Trei studenti ai Universitatii "Alexandru Ioan Cuza" din Iasi, laureati ai unor premii si burse SPECIALE
Miercuri, 12 iunie 2019, la Universitatea "Alexandru Ioan Cuza" (UAIC) din Iasi, a avut loc premierea participantilor la concursul de eseuri din cadrul conferintei internationale "Integrated Systems of Long-term Care" (ISoLTC).
La eveniment au participat, alaturi de studentii premiati, prof. univ. dr. Mihaela Onofrei, prorector UAIC, ing. Lucian Bala, Directorul General al Companiei TZMO România, prof. univ. dr. Contiu Tiberiu Soitu, decanul Facultatii de Filosofie si Stiinte Social-Politice, Alina Albu, director de vânzari TZMO România si co-presedintele comitetului de organizare al ISoLTC si prof. univ. dr. Daniela Soitu.
"E un eveniment fericit, într-o perioada aglomerata pentru comunitatea noastra academica. Suntem onorati ca mediul de afaceri este tot mai prezent în viata Universitatii, în ultimii ani am reusit sa modernizam 14 spatii de învatamânt cu ajutorul companiilor. Bursele care vin din mediul privat înseamna mult pentru noi, întrucât sunt complementare cu cele pe care le poate acorda Universitatea. De multe ori, sectorul public se inspira din cel privat, ne dorim sa preluam cât mai multe bune practici din managementul specific companiilor. Felicitari tuturor studentilor premiati astazi si mult succes în sesiune si în tot ce va propuneti mai departe", a transmis prof. univ. dr. Mihaela Onofrei, prorector Universitatea "Cuza".
În valoare de 6.240 de lei fiecare, cele trei burse au fost obtinute de Maria Boboc, Claudia Boiciuc si Viorel Valache, toti trei fiind studenti la Facultatea de Filosofie si Stiinte Social-Politice a UAIC. Premiile recompenseaza implicarea studentilor în realizarea de eseuri pe tema "Caminul pentru vârstnici nu este un hotel". Alti 16 participanti au primit premii speciale si tichete valorice pentru calitatea eseurilor transmise în aceasta competitie.
"Cu siguranta ca si mediul de afaceri are multe de învatat de la cel academic. Acum trei ani am demarat un parteneriat ambitios si am reusit sa implementam proiecte relevante si sa construim o alternativa la situatia actuala a serviciilor de îngrijire pentru vârstnici. Va multumesc ca v-ati alocat timp pentru întâlnirea de astazi si sper sa continuam colaboarea", a transmis ing. Lucian Bala, Directorul General al Companiei TZMO România.
Desfasurata în perioada 9-10 mai 2019, la Facultatea de Sociologie si Asistenta Sociala a Universitatii din Bucuresti, conferinta "Integrated Systems of Long-term Care" (ISoLTC) este cel mai însemnat eveniment anual dedicat îngrijirii pe termen îndelungat din România. Universitatea "Cuza" din Iasi, prin Facultatea de Filosofie si Stiinte Social-Politice, este co-organizator, împreuna cu TZMO România, al ultimelor trei editii ale ISoLTC. Invitatii si participantii sunt cercetatori, practicieni, directori de institutii de îngrijire, profesori si studenti, specialisti din ministere si alte organizatii publice ori private, din state europene, dar si din Statele Unite ale Americii, India, Rusia sau Japonia.
Publicație : Bună Ziua Iași
Students support disclosure of mental illness to parents
Two-thirds say problems should be revealed in extreme circumstances, research finds
Two-thirds of students think mental health problems should be disclosed to their parents or guardians in “extreme circumstances”, according to research.
The yearly Student Academic Experience Survey, conducted by Advance HE and the Higher Education Policy Institute, asked students about mental health problems for the first time this year.
The survey of more than 14,000 full-time undergraduate students found that 66% supported telling someone’s parent or guardian about their mental health issues “under extreme circumstances”, while a further 15% supported it “under any circumstances”.
The survey found that students were significantly more anxious than other young people. Just 16% reported feeling “low anxiety”, compared with 37% for all those aged 20 to 24.
James Murray, the father of a student who killed himself, called last year for the relaxation of data protection rules that deter universities from alerting parents that their child has serious mental health problems. His son Ben Murray, 19, who was studying English at Bristol University, died in May 2018.
The then higher education minister, Sam Gyimah, proposed in response that students arriving at university could be asked to opt in to a system that would allow a family member or friend to be contacted if they developed serious mental health problems – something that has now been introduced at Bristol University.
Alison Johns, the chief executive of Advance HE, said: “Student wellbeing remains a huge concern, and if a green light were needed for changes to allow universities to contact parents and guardians where an individual may have mental health problems, we have a very strong signal here in support of that change.”
The survey also found that 41% of students perceived “good” or “very good” value from their course – the second consecutive year with a three percentage point improvement. Twenty-nine percent of students perceived “poor” or “very poor” value, a drop of three percentage points since last year and five points since 2017.
For those who thought they were receiving good value from their course, teaching quality was the main reason cited (64%), whereas tuition fees were the main reason cited by students who thought they were receiving poorer value (62%).
The study detected small changes to average contact hours and workload. Since 2015, there has been a decline in independent study from 15.2 hours a week to 13.8, and an increase in timetabled contact hours from 13.4 to 13.9 hours.
Johns said the findings pointed to an emerging trend in students’ positive perceptions of value for money, which was “welcome and encouraging”. “It’s particularly pleasing to see teaching at the core of this improvement, and it also reflects good leadership and sound governance which Advance HE is committed to supporting,” she said.
Nicola Dandridge, the chief executive of the Office for Students, said the survey painted a mixed picture. “It is positive that the proportion of students who believe their course offers value for money has increased for a second year.
“However, with fewer than half agreeing their course is good value, there is clearly more to do for universities to understand and act upon what constitutes value for money in higher education.”
Publicație : The Guardian
Universities must embrace technological solutions to climate change
Gradual changes to lifestyles will not save the planet. Universities need to go beyond Cambridge's recent lead and think bigger, says Peter Harper
The University of Cambridge’s recent headline-grabbing announcement of a new research lab to develop radical scientific solutions to climate change is a welcome development. But it is only the beginning of what is needed.
Everyone knows that our responses to climate change must be speeded up. Generations of propaganda from the green movement have argued that the answer must lie in better personal behaviour: more bikes and plastic recycling, thick sweaters, holidays close to home. But while personal change is admirable, it is slow. The situation now demands very rapid, mostly technological, top-down changes.
