Pistols At Dawn?
Competition and Collaboration in Humanities Research in Ireland
Conor O'Caroll of the IUA pictured with Keith Sidwell and John Hughes, President of NUI Maynooth
Michael Shattock, author of the now famous OECD report on the Irish HE system, gave an interesting follow-up talk to the CHIU Conference in Cork two years ago. What leapt out from his lucid argument were three central points (1) the need to achieve a more competitive status for universities both internally and externally; (2) the need for a national strategy for higher education; (3) the belief that "collegiality is the most effective management style in universities". The OECD report had nothing to say about Humanities and Social Sciences - and this was put down by the author in questions to the fact that no one from those areas had thought to submit a report to the OECD group. But in his paper Shattock stated clearly "I do not want to be thought to be arguing that such a strategy should be dominated by state identified economic objectives, [or] that it should exclude the humanities and social sciences.". Hence, I thought it might be opportune to pick apart some of the implications of a system of research that is envisaged as simultaneously competitive, collegial and national. I'm going to work in a pretty classical manner here, as I hope you might expect, and work through the pars destructiva before making some constructive suggestions for a way forward in the second half of my address.
First of all, let's look at competition. Shattock says that from a research perspective the objective must be "for the universities to be more competitive and to concentrate their resources in areas/departments of promise". This implies the need to put the universities "in an internally much more competitive footing and redeploy or shake-out under-performing areas of academic activity". I confess, I am not quite clear what "competitive" really means. With whom are they competing? With themselves? With other Irish Universities? With other universities world-wide? However, the second part of his quote makes it clear that this is a model which invites the university to identify the so-called "research inactive" (more about how to do this in a moment) and, presumably, to relocate the resources thus freed up to more active parts of the system. By doing this, the theory goes, you can build up research excellence - though not everywhere, presumably - and thus be in a position to be more "competitive" (presumably in the market for international students). You might be attracted by this model for all I know. However, it has some egregious weaknesses. So we should think very carefully whether in any respect it suits a small system like ours, considering the expense and other difficulties it will involve. We also need to take care that we don't just jump onto a band-wagon that may not serve our best interests. We have to see, at base, whether such a system really can deliver what it claims at all.
Not the least of its weaknesses is that it is in a certain amount of tension with the notion of "collegiality", Shattock's guiding principle in University management. As we all know, what in fact happens when you apply the model stringently in internal reviews of universities is (a) that it does not happen in a collegial manner, since turkeys tend not to vote for Christmas (b) that the decisions about research activity/inactivity are therefore delegated to departmental managers or central research offices, who apply certain criteria (not usually agreed beforehand with the turkeys) to determine research inactive staff (c) this can lead to closure of departments or sometimes to amalgamation of departments elsewhere in the sector. In my mind here, of course, is the specific example of Queen's University Belfast, which went down this road. I won't bother you with the gory details, which I know only too well, having been an external examiner there during this unhappy period. Suffice it to say that the University lost several Humanities Departments in the shake-up. Moreover, at least one individual I know of on the "research-inactive" list published an important monograph with one of the world's leading academic presses very shortly after being so classified. Injustices are bound to occur, then. In our Universities too there have been signs that this approach is being tried out, this time with the application of metrics. A recent example reported to me gave the following litany of sins against "collegiality" The criteria which had been used to assess the Humanities were never discussed with the group most affected. The database to which the criteria were applied was in many cases unadapted to Humanities research and in some basically unsuited to it (and was not quality-controlled in any meaningful way). The information about individuals was woefully out of date (so that retired and even deceased members of staff were categorised). The window used was only three years and did not make any allowance for the recently appointed. The result was, I am told, a travesty of the situation on the ground. These two examples underline the serious difficulties that result from the imposition of any system of review of research activity/inactivity that is not based on discussion, agreement about criteria and the proper processing of all necessary information.
You may say, well we can be a whole lot more sensitive than that. But I think the issue is much more fundamental. I wonder whether there is any really fair way to judge whether someone is or is not research inactive or any way that would yield the sorts of results that might be useful for targeting funding in the manner envisaged by Shattock. In my field, for example, it takes a long time to produce work at least partly because the scholarship we have to get on top of goes back so far (no such thing as scientific proof or demonstrability) partly because it requires us to read work in at least five different modern European languages (as well as at least two ancient ones), and partly because major projects anyway take much longer than the paltry three years that some review systems seek to impose. I've just finished a book that I began 12 years ago. One of my colleagues pointed out that had Einstein been assessed between the publication of his two major works, the special theory of relativity in 1905 and the general theory in 1915, he might very well have been decreed research inactive! And had he been bullied into production by a system such as Shattock envisages imposing, he might well have been distracted from the task of producing the general theory.
