where a student occupation had uncovered the existence of confidential
files maintained by the University - specifically the Vice-Chancellor’s
office - on the political activities of a number of staff and students.
The Warwick files affair generated a Penguin Education Special, Warwick
University Ltd., edited by the historian E P Thompson, then Reader in
Social History at Warwick, written and published at breakneck speed as the
events unfolded. In this book, staff and students at Warwick not only described
the extraordinary way in which the files had been accumulated and deployed,
but also related the affair to the rise of a ‘business university’, in whose
development the regional business elite was seen to have played a central
role.
In the spring of 2000 the 30th anniversary
of the Warwick affair and of the book passed by without, as far as I know,
a single mention, either in the professional HE press or the wider media.
And yet the analysis of Warwick University Ltd. seems remarkably
prescient. If anything, British HE since 1970 has gone very much further
in the direction of serving private interests than we ever imagined. In
his ‘afterword’ E P Thompson asked:
Is it inevitable that the university will
be reduced to the function of providing, with increasingly authoritarian
efficiency, prepacked intellectual commodities which meet the requirements
of management? Or can we by our efforts transform it into a centre of free
discussion and action, tolerating and even encouraging ‘subversive’ thought
and activity, for a dynamic renewal of the whole society within which it
operates?
Today it would seem incredible that Thompson’s
second question could even be asked. For the university has indeed been
‘reduced’: by financial stringencies, authoritarian management, political
interventions, creeping privatisation, and overall the almost complete ‘commodification’
of both teaching and research. The ending of the quinquennial grant system
in 1976, by Secretary of Education Shirley Williams, destroyed the framework
of long-term strategic planning and institutional development that the universities
then enjoyed. The relentless erosion of the ‘unit of resource’ in the decades
since have encouraged the increasing commercialization of the university’s
relations with society at large. The ending of the binary divide, far from
leading to a unified network of ‘tertiary comprehensives’, created a viciously-competitive
hierarchy canonised in the unending multiplication of league tables. Graduate
unemployment and the assault on organised labour and progressive movements
of all kinds pressured students into switching towards more vocational studies
in the hope of securing a place in the Thatcherite world of vapid consumerism.
The student movement increasingly abandoned radical causes in favour of
bureaucratic student-unionism centred on the development of the political
careers of the activists, despite the occasional eruption of protests over
nuclear weapons or the poll tax.
The strategic direction of university development
became ever more driven by the need to chase the moving financial targets
set by authoritarian governments which regularly used HE as a whipping-boy
in their populist campaigns. At the institutional level, the so-called ‘new
managerialism’, which purports to introduce into the sleepy world of public
service the supposedly self-evident efficiencies of the private sector,
has created a looking-glass world in which more time seems to be spent designing,
specifying and fulfilling meaningless ‘aims and objectives’, than actually
teaching and researching. At the individual level, increasing workloads
and the peculiar combination of vacuity and ruthlessness in the management
process have led to overwork, stress, conformity, corruption and bullying.
Overall, we have witnessed in these past thirty years the literal demoralization
of higher education. Only the continuing satisfactions of contact with students
still eager to learn, and colleagues still somehow managing to pursue knowledge
for its own sake or the social good, make our working life still tolerable,
even while we have the unique distinction, as an occupational group, of
seeing our living standards frozen for decades (with the exception of course
of those who rise to the top on the backs of the rest of us).
Superficially our discontents have focused
in recent years on the immediate consequences of the Research Assessment
Exercise (RAE) and Teaching Quality Assessment (TQA). In the eyes of the
general public, however, our case for opposing these appears very weak.
It looks to them as if we just want to left alone to do what we like with
public money, pursuing silly research at the expense of teaching quality
and enjoying our traditional three-month summer break in our Tuscan holiday
cottages. Fatuous and unfair though this image may be, it is carefully nurtured
by our own top management, and above all by a generation of politicians
and media celebs who feel no compunction about kicking in the teeth those
to whom they owe their higher education and thus in no small part their
own wealth and status. Like all effective ideological campaigns, of course,
the assault on academic indolence and irresponsibility has a substantial
grain of truth to it. Traditions of secrecy and so-called self-government
allowed and still allow many individual injustices to be committed with
impunity. We should never fear the introduction of democracy, transparency
and accountability into higher education. The ‘visitor’ system in particular
should be scrapped forthwith; far more information should be made available
publicly about the finances and the academic strategies of universities;
and we should indeed be held responsible, both to the general public as
taxpayers, and to students as our most important clients, for the quality
and quantity of our efforts. Why then, the public ask, are we complaining
about the RAE and TQA?