It is similar to the difference between routine healthy living and emergency medicine. They are both useful, but healthy living will not fix a broken leg. We now need emergency climate measures.
Three types of processes are required on a large, corporate scale. All sectors must improve efficiency and reduce their emissions, largely through reducing demand for energy. Energy supply must switch comprehensively from fossil fuels to zero-carbon sources. And we need to maximise negative-carbon processes.
These three items are hardly surprising, but need to happen very quickly indeed. It is striking that, on the whole, they are background engineering processes that do not affect everyday life. Still, there are vested interests that will work vigorously to prevent such developments, and ordinary citizens will feel the impact through taxes and prices. It will not happen without a determined effort.
The problem is how the process gets initiated. Currently there is something of a logjam. Government, business and civil sectors all have reasons to keep their heads down and confine themselves to small, cosmetic changes; there are very large “stranded assets” at risk from the necessary changes. Meanwhile, the emissions mount and the threats multiply.
There is, however, one sector with more freedom of movement: higher education. Universities can teach any material they wish, provided they have students willing to learn it. With respect to research, they are more constrained by established patterns of funding, but would be in a good position to push for rapid evolution of research policy. This is the kind of thing that governments could easily and cheaply respond to, while claiming credit for “doing something”.
In the case of the UK, for instance, it is not too big a stretch to envisage an entirely new research council dedicated entirely to the needs of a rapid decarbonisation programme. This would coordinate relatively pure research with extremely vigorous learning-by-doing within the appropriate industrial sectors; universities and the business sector would have to work hand-in-hand.
Specialist universities are a common phenomenon in many countries, and the situation surely demands the creation of specialist climate change universities. There are already many research centres doing crucial work on the topic, but, like Cambridge’s new centre, they do not teach. It would be appropriate, given the severity and urgency of the situation, for forward-thinking universities to establish dedicated new faculties that will initiate both teaching and research programmes.
Teaching is probably easiest. A university might cut its teeth in this area by immediately offering a taught postgraduate course while it plans a series of undergraduate degrees in various aspects of the problem. It is an excellent topic for a modern interdisciplinary degree: visiting all the science, technology, engineering and mathematics subjects, with endless quantitative problems to solve, while reaching into economics, politics and the social sciences. There would be no problems with take-up: every idealistic young student would want to be part of it.
Funding might be problematic at first but, as Cambridge’s example shows, universities generally have money for new, potentially profitable initiatives. Alternatively, such programmes could be crowd- or donor-funded. There would be early mover advantage for the universities quickest off the mark.
Of course, universities are famously conservative, and many will find that their internal structures preclude such initiatives. Paradoxically, though, perhaps the biggest blockages will be from the traditional green thinking that eschews technical fixes. This is strongly represented in academic communities that regard sustainable development in terms of full-spectrum improvements in the quality of life. They will not like it!
Universities that go beyond Cambridge’s lead will encounter a great deal of opposition both from outside and in, yet they have the data to back up their proposals and the social prestige to be listened to, by government, business, media and the electorate. They can provide cover for all manner of new initiatives that might have been considered too speculative or controversial hitherto.
Then, the great corporate forces will need to be engaged, guided by governments newly confident that the public is behind them. That support will only increase as the public sees that the solutions to climate change are really not so bad after all. The logjam will be broken – and the environment will heave a sigh of relief.
Publicație : The Times
Is the Haldane Principle obsolete?
Last year’s scandal over the ministerial vetoing of Australian research grants coincided with the centenary of the fabled principle that politicians should keep out of such decisions. But with governments becoming increasingly ideological and desperate for innovation-fuelled growth, does scientific autonomy have a future? Rachael Pells investigates
In 1918, in the dying days of the First World War, a philosophically minded former war secretary and Lord Chancellor by the name of Richard Burdon Haldane chaired a UK government task force called the Machinery of Government Committee. The resulting report recommended that while politicians should have some oversight regarding the general direction of the spending of research funding, decisions on precisely what and who to fund should be left to the scientific community.
At least, that is how the story goes. In fact, the King’s College London historian David Edgerton points out that the so-called Haldane Principle was not actually mentioned in the report. Something resembling the modern understanding of the principle was misattributed to him in 1964 by another Conservative lawyer, the former science minister Lord Hailsham, in opposition to the new Labour government’s introduction of a Ministry of Technology.
But, whatever its precise origin, and however imprecise its definition, the Haldane Principle has long enjoyed an iconic status among science policy experts, as attested to by the considerable coverage given to its supposed centenary last year – and not merely in the UK. The principle is brandished by scientists whenever they consider politicians to be getting too directive in their aspirations for the national science base – and even if they don’t retreat, politicians will typically feel the need to engage in enough semantic dodging and weaving to make a case that they aren’t actually in breach of the principle after all.
Nevertheless, in an age when governments across the globe are looking to science to fuel their knowledge economies and plug them into the so-called fourth industrial revolution of automation and artificial intelligence, the temptation for politicians to micromanage science and innovation is arguably as strong as it has ever been.
“I really think Haldane is dead – literally and figuratively,” says Philip Moriarty, professor of physics at the University of Nottingham. “The idea of government being kept at arm’s length from academia is just nonsense…Guidance from on high is trotted out with great regularity as a get-out-of-jail-free card by politicians with hollow promises.”
One particular flashpoint over recent years has been the impact agenda. When the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, in common with other UK research councils, started about 10 years ago to ask grant applicants to predict the real-world applications that their research would have, Moriarty’s became one of the loudest voices in opposition. The protesters complained that it was paradoxical to specify in advance what open-ended research would lead to, and accused the research councils of compromising science in order to pander to politicians’ desire for short-term returns on research spending. But the councils remained steadfast, insisting that they only wanted to see evidence that applicants had thought about the potential of their work and how it might be realised.
“I’m not naive – I understand the motives, and the reasons why,” Moriarty says, a decade on. “[UK] investment from industry in R&D was nowhere near as good as [in other countries], so universities have been made to pick up the slack and we are increasingly encouraged to seek investment from industry. But the upshot is that it is so much harder to get funding for basic research projects than it was 20 years ago. The balance has shifted completely.”
Over time, however, Moriarty’s views on impact have mellowed, and he admits to some sympathy with research councils obliged to find “a compromise between academic and political interests”.
“I do think they are doing well for it,” he concedes, “But the reality is that big grants get funded despite the system not because of the system. I baulk at the idea we should always have to think of impact statements in drafting a proposal...You shouldn’t be biasing your outcomes.”
