A few years ago, Philip Moriarty, a professor of physics at the University of Nottingham, had had enough.
Mr. Moriarty was a member of a peer-review body for the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, one of the agencies in Britain that control the purse strings of academic research. In 2009 the council began to require that applicants for grants include a “pathways to impact” statement outlining the potential economic and societal effects of their work and who might benefit from it and how.
The professor objected, and eventually he said he would no longer review applications. “I said it would be unconscionable to take part in the process,” he says.
Mr. Moriarty is one of a growing chorus of British academics troubled by the extent to which publicly financed research is now required to demonstrate its economic impact and value to society and how that emphasis may steer the direction of research.
The fundamental idea is relatively uncontroversial: As government spending in Britain has become more constrained, public investment in research must be shown to have value outside academe.
But calculating research’s broader value is a challenge—and a growing number of academics find themselves arguing that the requirements are unduly burdensome and do little to achieve their stated goals.
British academics are primarily affected in two ways. Applicants for grants from all seven research councils, which are independent government bodies, must include the impact statement. And beginning this year, government financing of universities depends on a formula that includes a measure of university departments’ impact.
Under the so-called Research Excellence Framework, the impact made by university departments accounts for 20 percent of the formula for financing them.
For many academics, that emphasis may be negligible, simply a matter of redrafting applications to pay lip service to the concept. “Any academic worth their salt can just churn that nonsense out,” says Mr. Moriarty. But he also sees more-severe issues.
While he would like his research in nanotechnology to have a broad benefit to society, a focus on impact is a “perversion of the scientific method,” one that emphasizes “near-market” research, designed to generate a speedy economic return for taxpayers, he says.
The Humanities Problem
Concern about proving the worth of their research is perhaps most acute among professors in the social sciences and humanities.
“If you’re doing research in medieval French poetry, how can you demonstrate that it yields a significant economic return?” asks Thomas Docherty, a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Warwick.
After the government first proposed such measurements, in 2009, it backtracked because of the backlash in academe, he says, and broadened the definition to include a social benefit.
Mr. Docherty, who is involved with the Council for the Defense of British Universities, one of the organizations that has vocally opposed the emphasis on impact, calls the move “nothing more than a sop.”
The impact statement will end up being a straightforward economic and commercial calculation, he says. For example, an art exhibition will be deemed to be of benefit according to a quantifying of traffic to a gallery, ticket sales, and consequent use of public transportation.
It’s too early to say whether such objections will lead to a more substantive change in policy.
David Delpy, chief executive of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, says that “we haven’t seen the number of applications fall and haven’t seen a drop in the number of peer reviews that we’ve received.”
He insists that the council has been responsive to criticisms from the academic community, citing as an example a recent fine-tuning of the time frames according to which researchers in given disciplines are required to estimate the effects of their work.
The accusation that the councils are asking researchers to predict the outcome of their research is inaccurate, Mr. Delpy says. “The definition of impact that the research councils have is very broad and embraces the diverse ways in which research and knowledge and the skills we develop benefit individuals, organizations, and regions.”
A physicist himself, he says that “if an academic can’t think of a way in which a piece of research of theirs would not lead to some sort of impact, it is very unlikely to get through the peer-review process.”
Some see such thinking, however, as detrimental to the future of British research, including fields like astronomy and fundamental quantum physics.
Martin Rees, an emeritus professor of cosmology and astrophysics at the University of Cambridge and one of Britain’s most noted scholars, says his main concern about the approach is its potential effect on young researchers.
“Almost all scientists want their work to have an impact beyond academia, either commercial, societal, or broadly cultural, and are delighted when this happens,” he says.
“But they realize, as many administrators and politicians do not, that such successes cannot be planned for and are often best achieved by curiosity-motivated research.”
