POSTGRADUATE RESEARCH IN ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
Martin Harris deserves better than to have his keynote speech followed by these few comments of mine. This on two counts. First because when I take Martin's and his colleagues' Review of Postgraduate Education as my starting-point, I shall concentrate selectively on those recommendations in the Report which I find most worrying; and so I may not be giving due weight to a number of other issues about which the Report, in my view, has a lot of good sense to offer. Second, because I shall take the Review only as a starting-point. I shall also want to range a little wider into matters concerning the role of both postgraduate and other research in higher education at large, and into related general issues of funding in the current climate — matters beyond the Harris Report's immediate terms of reference, yet about which my comments nonetheless may seem to imply some criticism of the Report. With that apology in advance to Martin, it is only proper that I should say just a little, though it may be too little, at the outset about the considerable volume of good sense which I do find in the Report — pace some of its more voluble critics, and for that matter the criticisms I shall myself be making later.
To my own mind, the positive features of the Review include, not least, its firm acknowledgement of the intellectual and cultural role of postgraduate studies beyond considerations only of material utility, and the case it consequently makes in principle for a substantial continuing element of public funding towards it. We should welcome its simultaneous recognition that postgraduate work depends on a robust foundation of undergraduate work, so that further growth and/or innovation at postgraduate level should not be bought at the cost of even more erosion of the funding for first degree work. Equally welcome is the Report's concern, in the interests of clarity of purpose and information, to achieve an agreed standardisation of higher degree nomenclature and to make a comprehensive directory available on that basis — while remaining sensitive to the need to avoid vetting 'fatigue' in the process. Finally, there is the Report's concern, in principle, to reduce some of the risks of excessive concentration of research opportunities which might otherwise flow from one set of its recommendations, acknowledged to be controversial.
I shall come to that particular set of recommendations in a moment, for it is with them that my own main misgivings begin. I have, however, some misgivings even before I turn to matters of provision for research and to still wider matters of funding at large. In respect of typology and nomenclature of postgraduate work, for example, I doubt whether it is feasible to specify in percentage terms the contribution, hence a maximum allowable contribution, from undergraduate work to the total. At least, I doubt the feasibility of any such quantitative specification in application to a good deal of provision in the Arts and Social Sciences, where postgraduate character or quality arises more from the angles of approach adopted than from some determinable ratio of more advanced to less advanced material. But I hope that I have said enough to show that the misgivings on which I shall now concentrate come together, on my own part, with support for much of what the Review otherwise puts on offer.
My first major set of misgivings, as I have already hinted, concerns the recommendations to limit Funding Council support for postgraduate research primarily to departments (or the equivalent) with scores of 3 or higher in the Research Assessment Exercise. Now you may say that the first-instance proposal is in no way so drastic. For one thing, it applies only to the explicitly research-flagged flow of Council funding for postgraduate work, and not to the teaching-flagged flow from which postgraduate work would still benefit. Not for very long, however, as I read the Report; for in due course, so it seems, all Funding Council support for postgraduate research would require departmental compliance with the Code of Practice recommended for postgraduate research-specific provision. And here's the rub: the first item in that Code requires a demonstration of research quality, 'evidenced' — by way of first-listed example — precisely by an RAE rating of 3 or higher. True, the Report by way of next-listed example offers another means to demonstrate research quality: namely, through a 'significant record' of research grants or contracts; and this applies also to the first-instance recommendation confined just to research-flagged Funding Council money for postgraduate purposes. There is some leeway there. But not much leeway in the case of most Arts departments, which are far more starved of research grant opportunities than the usual character of their research activities justifies. And though grant and contract funding plays a larger role in Social Science research, it is still a fairly poor guide to quality of research in those fields too.