The EPSRC went on to further Haldane-related controversy when it sought in 2011 to begin “shaping capability” in UK physical science by growing or contracting the amount of funding it made available to each subdiscipline based on an assessment of its strength, current capacity and an assessment of its “national importance”. But the irony of irate synthetic organic chemists (whose discipline was slated to shrink) lobbying the then minister for science and universities, David Willetts, for a change of heart was not lost on a politician who often publicly patted himself on the back for abiding by the Haldane Principle (the scientists argued that they weren't asking him to breach the Haldane Principle because EPSRC policies were determined by “civil servants in Swindon” rather than scientists).
Willetts’ successor, Jo Johnson, took up the baton, even going so far as to enshrine the Haldane Principle in law, making the UK the first country to do so. This came within the wider context of an industrial strategy that pledged significant boosts to R&D spending and the semi-merging of the research councils under a new overarching body, UK Research and Innovation, that many researchers feared would be an instrument of political influence (see box).
However, Johnson did not always receive the plaudits for his move that he might have anticipated, with critics arguing that university autonomy was already protected by historic royal charters. In a blogpost written at the time, Richard Jones, professor of physics and pro vice-chancellor for research and innovation at the University of Sheffield, noted that the proposed legislation establishing UKRI – now passed into law – says that “the Secretary of State may give UKRI directions about the allocation or expenditure by UKRI of grants received”.
Jones tells Times Higher Education that while he supports the Haldane Principle, there “needs to be greater clarity on what it actually stands for”. His blog noted that one interpretation would have it that science “should not be subject to any external steering at all, and should be configured to maximise, above all, scientific excellence”. But both he and Willetts agree that if scientists were left completely to their own devices, the focus of research would be very much imbalanced in terms of what gets funded – and where.
“Governments have a right – and more than that, a duty – to direct public funding towards areas of research that need focus, such as clean energy,” Jones says in his blog. And, speaking to Times Higher Education, Willetts cites UKRI’s Strength in Places Fund as an example of a legitimate means by which politicians can ensure that research spending is spread around the nation. According to UKRI, the fund is targeted towards “excellent research and high-quality innovation” that promises to have “a significant impact locally that closes the gap between that region and the best nationally”.
This approach reflects a view of Haldane as stipulating that, as Jones’ blog puts it, “at the micro-level of individual research proposals, decisions should be left to peer review, but…larger scale, strategic decisions can and should be subject to political control. Of course, in this interpretation, where the line of demarcation between strategic decisions and individual research proposals falls is crucial and contested.”
Willetts agrees that the definition of Haldane becomes “fuzzy when you come to the organisation of bigger projects”. But, for Jones, the main problem is that strategic decision-making in the UK is not transparent. “It ought to be a process that is inclusive, with voices from all sorts of organisations which [have] a vested interest – charities, NGOs and so on,” he says, adding that this was part of the promised ideal with the creation of UKRI. “But I am not convinced we have got it right yet – I certainly don’t understand how decisions are made.”
Wherever the precise line is drawn by Haldane on political interference, most observers agree that it was crossed by former Australian education secretary Simon Birmingham last year, when he secretly blocked the allocation of A$4.2 million (£2.3 million) by the Australian Research Council, overturning its funding decisions on 11 humanities projects. This incident, unearthed last year by THE, was a break with established protocol whereby Australian education ministers automatically agree to funding decisions made by funding bodies.
For Willetts, the episode provides a “clear warning” over what can happen when government intervention goes too far, and it makes the case for enshrining the Haldane Principle in law.
The principle “has become fundamental to the way in which we go about distribution of funding in the UK”, he says. "It certainly means ministers do not and cannot interfere. It would have been [impossible] to imagine what happened in Australia happening [in the UK] – though I am mindful that we must not become complacent.”
His view is echoed by Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg, a researcher development manager at the University of Sydney. However, the applied ethnomusicologist, who recently moved back to Australia after years working in the UK, notes that the autonomy offered by Haldane comes at the cost of additional bureaucracy to ensure that funds are being wisely spent. Most significant among the resulting mechanisms in the UK is the research excellence framework: a “mammoth, highly politicised” undertaking in comparison with its Australian cousin, Excellence in Research for Australia.
Enshrining Haldane in Australian law, she says, would require the nation to “implement policies, strategies and bureaucratic institutions”, which would entail significant and time-consuming “upheaval, consultation and bureaucracy”. For instance, “the ARC and National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) would need to be managed by another, overarching organisation…policies and procedures would need to be much more aligned with other funding bodies, such as the Medical Research Future Fund, which are rather opaque in their application processes”. It would, in short, be “a huge undertaking”.
This perhaps explains that while Birmingham’s blatant interference in funding decisions “outraged arts, humanities and social sciences academics”, it “has not left people [in Australia] pining for Haldane”, according to Swijghuisen Reigersberg.
Nor is legislation on the cards elsewhere in the world. But that isn’t to say that the Haldane Principle has no traction there. East Asia is often perceived to be the region with the closest government direction of research: a condition of its rapid development in the post-war period. Singapore is a case in point. But while “nobody in Singapore will likely have heard of Haldane”, according to Barry Halliwell, a British biochemist who has spent the past 20 years working at the National University of Singapore, “if you asked them they would agree with the principle entirely”.
Singapore’s close historical ties to the UK and Europe mean that universities and ministers employ similar models of working, explains Halliwell, Tan Chin Tuan centennial professor of biochemistry and a senior adviser on academic appointments and research excellence to the university’s deputy president. “Academics [in Singapore] have freedom to do pretty much what they want, provided they can get the funding for it. There is a strong peer review element for research proposals, and the idea is that universities do more of the basic research and industry leads more of the applied research strategies.”
That balance has shifted recently, however. With no natural resources to trade on, Singapore faces particularly acute pressure to perform as a knowledge economy. Under its Research, Innovation, Enterprise 2020 strategic plan, published in 2016, the government has nominated various grand challenges and implemented some policy-led funds, in order, as the document puts it, “to allow greater flexibility in reprioritising funding towards areas of new economic opportunities and national needs as they arise over the next five years”.
This has prompted fears that research funding is tipping in favour of applied research. However, “in such a small country, there is a strong feedback loop”, Halliwell notes, and he was one of numerous academics to articulate the view to government that “universities were drifting away from basic research at their peril”. Strikingly, the politicians listened, and Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, made a speech earlier this year emphasising the importance of basic research.