Very problematic indeed is also the fact that while such review systems can improve and promote productivity, they cannot necessarily have any effect on quality. This is, in any case, appraised for individual items by peer review before publication. Systems involving general appraisal of that aspect are also heavily dependent on peer review, which is expensive and occupies researchers who might be better occupied on their own research. Productivity is excellent for factories - a widget turned out in more cost-effective ways and greater quantities can mean more profit. But academic papers are all individual products - more akin to works of creative art than to mass-manufactured items. And as to their quality. A widget has specified standards by which it can be judged. But an article about Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus or a book about the studies of Scaliger are unique and can be judged only by other students of Sophocles or Scaliger- though still only in relative terms, because the judges themselves are of necessity part of the world from which these products come and may be operating with different assumptions or ideas about what the field really is or which methods are most effective. Sometimes the very idea you need is lurking in an unnoticed paper fifty years old. This happens even in science. A researcher in genetics told me a few years ago that in the study of her particular gene the orthodoxy stayed the same for a very long time - nearly fifty years - yet was not yielding the results that would have been expected. However, a breakthrough was finally made when a paper written in around 1930, which had suggested an entirely different approach, had been brought out and dusted off. Here the general contemporary judgement had ignored work which turned out to be crucial, and no doubt the competitive grants system of the day will have reflected this judgement. In my own field, Higgins' book on Xenophon was ignored by his peers and he subsequently left the profession. Twenty years later he was invited to a conference of Xenophon experts and feted as the "onlie begetter" of modern Xenophontic studies. So current peer review can only tell you whether the work is of acceptable scholarly standard to those who read it now, not whether it really is worth anything sub specie aeternitatis.
Whatever is being said in the UK about the fundamental similarities between STEM and Humanities, STEM research tends to be done in groups, with the lead researcher responsible for design and the final product, but not for standing in the lab and collecting the data or running the experiment. Humanities research is almost always conducted alone, with all the hours it takes to do both reading and writing having to be expended by one individual. This can make a Humanities researcher look more unproductive, especially in the periods between major publications.
Metrics often include citation indices, now being proposed for Humanities. It is true that the sciences have embraced these as a good criterion of acceptability of the ideas in published work. This does not get round the problem I mentioned a moment ago of the rejection of a correct view: it rather suggests that peer review may have a conservative tendency, which is not necessarily a good thing in the world of ideas - nor of the economy. But say for a moment that this is not a serious problem. Still, the citation is used in scientific (and social scientific) writing as a piece of shorthand which helps the author evade much more lengthy discussion and to get to the nub of what is new in the findings of the current paper. In the Humanities, truth is not so easily isolated and tested. Human issues tend not to be cut and dried. Discussion, argument, disagreement are common currency in this world. The consequence is that an individual's work is as often cited to show fundamental disagreement as to move the argument on more swiftly. A colleague remarked to me a propos a few years ago that in a 1992 article specifically written to respond to an earlier piece of his he would have scored very highly on a citation index because I was replying to his argument one by one - judging them all, of course, to be mistaken! Though there was not, and probably never will be, general agreement as to which of us was actually correct (if either). And if an idea is not accepted right away - but turns out many years later to be the one which generates new research, current citation indices will give the wrong picture.
