I should like to emphasise at the outset that the dialogue that we on the Humanities Research Board are conducting with individual institutions and professional associations is very instrumental in formulating the Board's strategic attitudes. It has indeed already been influential in shaping the strategic document which was distributed to Deans this week and which I hope will be disseminated to individual members of Humanities departments along with a Newsletter which we intend will become a termly event and a primary means of communication with individual members of the Humanities community.
Concentrating now on the future, I shall identify a number of key points in the Board's aims and remit.
Firstly, I want to make the point that there is a colonisation of the vocabulary going on in the Government which is being reflected in the Research Councils, perforce, by the nature of their changed remit. The 'quality of life' which one sees frequently as a phrase in the White Paper, Realising our Potential, has actually come to have a very restricted meaning indeed, to the disadvantage of the Humanities. The 'quality of life', it seems to me, that is projected in the White Paper, concentrates rather too strongly on the material side and that by implication is linked with the 'exploitation' theme of the White Paper. The latter is a theme which I support, but which I think has a narrow focus and in the case of the Humanities needs to be made very much broader. Secondly (and I welcome the opportunity to say this shoulder to shoulder with Ron Amman, as the leader of our nearest neighbour in the Research Council structure), one of the functions of the Research Board, which it takes over from the previous administration, is to look to the provision of highly qualified manpower in the Humanities. You will be aware that we fund about 1,000 new studentships a year, more or less the same, or even slightly more than the ESRC. That to my mind is a primary contribution to society and reflects the value of the Humanities in a variety of ways which I will try to explain and comment on in a few moments.
A rather understated part of our remit, which I would like to bring much more into the foreground, is the need to promote public understanding of the value of the Humanities to individuals and to society at large. I believe it is because we have been somewhat backward in doing that for the last three or four generations that higher education generally has a lower public esteem than is merited. So a number of the measures that we have taken are directed at enhancing the public understanding of the nature of our contribution to society. I have mentioned one or two similarities between us and the other Research Councils but, of course, there are some major differences. An obvious one is that the proportion of exploitable research is different; but I must emphasise (although this might not be a very welcome message in some parts of the Humanities), that there are nevertheless areas where the Humanities have a definitely exploitable contribution to make. And in so far as we need to prove we give value for the use of public funds, that will not be an area that we in the Research Board neglect. Nevertheless, it is obviously true that, as the Chair said, the riches we produce lie not only in areas with obvious potential for exploitation but perhaps primarily in the more intangible aspects of the life of our community.
It used to be the case (I think up to about twenty years ago) that postgraduates working on doctoral degrees in the Humanities could expect to go forward to a career in academic life. That is emphatically no longer the case. Only a small minority can properly have that expectation; and I believe that the attitudes of people who train new postgraduates have not yet moved far enough towards the recognition that the typical employment of doctoral graduates in our disciplines is now not in academic life but elsewhere. I think we have here a major difference between ourselves and science-based subjects. PhD's in science are typically employed in their first post more for the content of their dissertation than for the process of education that they have gone through. Later on, of course, the latter becomes more and more relevant. But for most Humanities graduates it is immediately the quality of mind that they have acquired, and the ability to argue from carefully-weighted evidence in a persuasive, convincing but dispassionate manner that is the central reason they find jobs in the civil service, administration generally, banks, commerce and so on. We need then to pay more attention than we do at the moment to equipping people with transferable skills.