Another Singaporean advantage, Halliwell adds, is the flexible nature of its research funding directives. “How much money goes towards which grants [is determined] in five-year cycles,” he explains. “The system is not rigid; experts are at the heart of decision-making and they have been known to make changes mid-cycle according to the demands of the community.”
Flexibility is enhanced by the fact that much of the research undertaken by universities is not publicly funded, but comes, instead, from the interest earned on the considerable endowments accrued by Singapore’s two main universities through donations from wealthy Singaporeans.
But the situation is very different in South Korea, where the government still maintains tight control of the research funding system. Last year, the country was reported to have the highest R&D spend to GDP ratio in the world, at 4.55 per cent, with a total budget of 78.8 trillion Korean won (£52.3 billion). But a significant proportion of that spending is dedicated to national development projects. According to Chang Kim, director of the Korean Association of Human Resource Development, the research budget for open call projects amounts to less than 10 per cent of the total.
Most of the publicly funded projects are run on a contract-style arrangement whereby researchers are actively recruited by the National Foundation of Korea to fulfil set goals. But even for non-directive projects, applicants must explain the national worth of their proposal, Kim explains, and receive a higher evaluation if it promises economic or industrial returns. “As a result, researchers are forced to concentrate primarily on research that can yield short-term results,” says Kim.
But rather than being a conscious clamping down on creative-led research, Kim suggests that “bureaucracy” is to blame here. “This is a problem that occurs when there are more ‘referees’ than ‘players’ in the field,” he says. But in recent years, campaigners have petitioned the government in the hope of expanding support for basic research, citing the UK’s Haldane Principle as an ideal.
“Many experts point out the fact that most research funding budgets are overly focused on large national research projects,” he tells THE. “Experts worry that if this phenomenon continues, the basic science ecosystem of South Korea will collapse. In this context, they argue that institutional arrangements are needed to enable researchers to carry out creative research without any government intervention”.
Kim believes that in a more “bottom-up funding system”, over which researchers had more control, “the autonomy and motivation of the researchers would naturally increase”.
Meanwhile, in the US, top scientists are charged with making funding decisions – but each decision must ultimately be signed off by both president and Congress, which presents problems when disagreements arise.
Politicians often have “an aversion to basic research”, according to John Holdren, reflecting on his time as Barack Obama’s chief scientific adviser. “The first problem is that a lot of people don’t understand that basic research is the seed corn to applied [research]. They want to argue that the National Science Foundation should only be funding research that has an immediate, tangible effect on the economy,” says Holdren, who is now Teresa and John Heinz professor of environmental policy at Harvard University.
That perception is one reason why, in 2016, the House of Representatives passed legislation dictating that NSF grants must be awarded only to projects seen to be in the “national interest”. Another reason is Republican antipathy to social science in particular. In 2013, for instance, the then chair of the House Science Committee, Lamar Smith, drafted legislation requiring the NSF to certify that every grant it awards advances health, prosperity, welfare or national defence. Smith also wrote to the NSF’s acting director demanding to see the internal reviews of five social science grant applications that he deemed of “questionable” value. The agency refused the unprecedented request.
Earlier that same year, House majority leader Eric Cantor successfully amended a spending bill to temporarily prohibit the NSF from funding political science unless it promoted US national security or “economic interests”. Cantor argued that it would be better for the NSF to focus on the natural sciences “to better focus scarce basic research dollars on the important scientific endeavours that can expand our knowledge of true science”. He also objected to several specific funded projects, such as one into why white working-class Americans vote for Republicans despite their espousal of economic policies that favour the wealthy.
Right-wing politicians' hostility to social science is not confined to the US, of course. Hungary's right-wing populist government recently banned the teaching of gender studies, for instance. It has also taken over the Hungarian Academy of Science's former role of financing research institutions, which critics fear could see funding for basic research slashed. In a February statement condemning the move, Academia Europa, the Pan-European academy, specifically called on the Hungarian government to "respect the Haldane principle of science funding adopted by most European governments (decision on science funding can only be made by researchers and not policy-makers)".
Back in the US, Obama pledged in a speech to protect “our rigorous peer-review system” to ensure that research “does not fall victim to political manoeuvres or agendas” that could damage “the integrity of the scientific process”. However, he added that it was important that “we only fund proposals that promise the biggest bang for taxpayer dollars”.
Although the end of the congressional session prevented the House bill from being taken up in the Senate, Holdren says that US scientists increasingly find themselves having to look for alternative sources of funding for basic research or projects on “unapproved” subjects seen as controversial by those in power. Examples include stem cell research, whose public funding was restricted by George W. Bush’s administration, and research into gun violence, whose funding had been severely restricted since 1996, before, in the wake of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, Obama directed the National Institutes of Health to fund it (a programme that has now ended).
Moreover, Holdren adds, politicians’ decision to constrain research funding “lends itself to a degree of conservatism and cautiousness” within the peer review process itself. In a cash-starved environment, “reviewers have to have confidence that proposals will bear fruit, and that’s when you stop funding high risk, high return endeavours,” he says.
“Obama aspired to increase R&D spend to 3 per cent of GDP – with at least 1 per cent coming from public funding and the rest boosted through incentives for industry,” Holdren recalls. But while the administration “got a good start”, the House imposed a budget cap preventing the total federal spend from exceeding the existing budget.
That incentives were needed to boost industry spending is telling. Many observers believe that the perceived political push for research that yields predictable medium-term returns is bound up with the failure of many companies within the knowledge economy to invest enough of their own money in the research needed to keep them and their nations at the forefront of innovation – requiring the public sector to take up the slack.
For Nottingham’s Moriarty, “the private sector should be encouraged to dip its hand in its pocket a bit more”. And he urges governments to "trust scientists to do their jobs and trust industry to do theirs. True innovation does not come off the back of strict impact agendas.”
But he concedes that “some degree of impact must be shown” by university researchers; there should, in his view, be a “spectrum” of funding sources, with impact seen as a greater obligation for those signing up to do applied research.
However old the Haldane Principle might be, and whatever its precise meaning is understood to be, it is clear that it is not going to shield science from an obligation to forge prosperity from what, a year before Lord Hailsham's first mention of it, Labour prime minister Harold Wilson famously called "the white heat of technology". "Unless we can harness science to our economic planning," Wilson told Labour's annual conference, "we are not going to get the expansion we need."
And Jones, too, warns researchers not to use the Haldane Principle as an excuse to avoid seeking the application of their work. “Academia does need to accept the role of science,” he says. “The money does come from taxpayers. You do have a responsibility. We do need to think hard about translation of research and the motivation behind these goals.”