Now the idea of such review is ultimately based on the perfectly reasonable notion of accountability to the public for the taxpayers' money. But the need for a review mechanism rests on another assumption which can be challenged, viz that there are not sufficient mechanisms already in place. Perpend: it is nigh on impossible to get a post in an Irish University without a PhD already in the bag (or you'll have to be on the brink of getting it, at any rate). Thus, since all PhDs are vetted externally, there's a review of research capability at the entry point. Promotion to all higher grades in our Universities is also dependent in part upon research productivity. Here, then, is a second review stage. Publication itself is also subject to peer review. And now we have added Performance Management, where individual reviews of academics are bound to deal with the issue of research activity, one hopes in a positive, rather than a negative way. Moreover, though systems for assessing research output and quality are widespread in the European system (and we are obviously looking across at the UK in what we are attempting to do), they are not used in North America, either in Canada (with whom we have just signed, I see, a big R&D agreement) or in the free-market of all free-markets, the USA. Yet it is rare to find an academic in any discipline there who is not fully aware of the research profiles in his/her area of expertise of other universities and their relative strengths. It may be that Shattock is correct in saying that we do not make obtaining tenure tough enough (contrast North America). And we might want to go down this route at least a little way to ensure that PhD promise turns relatively soon into actual production. But if so - and this point needs to be taken as a more general critique of our current system - we are going to have to make it a good deal easier for young scholars to have the time needed to turn their work into published material.
Besides the potentially deleterious and uncollegial nature of such systems, it seems to me that in our case therefore very likely to undermine a basic requirement and objective of our universities, the provision of undergraduate education. Shattock rightly observes that our system has grown "like Topsy", with no overarching plan and without any strategic objective. Nonetheless, in many respects it does perform a set of functions which serve the national interest and within that regional interests also extremely well. It's a well known fact that the vast majority of our undergraduate students will opt to attend a local university for undergraduate studies. This is quite unlike the general pattern in England. This pattern of regional access - one that is unlikely to change seriously in the near future - sustains the need to provide a more or less similar range of disciplines in each of the universities. What this means, I submit, is that we cannot undermine the teaching mission of our universities to serve the research agenda. If we want to improve our research-standing, then we have to do it within the constraints of a system that already has an excellent logic of its own and does good service - as Sean Barrett argued the other day in the Irish Times - service whose quality can be judged by the acceptability of its degrees in other jurisdictions and by the continual monitoring of standards by examiners external to the system.
And then there is the increasing difficulty, in the rush to produce, that a very basic requirement of society in its academics will not be served. I quote a fragment of Samuel Johnson from John Moir's Hospitality of 1793:
...the academick is the depository of the public faith, it is required of him to be always able to prove what he asserts, to give an account of his hope, and to display his opinion with such evidence as every species of argument admits.
Our colleges may be considered as the citadel of truth, where he is to stand on his guard as a sentinel, to watch and discover the approach of falsehood, and from which he is to march out into the field of controversy, and bid defiance to the teachers of corruption. For such service he can be fitted only by laborious study, and study therefore is the business of his life; the business which he cannot neglect without breaking a virtual contract with the community. Ignorance in other men may be censured as idleness, in an academick it must be abhorred as treachery.
My colleagues often say to me these days that there seems to be no "public faith" any more. That the introduction of metrics suggests the underlying assumption rather that academics will not do what they are contracted to do - and what it is their vocation to do - unless they are watched and judged at all times. For them "Big Brother" is returning to its Orwellian roots.
Let me be clear. My critique is not aimed at the notion that the Humanities do not have a role in the economic life of the nation. After all, we train people - or we aim to train people - in the higher level intellectual skills, such as assessment of complex debates and criticism of source material, which are vital to every major organisation, be it a business, an educational institution or a government department. Nor am I knocking business. We are all dependent upon a strong economy and business is at the heart of that. But we will be making a fundamental error - one which has already been perpetrated in Thatcherian and post-Thatcherian Britain - if we thoughtlessly apply a market-oriented model to the world of the Academy. The competition which apparently makes business thrive is something which has no real analogue in our world. Scholars do not set out to grab a market share. They operate mostly by spotting gaps where there is no competition and they often ask fellow workers in other universities or sytems to ensure that a PhD topic they have directed their students towards is one which is viable and not being done by someone else. In any case, there are many fields in which the state only has one expert. Where is the competition there? It is collaboration that ensures the working of the Academy, both within our system and world-wide. If it were not so, academics would never write book reviews (which never count in research assessment exercises, though they are always instructive and often contain new insights). They would never read papers at international conferences. They would never write references for the promotion of colleagues in other universities in other systems. They would never be external examiners. They would never read a colleague's work before publication. They would never - and here's the rub - be peer reviewers in a review system.
