Înscrieri deschise pentru zeci de burse doctorale şi postdoctorale la UAIC

Miercuri, 9 octombrie 2019, au început înscrierile pentru selecţia beneficiarilor de burse doctorale şi postdoctorale acordate în cadrul proiectului cu titlul – Doctoranzi şi cercetători postdoctorat pregătiţi pentru piaţa muncii (POCU/380/6/13/123623), derulat de Universitatea „Alexandru Ioan Cuza” (UAIC) din Iaşi, în parteneriat cu Academia de Studii Economice din Bucureşti (ASE) şi cu doi parteneri privaţi, selectaţi în urma unei proceduri care a respectat principiile transparenţei, tratamentului egal, nediscriminării şi utilizării eficiente a fondurilor publice, derulate în conformitate cu prevederile OUG nr. 40/2015 privind gestionarea financiară a fondurilor europene pentru perioada de programare 2014-2020.

Cu un buget total de 6.877.908,86 lei, proiectul îşi propune crearea unui cadru favorabil inserţiei pe piaţa muncii a doctoranzilor şi cercetătorilor postdoctorat din grupul ţintă, prin acordarea de sprijin financiar şi prin dobândirea de competenţe antreprenoriale şi transversale.

Grupul ţintă eligibil în cadrul acestei cereri de propuneri de proiecte include numai cetăţeni ai Uniunii Europene cu domiciliul sau reşedinţa în România (cu excepţia Regiunii Bucureşti-Ilfov), care urmează programe doctorale sau postdoctorale subvenţionate de la bugetul de stat, în regim cu taxă sau din alte surse legal constituite, şi care îşi înscriu cercetările domeniilor prioritare ale Strategiei Naţionale de Competitivitate 2014-2020, respectiv în domeniile de specializare inteligentă, identificate pe baza potenţialului lor şiinţific şi comercial, prevăzute în Strategia Naţională de Cercetare, Dezvoltare şi Inovare 2014-2020.

Prin acest proiect, 120 de doctoranzi şi 40 de cercetători postdoctorat din cadrul Universităţii „Cuza” din Iaşi vor beneficia de burse lunare pe perioada derulării programelor antreprenoriale personalizate pe domenii de specializare inteligentă şi vor avea posibilitatea de a accesa oportunităţile de finanţare a unor stagii naţionale şi internaţionale, publicării de articole în jurnale de specialitate, participării la conferinţe şi alte manifestări ştiinţifice, derulării unor stagii practice (internship-uri) în laboratoare/centre de cercetare şi companii (potenţiali angajatori), participării la sesiuni de consiliere şi orientare profesională.

Informaţii suplimentare pot fi obţinute de pe pagina web a Biroului pentru Studii Universitare de Doctorat din cadrul UAIC, de la Şcolile doctorale şi de la echipa de implementare a proiectului, coordonată de managerul proiectului, prof.univ.dr. Liviu-George Maha de la Facultatea de Economie şi Administrarea Afacerilor (FEAA) de la „Cuza”.

Publicație : Bună Ziua Iași

 

Ieșenii, invitați la o expoziție sensibila organizata la Biblioteca Central Universitara Mihai Eminescu

Biblioteca Centrală Universitara (BCU) Mihai Eminescu organizează, pana pe 31 octombrie 2019, expoziţia documentară dedicată împlinirii a 135 de ani de la naşterea lui V. Voiculescu (1884-1963). „Expoziţia propune, sub semnul neuitării, reactualizarea principalelor momente care au marcat destinul operei şi parcursul existenţei celui care a fost supranumit medicul fără de arginţi” sau „poetul Îngerilor”.

”Teza pentru Doctorat în Medicină şi chirurgie”, printre documentele expuse la BCU

Printre documentele expuse se numără:

  • „Teza pentru Doctorat în Medicină şi chirurgie” (publicată în 1910).
  • poezia de debut din Convorbiri literare (1912).
  • volumul de debut Poezii (1916)
  • cărţi apărute în perioada 1918-1944
  • poezii publicate de presa românească a exilului (în perioada în care Voiculescu era absent din spaţiul publicistic literar românesc)
  • cărţi şi diverse documente referitoare la momentul „Rugul Aprins”
  • primele volume apărute după moartea lui, în anii ’60 (în timp ce unele scrieri ale sale din perioada interbelică erau cenzurate)
  • ediţii reprezentative ale operei literare apărute în postcomunism.

facsimile după două importante manuscrise ale lui (din carnetul cu poezii pe care i l-a dăruit în noiembrie 1956 prietenului său, călugărul Andrei Scrima, înainte ca acesta să părăsească România, şi din manuscrisul cunoscut sub numele de „Caietul negru”, confiscat de Securitate în noaptea de 4 spre 5 august 1958, când a fost arestat, în cadrul lotului „Rugul Aprins”). Expoziţia cuprinde şi imagini cu V. Voiculescu în diverse ipostaze – student, ofiţer în timpul Primului Război Mondial, medic de plasă, medic la Administraţia Domeniilor Coroanei, director literar la Societatea Română de Radiodifuziune, deţinut politic şi altele”, au anunțat oficialii BCU Iași.