A quick word about money: and here I am directing at least half of my comment as much to my colleague as to the audience. From the Academy's grant-in-aid, currently at about £23 million per year, the Research Board gets about £16 million. The lion's share is devoted to postgraduate studentships (£13.7 million for roughly 1,000 new studentships provided every year. Whatever the opposite of the lion's share is, (the mouse's share) goes to the support of post-doctoral research: currently only just over £2 million. I would like to develop that point further. If we compare ourselves directly with the Social Sciences, we have approximately the same numbers of research-active staff - nearly 8,000 in the Humanities and about 7,500 in the Social Sciences, according to the 1992 Research Assessment Exercise. If we divide the £2 million that we have by the 8,000 research active staff, we come up with the princely sum of £260 per member. In the ESRC budget the equivalent amount is about £36.5 million, for roughly the same numbers of staff. Of course, the Government could say: Social Science research is a good deal more expensive, it involves much more collaborative research (which is perfectly true) and there are more efficient channels for feed-through to exploitable research in ESRC to justify the difference. Now I don't at all begrudge ESRC its funding. On the contrary, I think it is rather low, and perhaps Ron and I would find agreement there. But nevertheless there is a problem. And the root of it is that of all the sectors of academic research only the Humanities lack effectively a dual support system. The assumption is made by Government that the block grant through the Funding Councils is sufficient to buy the time for the individual scholar to spend on the traditional mode of Humanities research. A quite basic point, which I hope the community at large will argue fiercely, is that this constitutes a vicious straitjacket of historical underfunding that has not allowed Humanities to explore properly the potential benefits of collaborative research as another mode of research, alongside what will always be the predominant mode of the single scholar working more or less alone. We need, as a community, to develop a number of arguments which will eventually persuade Government that the Humanities can make productive use of a greater amount of funding. When I say a greater amount, I am not suggesting that I believe it would be appropriate for the Humanities to be funded at the same level as the Social Sciences. If we were to try and calibrate ourselves against the Social Sciences, I think a due proportion might be roughly 2-1 in their favour. Gillian Shepherd, as the new Secretary of State For Education, came to lunch at the Academy a couple of weeks ago and showed herself rather more open than her predecessor to the possibility of a ramped approach to increasing funding in order to get a more productive set of outputs from Humanities research. I would like to suggest that we should campaign for a stepping-up of the annual total funding for the HRB to about £30 million: roughly 1-2, as I say, against the ESRC over about a five-year period. That will only be done by developing quantified, specified, well-argued programmes which justify the expenditure of that increase in funding. I will say a little in a few moments about the programmes we have in view for the 1996/97 budget round which we are currently negotiating.
In the meantime, from now on, I think the Humanities constituency must be more vocal in every possible arena about the factors that feed the belief that the Humanities are of intrinsic value to society. The following are some of the arguments that have been put to me in different institutions and professional associations in conversations like the one I hope we are about to have. For example, I am told, although I have not been able to validate this so far, that the annual contribution of the copyright industries to Gross Domestic Product currently and for the last six or seven years has exceeded the contribution of the manufacturing industry in Britain. (Of course it depends what you call the copyright industries: it's also a sad commentary on manufacturing industry in Britain!) But quantifying the real contribution to the economy of the Humanities in their broadest interpretation is likely to be a secure foundation for all our more socially-orientated arguments. A further point must be the civilising influence of the study of the Humanities. Here I would link the Humanities and Social Sciences. Their essential function is to reflect on the nature of society; and from an education in these two areas, I think that graduates acquire a reflective habit of mind. I would have thought that it was of prime value to the development of an advanced society that the citizenry had a reflective cast of mind and was able to look at the pros and cons of political arguments advanced for particular programmes of development. In the absence of Social Sciences and Humanities education, it seems to me that one is less likely to achieve this reflective view a number of disadvantages then accrue, one for example being xenophobic treatment of immigrants, and all its consequences. Finally, if I might invoke Government's own vocabulary, I believe that the funding straitjacket that I have described simply does not allow us to realise our potential contribution. I would like to hear from you some strand of argumentation that would help support this contention. Market forces arguments are of course two-edged. It's true that more people want to do Humanities research than almost any other category of research; but there are some dangers in mounting those arguments directly.
The priorities of the Board, then, include getting more funding. We have many allies in that, especially in other parts of the Academy. I hope that Funding Councils and the Research Councils will also be prepared to support that general argument; but may I add that, amongst the Government and non-Government sources to which we should look for funding, I very much include the European Commission Programmes. I am fairly familiar with the technological side of the Commission Programmes. But looking across the Human Capital and Mobility Programme, to take one instance, I do not see British Humanities departments very much in evidence, certainly not in the proportion that one might expect. I would hope that the Newsletter that we distribute will become a vehicle for catalytic information and advice which will enable a greater participation by British Humanities departments in European Programmes. I would just mention to you also that the Maastricht Treaty enjoins member states to make sure that 1-3% of all money spent on technological programmes is spent on work with a cultural content. This should certainly give encouragement to anyone trying to be active in the Humanities area, or to promote research in a European arena.
As well as promoting collaborative research as an additional mode to be explored the Research Board is very anxious to promote the use of computing in the Humanities. Indeed, I think there is a lot of energy and movement there already. The development of an Arts and Humanities Data Service which I hope that the JISC part of the Funding Councils is going to support will be a transforming instrument for research in very many areas of the Humanities. I hope that by the year 2000 every Humanities scholar will have a high-resolution workstation on their desk, linked by a high speed, high capacity Super-Janet network accessing the 2,000 or so databases available in the Humanities and able to look at images of manuscripts, artifacts in the Fine Art and Archaeology areas, and so forth. If that's to become true, individual scholars have to become politically active in their own institutions, become familiar with the way that the equipment grant works, become active in negotiations on the development of the formula to distribute that money within their institutions, and generally become computer-literate to the point where they can mount reasoned arguments in the negotiations with the science-based subjects. The Board cannot fund infrastructure, but I hope it will be able to fund projects which contribute to that Arts and Humanities data service in the way of constructing and disseminating databases of appropriate sorts.
