Risk and Research
Mary Beard’s latest Don’s Life column refers to the current culture of risk aversion in university research funding. As someone who’s putting together a funding application for the ESRC (with almost zero chance of success, I should add) her words seem absolutely right to me:
the only way sensibly to be able to conform to the AHRC guidelines is to apply for money for research you’ve already done
In order to apply for research funding it is no longer sufficient to outline what you’re interested in, and show that it’s something other people are interested in as well. What’s now required is something much more like a project plan, breaking the work down into smaller deliverables and indicating when and how each one will be completed. I suspect the only reason they don’t ask for a Gantt chart is that these projects only involve one person.
This kind of micromanagement is, as Prof Beard points out, a complete nonsense. Most research can’t be planned down to this level of detail before it’s been undertaken; a PhD project, for example, will usually change direction a few times before arriving at a destination that may or may not bear much relation to the original intended goal. The point is that where you end up is better and more interesting than where you were supposed to end up, because you chose to change direction as a result of doing the research. The only way you can know with much assurance where you’ll actually end up is if you’ve done a big chunk of the spadework already.
I suspect this has to do with a creeping commercialization of education. The language of risk management sounds reassuringly as if it will help avoid those cases of PhDs being funded but never completed, or being completed in such a haphazard way that they don’t amount to much. We hear it in teaching, too, where students are identified as “at risk” (of pulling down the institution’s success rate) and managed away into lower-status courses or out of the door entirely. In the last few days we’ve heard about plans to focus PhD funding on the “most productive” HE institutions, in the same way that we’d like to give our business to the companies that can get the best possible job done for the lowest price.
There’s a fair amount of research done in the universities that doesn’t seem to me to be worth very much, and that we could get rid of without any loss to the national culture. Lots of PhDs are written and never read by anyone other than the examiners. The trouble with research, as academics protesting the Government’s emphasis on “impact” continually point out, is that you can’t spot the winners ahead of time. Yes, I’m sure it would be great to run a publishing house that put out one multi-million-selling book a year and nothing else, or a music company that only had hits, or indeed to be a trader who only ever bought shares that went up in price. The big problem with risk is that it cuts both ways: usually reducing downside risk reduces upside risk (the risk that something good will happen) as well.
Back in 2004 Robin Holt published a much-cited essay, “Risk Management: The Talking Cure “, in which he likened the practice to psychoanalysis. In the same year, Demos published a paper “The Risk Management of Everything” drawing on Holt’s work; it’s available free online and its conclusions seem to me to be sensible and worth a read.
The image of Queen’s Library was by clbean.