Publicație : Bună Ziua Iași

 

Premieră. Săptămână de Formare a Bibliotecarilor, organizată la Universitatea „Cuza” şi Biblioteca Central Universitară

Universitatea „Alexandru Ioan Cuza” (UAIC) din Iaşi găzduieşte, în perioada 7 – 11 octombrie 2019, prima ediţie a „Săptămânii de Formare a Bibliotecarilor” (Librarians’ Staff Training Week).

Evenimentul este organizat de Serviciul de Relaţii Internaţionale împreună cu Biblioteca Centrală Universitară (BCU) „Mihai Eminescu”.

Beneficiarii direcţi sunt bibliotecarii, atât ieşeni, cât şi de la bibliotecile universităţilor partenere: Université Catholique de Louvain şi University of Antwerpen (Belgia), University of Zagreb (Croaţia), University of Southern Denmark (Danemarca), Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Grecia), City University of London (Marea Britanie), University of Gdansk, The Józef Piłsudski University of Physical Education in Warsaw (Polonia), University of Coimbra (Portugalia) şi Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spania).

Programul evenimentului include activităţi academice şi culturale legate de rolul şi viaţa bibliotecarilor. În şedinţa festivă, conf. univ. dr. Mireille Rădoi, Directorul Bibliotecii Centrale Universitare „Carol I” din Bucureşti a susţinut prelegerea intitulată „2020 SmartBraries – as Digital Citizenship Facilitators & Cultural Paladins”.

Invitaţii vor participa zilnic la workshop-uri pe teme specifice, precum biblioteca digitală şi publicul ţintă, promovarea şi marketing-ul bibliotecii, gestionarea colecţiilor speciale, promovarea resurselor ştiinţifice şi respectarea principiilor Open Access, infrastructura IT, împrumutul interbibliotecar, schimburi internaţionale, cât şi mese rotunde şi întâlniri de lucru cu invitaţi de la Biblioteca Judeţeană „Gheorghe Asachi” din Iaşi, Biblioteca Universităţii Tehnice (TUIAŞI) „Gheorghe Asachi”, Biblioteca Centrală a Universităţii de Medicină şi Farmacie (UMF) „Grigore T. Popa” din Iaşi şi Biblioteca Universităţii Naţionale de Arte „George Enescu” (UNAGE) din Iaşi.

Activităţile organizate pentru participanţi includ turul campusului UAIC şi al oraşului Iaşi, vizitarea Palatului Culturii şi a Grădinii Botanice din Iaşi.

Evenimentul se va încheia cu o excursie în regiunea centrală a Moldovei, prilej de explorare a cadrului natural, de descoperire a patrimoniului cultural şi de cunoaştere a moştenirii istorice a zonei.

Librarians’ Staff Training Week favorizează creşterea vizibilităţii Bibliotecii Centrale Universitare „Mihai Eminescu” în reţeaua de biblioteci universitare din Europa, oferind prilej de consolidare a schimburilor de bune practici între participanţi şi organizatori, atât în domeniul biblioteconomiei, cât şi al relaţiilor internaţionale. Totodată, evenimentul ilustrează rolul de pionierat al Universităţii „Cuza” şi al BCU, prin organizarea primei manifestări de acest fel din ţară.

Publicație : Bună Ziua Iași

  

Universities must do more to tackle racial harassment on campus, report says

Efforts from senior leaders are ‘simply not good enough’, minister warns

Universities must do more to tackle racial harassment and hate crime on campus, according to a new report.

Institutions have been prioritising sexual harassment and gender-based violence but less status has been given to race-based incidents, according to the findings from Universities UK (UUK).

Universities minister Chris Skidmore is now calling on all vice-chancellors to prioritise “a zero tolerance culture” to all types of harassment and hate crimes.

He warned it was “simply not good enough” that some senior leaders were not tackling the issue.

The report, from the body representing vice-chancellors, says efforts to tackle other forms of harassment and hate incidents remain “relatively underdeveloped” across the sector.

It comes after an investigation by The Independent revealed that the number of racist incidents in universities across the UK surged by more than 60 per cent between 2015 and 2017.

Black students’ experiences have been in the spotlight in recent years – with racist chants in student halls and a banana being thrown at a black graduate hitting the headlines.

The new report says addressing racial harassment will require further support, time and resources to achieve the same focus as issues like sexual misconduct and gender-based violence.

Nearly two in three institutions surveyed said they had introduced consent training for students to address sexual harassment on campus,

However, reports of hate incidents tend to be low, the report said, as a normalisation of behaviours in society, as well as lack of understanding of what constitutes racial harassment, has led to underreporting.

