Many Americans are bewildered by the mixed reception that Baroness Thatcher's death has received in the United Kingdom. Having lived in England for a year or so during her time as Prime Minister, Eli will refrain from commenting on her political career, but there was something he wrote over at the Curry Shack that is worth repeating. Curry posted remarks from Michael Kelly of the Oxburgh panel
During Mrs Thatcher’s period as Prime Minister, UK science was
squeezed hard, and I would argue came out of it better, leaner and
fitter. Like dieting, it is not a healthy permanent state, but its
absence is definitely unhealthy. In times of plenty, one ‘lets a
thousand flowers bloom’ and in tough times, one redoubles the effort to
exploit the stock of recently acquired new knowledge, rather than
generate more new knowledge and leave it unexploited. This makes sound
economic sense. It is the point I made in a lecture (sponsored by Intel)
to the Irish Academy of Engineering in Dublin in December 2011.
Michael Kelly is completely wrong about
what Thatcher and the conservative government did to research at British
universities but the story is instructive.
The first move was to arbitrarily declare all of the polytechnics
(locally focused teaching institutions) universities in 1992. This
greatly increased the pool of those who could compete for support. Of
course, the amount of support stayed the same or went down and the polys
now unis didn’t get anything near the level of support needed to move
into the research university ranks.
The “response” was to institute departmental rankings, the effect of
which was to kill research at many of the older (red bricks)
universities as with some exceptions they did not come top of the pile. Almost no departments in the former polytechnics were
able to compete and thus received little research funding, while
departments at the “best” places, Oxbridge and such, got more of the
pie.
A number of very good research groups were left high and dry by this
especially since assessment was done by department and not research
group. Eli pointed out that the entire farce was a poisoned pawn at the
time to friends at both the polys and unis. Eli is Cassandra.
Posts
The first move was to arbitrarily declare all of the polytechnics (locally focused teaching institutions) universities in 1992. This greatly increased the pool of those who could compete for support. Of course, the amount of support stayed the same or went down and the polys now unis didn’t get anything near the level of support needed to move into the research university ranks.
The “response” was to institute departmental rankings, the effect of which was to kill research at many of the older (red bricks) universities as with some exceptions they did not come top of the pile. Almost no departments in the former polytechnics were able to compete and thus received little research funding, while departments at the “best” places, Oxbridge and such, got more of the pie.
A number of very good research groups were left high and dry by this especially since assessment was done by department and not research group. Eli pointed out that the entire farce was a poisoned pawn at the time to friends at both the polys and unis. Eli is Cassandra.