To find the answer to that question, we
have to probe beneath the superficialities and analyse the substance of
the bureaucratic managerialism of which these are only the most visible
part. And here we find the strange paradox at the heart of not just HE,
but all the battered and dispirited remnants of the once proud tradition
of public service in Britain. What the Thatcherites intended was to replicate
the disciplines of private capitalism: what they achieved was to replicate
the waste and irrationality of the Soviet mode of production, even as it
crumbled before the restoration of capitalism across the Soviet bloc. Of
course, it can be argued that the realities of capitalist discipline itself
- manipulation, monopoly, exploitation and fat-cattery - are a very long
way from the myth of the proud and productive entrepreneur serving the public
interest by responding to consumer demand, but that story is relevant only
to those parts of the public sector that have actually been privatised.
For the rest of us, the institutions we
work in resemble more and more closely the Soviet form of enterprise: we
are in that weird and wonderful world described with such humour and understanding
by the late Alec Nove in The Soviet Economic System. Our activities
take place within a rigid hierarchy that runs up through the head of department
to the school, the faculty, the university as a whole, and thence to HEFCE,
the functional equivalent of Gosplan. Administration, while superficially
collegiate in places, is based on the principle of one-man management. Objectives
are set by a planning process which locks the levels of the hierarchy to
each other in vertical bargaining. As soon as targets are met, they are
raised, and so the lower levels strive mightily to avoid meeting the targets
too easily; they also seek to conceal their resources, so that when targets
are routinely raised, they can be met (just) without excessive effort. Heads
of department, under inexorable pressure from above, are obliged at the
cost of their personal goodwill and integrity to transmit the target-driven
management system downwards upon their subordinates, dividing and bullying
them into conformity. Above all, it is the targets as specified from
above that are met, not the targets that common sense or an intelligent
outsider might consider legitimate: thus, for example, our task is not to
generate a high quality of learning and teaching, but to satisfy the current
demands of the quality inspection system, which at present means producing
a Potemkin village, paint scarely dry on the walls, for the week of the
QAA inspection.
And we can multiply ad infinitum
the stupidities that result. The RAE demands publications, which are deemed
to be the only measurable indicator of research quality, so the journals
multiply, pointless because unread; speculative research that might possibly
not generate publications is not supported; and young colleagues quickly
learn to conform to the prejudices of their elders who, as editors and grant-givers,
hold the keys to the kingdom. Because RAE success yields a larger proportionate
return on effort than genuine improvements in teaching quality, promotion
continues to depend almost exclusively on the former: those whose talents
and disposition are more towards teaching than research are denied advancement,
or worse still given ‘academic-related’ posts of lower status and rewards.
Lower-level teaching that has little or no connexion with research is increasingly
done by a growing army of flexible contract workers, who thereby sustain
for some years their dwindling hopes of eventual inclusion in the system.
In other respects too the Soviet mode of production seems to be faithfully
reproduced. The principle of self-supply, under which departments prevent
if at all possible their students taking courses or research supervisors
from other departments; the production cycle in which output peaks in the
final months before the end of the plan period (the RAE deadline); the relentless
pressure exerted by departments upon ‘the centre’ to invest in new capacities
(posts).
And yet, the analogy with the Soviet mode
of production must not be taken too far. It captures the organizational
features of British HE, but tells us little about its content and its social
consequences. Just as the Soviet planning system needed to be set within
the wider sociopolitical context of the one-party state and the class system
peculiar to state socialism, so in order to complete our analysis of British
HE, we have to set the Soviet-style organization within the political and
economic context of contemporary British capitalism. For this purpose, it
turns out that the critique offered in Warwick University Ltd. still
applies in essence, although the means by which private interests dominate
the HE agenda have changed.
The direct subordination to corporate capitalism
of course exists on a far wider scale: in particular, the brand-name chairs
and the research contracts meeting the specific needs of business. But these
are no longer reinforced, as they were at Warwick in the 1960s, by direct
dominance of the strategic decision structures of the university. On the
contrary, experience has shown that captains of industry have no need to
intervene personally in university affairs, since the great and the good
who sit on the key committees of councils and senates have by now thoroughly
internalised the requirements of business. Reliance on donations and endowments
incline the overall direction of much of our activities in certain obvious
directions. It is taken for granted that we must produce students who are
above all ‘employable’, which means simply that it costs their future employers
as little as possible to train them on the job, because they have mostly
followed vocational study programmes (and those who have not are endowed
with ‘transferable skills’). The Research Councils, cowed into submission
in the early Thatcher years, ceaselessly press us to do ‘relevant’ research,
and to ensure that our results are ‘diffused across’ (given for free to)
the ‘wider’ (business) community.
The introduction of fees and the student
loan system ensure too that the student body is also tied to the needs of
the labour market. However much the government protests that loan repayment
is based on ability to pay, what this amounts to is an additional marginal
rate of income tax which pushes graduates to increase their earnings faster
(or, of course, to drop out of the wage-labour system altogether, a solution
that appeals only to a tiny few). While the students’ financial stake in
HE strengthens their legitimate expectation of getting a good education,
it also encourages conformism as the easiest road to a 2:1 and that well-paid
job. It is, of course, the sons and daughters of the wealthiest families
who alone can still afford themselves the luxury of education for education’s
sake.