UUK has said it will develop guidance to address racial harassment and race-based hate incidents and crimes experienced by both students and staff to

The report also calls on university chiefs to move accountability for tackling harassment and hate crime to the senior management team, adding that all forms of harassment should be prioritised.

Some universities have already introduced measures to tackle issues – including putting behavioural expectations in student halls and introducing “inclusivity” quizzes on registration.

Professor Julia Buckingham, president of UUK, said they had seen “a dramatic increase” in public awareness of sexual and racial harassment since 2016.

She said: “The higher education sector recognises its shared responsibility to eliminating hate crime, which is unacceptable in our society, and in our universities. We are committed to ensuring we create welcoming and inclusive environments for students of all genders, backgrounds and ethnicities to flourish and this research shows significant progress towards that.

“However, it is clear that there is a long way to go in ending harassment and hate crime for good in higher education.”

She added: “While it is understandable that there has been a particular focus on addressing gender-based violence, it is time for us to step-up and make sure the same priority status and resourcing is given to addressing all forms of harassment and hate.”

Nicola Dandridge, chief executive of the Office for Students, the higher education regulator, said that “more must be done” to address harassment, assault or discrimination facing students.

“These improvements need to be taking place across all universities,” she added.

Jo Grady, general secretary of the University and College Union (UCU), said: ‘Universities should be safe spaces for all staff and students, free from harassment and discrimination, but this report shows there is still much work to be done to make this a reality. The minister is right to call for a zero-tolerance approach to all forms of harassment and hate crime, but he must be ready to back this up with sanctions where the sector fails to act.”

Omar Khan, director of the Runnymede Trust, a race equality think tank, said: “Statements of zero tolerance policies towards racism while welcome, are not enough. They depend on disclosure and the effectiveness, transparency and credibility of mechanisms for reporting and dealing with complaints of racism.”

Publicație : The Independent

Is media studies about to go viral?

Ever since it emerged from English departments in the 1970s, media studies has been routinely dismissed as the archetypal ‘Mickey Mouse’ degree. But in an era of fake news and media hegemony, has this multifaceted subject finally found its place in the zeitgeist?

Joining the Mickey Mouse Club

I recently had a senior white, male academic manager (yawn) explain to me in some detail that he has no time for scholars with teaching qualifications. “Academics with education degrees are the worst teachers,” he whined. “Give me a great public speaker and use easy assessment. That’s a great teacher. That’s how you slash attrition rates.”

I laughed because I thought he was joking. Then I was filled with rage because – for him – ignorance was a strength. He meant it. He really meant it.

In our anti-intellectual times, when knowing is an inconvenience and feeling a priority, experience is a welcome substitute for expertise. Michael Gove’s proto-Brexit commentary – “I think the people in this country have had enough of experts” – has spread to our universities.

That is why media studies is disrespected: because “everyone” is on Facebook and uses YouTube. Supposedly, understanding media – like public policy – does not require particular expertise.

From its origins in the 1960s, this neglected if popular child of English literature has been condemned by the Harold Bloom School of Posh Pretension. Often taught at the former polytechnics and even occasionally by women, media studies is a Mickey Mouse degree meant for a Goofy who can’t quite manage “books” but might understand “films”.

Yet media studies is provocative in its quirkiness and dogged in its innovation. Its trick of combining production and theory – the doing and the understanding of the doing – is incredibly valuable. Tweeting is easy. Understanding why Donald Trump tweets is important. Laughing at Boris Johnson is predictable. Understanding why Oxbridge elitism must now be clothed in the jacket of the Scarlet Pimpernel’s bumbling fool is crucial.

Media studies maintains a strong graduate employment rate because people who have studied it can work in a newsroom, a local council’s tourism department, an independent film streaming service or on a breakfast radio programme. They understand the how and the why of communication. They are agile workers in the gig economy, and they grasp the consequences of a portfolio career for themselves and others.

But this success – combined with the relentless Daily Mail attacks – means that media studies undergraduates rarely return for postgraduate qualifications. That is a problem, as we live in times where research into media literacies, intertextuality and multimodality can reshape our social and political landscape.

Media studies grazes the surface of interfaces to renew and grow important new ideas. It is bizarre – but so typical of the age – that the platforms and theories that matter so much are disrespected so pervasively through the treatment of the discipline that investigates them. It is media studies – not physics, not English and not economics – that can explain how we accept and live in a culture of lies and xenophobia, where shopping is the medication for any societal illness. It is a lighthouse in dark times, illuminating the path to a better way of living.

Groucho Marx famously refused to join any club that would have him as a member. Yet being a member of the Mickey Mouse Club of media studies makes me proud. I completed elite degrees in elite disciplines at elite universities, but they did not prepare me to understand our claustropolitan age.