A fine balance: Futureproofing scientific autonomy
The Haldane Principle was enshrined in UK law in the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, which also established UK Research and Innovation. Although the act’s architect, Jo Johnson, was sacked from his position as minister for universities, science, research and innovation a few months after it was passed, Johnson defends the inclusion of Haldane in the legislation as a “protective mechanism” for scientists. That was particularly necessary given the impending publication of an ambitious industrial strategy White Paper pledging to increase productivity by raising the UK’s investment in R&D to 2.7 per cent of GDP by 2027, ultimately rising to 3 per cent.
“There was a lot of concern at the time that, given that the coming research bill would inform funding decisions for research councils in the future, if Haldane was not written into the legislation then power might be lost for UK scientists,” Johnson tells THE. “The last thing I wanted to do was to direct funding according to the latest Number 10 fad. From my point of view, this legislation was something I hope would prevent what we were beginning to see as a gradual erosion of the Haldane Principle.”
Johnson’s predecessor, David Willetts, had been criticised by some Haldane purists for announcing in 2013 that research capital funding should be concentrated on “eight great technologies”, while former chancellor George Osborne received flak for announcing a string of new research institutes concentrated on specific funding areas, such as graphene and data science. Concerns were also raised when Osborne announced in 2015 that the UK research budget would be expanded significantly with money from the Department for International Development, which, legally, had to be spent on foreign aid.
For Johnson, “the very notion of the industrial strategy” was something he “did not feel convinced by. I was concerned it was going to be nothing more than ministerial strategy playing to industrial projects. My concern was that ministers were simply not going to make that kind of [investment] without a compromise to the scientific research community.”
Asked whether he believes the current balance is right between directive and curiosity-driven research, Johnson says he “strongly believe[s] that any direction of research to meet policy aims risks destroying the value of science”. In his view, “the smartest thing to do is to get the largest possible amount of money and leave it to the good judgement of the research system. It is not the role of government to dictate what happens to that money.”
While he acknowledges it may be “too early to tell” whether his enshrinement of the Haldane Principle in law has been a success, Johnson dismisses any suggestion that he would have been better to rely on the existing royal charters to protect university autonomy as “complete bollocks”.
Publicație : The Times
More UK students see university as good value for money
Hepi/Advance HE annual survey finds improvements, but lower perceived learning gain on some courses will be scrutinised in post-Augar era
The proportion of UK undergraduates who perceive their course as “good” value for money has risen for the second year in a row after years of decline – however, variations in perceived learning gain between different courses could add weight to the English post-18 education review’s call to shift funding away from “low value” degrees.
The 2019 Higher Education Policy Institute/Advance HE Student Academic Survey found that the percentage of UK students who felt that their course was “good” or “very good” value for money was 41 per cent, up from 38 per cent in the previous year, and 34 per cent the year before.
The annual survey of more than 14,000 students had shown a consistent decrease in perceptions of value for money since 2012 – from a high of 53 per cent – the year £9,000 fees were introduced in England.
This year, the number of students who said they felt that their course was “poor” or “very poor” value for money fell to 29 per cent, from 32 per cent last year and from a high of 34 per cent in 2017. In 2012, the percentage of students who felt that their course was poor value for money was 18 per cent.
The boost to value for money perceptions found in this year’s survey came alongside perceived improvements in teaching quality and assessment. Of the eight aspects of teaching quality the survey asked about, six showed improvement on last year, including on whether “teaching staff used contact hours to guide independent study” (59 per cent of students agreed, up from 57 per 0cent last year), and whether “teaching staff clearly explained course goals and requirements” (67 per cent agreed, up from 65 per cent).
Students also told the survey that feedback on assessments was improving: approval for general feedback on progress was up to 46 per cent, from 41 per cent the previous year, while approval for commenting on draft work was up to 39 per cent from 35 per cent.
The findings might be significant in the context of the recent report from the independent panel, led by Philip Augar, of the government’s post-18 education review, which calls for tuition fees to be cut to £7,500 but for full replacement direct funding to be shifted on a subject basis to “reflect more accurately the subject’s reasonable costs and its social and economic value to students and taxpayers”.
The majority – 64 per cent – of students in the survey felt that they had “learned a lot”, and just 6 per cent felt that they had learned not much or nothing. However, there were variations between subjects in terms of student perceptions about how much they had learned.
Students on subjects that typically have a high workload were the most likely to feel that they had “learned a lot”: 80 per cent of medicine and dentistry students felt that they had done so, followed by veterinary subjects and other subjects allied to medicine. However, languages, both European and non-European, scored highly for learning gain and are subjects that typically have a lower workload.
Students on business and administrative subjects were the least likely to feel that they had “learned a lot” – about 50 per cent – followed by mass communication and documentation students and those studying social sciences. This appears to suggest that for some, “their courses may not always be stretching their knowledge significantly beyond what they already feel they knew”, according to the report.
Nick Hillman, director of Hepi, said the survey appeared to reflect the fact that universities “are giving more thought to the overall student experience than at any point in living memory, and that’s fantastic”.
However, he added that tuition fees had barely risen since 2012. “It might be that £9,250 is not as much in 2019 as £9,000 was in 2012. But, if anything, universities are doing more for less.”
Mr Hillman said that the differences of perceived learning gain and workload found between subjects in the survey would “certainly be relevant” to the Augar recommendations. “Everyone in the sector takes issue with the different ways of valuing courses – such as job earnings, contact hours or TEF – but unless we think every single course at every single university is absolutely brilliant, and I don’t, we have to have our own measures of what a ‘low value’ course is,” he said. “Our survey results feed into that debate, which we have to be part of, or things we don’t like will be done without our input.”
Students in England drove the overall increase, with perceptions of good value for money rising from 35 per cent to 39 per cent this year, although there were also smaller increases on this among students in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
The one group to show a decline in perceptions of value for money this year were students from other European Union countries, down from 47 per cent to 44 per cent. This could raise concerns around “how the UK university experience is viewed as Brexit continues to dominate the news agenda”, according to the survey.
The data also showed that black and minority ethnic students continue to perceive lower rates of value for money than their white peers. BME students are also less likely to feel that they have “learned a lot”, to have had a better experience than they expected or to be satisfied with access to teaching staff, the survey showed.
Among students who said their experience surpassed their expectations, the most common reason – cited by 59 per cent – was the “right level of challenge”. Whereas among students who reported a worse experience than expected, 35 per cent blame themselves for not putting in enough effort, an increase from 30 per cent last year. This rises to 42 per cent among BME students.
