Petition against “impact”

PS Transpose ‘of’ and ‘our’ above. And for ‘it’ and the end of the last paragraph, read ‘out’. I should have learned by now that typing when I’m angry is a recipe for typo disaster.

@2: Or so he thinks… Might be safer, indeed, to just think his research; write it down and there’s no telling what some greedy bastards might make of it…

I jest, of course, but this sits rather amusingly alongside the latest tranche of THE articles, in which historians strive to point out that bloody politicians never pay any bloody attention to what happened before, and therefore bloody sod things up all over again, regularly. The only ‘impact’ in our departments therefore being that of heads on brick walls…

… allocate funds for academic research solely on the basis of academic excellence

Got a bit greedy there, I’d say. You may be working under the assumption that people respect academics rather more than is the case.

(My favourite set theorist assured me that his work will have no economic or social impact whatsoever.)

That’s more or less what G.H. Hardy thought about his own work but it ended up being used by nuclear physicists and in genetics.

I think it might be helpful to suggest that a scheme that makes most research depend upon what civil servants think will be a good business proposition holds little promise.

I agree that the “barbarous proposal” is, well, barbarous, but I think that this petition goes too far in the opposite direction. Here’s how it is worded:

“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to allocate funds for academic research solely on the basis of academic excellence and not on the basis of ‘impact’ or the judgements of ‘users’.”

“_Solely_ on the basis of academic excellence”? If this is supposed to mean that considerations of impact should carry no weight at all, I can’t sign it.

Suppose that we have two projects competing for funding: one in pure mathematics, one in medecine. The study in pure mathematics is marginally more “academically excellent” than the medical study, but while the maths study promises no practical benefit, the medical study promises to lead us to an important new treatment for a serious disease. Surely, in this case, one should fund the medical study.

From a debate of the policy called Don and Dusted: Is the Age of the Scholar Over?:

David Sweeney, director of research, innovation and skills at the Higher Education Funding Council for England, approached the case for assessing academic research in combative mood.

He observed that universities had “played very little role in the Enlightenment because they became absorbed in theological and professional academic disputes”.

Professor Sweeney added that only people “living on Mars” would expect the Government to pay for research without any indication of the potential results.

He concluded that pressure on academics to justify what they are doing is largely “a good thing”, but admitted that “there are some bureaucratic methods we’d prefer to refine”.

Aw, and I was looking forward to a petition against the use of “impact” as a verb.

(A verb promulgated, I’m sure, by those who, rather than learn the difference between “affect” and “effect,” simply declared “fuck it” and turned to “impact” for their affect/effect needs.)

What prey is ‘academic excellence’?

How does one measure it empirically?

There are always fights over how research money should be allocated. And the money almost always ends up going to the people who are already getting it for the purposes for which they are already getting it regardless of whether there is any point to it.

As a taxpayer myself, I can understand how taxpayers and our badly-behaved servants, politicians, would want public funds to be expended in ways which benefit us socially or economically. So, I am complete utilitarian on this issue. However, we utilitarians have a major problem operationalizing this idea, because powerful and profoundly-transformative technologies have a habit of arising from research that was pursued for reasons of curiousity, and often by lonely individuals against significant opposition from their academic peers.

Who would have guessed, for example, that speech act theory from the philosophy of language would find application in artificial languages for machine-to-machine communications, 40 years later? Who could have thought that imaginary number systems with multiple, distinct square roots of minus one (the quaternions) would turn out to be useful, just 150 years later, for the concise representation of animations in computer games? Who would have guessed that Aristotle’s theories of rhetoric and dialectic would turn out, a mere 2300 years later, to be useful for the design of computer systems able to reason and argue with one another?

It is as a utilitarian, therefore, that I strongly oppose the use of impact measures to decide which research to fund. If we do not fund research which has no present or expected future value, we will lose the very source of our future technologies! The Research in R&D has to be curiosity-led, or we risk having nothing to Develop.

Whenever I come around here I usually end up arguing that Government Sucks And You All Should Just Admit It. But I have to say: one thing government probably does better than the private sector is pay for weird science without fretting too much over the, uh, impact. Here in the US, our Department of Defense is particularly generous to researchers who want to investigate various dark alleys that private investors would steer clear of. A lot of that money must be “wasted”, I guess. But they also turn up wonderful results, and contrary to what some might suppose, they don’t limit their inquiry to finding new ways to kill people.

So in this case, you can put me down as a sympathizer, and perhaps share in my dismay at Defense spending cuts.

@16 Phillip Hallam-Baker
What prey is ‘academic excellence’?

Timid, squeaky, and tormented by eagles?

A thorough inquiry into the metaphysics of holes is a necessary condition for the empirical examination of holes, so this sort of project, at least, should have an easy time winning funding for its expected biomedical contributions.

“I think it might be helpful to suggest that a scheme that makes most research depend upon what civil servants think will be a good business proposition holds little promise.”

We might add as well: “I think it might be helpful to suggest that a scheme that makes investment depend upon what civil servants think will be a good business proposition holds little promise.”

But that would rather stick a fork in economic planning….