Media studies is a neglected clifftop in our hurricane-battered age, but from this craggy, unstable intellectual precipice, the view is spectacular. And the opportunity it affords to resist, rally, poke and provoke is beyond even Donald Duck’s exuberant aspirations.

Fewer manifestos, more analysis

Media studies is not a discipline but a subject area that may include the analysis of texts (such as films or television programmes), industries (such as news organisations or TV networks) or audiences (such as fan cultures or consumer markets).

If the only criterion of what counts as media studies is a focus on media, then you can find media studies courses and scholars in a huge number of university departments. These include journalism, film studies, film and television production, television studies, advertising, English, cultural studies, information science, history, American studies, sociology, anthropology, economics, business, rhetoric, performing arts, theatre, new media, digital media, communication, area studies, art history and performance studies. You can find them in colleges of liberal arts and performing arts, and in professional training programmes in business and journalism.

Reflecting this diversity, media studies can be categorised as either one of the social sciences or one of the humanities. Social scientists apply qualitative and quantitative methods to analyse the effects of media texts and technologies on audiences. Some humanities scholars apply the work of critical and literary theorists to interpret or classify media texts or their representations of identities. Other humanities scholars employ an empirical approach, trawling archival and primary sources to document and analyse texts or the institutions that produce them. And the goals of these scientists or scholars may be more or less descriptive, prescriptive, normative, critical or analytical.

Thus, within media studies, one topic can be analysed from a great many perspectives. For example, the Netflix series Thirteen Reasons Why could be analysed by a social scientist for its potential effects on teen suicide rates; by a textualist for its representations of gender and race; and by a media industries scholar as an example of a programming strategy for an emerging programme distributor.

The advantage of this diversity is that a thousand flowers may bloom. But there are disadvantages, too. Potential students may be unable to identify which department or major or college offers an appropriate curriculum for them. Readers may find it difficult to locate scholarship spread across a variety of journals in allied fields. And scholars with similar interests may never learn from one another because they attend different professional conferences and publish in different journals.

This diffusion also leaves the field open to a charge of irrelevance or insubstantiality: without canonisation or disciplinary standards, media studies may seem more a fad than a field.

I am a scholar of media history, interested in understanding and empirically analysing media texts, technologies and institutions. And I think this is where the future of the field lies: not in prescriptive or predictive pronouncements and manifestos but in analysing the complexities of the economic incentives, cultural contexts and social structures that shape media texts, industries and audiences.

Instead of succumbing to the moral panics that arise with every emerging media technology, media studies scholars need to historicise and contextualise these fears, avoiding the mindless technological determinism that sometimes drives media punditry.

Social media platforms have allowed every user to be simultaneously a producer, distributor and consumer of media texts. Traditional information gatekeepers are increasingly disintermediated. Media business models are undergoing radical change. In such a world, we have a greater than ever need for expansive, robust and diverse media studies scholarship to help make sense of where we have been and where we are going.

Top of the class

“If media studies as an academic discipline is delegitimised then it becomes too easy to dismiss its critiques; critiques that often circulate around questions of power, influence, representation and value. This might be in the interests of politicians, even journalists, but it cannot be in the interests of an informed citizenry.”

This is the conclusion of Lucy Bennett and Jenny Kidd’s 2017 paper, “Myths about media studies: the construction of media studies education in the British press”, published in Continuum: The Journal of Media & Cultural Studies. They are spot on.

Journalists can overstate their entitlement to the public’s trust. In response to the threat posed to good governance by fake news, they tend to take the view that if only citizens were reminded of the value of “real news” – and were prepared to pay for it – democracy would be less fragile. Politicians, meanwhile, advocate a shallow, safeguarding response, calling for quick-fix media literacy schemes and initiatives to verify legitimate news stories.

But teachers, academics and students in the media studies community of practice take a more rigorous approach. And a year-long project that I recently led, bringing together US and UK media literacy researchers with teachers, librarians, journalists and young people, concluded that the best antidote to fake news would be to make media studies mandatory at school. Unlike the “giving fish” approach of reactive resources and small-scale projects focused on competences, teaching media studies in school teaches future citizens to fish for themselves.

Studying the mediation of the social world and the influence of media in all aspects of our lives has always been necessarily uncomfortable, and academically difficult, both to study and to teach. But it is becoming ever more necessary. Moreover, the healthy enrolment figures for university media studies courses suggest that students recognise this, even if the media themselves do not. Some credit can perhaps be taken by the colleagues from across the discipline that have provided deconstructions of the perennial “Mickey Mouse” attacks, often channelled through the subject associations.

The media’s antipathy to media studies amounts to a thinly veiled display of class prejudice: an othering of a non-traditional subject often taken by non-traditional students at non-traditional universities. Professional journalists are, after all, no more representative of the general public than politicians, given the nepotism and networks of privilege that operate around media internships and recruitment. As the Guardian journalist Owen Jones, a friend of media studies, put it in 2018: “If you have so many people from such similar backgrounds – from a small and relatively privileged slither [sic] of British society –  then similar prejudices and worldviews will reinforce each other.”