Nor do I want it to be thought that I don't believe we should continue competitive funding initiatives such as PRTLI and the IRCHSS fellowships and project schemes. The difference between these schemes and the review model is that one provides an inducement to research, while the other is punitive if the subject appears to fall short of the mark and may be unjust. The review system, more or less in whatever form it is envisaged, has an aura of negativity about it. Psychologists, teachers and management experts will all tell you that if you want to get the best out of people it is better to encourage than to discourage. I see absolutely nothing encouraging about an RAE either within our universities or between them. And I urge those who are guiding research policy to turn back on this issue before it is too late. I hear little from my British colleagues except a litany of complaint, bitter feelings and pessimism. We have not yet reached that point. Trust the safeguards we have in place and use incentive schemes to increase productivity.
This outburst I hope will have cleared the air. As an exile from Thatcherite intervention in the UK Universities, I speak with passion. My remarks will make it clear that I really don't think we need to go down the Shattock route. That is not to say that we don't have some strategic thinking to do and some major investments to make to put our system into a better competitive situation in areas where competition is an issue - that is in recruiting overseas students and improving the research output from our system. I want to address two areas in which only a collaborative and national approach will secure the future of the fourth level system we are trying to enhance. And I am speaking here, of course, about the Humanities. The first is PhD training. The second is Humanities resources. They are integrally linked of course, and in both areas there is already good news in moves already afoot within the system to enhance both.
For reasons I've already adumbrated, in a small state like ours the Universities have a primary mission to teach undergraduates in their regions. Almost nowhere, then, within the system can the resources be found to support every specialism within the disciplines that are taught. Even the largest Classics Department in the state at UCD does not have an expert in the central fields of Ancient Comedy, Sparta or the Greek Novel. UCC does, but it does not have experts in, for example ancient philosophy or economic history, such as can be found at UCD. Obviously, there is no overarching strategy for picking which experts go where - nor could there be. Nonetheless, we can use the research training model developed by the NIRSA, established under PRTLI at NUI Maynooth. Under this scheme, Geography PhD students in other state partner institutions attend regular training-sessions at which they receive lectures and tutorials from experts in various aspects of the discipline who may not teach in their home institution. This approach, if introduced more generally, could, I think, have a really significant impact on the attractiveness and effectiveness of PhD studies in the Humanities. For example, in Classics we have increasingly been faced with the problem that PhD students have not acquired a knowledge of Latin or Greek in their school or undergraduate studies. We all struggle independently with this problem, thus multiplying work across the sector. A unified approach here would certainly be more efficient than what we currently do and would also have the effect of bringing more closely together the relatively small PhD cohort in Classics in Ireland. The same approach could be used for training in such areas as epigraphy, palaeography, archaeology and papyrology. It would need considerable investment, of course, to support student and staff mobility among other things. But we have the advantage of being a relatively small geographical area: imagine trying to do something like this in Canada, for example, and you can see that. And our transport infrastrucure is improving all the time. Two things stand in the way. One is the natural desire of Universities and Departments for independence and of individual Universities to make it into the top fifty as an institution. This type of competition between state institutions is not entirely on all fours with the rhetoric of collaboration. We need to think about this more. The second thing is my next theme, resources.
