The Rise of the Para-Academic

David Mills and a room of para-academics

The annual conference of the Association of Research Managers and Administrators took place in Brighton at the beginning of June. The event, and the association itself, has mushroomed in recent years. I’ve written before about this exponential growth. At the turn of the millennium ARMA’s forerunner, RAGnet, had 350 members; fifteen years later the Brighton conference, which was attended by only a fraction of ARMA's membership, had 750 delegates.

Part of me is proud of this, and part of me is shocked. Who are all these people? Seeing the delegate list was a moment of existential angst. Why do we exist? Who are we? What are we? The sociologist Laurie Taylor recently wrote in the Times Higher Education about this new ‘tribe’: "Managers and administrators who once had a mute background presence are now a noisy part of the daily life of every scholar. Their ranks continue to swell even though the UK is already one of the very few countries in the world where non-academic staff already outnumber academics."

The Sweeney Speaks: Citations, Timing, Impact

Following the publication of the response to the REF Consultation last week, David Sweeney, Demon Barber of Fleet Street and Director of Research at HEFCE, has been speaking frankly to the Times Higher. He told the magazine that HEFCE was 'edging out' of plans to use citations. He said that the costs to institutions of including such a measure could be high. He added that the council had also received an analysis suggesting that their use could disadvantage female staff.
'Equal opportunities is a problem that concerns us, so we are very nervous about the use of citations,' he explained. This did not mean that citation data were being ruled out once and for all, he said, but 'we will be discussing it closely with the panels before we give it any significant role'.

In addition he suggested that it was very likely that the REF assessment process would be delayed by a year. This would push the REF assessment to 2014 and REF-based funding to 2015.

Finally, he robustly defended the inclusion of impact in the face of criticism from the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee last month. 'We will test the methodology and if it doesn't prove adequate then we will reconsider, but we remain confident that the issues can be surmounted,' Mr Sweeney said.

The full article's available here.

Research and 'Strategic Priorities'

There was an interesting article in this week's Times Higher, which highlighted the potential (or, in the case of Queens University Belfast, real) conflict between the research of individual academics and the aspirations and positioning of managers.
At QUB, proposals for a new appraisal system state that - to quote THE - 'all academic research projects must be aligned with the stated goals of the department or school in which they are undertaken.'
It brought to mind two things. One was a visit from the University of Maastricht that I was involved in last week. At Maastrict they have gone one step further than this. Rather than merely having 'stated goals', the University has been restructured around clearly defined interdisciplinary groupings, and there are clear themes into which you need to fit.
The second thing that the article brought to mind was the increasing move by the Research Councils towards 'managed programmes' in priority areas, such as Living with Environmental Change.
So is this the shape of the brave new world of research? Perhaps it's the first step towards rethinking departmental boundaries, of understanding what a department is. After all, the departmental structure of most universities is now more than a century old, and perhaps it is time to think again about how disciplines are grouped. However, it would be a shame to take this too far and slavishly follow the prevailing political wind, overlooking or dropping unfashionable but important subject areas that 'don't fit.'

RCUK Serendipity Award: an Unexpected Impact

The Times Higher RCUK-sponsored Serendipity Award was awarded this year to Mark Moloney, of St Peter’s College, Oxford. While researching how penicillin is made, he discovered that a similar process could be used to encourage dye migration in plastics.
Congratulations to Dr Moloney, but I wonder if his serendipitous discovery has been stymied by not setting out beforehand how he will exploit it in his 'Impact Plan'?

'Sell, Baby, Sell'

Dan Stern, a PR man writing in the THE, suggests that academics need to fully engage with what the market wants. 'In order to succeed, you are going to have to learn to relate your research to the outside world. Put on your lipstick, do your hair and go out and sell, baby, sell. The innovation system demands that communication takes place throughout the life cycle of the project and beyond.'
The full article is available here. Sceptical comments follow.

'The only thing we have to fear is fear itself'

The Times Higher recently analysed Research Council success rates, and the news was not good. For the first time success rates have fallen to 23%, with the AHRC and ESRC bottom of the pile at 19%.
It’s easy to be dispirited by this. However, success rates only tell a partial story. If your research is good, your case compelling, and your application well framed it is much more likely that you will be funded.
This is shown by some big wins from the very Councils holding up the bottom of the success rate league:

• Jeremy Carrette (Secl—Religious Studies) has just been awarded £450,000 (TBC) from the AHRC for a project on Religious Non-Governmental Organizations and the United Nations in New York and Geneva;
• Caroline Rooney (English) and Anne Hammerstad (PolIR) got 2 of only 14 fellowships made by the ESRC in their ’Global Uncertainties’ Programme. Caroline’s award was £274k, and Anna’s was £162k. Programmes are notoriously hard to succeed in, so this is a great achievement.

And it’s not just good news at RCUK. Jim Mansell (Tizard) and Ann Netten (PSSRU) are part of a successful consortium that established a £15m School for Social Care Research (SSCR). Jim and Ann are due to receive £1.1m each from the NHS for their part in the SSCR.

So be brave: Research Services are ready to help with your applications to ensure that they stand every chance of bucking the success rates.