And while it may be true that progression to postgraduate study is lower in media studies than in other disciplines, that is surely not unconnected to the relatively high employability of media graduates. It is also related to the subject’s status as a semi-permeable membrane that takes in influences from a wide range of other disciplines and feeds graduates and scholarly work back into them. One person’s lack of disciplinary coherence is another’s interdisciplinary contribution to knowledge.

Media studies is always a fusion of theory and practice, increasingly practised in the “third space” between industry conventions and counter-narratives for social justice. As such, students are usually assessed with regard not so much to their static knowledge as to their ideas for “doing media differently”.

Our project captured a range of different views on the subject’s essence, but one common thread was the impossibility of disconnecting the study of media from the study of power. So if healthy numbers of undergraduates are engaged in the critical deconstruction of mediated power, that is surely a very healthy thing in a democratic society. But, equally, it’s easy to see why the media might see that as a threat.

Weak-minded celebrity wannabes need not apply

Recently retired BBC broadcaster John Humphrys provoked much ire recently when he gratuitously repeated his familiar prejudices about media studies.

During an August interview with the shadow education secretary, Angela Rayner, about the Labour Party’s plan to move to a post-qualification admissions system, Humphrys suggested that the amount of time spent by students at university should be reduced instead. “If you want to be a doctor, it’s going to take you years to learn. But if you want to do media studies…do you really need three years?” he asked. When Rayner suggested that listeners would decide for themselves, Humphrys speculated that “most of them will say you need about five minutes”.

But Humphrys is by no means the only person to voice this familiar refrain. In 1993, for instance, John Patten, then the UK’s education secretary, announced an inquiry into why young people “flock to the seminar room for a fix of one of those contemporary pseudo-religions like media studies”. He noted that “for the weaker minded, going into a cultural Disneyland has an obvious appeal”. And one of his successors, Michael Gove (a former Times journalist), lamented that schools deliberately steer students towards easy-to-pass subjects such as media studies. His remarks came after a report into the supposed dumbing down of education compared “soft” subjects like media studies very unfavourably with “proper” subjects such as maths and physics. The Independent newspaper wrote up the story as: “Tories to tackle the media studies menace”.

As well as the belief that media studies lacks rigour, the attacks are also fuelled by a complaint that the subject falsely lures students into anticipating glamorous employment in the media and “cultural industries”. In 2016, for instance, the senior broadcaster and journalist Sir Michael Parkinson claimed that the subject attracted “fame-hungry youngsters wanting a short cut into reality television”.

But the reality is that, over several decades, media studies has become among the most successful and internationally well regarded subjects in UK higher education. Drawing on both the social sciences and humanities, it includes programmes ranging from the highly vocational to the largely theoretical. But none of these variously labelled courses are easy, requiring extensive reading and rigorous understanding of methods of investigation and analysis in various disciplines.

Nor, as the journalist Janet Street-Porter once claimed, is media studies (which she dismissed as “a joke”) a career dead end. Few students are naive enough to assume that media, communications and cultural studies degrees are a direct path to an instant career in front of a camera or managing a social media corporation. But employment rates across a very wide range of sectors exceed those found among graduates in, for example, maths, English, history, biology or chemistry.

So why the antipathy? It would be a dereliction of duty if universities failed to offer students the opportunity to study rigorously the institutions and processes that make up such important elements of their lives, and it would be bizarre if they did not engage in relevant research. Yet such work, often rooted in critical traditions, might well be challenging to cherished assumptions and practices in the worlds of politics and media, such as around the representations of minorities.

Far from being “weak-minded” celebrity wannabes, the young people attracted to media studies want to intellectually examine their place within systems of representation and relations of power that often deny their own experiences. This is much more than the crude vocationalism that many politicians wish our education system to be reduced to: it is a genuine urge to have a voice and make meaning in and of our world. What more noble and important aspiration could there be for any university field?

Media studies is an umbrella term that has always sheltered a wide range of intellectual endeavours. Yet, as a named discipline, it has started to feel dated, as the impact of digitisation continues to transform societies and cultures, nowhere more so than within the media itself.

One of media studies’ common origin stories is its often fractious route out of English departments. Film studies came first, with its focus on auteur and genre theory, feminist film theory and so forth. Inclusion of the “baser” popular cultures, such as television and music, soon followed, and intellectual approaches were expanded further, edging into politics, sociology and cultural studies.

Most film and media studies departments from this evolutionary pathway remained primarily theoretical in their focus, although some introduced production classes, engaging with documentary or experimental film – and, more recently, with digital cultures.

But media studies also emerged from another direction: communications. These disciplines are often more, or even purely, practical in their basis, encompassing journalism, public relations, TV production and documentary. The theoretical strand in this instance – particularly critical theory – tended to play second fiddle to skills-based teaching.