No one who has spent a career, as I have, working in the Irish system in a Humanities discipline will tell you a different story. It is more or less impossible to complete any piece of work without a visit - sometimes multiple visits - to libraries in the UK. And this is not for primary material (e.g. archives held in only one location), but for secondary material to which reference must be made in any properly scholarly piece. The reasons why we are still not totally independent in terms of library resources can easily be rehearsed: (1) lack of money to invest in books at times of economic slump; (2) the need to service a significant number of academic libraries within a small state; (3) the necessary overlap in servicing undergraduate and graduate needs at each location; (4) the different specialisms evidenced in various locations. As to reason (1), if, as Marc Caball and Patrick O'Donovan have argued in a recent paper to IRCHSS , the state will be well served and also economically rewarded by a significant investment now into Humanities research, then the Celtic Tiger has given the Government the wherewithal to remedy the matter. Under (2) and (3), of course, given that my argument about the need for undergraduate provision to remain as it is, this situation will not change either. Nor is (4) likely to change, and, as I have already mentioned, this can be made to serve us to advantage. On the other hand, the state's recent intervention into the provision of electronic research resources has been a great boon to the Humanities as well as the Sciences. How can we improve the situation? It is necessary before I answer that to note the method by which most book acquisition is done in the state universities. This applies certainly to the two NUI colleges where I have taught. Each department is given a budget for buying books. This is then (usually) distributed on a pro rata basis between staff. The system has two major weaknesses. One is that some staff don't fill their orders. The second is that because departments don't have the full set of sub-disciplines, there will be major gaps in the library''s provision. This situation is made worse when one area of expertise is lost with a retirement and a new one enters. What we need is a system somehow to ensure that in all the disciplinary and inter-disciplinary areas we cover in the state and expect to attract PhD students from abroad to study, we have somewhere in the state (perhaps on the island?) a copy of everything. One way to do this would be to establish a national Humanities research library. This might be very expensive, though it is highly desirable. A different option would be to establish a national humanities library service, which would monitor all disciplinary areas bibliographically and in terms of what had been ordered by individual institutions. A budget would be available to buy items not acquired elsewhere in the system. Moreover, this service would also be responsible for establishing an Irish inter-library loan service. As you will know, at present we use BL almost exclusively, and I have even had books come from Boston Spa when I know for a fact that there's a copy in Maynooth or TCD. My purpose is not to try to solve this problem here in detail. But it needs to be said very clearly that PhD students will not come here to study unless they can see some special advantage in doing so. The library resource issue is a key one for the Humanities if we hope to "compete" in this area. And ensuring such provision will make us truly independent for the first time.
One final set of points, this time regarding funding and job opportunities. We have now a better situation than ever in the past, where there are scholarships for PhD and post-doctoral study. But there are still not nearly enough to fulfil the OECD's stated goals. The other thing we need to address is that of opportunities to enter an academic career. The usual reason why a student enters a PhD programme in Humanities is as a qualification for a university teaching post. Very few do so with the idea of then moving into business or administration - though some, of course do do that. Even now, there are signs that we are training the majority of our PhD students for export. This situation does require to be addressed and it might help, as a first step, if we could agree some principles at national level for research/teaching careers which would ensure that the state itself gained more than a marginal benefit from its investment.
So will it be what I have called in my title the "pistols at dawn" approach, where everyone competes, within their own institution for funding against everyone else, and against other institutions in the state for a bigger slice of the research cake? Or can we avoid the internal wrangling and disillusionment this scheme will inevitably bring in its wake and work nationally and collaboratively together to focus our competitive instincts on the goal of outdoing other systems in our provision of world-class resources and world-class PhD training? I lay down my gun. Shoot back if you will.
Comments on the discussion
- The current orthodoxy seems to be introduction of "transferable skills" into the PhD programme. We should beware of such genetic engineering. Since the PhD needs primarily to enable our graduates to compete world-wide for academic jobs, anything smacking of dilution or not directly helping them to compete in this market will actually undermine the degree's competitiveness. The successful PhD candidate will learn plenty of high-level transferable skills just by completing the project. Last week, we had a visit in Cork from a colleague in New Zealand, who reported the eagerness of administrators there to introduce the 2-year taught PhD. It will quickly become know world-wide what this PhD amounts to and it will not help those who complete it to achieve their goals. Given that in my field (and in other Humanities fields) the dominance of the Cambridge/Oxford PhD, that is the "benchmark" we should be aiming at and that can only be achieved by improving and pooling our resources, and offering "added value" (i.e. something those august institutions cannot or do not do).
- The panel was asked about "bibliometrics". Apart from the technical difficulties (sometimes works will not be easily tracked down if they are published, for example, in German), I think there is a real danger that crass measurement will be allowed to take the place of judgement if we follow this path. I do not judge my colleagues' work by the number of citations they receive, but rather by their enthusiastic commitment to extending knowledge in their field of expertise. Given that academic work is also subject to fashion, it seems ridiculous anyhow to allow the "in thing" an overwhelming value simply because it is the "in thing".
- It struck me afterwards that there is a paradox in the application of the market forces model to academia. Actually, in economics there is a venerable dispute between those who consider that the market should be allowed to operate alone and unfettered and those who believe in a regulated market. The model suggested by Shattock (and adopted in the UK) is of a very tightly regulated market, geared only to productivity. In fact, the "market" in research, especially in Humanities, should be much more akin to the unregulated model, in which, as it were, the academic entrepreneur can run with ideas unhindered by forces of repression or encouragement (or the political effects of the arguments...).