Jonathan Neves, head of business intelligence and surveys at Advance HE, said it was interesting that students were self-aware enough to recognise the effort they needed to put in. However, “it’s a concern that BME students are particularly blaming themselves. There’s something more complicated going on there…the BME experience is a much less positive part of the study,” he added.
Publicație : The Times
Drive for working-class vote could push next PM to change HE stance
Change in Tory electoral strategy already leads some in party to prioritise FE and oppose university expansion, policy experts suggest
The Conservatives’ move towards courting non-graduate voters in the UK, partly prompted by Brexit, could drive the next prime minister to prioritise further education and skills above higher education, experts have suggested.
The winner of the Tory leadership race, along with the chancellor they appoint, will determine the government’s response to the Augar review of English post-18 education. But more widely, their attitudes on further and higher education policy may be driven by shifts in electoral strategy.
Ryan Shorthouse, chief executive of the liberal conservative thinktank Bright Blue, said that there was “a split in the Conservative movement between those who feel that too many people go to university” and those who support expansion.
One key recent factor in this, he said, had been the Conservative strategy to court working-class voters in areas that voted to leave the European Union. This strategy was set in motion by Nick Timothy, Theresa May’s former adviser, at the 2017 election and sought “to use Brexit as a way of winning over working-class voters”, Mr Shorthouse said.
Many of those voters, or their children, “will be going into FE and apprenticeships”, he added.
“For that reason there is a body of Conservatives who feel that there are too many people going to university, it should be restricted in some way and we should be putting much more investment into FE and apprenticeships,” Mr Shorthouse said.
The attempt to introduce a restriction on the numbers entering universities via a minimum grade threshold for loan access – which some on the Augar panel wanted to recommend, but which was successfully opposed by the pro-expansion universities minister Chris Skidmore – was a skirmish in this Tory “civil war” over higher education expansion.
In this context, Theresa May’s move to seek a shift of emphasis from higher education to further and vocational education through the post-18 review looks less like a sudden conversion and more like political strategy. Further education funding has been slashed by Tory and Tory-led administrations since 2010.
Mr Shorthouse said of the leadership contenders: “People like Michael Gove are probably more in that David Willetts [the former universities minister] camp of ‘let’s get more people going to university’ and [he] is probably quite sceptical of the Augar review. Whereas you might see people like Dominic Raab taking the other school of thought [and saying] ‘we need to be focusing much more on FE and apprenticeships’.”
Sajid Javid, the home secretary and leadership contender, has announced a “national skills service” plan as one of his campaign pledges.
If the shift in Tory electoral strategy away from metropolitan graduates and future graduates were to continue under the new leader, the next government may be less likely to prioritise the protection of university funding.
Many academics argue that levels of education – the divide between socially liberal graduates and socially conservative non-graduates – should be understood alongside age as the essential factor determining likelihood of support for Remain or Leave in the UK’s Brexit referendum.
With Labour pursuing a policy to abolish university tuition fees as the Conservatives eye a shift towards prioritising further and vocational education, this divide could feed through into general election strategy – and into education policymaking.
Publicație : The Times
Australian universities struggle to cover domestic teaching costs
Narrowing financial buffers raise questions over Australian universities’ goals of being comprehensive
Teaching Australian students is becoming an increasingly marginal proposition for many of the country’s universities as stuttering domestic income fails to keep pace with soaring costs.
Newly released financial statements suggest that many universities are battling to make ends meet, with teaching expenses mounting more quickly than government grants or income from domestic students’ tuition fees.
The situation is worst at regional institutions – notwithstanding the federal government’s focus on improving educational opportunities outside the major cities – because they struggle to top up their income from fee-paying foreigners and because their relatively high levels of part-time study and student attrition add to costs.
Annual reports for 2018 have now been released by 32 of Australia’s 38 public universities, including the 10 regionally based institutions in New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland. Two recorded deficits – including the University of New England, which parlayed a A$9.3 million (£5.1 million) surplus in 2017 into a A$23.3 million shortfall last year – while two other regionally based institutions recorded wafer-thin surpluses of less than A$500,000.
The University of New England said its deficit had been driven largely by “one-off costs” caused by a payroll tax change and the transfer of one of its campuses. It said its teaching costs had been temporarily inflated by the tax increase and by investments “to improve our financial sustainability in the long term” by improving its online offerings.
But it noted that the financial impact of the 2017 capping of teaching grants had been “significant”, with income from these grants declining in real terms – despite a small rise in domestic student numbers – because they had not been indexed to compensate for inflation.
While four non-metropolitan universities managed to convert deficits in 2017 into surpluses last year, in some cases by ramping up international recruitment, the average operating margin across the 10 regionally based institutions plunged from 3.5 per cent to 1.4 per cent.
Former Australian National University economics dean Keith Houghton said scale was a problem for some regional universities. “It’s a challenge if you’re under the threshold of economies of scale and you try to be comprehensive,” said Professor Houghton, chief academic strategist with the consultants Higher Education and Research Group.
He said some specialist UK institutions were “extraordinarily efficient” despite being small, but almost all Australian universities strove to be comprehensive.
University annual reports show that operating results declined in four of the seven public universities in Queensland, three of the four in Western Australia, four of the nine in Victoria and eight of the 10 in New South Wales.
Collectively, New South Wales universities netted about A$325 million less in 2018 than they had in 2017. The financial performance of universities declined by about A$240 million in Victoria, A$100 million in Western Australia and A$70 million in Queensland.
Publicație : The Times
European scientists must defend European values
Brexit or no Brexit, scientists across the continent have an obligation to keep standing up for ideals such as integrity, trust and cooperation, writes the European Union’s former director-general of research, Robert-Jan Smits
The heart of the European project is not its internal market or its competition or trade policy. Nor is it the monetary union or the Common Agricultural Policy. It is the set of values on which the member states have agreed: respect for human dignity and human rights, freedom, democracy, equality and the rule of law.
These values are enshrined in Article 2 of the European Treaty and were inspired by the atrocities of the Second World War. But Article 2 says more. It talks about these values “in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men prevail”.
Upholding these values has never previously been a big issue. They have mainly featured in the accession criteria for new member states and in EU external policies towards countries such as Turkey, Russia and China. But, today, the situation is different. In Poland, the independence of the judiciary is endangered. In Hungary, the lives of civil society organisations and universities – in particular, the Central European University and the Academy of Sciences – are being made difficult. And journalists have been killed in Malta, Bulgaria and Slovakia – indeed, Slovakia’s former prime minister also said that there was no place in his country for Muslim refugees.