These different origins have led to frequent tension within media studies between the theoretical investigation of culture and its production. “Thinkers” complain that creative work was mere craft, or that makers failed to understand the ideological implications of their work. Practitioners retort that academics don’t understand the real world.

Institutionally, however, these tensions have been muted as departments have met somewhere in the middle, turning to “creative practice as research”, to include production that is research-rich and, hence, compatible with the goals of university study. Conveniently, too, creative practice addresses the widespread student desire to achieve skills that could help them enter the workforce. PhDs with creative or production components are flourishing, and theory itself has seen the emergence of strands of reflexive academic study, such as production studies or screenplay studies.

Yet media studies in all its manifestations is wrestling with the digital sphere. It must continuously update itself to incorporate digital practices such as coding, web design, podcasting and mobile media production. It has also had to address the huge social and political impact of digital transformation, focusing, for example, on the positive and negative impact of social media, the shifts in media economics and ownership, technology’s fraught relationship with democracy, the production of fake news and now deep fakes, and the impact of state and commercial surveillance.

The consequence of all this volatility is that media studies is subject to regular restructuring processes, constantly being expanded, rebadged and repartnered. Its core purpose – the recognition and analysis of how mediatised our world has become – will continue to be highly relevant. But whether it can survive as a visible discipline remains to be seen.

 Publicație : The Times

Big increase in UK research funding may bring major system revamp

Green Paper under consideration to explore nature and scope of ‘mission’ approach, while funding increases under discussion could range to the ‘eye-popping’

A large increase in UK research spending being discussed by the Boris Johnson government could be accompanied by a major reshaping of the funding system to create a multi-year framework setting out key scientific missions – an approach seen as bringing potential rewards and risks.

Chris Skidmore, the universities and science minister, wants to create a five-year financial framework programme to fund research with strategic missions “centred” within it, similar to the European Union’s system, to promote public appreciation of the benefits of research funding.

Ministers and advisers are in the early stages of discussions on this plan, seeing a potential major increase in research funding – aimed at delivering on the existing commitment to devote 2.4 per cent of gross domestic product to public and private research spending by 2027 – as an opportunity to take a more strategic approach to investment, if the Conservatives win the next general election.

Times Higher Education understands that the proposal is for all research and development spending funded by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy to come under such a framework. Whether spending funded by other departments, such as health and defence, could come under the system will be one issue under discussion.

It is thought that, while any framework running between 2020 and 2025 would in essence be a repackaging of the status quo, there are early discussions about potentially creating a more fundamentally reformed framework system to implement in 2025-30.

Ministers and advisers are considering opening key questions, such as the nature and extent of missions, to public consultation via a Green Paper, THE understands.

The close and personal interest in science shown by Dominic Cummings, Mr Johnson’s most senior adviser, could be a key influence on the plan.

James Wilsdon, professor of research policy at the University of Sheffield, said there was a “growing conviction” that Mr Cummings and others in government want to deliver the “massive uplifts” required to meet the 2.4 per cent target. But “they don’t seem to want it flowing through the normal systems and allocation pipelines”, which raises key questions about how it would be delivered and about “whose priorities” would set the strategy, he added.

Stian Westlake, a former adviser to three science ministers, including Mr Skidmore, said that “after Brexit”, science funding “is a very high priority for Dom Cummings”.

Mr Westlake said “the strongest argument” in favour of mission-oriented research was around “public accountability [and] public communication of research”. He added that “part of the quid pro quo for that [extra research spending] politically is to really make a strong case to the public for why this is happening”.

The Campaign for Science and Engineering estimated last year that public spending on R&D of £20 billion would be needed to meet the 2.4 per cent total target, an increase of £9 billion on baseline levels.

Mr Westlake said of the plans being formed in government: “It’s possible we might be looking at something even more ambitious than that. I would guess the range of outcomes would be between a 50 per cent increase and a doubling – a doubling would be eye-popping in many ways.”

The EU has decided to follow a “mission-oriented” approach in its next seven-year framework programme for research, starting in 2021, with five broad categories of mission agreed: climate change, cancer, oceans, carbon neutrality and food.

Robert-Jan Smits, former director general for research and innovation at the European Commission, said that he “fully understood” why the UK government wanted to move towards multi-annual frameworks. “It will offer financial security and reliability to the UK research community, [bringing] together scattered funding streams, and as such enhance visibility [of research] to the British citizen and society as a whole,” he said.

Mr Smits added that the missions chosen must be of a scale and scope appropriate to the national context. He cited Japan and China as countries “that have followed the EU approach and set up multi-annual science and innovation framework programmes”.

However, Mr Smits, now president of Eindhoven University of Technology, said that a national programme “will have impact only if it is opened up to scientists from across the globe”.

Professor Wilsdon said that while “everyone” in the sector would welcome the stability of multi-year funding, such a system would be “nothing new” given that the Labour government had introduced a 10-year framework in 2004, before losing power in 2010.