Do not misunderstand me. For myself, I find it very reasonable to tie support for postgraduate research both to compliance with a Code of Practice, in respect of arrangements for supervision, monitoring, assessment and so on, and to some sort of indication of surrounding circumstances which are conducive to postgraduate research. But to include in or add to the latter a test of the research quality of the milieu which, to all practical effect, will rely only on RAE verdicts or the verdicts of grant and contract donors (sets of verdicts which tend already to be intertwined) seems to exacerbate the risks of ossification inherent in the many trends observed in the past decade towards concentration of research in few places, and its exclusion elsewhere from interaction with teaching.
To its credit, the Harris Report pays attention to those risks. But its suggestions for inter-institutional collaboration in research supervision, while welcome, are hardly likely to do much towards stemming the tide of selective concentration. Nor, in my own view, does the Report pay more than lip-service to the point that this tide of selective research concentration — across the board, not just in the sector's postgraduate provision — has no proven justification so far as the Arts and Social Sciences are concerned. The Report notes — though sadly it does not actually underline — the dubious relevance of any notion of critical mass to research in these fields. And these fields after all comprise about half of all academic activity, by reference to either student or staff numbers. Yet the Report goes on to recommend the reinforcement of just such selective concentration as critical-mass thinking has already fostered. This is the first point on which I find the Review disappointing, because in practice it seems too readily to take current trends as inexorable, as beyond its remit to oppose or even to question save in peripheral terms.
The second point on which I find it disappointing concerns matters of funding more widely. I fully endorse the Harris case for not raiding undergraduate funds further in order to give more to postgraduate purposes. But I am afraid my hackles then rise when I read that any extra money for the latter will have to come from 'efficiency gains' or privately-borne fee increases. The scope for further so-called efficiency gains is surely more than exhausted. And to increase fees, whether paid personally by students or by potential employer-sponsors, I find impossible to reconcile with the rhetoric around higher education policy that still, curiously, purports to seek widened opportunities and fuller use of talent.
You may feel — and not least Martin may feel — that I am now straying well beyond the Harris Report's brief. Such matters of funding could not be properly pursued within its terms of reference, which had to take current trends more or less as set and at best make points about them for the Dearing Committee to consider. This is what the Report did when, for example, it called Dearing's attention, quite rightly, to the sad and anomalous lack of provision for the support of part-time postgraduate students. But the Report then left Dearing to chew on the points more or less as he and his great and good colleagues may see fit, without any more specific proposals to go by.
Now this, the last matter I want to turn to, is indeed one that takes us well beyond both the Harris Review and today's immediate topic of postgraduate development in the Arts and Social Sciences. It concerns the way in which matters crucial to the future of higher education at all levels are being 'left to Dearing' and, moreover, are being left to Dearing within a framework of assumptions that leave little practical room to question current policy wisdom. It would certainly be unfair to blame Martin and his colleagues for that. Their Report is only a limited example, which gives minor reinforcement to a much larger trend to separation of research from most teaching — a trend both academically counter-productive for the Arts and Social Sciences especially, and damaging to effective higher education opportunities for students in research-starved institutions and departments. Again, this Report only exemplifies the 'leave it to Dearing' mentality when it relies on efficiency gains and/or increased fees for further development of postgraduate provision; or when it holds back from elaborating its intrinsically sound note about the lack of support for postgraduate part-timers. If only out of exhaustion, all too many of us have been going much the same way, 'leaving it to Dearing'. SCASS has tried not to.
In the evidence we have submitted to Dearing, we have set out to resist the separation of research from teaching; to resist the imposition of critical-mass models derived from some natural sciences on academic work indiscriminately across the board; and above all to resist the spurious but now widely taken for granted assumption that desperately-needed extra funding for higher education, at all levels, can only come from the current or future pockets of students themselves or of such sponsors as some of them can find. But I fear that, unsustained by opposition to similar effect from Funding Councils, CVCP, SCOP and so on, SCASS's voice will prove a puny cry in the wilderness.
And on that note of disappointment over the reluctance of Martin and his colleagues to go beyond prevailing terms of reference, for all the fair sense they offered within those terms, I now end these comments. I may well have compressed some of the points I wanted to make too much, in order to make them plain, but if so I hope that the corresponding time for discussion now may tempt you to pick them up.