I’ve been in marking hell since the end of the period of
strike action which I’ve just emerged from. I can’t read anything without
correcting the grammar.
Anyway, during the strike, among all the amazing USS Strikes
Tweets I saw one from the Times Higher about research that had shown that
European universities spend more on getting European Research Council funding
than they receive in grants awarded. This led to the usual moaning about the
ridiculousness of the situation, and also the suggestion that grants should be
replaced by a research
basic income.
This got me thinking more about an idea I’ve had which I’ve
discussed with a few people now and I now have time to tell the entire world
about…
To start with, why do we have research grants? Basically
they emerged (as I understand it) as there was an awareness that some research
required levels of investment in people and infrastructure that were beyond the
capacity of all but the largest universities. Over time, in the UK, as the
other elements of state funding to universities have been reduced, they now
have to account for the vast amount of research funding for universities. There
are two problems (I see) with replacing grants with a fixed sum to each
researcher. Firstly, is the ability to fund large-scale research particularly
that which requires investment in non-staff capital resources. Secondly, it
adds an odd perverse incentive for universities to just keep appointing staff
even though they might struggle to cover the rest of their salary with teaching
income, as you know you’ll get some money for the post.
This leaves us with a distributional problem – the pot of
money to distribute for grants must always be limited. As a result complex
mechanisms of measuring the quality of proposals to target funding at those
which academic peers believe will be most important, have grown over time. At
the same time demand for research income has grown as more researchers want to
do more research; as the funding landscape for HEIs has changed; and as
pressure is put on staff through HEI’s expansive strategies to bid for more
funding. As a result, success rates for UK research council grants are now
hovering around the 10% mark.
There are obvious massive sunk costs here. I’ve heard quite
a number of people who have had “outstanding” scores across the board on
research proposals which have not been funded because there’s just not enough
money. The system also has massive in-built biases. At the most basic level,
grants beget grants – as this recent
paper shows. More problematic are the massive gender and race biases in who
gets funded – what Deb Verhoeven
hilariously calls the “Daversity”
problem.
So, what’s my big idea? A lottery. Or actually something a
bit like Premium Bonds.
How it would work is when a research-active member of staff
joined a UK university you would be given a unique identifier – your research
premium bond number. Every year there would be a draw for “winners”. If your
number was called out you would then get £1 million to spend on research over
the next few years. Within six months you would have to submit a short proposal
as to what you will spend the money on. You would have to report every year on
your progress and at the end of five years you would have to return any unused
funds.
You could spend the money as you can spend research council
grants now – employ staff, buy-out your own time, buy equipment, and share it
between institutions. So, if you didn’t win, but your colleague who you had
been working with on a research idea did win, you could work together using
their winnings.
The advantages of a lottery for me are:
You remove most of the sunk costs in unsuccessful bids.
There would be a shifting of resources to actually supporting good quality
research to be developed and go ahead, and good reporting so the outcomes can
be adequately captured and disseminated.
I think you would actually get a lot more innovative
research funded. I imagine there’s researchers in UK HEIs who never have the
time to even think about what they might do with £1 million of research money,
but if they got it would probably do something really quite exciting. You would
probably end up with a lovely mix of utter blue-skies, ivory-tower research and
some really applied stuff from all kinds of disciplines.
It would reduce the inherent biases in a system of
quality-assessed research applications. I don’t know what the research councils’
annual budget is – I’m guessing billions – divided by a million will mean
enough prizes that all researchers would be equally likely to win. Also,
institutions, and academic disciplines, would be equally likely to win, no
matter what their level of research infrastructure.
Given the above, I reckon everyone would win at least once
in their career and have a chance to do some amazing research. You might even
win twice. It would be up to the random number generator.
You might say that people might just waste the money. This
would be a small risk I reckon. I think the need to submit a research proposal and
annual updates would negate this. Some of the current sunk costs in developing and assessing applications would have to be shifted to post-award audit. I also think if you were not a very good
researcher you would also have trouble spending £1 million over five years and
you would end up giving a lot of it back. Also, I don’t think you can say that
our current system ensures that poor quality research doesn’t get funded – it just
has well written research proposals to support it.
I think there would have to be a residual pot for the
absolutely massive research projects (the big STEM infrastructure investments;
humanities investments in new collections; social science longitudinal surveys
etc.) and you would need a competitive funding system for that, but it would be
a small part of the overall budget.
So, that’s my big idea. UKRI – hit me up.