He cautioned that “what you don’t want is the whole system violently lurching off to this month’s new set of fashionable missions”, and that “the more you put into missions, the more you need to put into QR [quality-related funding] to provide the corresponding flexible money”.

But Professor Wilsdon also said the value of a mission-oriented approach – which already exists in some industrial strategy funding, for example – was “in breaking open the disciplinary categories and getting people to think in cross-disciplinary ways”.

 Publicație: The Times

What price academic impact on the Brexit debate?

Academic lawyers have helped to resolve legal puzzles, but wider engagement can be demanding and ineffective, says Kenneth Armstrong

The recent Supreme Court case on the UK government’s prorogation of Parliament is but the latest example of Brexit throwing up tricky legal and constitutional questions that academic lawyers can play a useful role in helping to answer.

In an earlier era, law schools were populated by a mix of full-time academics and part-time practising lawyers. The rise of the research excellence framework (REF) and the professionalisation of higher education has diminished the overlap between the UK’s legal profession and academia, creating a clearer divide than is often found in other jurisdictions.

However, the legal teams that have been involved in the most high-profile Brexit-related cases include legal academics who are also barristers – such as UCL’s Tom Hickman QC, who acted for Gina Miller in the successful challenge to the legality of prorogation – and those like myself who are simply full-time academics.

Also of significance is the emergence of online blogging platforms for legal academics and practising lawyers. The influence of these new channels of communication and debate should not be underestimated. The 2017 Gina Miller case on the use of prerogative powers to trigger the Article 50 withdrawal process is a good example of the power of a single blog – written, in this case, by legal academics Nick Barber, Tom Hickman and Jeff King – to shape the litigation that followed.

Academics soon realised that blogging was a fast way to get arguments into the public domain and more directly into legal pleadings. However, the maintenance of personal sites has several downsides. It is time-consuming; it fragments the distribution of communication; and it lacks the academic warrant of a peer-edited domain. The UK Constitutional Law Association’s blog, by contrast, has been a very important test bed of a range of opinions that, following open, ex-post peer reviewing by the legal community, have found their way into arguments presented to the top courts.

With another REF cycle in full swing, it is tempting to think that Brexit and these interactions between the legal profession and the law school are generating research “impact” that will score highly. However, there is a mismatch between this real-time, blog-driven impact and the REF’s view of impact as the sequential outcome of a discrete research process that finds its tangible form in more formally peer-reviewed books and journals.

As the author of a book called Brexit Time: Leaving the EU – Why, How and When?, published a full year after the June 2016 referendum, it seems clear to me that the timelines for traditional academic publishing – and any impact they could produce – are hard to reconcile with the ever-changing political landscape of Brexit.

The rise of social media, and especially Twitter, has facilitated a process of exchange and dialogue even more rapid than the blogosphere. Significantly, it has created virtual legal communities that might otherwise struggle to form. The visibility this affords to lawyers and legal academics clearly facilitates a communicative and educational function, but it also suffers from the standard social media problems of producing echo chambers and facilitating vitriolic trolling, particularly of women lawyers.

Social media is, therefore, a double-edged sword. On the one hand, given the paucity of positive feedback loops within academia itself, there is clearly something seductive about being “liked” and “retweeted”, and of watching your number of “followers” grow. On the other hand, the exposure can come at a personal price, and can diminish the very nuance and reflectiveness that makes us academics in the first place. My evaluation of both the 2014 Scottish independence referendum and the aftermath of the European Union referendum is that subtlety is easily lost in the febrile communications around highly contested political matters.

The fundamental question is who benefits from this Brexit-influenced interaction and exposure? I view my own recent engagements with the legal profession very positively. The utter professionalism and teamwork of practising lawyers has been nothing short of inspiring. I also think there is no doubt that legal academics have had a profound effect in answering difficult legal questions. Yet for academics who already have to balance portfolio careers as teachers, researchers, managers and editors, these new demands can be just another plate to spin.

My anxiety increases when it comes to feeding the beast of the Brexit running commentary. Academics have done an enormous public service in their willingness to help the media fill slots to opine on the latest Brexit twists and turns. I feel that academics remain trusted by a population that despairs of our politics and our politicians. But I don’t think that punditry is a substitute for deeper academic reflection.

More importantly, it is not clear to me that there has been a wider social impact. Notwithstanding the distrust of politicians, I fear that Brexit remains refracted through the prism of party politics far more than through the lens of academic analysis and reflection.

 Publicație : The Times

Dartmouth’s ‘cluster hiring’ move ‘key to attracting top scholars’

President says Ivy League institution is reaping reward of looking past academic silos and selecting staff on ability to tackle external challenge

No boundaries: ‘we’re organising the hire of staff around an external challenge’

A leading US university has credited its new strength in recruiting and retaining top scholars to a novel approach to hiring focused on selecting academics based on their ability to help solve a global problem, rather than their research specialism.