I am surprised that no one has mentioned the missing comma and the two gratuitous hyphens in the petition. To my mind they are the most serious flaws in it. How anyone can think that its objective is to ensure that resources are spread equally among cancer research and literary criticism is beyond me. The point is that if you are going to spend money on philosophy you should apportion funds based on the excellence of the work being done as judged by expert peer reviewers not on the basis of its short-term impact. Expert peer review is of course highly fallible and imperfect but there is no better alternative to it because the very best academic work is only properly understood and appreciated by experts. That is how it is with all forms of intellectual inquiry. Clearly the people who are best able to judge what is the best work in pure mathematics are the best pure mathematicians – nobody else has a clue what they are up to. Finally, let me just point out that the total budget for research in the arts and humanities is small beer and amounts to good value for money. My department gets a relatively large share of the so-called QR (research funding based on the RAE) and that amounts to the princely sum of about £400K for a year. This supports the work of up to twenty staff and the intellectual culture in which 50 plus postgraduates and about 300 undergraduates study.

What a stupid petition. As though we should spend as much on metaphysical french poetry as we do on fundamental physics.

Ah, yes, the argument from textually unwarranted attribution of ridiculous beliefs. How could any online discussion proceed without it?

The best, the really best, bit about all the impact palaver comes if you read the actual draft documentation. There you will see that the civil servants in charge have strained themselves mightily to demonstrate that it isn’t all about GDP. They have offered up all sorts of potential cultural enrichments as ‘impact’. The catch? The outcomes have to be ‘measured by surveys’. Yup, if YouGov can’t prove that your book on Rimbaud caused a 0.17% increase in national thoughtfulness, you’ve had it…

Yup, if YouGov can’t prove that your book on Rimbaud caused a 0.17% increase in national thoughtfulness, you’ve had it…

Maybe government funding could bring back The Smiths.

The British government already funds research in ‘STEM’ — science (natural and medical), technology, engineering, and mathematics — to a much greater extent than it funds research in the humanities and social sciences. It does so in part because it thinks that research in the former areas will have more ‘impact’. It’s defensible for the government to allocate more money to these general areas on these grounds (among others). But, having done so, it should then award money on the basis of the academic standards of excellence that have arisen within the various disciplines. It has already paid due heed to impact at the level of its general budgetary allocations, and it shouldn’t also try to micromanage impact in the manner they are now proposing. That will just give rise to distortions.

*musical mountaineer @22: “one thing government probably does better than the private sector is pay for weird science without fretting too much over the, uh, impact. Here in the US, our Department of Defense is particularly generous to researchers who want to investigate various dark alleys that private investors would steer clear of.”*

‘dark alleys’ and ‘without fretting’ indeed.

First, DoD projects aren’t – are they? – ‘blue skies’ – in the sense of pure, abstract etc. – research; perhaps in the original politicians’ sense of desperately casting around for inventive fixes to narrowly constrained problems. An exceptional willingness to take on technological projects with low expected success rate is not the same as seeking understanding without the restriction of any particular technical goal. The potentially very high (imputed) value, and low cost by military-industrial complex standards, make a nothing-too-insane scattergun approach quite rational, even including staring-at-goats type activities. But the approach generally subserves specific practical aims. I stand to be corrected of course. Maybe doing R&D for militaristic brutes is actually an efficient method of deriving important – and public – developments in science…

Second – while I’m baffled at why researchers should be given the additional, unrelated, job of publicising their findings, as comments here suggest the REM proposes, it seems reasonable that they should at least not keep them secret. The mind boggles at what techniques must have been developed in more than 1/2 a century of throwing DoD money at problems like sending people mad, brainwashing and mind control, information extraction, indetectible murder, ‘disintegration’ weapons, stealth who-knows-what etc. etc.

We hear about the wacky projects – the goats, gay bombs etc – 1st because they have been abandoned, 2nd for reassurance along ‘all conspiracy theories founder on the simple truth that everyone in any position of power is a total moron’ lines, 3rd for fostering a disorientating air of bizarre fantasy that makes the whole topic daunting and queasily unrespectable.

(And however perversely plausible a dismissive swipe at an only-slightly-straw-stuffed man may tend to be, I’m not terribly impressed with preemptive faux-authoritative claims like ‘contrary to what some might suppose, they don’t limit their inquiry to finding new ways to kill people’. ‘Some’ may indeed suppose something very like that, and with excellent justification.)

Every additional signature on Ladyman’s petition of course constitutes “impact” for the persons who proposed this method of assessment, thus going to show what an excellent job they are doing. They are sure to be rewarded with greater responsibility and compensation if the measure proves unpopular enough.

PS Andthenyoufall, brilliant, LOL.

Actually if you want to stop this Impact mania in UK academia, just vote Tory in the next general election. As an efficiency saving, they’ve already floated the idea of killing the entire Research Execllence Frame that is driving this Impact stuff. After all, given current budget deficits and academic rancour over this, the easiest way to sere the boil would be to drop the whole exercise.

More generally, this petition is really a bit of a joke — symbolic politics at its worst. First of all, why should any national body take seriously a few thousand signatures from people of miscellaneous origins? Petitions only make sense when those who are potentially subject to the rule petitioned about respond — not just any old schmo who happens to surf the net.

Also, there is the small problem that some disciplines — not least in the arts subjects — have already come up with ways of demonstrating their Impact. (e.g. attendance at events). Also, ‘user groups’ (including charities and NGOs) have come out praising the ‘impact’ that academic research has had on their activities. Whether this ‘impact’ is real is another matter but it certainly doesn’t help the cause of those who want to justify an impact-free research zone.