Just a very quick word about some basic structuring within the Board. There are two major Committees of the Research Board: postgraduate and research. We have inherited the structure of the postgraduate side, we are anxious not to disturb that in the immediate future in terms of its subject-specific panels; but we will perhaps look at that structure in about two years time to see whether it represents the most appropriate division of subjects. I want to confine my comments here mostly to the research area since we are talking today about the future of research. We engaged in a great deal of consultation about how to divide up the subject universe, so to speak, into panels for the Research Committee of which Dr Butler is the Chair. One message that I heard frequently as I went round the different institutions and associations was that interdisciplinary work was not getting its fair share of funding. It was falling into the gaps between the structures: between the Academy and ESRC, and between the different subject interests that operated in the Academy's funding administration. We have taken particular care to protect the interest of multi-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary subjects by a matrix arrangement. In Panels 2-5, we have divided up areas into what we assume to be cognate groups, so that the members of the Panels can illuminate each others' discussion on a professional basis. Panel 1 is drawn as a matrix, in so far as its membership is made up of selected individuals from Panels 2-5. We will have a procedure whereby any one makes a research application will have to tick subjects on a subject list that we are currently developing by consultation. If they tick two or more subjects their application will automatically be navigated not only to the two or more constituent Panels for mono-disciplinary subjects but also to the multi-disciplinary Panel. That means that every single application of an interdisciplinary nature will be looked at by perhaps up to four evaluators within the Board's own structure. That may be over-egging the cake a bit on the evaluation side, but perhaps it is a price worth paying to make sure that interdisciplinary work is properly evaluated.
We have obviously had to reflect rather hard on how the Board will operate, since from April we have more or less had to develop that process. We have given a lot of time on the Board to thinking about principles and I would like just to point to four of them. Firstly, we are determined to be transparent. We want people who benefit from the funding to be completely clear about the mechanisms for decision-taking and the criteria for evaluating individual applications, and we will rely heavily on a peer review process. We can't be fully representative because we are appointed, not elected: the Board is appointed by the Council of the Academy after consultation. We are accountable to the Council of the Academy and through them to the Department for Education and to Parliament. But I would also like to think that we are accountable to the Humanities constituency itself. We will always be driven by competitive criteria of quality, but a policy which is solely responsive can lead to distortions of funding in different subject areas. I think that we are already seeing that in the postgraduate area. For example, at the moment there are very many applications for 20th-century literature, but almost no applications for 18th century English literature, nor for ethics in the Philosophy area. Given the large distortion of the academic profession that will happen when a disproportionately large number of members retire in 5-10 years time, we may be left with a rather dangerous situation where we can't continue to cover what we commonly regard as I think a canonical syllabus. The Board is likely to undertake a degree of strategic intervention in certain funding areas, after consulting the community about what those areas should be: minority subjects; neglected subjects; new subjects, perhaps, to some small extent. This would only involve a minority of our funding - perhaps a maximum 10%, for instance of studentship funding. We will seek to maintain a balance between responsiveness and various factors of proportionality.
Finally, we are currently engaged in constructing our bid for the 1996/97 financial year. Amongst the different schemes that we are thinking of including, but which are still being debated by the Board for finalisation in January, are the following. In the studentship area, we are likely to follow the model of the ESRC and begin to fund part-time studentships as well as full-time studentships. We are likely also to want to explore the theme of partnership with various other sources of funding, such as institutional funding. We would like to think that institutions might bid for studentships in a number of strategically important areas. Once again, the identification of those strategic areas would be the subject of consultation. An institution might bid for a set of studentships to be linked to a research centre or a particular research project for example. Lastly, in the post-doctoral support, we would like to promote the possibility of collaborative research, either interdisciplinary or specialist collaboration. We hope to help the Humanities explore the benefits of a different mode of research by offering institutional fellowships for which institutions would bid competitively. One of the ideas behind that is that where a particular proposal for an interdisciplinary research centre is unable to rise to the top of the priority list within an individual institution, but where in the interests of the Humanities it is important that it should be funded, we could supply pump-priming. We might fund, let's say, three fellowships round about the £20,000 salary level to an institution, in the hope that by the end of the three-year period the inter-disciplinary or collaborative centre would have proved its academic viability and its worth. The institutions could then be expected to take over the running costs. We would have had an accelerator effect in launching new types of subject research, new types of inter-disciplinary research, and so forth.
I hope I have said something to give you the flavour of the Board's thinking, its determination to be interactive with the constituency, and the efforts it is making to promote the value, viability and amount of research that goes on in the Humanities.