Philip Hanlon, president of Dartmouth College, said the institution’s “cluster hiring initiative” had helped it to hire, and hold on to, leading scholars in an increasingly competitive and global marketplace.

As part of the scheme, the private Ivy League research university has established 10 “cluster themes”, including the challenges and opportunities of globalisation, Arctic engineering in a period of climate change and next-level cybersecurity. Dartmouth’s goal is to recruit three new academics to work on each of the clusters, but Professor Hanlon said the university was not designating the department in which the scholar would be based.

“Historically, like most universities, when we set out to hire a faculty member, we did it by academic discipline. We said: ‘We want to hire a historian who studies the Civil War.’ With the cluster initiative, what we’re doing is hiring groups of faculty, but we’re organising the hire around some external challenge,” he told Times Higher Education.

The new interdisciplinary teams would both conduct research and teach courses “on this important world topic”, Professor Hanlon said, adding that each cluster was “in an area where we already have some faculty interest and strength”.

The programme was benefiting students, who were increasingly interested in “interdisciplinary majors” such as neuroscience, environmental studies and international relations, he continued.

Professor Hanlon said that the university had raised $150 million (£122 million) through philanthropy since 2014 to support the programme and that 24 of the 30 new academic positions were already “fully funded”. Of these 24 posts, Dartmouth has hired 13 new scholars, with a further two offers outstanding.

“We shot for very high quality so that the level of success is quite good,” he said. “We’ve been able to recruit some outstanding faculty from MIT and Northwestern against competing offers from Duke, Stanford and Columbia.”

The New Hampshire university has also increased its average faculty compensation over the past six years.

Professor Hanlon said that when he took over the institution in 2013, it was ranked 16th in the US on this measure and it is now ranked fifth, as a result of a “prioritisation and reallocation process” at the university.

As part of this process, Dartmouth has reduced annual growth in spending from 6.3 per cent to 1.7 per cent and brought down the rate at which tuition fees are rising to the lowest level since the 1950s, by cutting 200 full-time roles in the central administration, he said.

“We’ve tried not to in any way impinge on the student experience,” he said. “We’re trying to increase opportunities for undergraduate research, for studying abroad, for entrepreneurial activities.”

Publicație : The Times


Paul Seabright : « A Harvard, mieux vaut être riche, blanc et sportif »

L’économiste constate que les critères de recrutement de l’université privée Harvard, aux Etats-Unis, favorisent toujours les catégories favorisées.

Chronique. Le 1er octobre, une juge américaine a soutenu l’université Harvard contre des plaignants qui lui reprochaient d’utiliser des procédures discriminatoires – notamment contre les Américains d’origine asiatique – pour le recrutement de ses étudiants. La juge n’a pas défendu les procédures en question – bien au contraire, elle a reconnu qu’elles étaient « imparfaites », et qu’elles utilisaient des critères raciaux au service d’un objectif : augmenter la diversité du corps étudiant – mais que Harvard étant une université privée, ses procédures de recrutement n’avaient pas besoin d’être parfaites, mais d’être simplement conformes à la loi. Les plaignants ont fait appel.

Trois semaines auparavant, une étude utilisant les données rendues disponibles par le procès a été publiée par des chercheurs d’autres universités (« Legacy and Athlete Preferences at Harvard », Peter Arcidiaconio, Josh Kinsler et Tyler Ransom, Duke University et National Bureau of Economic Research, 11 septembre). Elle montre que 43 % des recrutés blancs tombent dans une des quatre catégories qui bénéficient d’un examen allégé du dossier de candidature : les sportifs de haut niveau, les enfants d’employés de Harvard, les enfants ou autres parents d’anciens, et ceux signalés par le doyen (typiquement parce que leurs parents sont donateurs de l’université).

Mais parmi les Afro-Américains et Américains d’origine asiatique et hispanique, seuls 16 % figurent dans ces catégories favorisées. Utilisant les données détaillées sur les dossiers de candidature pour construire un modèle du processus implicite de décision, les chercheurs estiment qu’environ les trois quarts des admis dans ces catégories n’auraient pas été admis s’ils n’y avaient pas figuré.

Catégories favorisées

Autrement dit, presque un tiers des étudiants actuels d’origine ethnique blanche n’auraient pas été recrutés si on leur avait appliqué les critères de mérite que Harvard prétend appliquer au reste du corps étudiant. Si le modèle des auteurs est valable, Harvard recruterait des proportions sensiblement plus élevées d’Afro-Américains et d’Américains d’origine asiatique et hispanique si les candidatures issues de ces quatre catégories privilégiées n’étaient pas favorisées. En particulier, les Américains d’origine asiatique auraient 9 % de plus d’étudiants admis si seulement les préférences pour les sportifs de haut niveau étaient éliminées.

Publicație : Le Monde