Carnegie Europe’s 2017 report, “Defending EU Values in Poland and Hungary”, is right to say that “countries, like individuals, can trust each other only if they share values of democracy and rights, because these define acceptable behaviour between stakeholders. If that trust disappears, cooperation stops and integration unravels.” Add Brexit and the rise of anti-EU political parties across the continent and you have a recipe for considerable unravelling.
In such circumstances, I believe that the scientific community across Europe has a special responsibility to speak up and show that we still believe in our European values. Indeed, science cannot flourish without them. Take integrity. Let’s make it clear that we apply the highest standards of integrity and ethics and are ruthless towards scientific misconduct.
In 2017, at my request, ALLEA, the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities, updated and modernised the European Code on Research Integrity, inserting new notions such as data integrity. With so much researcher mobility between nations, it would make a lot of sense if all European nations adopted it.
Just establishing rules is, however, not enough. They need to be embedded in the science community and monitored. Too often in the past, the responsibility for scientific misconduct was put on the individual researcher. The European Commission is right to increasingly insist that host institutions also accept some responsibility. It was also right, last year, to re-establish the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies: a body of 15 ethics experts to advise it on the social consequences of developments such as gene editing, artificial intelligence, big data and automated driving.
Respecting the highest levels of integrity and ethics will allow us to stand up against sceptics and make it clear that science is not “just another opinion”.
Another important value is trust. Science can function only in a trust-based system, in which there is complete freedom and autonomy. We can be proud of having such a system in most EU member states. However, in Hungary, gender studies has been banned and, in Poland, objective research on the Holocaust was endangered when it was proposed that criticising the role of Polish citizens and politicians would be made a criminal offence.
Europe’s science community must be much more vocal in condemning such moves and showing solidarity with affected colleagues. For this reason, I was very happy when I read February’s public statement by Academia Europaea, the EU’s Academy of Humanities and Sciences, in support of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, after the government stripped it of its responsibility for financing research institutions and threatened to annex its premises.
But accountability is also important. In the scientific context, I don’t just mean financial accountability, but accountability to society for the research that is being done and financed by the public purse. We should not be afraid of this.
Accountability is partly about showing impact. But while I fully support the trend for funding agencies to ask applicants for impact statements when it comes to mission-oriented research, I remain sceptical about requesting it for frontier research. That is why I have always opposed it for the European Research Council, at whose birth I was proudly present and whose completed projects have nevertheless made major social or economic contributions in 79 per cent of cases, according to its own retrospective analysis.
Beside extending knowledge, the most important impacts of science are the training of young people and providing scientific support to policymakers. For politicians ultimately to take their decisions on “political” grounds is, of course, their right, but it is important that they know what the scientific evidence says on the topic concerned. This is why the EU’s Scientific Advisory Mechanism, consisting of seven distinguished scientists and five European academy networks, is so vital.
Accountability obviously goes hand-in-hand with transparency, best defined as operating in such a way that others can easily follow what you are doing. The broad public consultation that the commission performed a few years ago on open science put transparency high on the agenda. As the League of European Research Universities rightly puts it in its position paper on the subject, “open science opens up new ways in which research/education/innovation are undertaken, archived and curated, and disseminated across the globe”. A key component is open access to publications and data and, in my previous capacity as open access envoy of the European Commission, I worked on this until recently, overseeing the development of Plan S. Social media also offers enormous opportunities for the science community to reach out to society and present what research is being done, how and why. Of course, it also leads to exposure and vulnerability – but we should not be afraid of this.
Inclusiveness is another hot topic and contains several dimensions, relating to factors such as gender and geography. One of the main questions is how far we should go in requiring inclusiveness in European research funding. I have always been very clear that quotas should never be imposed for political reasons – especially on the excellence-driven ERC. At the same time, however, we need to open up research networks – and let’s be clear: there is not a single country in Europe that has a monopoly on excellence. The most brilliant young researchers I came across during my time at the commission were located in Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Romania.
The final European value I want to talk about – and the most important in the context of the current political climate in Europe and, of course, Brexit – is cooperation. We all know that internationally co-authored publications are the most highly cited, and we all know the African proverb that if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together.
In relation to Brexit specifically, I would make these observations. There are currently some 32,000 EU nationals working and 12,000 European PhD students studying at UK institutions. Between 2005 and 2014, 450,000 research papers were co-authored by British and European researchers. Under Horizon 2020, 12,000 British participants are expected to receive around €9 billion. More than 2,300 British researchers are involved as experts in the evaluation of project proposals.
These figures tell you how strong the cooperation is between British researchers and their colleagues from the Continent. And this cooperation is the result of many years of networking, mutual respect, partnership and friendship. Some British politicians think that you can replace such bonds overnight by “going global”, but this is just naive. Thinking that setting up a UK-based version of the ERC will make up for the real thing is more than naive. Just ask the Swiss: they tried to do something similar when they were excluded from Horizon 2020 in 2014.
There is, however, some light on the horizon. In its proposal for the next framework programme, Horizon Europe, the commission has established the legal basis for the UK’s full association. Therefore, I hope that there will be an orderly Brexit that will allow this to happen – though even better, of course, would be no Brexit at all.
Whatever politicians in their wisdom decide to do, scientists and representatives of the science system from the UK and the rest of Europe will always cooperate.
In the early 20th century, the famous Solvay conferences of world-leading physicists, held in Brussels, were considered crucial to driving important advances in the field. I believe that a new Solvay-type conference should be organised: not to discuss any scientific issue in particular, but to celebrate the beauty of science cooperation across borders. We need to make it clear that we, as representatives of the European science community, will stand together and are committed to the fundamental values of the EU and of our European society as a whole: respect, freedom, equality, democracy and cooperation. Cooperation beyond borders. Cooperation beyond Brexit.
Publicație : The Times
Gérald Bronner : « L’esprit critique peut s’enseigner et s’apprendre en tant que tel »
Dans un entretien au « Monde », le sociologue estime que l’esprit critique devrait être enseigné à l’école et à l’université, notamment pour empêcher « les épidémies de crédulité sur le Web ».
A l’occasion des « Orsu Talks » de l’Association de la fondation étudiante pour la ville (AFEV), qui se tiennent mercredi 12 juin dans l’amphithéâtre du Monde sur le thème « Soft skills, clés de la réussite étudiante ? », le sociologue Gérald Bronner, professeur à l’université Paris-Diderot et membre de l’Académie des technologies et de l’Académie nationale de médecine, évoque l’une des soft skillsles plus utiles à ses yeux : l’esprit critique.