British universities thus operate within
a bizarre combination of the Soviet and capitalist systems. The two elements
feed upon each other in ways that break down the collegiality and sense
of public purpose, which by now many of us feel have largely vanished. Nostalgia
for an imagined past does not, however, help us very much in dealing with
our present discontents. The old order, certainly in the ‘old’ universities,
was undeniably elitist, and although it was less visibly bound to capitalist
interests it was very closely integrated with an Establishment that provided
the political and administrative framework for the nation and its Empire.
There may have been less faking and fixing, less croneyism and corruption,
than can be unearthed at present, but the old boy network, the nod and the
wink, the lunches at the Carlton, determined many vital aspects of the development
of the sector, and traditional attitudes on matters of gender, race and
class were all-pervasive. In such respects there have undoubtedly been changes
for the better. It must also be admitted that, despite all the above, and
despite the oft-cited evidence of overwork, stress and demoralization, most
of us still garner a reasonable level of satisfaction from our work, notably
from students as I have already argued, but also from the irreducible fact
that our own interests and passions are such an intrinsic part of our work:
workers in HE cannot easily be made as deskilled, flexible and disposable
as their counterparts in so many occupations are today. What is more, beneath
what Marx called its ‘capitalist integument’, the production of knowledge
still has the potential to yield significant benefits for the world at large.
So from the corner into which we have boxed
ourselves, as we slowly but steadily move towards a world of differentiated
fees, performance-related pay, single-institution bargaining and the rest,
we harbour a faint but persistent intuition that it could all be done differently
and so much better. Where would we start? Surely from the basic principles
of democracy, participation, transparency and accountability. Our university
councils should be peopled with representatives of all sections of the community,
our senates opened with far more determination to participation by students
and non-academic staff, our ‘heads of resource centre’ required to be accountable
not exclusively to bureaucratic hierarchies but also to their colleagues
at large. The nature and purpose of financial and management systems need
to be the subject of continual public debate, both inside and outside HE.
The university should be seen above all as a public institution whose direction
of development is guided not by the immediate needs of business and the
labour market, but by wider social needs defined by public debate. The alternative
is not, in short, to disengage from society, but to change the structure
and content of that engagement.
Within the university we need to create
a culture of collegiality and trust. We know that financial resources are
bound to be limited, but we can manage them in ways that we can all understand
and learn to live with. Above all we need to overcome the divisions that
beset us, between subjects and faculties, between academics and non-academics,
staff and students. At present, we lurch from one financial crisis to the
next, manoeuvring by all possible means to ensure that the next axe to fall
will strike elsewhere, and if we succeed in this, we are far too busy to
concern ourselves with those who now find themselves ‘restructured’ or ‘redeployed’.
When the university launches yet another initiative, in response to carrots
from HEFCE or wherever, we reluctantly climb on board, trying to minimize
the cost and maximise the benefit to ourselves and our immediate colleagues.
In short, we have no collective strategy, indeed no strategy at all: we
react to events rather than seeking to shape them.
The response to this in some quarters will
be to say: but we have a strategy, we have a collective decision process,
we do engage proactively with the world outside, we have up-to-the-minute
human resource management, we have charters and agreements and guarantees.
To which I retort: why then is it that most of us in this ‘community’ see
these things as ‘yours’, not ‘ours’? Go back through the arguments I have
made, and tell me where I have gone wrong. Discount, by all means, the at
times overly bitter and sarcastic tone: it is not directed at you personally,
but at ‘the system’ of which we are all a part. For myself, before I shuffle
off grumpily into retirement, I still would like to feel that some of the
lessons of Warwick University Ltd. have at last been learned, and
that our present complaints are not similarly swept under the somewhat threadbare
carpets that line the corridors of British Universities plc.
Note: the author was a member of the group that
researched and wrote Warwick University Ltd., and has worked in British
higher education ever since….
An edited version of the above article is in Red Pepper,
March, 2001
A Deafening Silence
John Hewitt
Regular readers of the Update will remember my web
site, http://freespace.virgin.net/john.hewitt1/ {note that there is no www
in this name}.
"A Habit of Lies - How Scientists Cheat!" The site is about
cell biology. What it says, as loud as I know how to say it, is that the
field has got this subject wrong and it has it wrong because of lying among
some very senior scientists.
After a year, the number of hits on the site is approaching
4000, at an accelerating rate, and few people who have contacted me have
offered any dispute about the rationality of its arguments.
Now, if I am right when I say this field has got it wrong,
and I'm well qualified to know, the implication is that an awful lot of
public money has been spent chasing nonsense ideas. In the circumstances
you might think workers in the field would be willing to commit just of
few hours replying to obvious questions. But they don't, all I hear from
them is this deafening silence. There is no reply from the central figures.
It seems Cambridge University and its staff are so busy
"pursuing academic excellence," that they have no time to reply to critics.
Or perhaps they are just too "excellent" to notice that anyone disagrees
with them.
