Engaging our academics

BrianSJ

Academe has largely become the same target-driven managerialist numbers game as other government agencies. If you want ideas, then get them out from under Sir Humphrey's thumb. The coming depression offers immense potential for radical change to the dreaming spires. Or we can fiddle with RAE and watch the decline worsen rapidly.

Caedmon

"To the man in the street,
Who, I'm sorry to say,
Is a keen observer of life,
The word 'Intellectual'
suggests straightaway
a man who's untrue to his wife"

W H Auden

Nigel Sedgwick

Would anyone like to compare the percentage of university income directly from central government, in the UK and in the USA? And, along similar lines, who 'owns' the universities?

And then consider ...

Best regards

UK academic

The comment on the RAE is spot on, the time spent on talking with government/parties etc. could be used to write a (probably meaningless) academic paper that no one cares about - not even fellow academics.

Ian Brown

The problem is that the Research Assessment Exercise basically ignores policy advice. Change the RAE (as the government is doing, but mainly to count citations rather than publications) and you might see some change in academics' publishing behaviour. They respond just like everyone else to career incentives.

john miller

Academia will not be able to pay retired politicians a fortune in fees.

Compare and contrast with the consultancies used by the government.

Gaw

In the US they have the 'spoils system' which provides academics the equivalent of civil service posts periodically. When they're not employed by the government they've got to go somewhere and this somewhere is usually the think tanks, funded alongside the political parties. If we abolished a large part of our permanent civil service I'm sure we'd see a similar ecosystem.

Fergus Pickering

Why would any academic want to have anything to do with this lot? As Terry-Thomas would surely have said, 'They're an absolute shower'. Curious nobody ever asked T-T a shower of what. But we know. Of course it wasn't always so. Remember Wilson's B and K. Or perhaps you are too young to remember.

Rhoda Klapp

"our academics play such a limited role in public life and policy debates.

There’s plenty of blame to go round for this"

Blame? Blame! Are things not bad enough without getting more never-led-a-real-life wonks to weigh in? But we don't have any meaningful policy debate at all anyway. Policy comes as a press release now, or a youtube video. An almost entirely left-wing media dicusses it, nobody else gets a say, and that's it. The correct way to approach this problem is to ask the question 'how can we avoid doing stupid things?'. If the answer is to involve academics (and I reject the notion completely), then by all means do that. Don't do it because the Seppos do it. Which are the examples you would wish to follow?

TGF UKIP

Most political academics join the Labour Party and become government ministers.

Just what we want, more buggers who've never run or managed anything in their lives giving advice on how the country should be run.

I can think of few things which would screw Britain up even more.

Puncheon

Rhoda Klapp - Well said. Academics should be kept well away from policy-making, they tend to be yet one more stage removed from reality than our benighted politicians. If you want a example of what academics and policy are like when mixed look no further than the wretched Prodi of Italy. They are merely people who know a lot about a little. James-you really are misguided on this one, believe me. I speak as one who has in his time had to deal with many academics attempting to meddle in policy-making. It does not work, I can tell you.

Diogenes

If you want decent ideas, academia is absolutely the wrong place to look for them. Universities are a prime example of public sector waste, and withdrawing all public funding for them should be an early objective for any new government.

TomTom

Depends how intelligent the political class is - that determines who they can attract as fellow thinkers. Academics are not there to develop policy but to inform policy.

steve-roberts

It's actually a very bad idea. So you suggest that Academia should provide goverment with more policy advice. Given that government decides which parts of academia get more or less tax funds, wouldn't that be a circle of self-serving ?

KB

The area of academia with most to offer on policy is economics, as your two examples suggest. I've totted up the nationalities of the economics Nobel winners for the last 20 years:

USA: 27
UK: 3
Norway: 2
Canada: 1
Germany: 1
India: 1

Looks like the US is where all the action. I think economists call this comparative advantage.

On the other hand, I believe Anthony Giddens had a hand in giving us the Third Way. Er, maybe not such a good example after all...

Bryan Dunleavy

I've generally thought of universities as useful places to keep highly intelligent people from doing too much harm. Occasionally a few, such as Enoch Powell and Gordon Brown, get to rise to positions of influence in public life usually with disastrous consequences.
Arthur Koestler drew a distinction between the Yogi and the Commisar - the Yogi being the intellectual dreamer and the Commisar who gets things done. WE need both, but let the Commisars run things.
The Gordon Brown experience, which we are all suffering under, is a perfect example of how an intellectual with no understanding of people can operate.

Fortunata

Have you ever sat in on an academic committee meeting? "It's like herding cats" our head of department used to say.

Alfred T Mahan

I agree with your diagnosis, but not your prescription. It's barking to suggest the RAE could perform its pointless task in a different way - it needs to go and the universities need to be freed from bureaucrats. Let's hope the next government will let funding follow the under/postgraduate and then just let them get on with it. God knows our dons are bright enough to manage without second rate Whitehall political interference. Then we'd really see intellectual sparks fly!

Bill Brinsmead

Mary Dejevsky is wrong - they do engage in policy debates and have exerted huge influence on Labour policy in some areas.

The whole regional agenda of Assemblies and Development Agencies, as implemented by Prescott, was conceived and promoted by regional studies academics at the Universities of Cambridge, Newcastle, Manchester plus others in the mid 1990s and afterwards.

I was at a conference with about 200 of them just after when the North East referendum result on a regional assembly. They were all crestfallen and angry with the voters.

I laughed long and hard at their hubris. But the RDAs are still there soaking up more than £2.5bn per year.

Jonny Newton

I agree with Bill Brinsmead. Academics do engage and do influence MANY areas of policy making.

Economics doesn't have any megastars here. The reason being that all of the academic action has shifted to the US.

New academics just finishing their PhDs are sometimes offered twice as much money by US universities as by British ones such as my own. It isn't surprising that they choose with their wallets.

Jonny Newton

Fergus Pickering

I am not an academic. I wasn't clever enough. But if any of you think that running a department, designing courses, dealing with recalcitrant stdents and mollifying the overpaid bastards (often from industry) who are vice-chancellors and the like, has noting to do with management, then you don't know what you are talking about. And who supposes that (say) the past management of the motor industry or the present management of the post office can teach ANYBODY anything about these skills? Surely our business management is among the worst in the world. The same is not true, even after all these years of Labour Government, of our academics. Ivory towers, my arse.

African Alliance

Judge each thinker on merit not "academic". Some academics useful, others useless.

Oscar

Bryan Dunleavy - you are flattering Gordon Brown. He'd like us to believe he's a great intellectual, but there has been absolutely no evidence that this is the case It's yet more vainglorious spin about our Leader as utterly deceptive as the claim that he is some kind of global economic genius deserving of a Nobel prize.

Thomas Young

Academics used to be on television programmes like Newsnight, Panorama and the Money Programme all the time. The Money Programme also used to have rivetting discussions featuring heavyweight city types who knew their stuff. But then politicians saw that the academics didn't toe the Party line and knew too much about their subject they were cast into the outer darkness in favour of an endless stream of Cabinet ministers and pressure groupies.
The system couldn't be resurrected now because even the selection of academics would no doubt be corrupted by spin doctors, BBC managers and self-promoting minority groups.

Thomas Young

And the dumbed down quality of 2009 academics wouldn't lend themselves to informed, learned discussion.