Ses travaux portent notamment sur la sociologie des croyances collectives. Il est l’auteur de Déchéance de rationalité (Grasset 2019) et de La Démocratie des crédules (PUF, 2013).
Les théoriciens des ressources humaines définissent l’esprit critique comme faisant partie des « soft skills », ces compétences humaines qui sont aujourd’hui autant valorisées que les diplômes ou les expériences professionnelles. Qu’en pensez-vous ?
Gérald Bronner : Il ne faut pas sous-estimer les effets de mode de la pensée managériale, dont les softs skills me paraissent en être l’une des expressions. Mais sur le fond, il est vrai que les entreprises qui veulent faire preuve de rationalité doivent encourager la pensée critique. Une organisation qui ne permet pas la contestation, par exemple en raison d’une exacerbation des relations hiérarchiques, empêche le recueil d’informations, et va à sa perte. C’est dans la culture de l’erreur que les entreprises sont les plus performantes. D’une façon générale, toutes les institutions ont intérêt à encourager le développement de la pensée méthodique, il n’y a pas de raisons que les entreprises fassent exception à cette règle d’intérêt général.
Comment définir l’esprit critique ? Et d’où vient cette notion ?
L’esprit critique est une façon de négocier intellectuellement avec le monde. Exercer son esprit critique, c’est apprendre d’abord à se méfier de ses intuitions. Notre raisonnement peut s’égarer de bien des façons. Nous n’accédons pas toujours à l’information adéquate pour bien juger en raison de la position que nous occupons dans l’espace social, des groupes que nous fréquentons, que ce soit dans la vraie vie ou sur Internet. Cette information, nous ne l’évaluons jamais tout à fait de façon neutre, car nos cadres culturels l’organisent à notre insu.
Et enfin, notre pensée est encore limitée de façon cognitive, c’est-à-dire que notre cerveau peut se tromper souvent lorsqu’il manipule des probabilités, des situations à risques, lorsqu’il tente de comparer les coûts et les bénéfices. Développer son esprit critique, c’est avant tout se méfier de ces trois biais de notre raisonnement.
Le mode de pensée critique est aussi ancien que la philosophie grecque. Socrate s’employait déjà à dénoncer les sophismes, ces raccourcis de la raison qui ne résistent pas à un examen critique. Tout au long de l’histoire, des philosophes se sont emparés de cette ambition et ont posé les bases de la pensée méthodique : Francis Bacon, René Descartes, David Hume, Emmanuel Kant. D’une certaine façon, la Révolution française, qui revendique son inspiration des Lumières, place au cœur de son projet cette légitimité rationnelle.
L’enseignement de la pensée critique est au cœur des ambitions du système éducatif français, comment expliquer dès lors que les« fake news » ou les théories complotistes rencontrent un tel succès auprès des plus jeunes ?
De mon point de vue, l’esprit critique n’a jamais été enseigné à l’école en tant que tel. Beaucoup de disciplines enseignent des fragments, en physique, en histoire, en philosophie, en économie, en sciences de la vie et de la terre : chaque cours participe en partie à mettre à distance nos intuitions, mais cela n’est jamais systématisé. Les enfants n’apprennent pas à comprendre leur compréhension, à connaître leur connaissance. Ils ne sont pas invités à se poser la question : comment savoir que ce qui est vrai est vrai ?
La théorie de Darwin est à cet égard un très bon exemple : pourquoi nous résiste-t-elle autant ? Pourquoi est-elle contre-intuitive ? La plupart d’entre nous avons l’impression que « la nature est bien faite » ou que la « fonction crée l’organe », ces intuitions sont finalistes, presque d’ordre religieux. Alors que la théorie de Darwin, écrite au XIXe siècle, insiste sur la masse insondable des échecs de la nature que l’on ne voit pas. Ce que l’on voit, au contraire, ce sont ses succès dans une temporalité d’observation beaucoup trop brève. C’est pour cela qu’elle doit être enseignée fermement à l’école. Le temps long de l’éducation nationale est un moment social idéal pour aider les élèves à développer leur « système immunitaire intellectuel ».
A l’université, cet enseignement est-il plus poussé ?
C’est encore plus complexe, car la fragmentation entre les disciplines est plus importante. Il serait intéressant de proposer un grand cours d’esprit critique, dans un tronc commun entre toutes les disciplines. Je le fais avec mes étudiants de sociologie en leur enseignant le fonctionnement du cerveau socialisé, et les limites qui pèsent sur notre rationalité. Je décrypte avec eux le fonctionnement de la régulation du marché de l’information, les phénomènes de chambres d’écho médiatiques, les effets de polarisation, les bulles algorithmiques…
Comment Internet et les réseaux sociaux mettent-ils à l’épreuve l’esprit critique ?
Internet n’est pas un espace homogène et neutre, c’est un espace qui résulte de la rencontre entre le sillon que l’on a tracé soi-même et le fonctionnement ancestral de notre cerveau. Sur ce marché par ailleurs largement dérégulé, des groupes souvent minoritaires mais motivés réussissent à faire valoir leur point de vue au-delà de ce qu’ils représentent.
Pour n’en prendre qu’un exemple, lorsque certains médias organisent des « sondages » sur Internet basés sur le volontariat des participants et sans échantillonnage, ils aboutissent souvent à des résultats aberrants, qui ne sont que le reflet de la motivation de certains groupes minoritaires à rendre visible leur point de vue.
Ainsi, en France, de tels « sondages » électoraux donnent régulièrement François Asselineau en tête des prévisions quand celui-ci ne dépasse pas les 1 % dans les élections réelles. Cette motivation de certains acteurs, et ceux qui sont porteurs de croyances sont souvent plus motivés que la moyenne de nos concitoyens, se traduit à terme par une visibilité de leur point de vue qui sera éventuellement confondue avec de la représentativité.
De là, certains indécis finissent par être frappés par les épidémies de crédulité qui touchent le Web. Les antivaccins, les conspirationnistes ont réussi de cette façon à faire se diffuser des formes d’argumentation qui auparavant étaient confinées dans des espaces de radicalité.
L’accès aux « Orsu Talks » de l’AFEV est libre sur inscription. La conférence « Soft skills, clés de la réussite étudiante ? » se tient mercredi 12 juin de 9 heures à 16 h 30 dans l’amphithéâtre du Monde (80, boulevard Blanqui, Paris 13e), en partenariat avec Le Monde Campus.
Publicație : Le Monde
|
