Generating Priorities

Deep in the heart of Death Star House, RCUK
workers tirelessly adjust the settings for the Priority Generator

Sometimes, calls for thematic programmes make complete sense. Sometimes they sort of make sense, once you dig a little deeper. Sometimes they make no sense at all.

It was the last category that prompted me to develop the Research Council Priority Generator for my blog. It was a tongue-in-cheek look at how the funders seem to jam together apparently random and often conflicting ideas to create new themes. The generator would give you Nanotechnology and Remembrance, for instance, or Progress towards Language, Radicalisation beyond Space and Expressionism in Transport.

None of these seemed a million miles from the real thing, such as Science in Culture, Lifelong Health and Wellbeing, Nanoscience through Engineering, Care for the Future and Living with Environmental Change. Indeed, the random generation of priorities gave us themes that were all too plausible, such as Progress and Islam, Technology of Wellbeing and Curating the Future.

Beware the Poets

I'm worried about those clever people at Polaris House. Our great and glorious research leaders, those academic taste makers who hold UK funded research in the palms of their hands, seem to be entering the world of self parody.

A couple of weeks ago I devised the Research Council Priority Generator. This randomly mashed together abstract nouns to create strategic priorities that sounded edgy and thoughtful, but were ultimately empty and meaningless.

Whilst it highlighted how randomness could produce apparent profundity, I thought it was too exaggerated and  stupid to really bear any resemblance to reality. How wrong I was. Within hours of launching the Generator, the AHRC had produced its latest 'emerging theme': 'Care for the Future: Thinking Forward through the Past'.

Beautiful. I couldn't have invented a better nonsense programme myself. But, oh, it got better. The AHRC weaved together a fine piece of poetic prose to explain the rationale of the theme: it was, they gushed, 'an opportunity for researchers...to generate new novel understandings of the relationship between the past and the future, and the challenges and opportunities of the present through a temporally inflected lens'.

'New novel'? Really? 'A temporally inflected lens'? If I had a temporally inflected lens I'd be sure to take it down to Jessops to have it looked at.

But the muse is upon them, and they continue in a stream of consciousness that would make Molly Bloom blush:

'...these include questions around what is meaningful about continuity and change, and the role that narratives, experiences, visualisations, performances and stories have to play in these processes. Issues around understanding modes of cultural learning and intergenerational equity, as well as questions relating to authority, ownership and justice within and across time, may help inform understanding of current and future global challenges faced by society today. Technological development, alternative lifestyle movements, and the nature of ideological and philosophical, ethical and creative, historicised and imagined perspectives jostle for attention and require a diversity of approaches and disciplinary engagements for the theme to reach its full potential.'

It's like a postmodern disciplinary shopping list, complete with an unreliable narrator. It's all there, but it's up the reader to try and make sense of it.

However, the AHRC is not alone in bowing to the creative urge. Following swiftly on this is EPSRC's announcement that it will be running a 'creativity greenhouse'. They've already had us playing in 'sandpits', and the TSB is encouraging us to develop 'catapaults'. What analogy, metaphor or simile will they reach for next? The ESRC Trouser Press? The NERC Hostess Trolley? The BBSRC Kenwood Mixer? Now there's an idea for a new generator...

But should we welcome all this creativity? After all, other great leaders have succumbed to the inner poet. Barack Obama has written poetry, as has Jimmy Carter. But then, apparently, so has Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Ivan the Terrible and Goebbels.

Hmm. On second thoughts perhaps the Research Councils should stick to their day jobs before they take UK research any further into this weird parallel universe.

Research Council Priority Generator

Ever wondered how the RCUK chiefs come up with the strategic priorities? Do they sometimes seem - well - slightly random?

Well Fundermentals has managed to get its hands on the software programme that they use to devise their clever, cross-cutting, interdisciplinary programmes. For the first time we, the people, can click RCUK's 'button of power' and create whole new areas of research endeavour.

Go to the 'Research Councils Priority Generator' to have a go.

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.'