Alan Ryan: We should look abroad for research ideas

Drowned in the uproar over tuition fees and the establishment of OfToff, the most important parts of Charles Clarke's White Paper contained some very good ideas about research, especially the thought that it should not get in the way of teaching as it does now. The suggestion that most universities should concentrate on teaching and forget about the RAE has produced a lot of pious talk about the importance of a university's research effort in improving the experience of students. But piety is the enemy of common sense. So, let us draw a few distinctions. The most important is between research and scholarship. The idea of the scholar has rather dropped out of currency, but it needs to be revived for at least the following reasons.

High-end, expensive basic research in the natural sciences is a bad model for scholarship in the arts. Most, though, very far from all, of what goes on at the graduate and professional level in arts disciplines consists in interpretation and reinterpretation, looking at things from another angle, invoking the insights of another discipline, and so familiarly on.

Arguing about interpretation is what scholars do – among other things. What people doing that sort of thing need above all is time to keep up with their discipline, and the chance to talk to colleagues. In the US, summer seminars and institutes provide just that. In the UK, there is almost nothing of the sort.

Second, it is not obvious that even in the sciences everyone needs to feel they are operating at the frontiers of knowledge if they are not to forfeit their self-respect. Think of the many scientists who do not work in a lab doing costly cutting-edge research, but who have excellent students who will go on to do cutting-edge graduate work. In percentage terms, more students from the best American liberal arts colleges go on to do research than their peers in research universities. What students get out of teachers in such places is what they get less of as undergraduates in research universities, which is the undivided attention of really good scholars who treat them like the research students they aren't.

Third, it is perfectly foolish to imagine that every higher-education institution ought to hanker after spending the enormous sums of money that expensive science costs. It's true that the effect of league tables is to create a pecking order determined by research expenditure, and because that is heavily slanted towards the bio-medical sciences, people are prone to believe that spending a lot of money on drug-related research is a sign of intellectual excellence. But that's what is so stupid about league tables. What intellectual excellence is is highly debatable, but it plainly isn't measured by institutional turnover.

Indeed, one bright thought in the White Paper is that we move a lot of applied research out of universities and into specialist institutes as they do in India and are planning in China. To have six universities competing to be underfunded out-stations for the research efforts of pharmaceuticals companies is wasteful, and the lop-sidedness of the way a university spends money has bad effects on its administration. Managers mind more about big money then little money, so expensive bio-science distracts them from everything else. It'd meet the Government's wish to have universities and industry liaise better if we could park industrially minded researchers alongside their industrial peers and let them get on with it. As Mr Clarke has noticed, it'd help institutions, too, if people who do not wish to teach could avoid taking jobs that force them to pretend that they do.

The other thing the Government can take credit for is having understood finally just how expensive high-end research is, and how absurdly under-funded it has been. For the past 20 years, the research-intensive institutions have been trying to do world-class research while charging overheads at half the rate of their American peers. The result has been disastrous: universities have simply run their plant into the ground. If we go on, there'll be no front-rank British science left. It is to Mr Clarke's credit that he has seen the problem; the answer may be simple but even with all the rationalisation and modernisation you can imagine, it won't be cheap.

The writer is warden of New College Oxford and is on a year's sabbatical at Stanford University, California

education@independent.co.uk