It gets worse and will probably mean the end of substantial funding
for experimental arts in the UK. Lets face it, the Arts Council wont be
able to pick up the tab.
Is Vince Cable about to end Britain's research empire?
In 1960, Harold Macmillan announced the abandonment of Britain's
colonial aspirations with his famous "wind of change"
<http://africanhistory.about.com/od/eraindependence/p/wind_of_change2.htm>
speech. The empire had become too expensive, it was time to withdraw.
This Wednesday, Vince Cable is poised to signal an equally historic
retreat, this time from the empire of knowledge.
Britain has an unusually comprehensive capability across all the
disciplines of scholarly research. Only the US can match our diversity
of expertise. Everywhere else has concentrated on disciplines directly
relevant to their commercial ecosystem. Germany is famously strong in
engineering, Japan spectacularly weak in the social sciences.
Our expertise resides largely in our universities and has been irrigated
for decades by increasing funding for research under both Conservative
and Labour governments. The water of funding has allowed academics to
spend time exploring the frontiers of knowledge, maintaining British
outposts in many far-flung realms. Now the Treasury is considering cuts
of 35% in research funding <http://bit.ly/9v7uH0>, turning off the tap
to many fields. If that happens, expertise will rapidly wither, and our
empire will fragment.
To understand the coming drought, consider just one of the government's
two main channels of funding for academic researchers, the
quality-related (QR) fund provided by the Higher Education Funding
Council for England <http://www.hefce.ac.uk/> (Hefce). Hefce's QR budget
is over £1.6bn a year. In recent years it has ringfenced the part of QR
given to science and engineering disciplines. So when funding has been
squeezed, it has been the social sciences and humanities that have borne
all the cuts. If that policy is maintained in the face of cuts of 35%,
there will be virtually no money left for the humanities or social
sciences. Huge swathes of scholarship will lose half their irrigation.
Many outposts will be abandoned. It will not be a case simply of
trimming here and there.
Fear of such devastation is why learned societies, usually the most
cordial of allies, have started attacking each other's turf. The Royal
Academy of Engineering <http://www.raeng.org.uk/>, for example, has
recently advised ministers to make cuts in physics
<http://exquisitelife.researchresearch.com/exquisite_life/2010/07/chemical-engineers-back-physicists-in-row-with-royal-academy-of-engineering.html>.
So as Vince Cable comes to make his first major speech on research on
Wednesday, the stakes are high. It is of course inconceivable that the
business secretary will say anything as frank as that he wants us to
abandon much of our empire of knowledge. But then, Macmillan was also
diplomatic in his language.
In his speech, the strongest Macmillan came up with was: "The wind of
change is blowing through this continent, and whether we like it or not,
this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all
accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it."
On Wednesday, it is quite possible that the heart of Cable's speech will
be something similar -- perhaps: "The need to reduce the budget deficit
is pressing, and whether we like it or not, the cuts required are a
political fact. We must all accept it as a fact, and our policies on
science and research must take account of it."
If so, then we will know the battles with the Treasury are over, deep
cuts are coming, and that Britain has finally given up trying to
maintain expertise across the entire empire of knowledge. The chill wind
of history will have arrived. And the only question left will be which
outposts to abandon first.
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