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Universities: Research Funding

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, has raised some timely concerns in this debate, but it is only fair to acknowledge that these are partly the consequence of this country’s success in raising the proportion of young people participating in higher education. We are fortunate to be the only country outside the US to have several research universities near the top of the international league. As a scientist and university professor, I gladly acknowledge two of this Government’s achievements. The first is the introduction of top-up fees, despite the political capital that had to be expended by the key Ministers involved. Without these fees, the issues that we are addressing would be even more acute. The second achievement is the substantial and continuing real-terms growth in the budget for the research councils. However, other countries are not standing still. The standing of our universities depends on their remaining attractive to versatile talent from overseas as well as the UK. Students will expect higher quality in return for their higher fees. We need to ensure that our graduates meet the Bologna criteria. If we want to retain research excellence within a diverse university system that depends on public funds, some system like the RAE is a necessary evil as a discriminatory tool for distributing scarce resources that underpin research. It is then crucial to decide how steep the differentials should be. How much more should a really strong department receive than a fairly strong department? How must we diverge from the uniformity of universities on mainland Europe if we want to nurture peaks of international excellence? What should be the floor level of support for any university? These are difficult issues, but what motivates this debate is concern that the concentration must not go too far. There are obviously a few universities, each with many strong departments, which receive the lion’s share under any funding formula. However, despite the trend towards concentration, there is at leastone top-rated department in more than 50 of our universities. These strong departments were not all planned for. Many stem from exceptional individuals who were able in the 1960s and 1970s to build up strong groups. It is important for the country that these opportunities are not choked off. Recruitment into the less well funded universities would be handicapped if prospective faculty perceived that, however enterprising they were, they had no chance of emulating the careers of those who built up, for instance, space research in Leicester and archaeology in Bradford. Good researchers should be nurtured in all universities, but that is not enough. All our students should be taught by faculties whose expertise extends well beyond the standard curriculum and whose teaching is nourished by research, scholarship and reflective inquiry. That is what distinguishes a university from further education. This does not require that all universities should offer PhD programmes in all subjects. Some of the best undergraduate education in the United States is offered by liberal arts colleges that teach undergraduates only, but professors in those institutions none the less pursue individual research and scholarship. That is just one benign example of the benefits of diversity in American higher education. We need to foster such diversity here—diversity of funding and admission—with not just one league table but many, measuring excellence of different kinds. Surely a prerequisite of anything that merits the title of university is that the academic staff should be scholars and researchers and a resource of expertise to the nation. This requires that they have enough support and time to pursue projects outside their narrow teaching duties. If that does not come via QR allocations, we need some other route—and that is why we should welcome this debate.