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Many readers have now sent this item which, even by the standards of foolish bureaucratic meddling in British higher education, is in a league by itself for destructiveness. Thoughts from readers?
The AHRC has posted an 'Important Statement' in which it 'unconditionally and absolutely refutes the allegations reported in the Observer':
http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/News/Latest/Pages/Observerarticle.aspx
Given how strongly worded and devoid of hedging their statement is, I'm inclined to believe that the Observer article is full of inaccurate rumor. (When I read the Observer piece, "the word is that it has come down from the secretary of state for business, innovation and skills, Vince Cable" independently struck me as unlikely, since it's doubtful that the funding of a Tory campaign slogan would be high on the list of priorities of this Liberal Democrat Minister.)
But if we take the AHRC at their word that they were not "pressured or otherwise coerced by BIS or anyone else into support for this initiative," that raises the following question: why, then, did they freely choose to incorporate this Tory slogan into their research agenda? Imagine that, shortly after Blair had been elected Prime Minister, the AHRC (or AHRB as it was called back then) had sprinkled its "Delivery Plan" (or whatever it was called back then) with talk of funding research on the "Third Way"? That would have come across as a grotesque politicization of research funding and a cack-handed attempt to curry favor with the leader of a political party. Incorporation of the 'Big Society agenda' into their research priorities should have struck the people who now run the AHRC as no less inappropriate.
Trying to look on the bright side, the idea is that the Big Society should be researched, not that it should be supported. So there's the enticing prospect of the government having unwittingly generated a slew of papers debunking the whole shoddy idea…
I challenged the chief executive of the AHRC about this at a meeting a couple of months ago. His response was amazing. He began by saying that the big society was about localism and empowering people and wondering how anyone could object to that. I said that the point was that they were publicising a particular political brand. He then said if I was just worried about the words 'big society' then that was 'just semantics'. I strongly suspect that BIS are telling the truth and that the AHRC are so intellectually corrupt and lacking in critical thought that they thought of it by themselves and congratulated themselves for doing so. There is a story on the THE webpage and their statement is unapologetic. I suggest all philosophers consider resigning from their peer review college as Bob Brecher has done. Unless we make a stand on this every future government can reasonably expect that their particular political ideology to become a strategic priority for academics. There is more of this to come which is why we should have stood up to impact more and why we should organise a boycott of the research councils and the REF until intellectual standards are raised and the bullshit stops. I keep trying to persuade people that pragmatic engagement with these people just encourages them to come back with worse. Once you compromise on academic and intellectual principles for pragmatic reasons you cannot invoke them later when it gets worse and you don't want to compromise anymore.
Of course the British government wants academia to research the "Big Society".
After all, they finally want to find out what it is supposed to mean.
I'll tell you what's totally mindblowingly amazing, and it's this document, currently gracing the Funding Opportunities section of the AHRC website:-
http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/FundingOpportunities/Documents/buildingthebigsociety.pdf
I'm actually feeling somewhat sick after viewing it. But you need to take a look yourself anyway, just to get a proper sense of what we're up against. Preview: not only does the glossy brochure approvingly quote Cameron about fifteen times while it's outlining our future research questions, but it's even illustrated with pictures of drug dealers in hoodies and low slung jeans (bad, and all the fault of the welfare state), contrasted with happy women out of the fifties, when people had personal responsibility and life was great (good, and soon to be promoted in the journals by er you and me apparently, if we want to stay on the right side of our managers). After all, according to the AHRC statement 'refuting' the Observer article, the Connected Communities project of which the brochure provides its nightmare vision is the result of "extensive – and continuing – consultation with researchers". We must have agreed to all this then, so there can't be a problem.
I second Seiriol's sickness. I could only bring myself to read the first half of the .pdf to which he links, but it reads like a Tory party campaign manifesto.
When we got rid of Mandelson and his appalling plan to prostitute academia to Big Business, it seemed for a moment like the credibility of our academic institutions might have been saved. Instead it turns out that now we're being prostituted to Tory party ideology; so that we can help David Cameron fuck the poor by providing the academic foundations for his slash and burn approach to the government funding of social goods.
If the research agenda of the AHRC is to be set by the ruling party, or their cretinous admin puppets, then the universities ought, en masse, to withdraw from AHRC funding initiatives. There's no point in having arts funding without academic freedom; and we need academic freedom far more than we need a new generation of PhD students with no jobs to go to. I think a large scale revolt would be enough to embarrass the AHRC into submission, whether or not the Big Society agenda is its own doing or not.
A quote from the document which Seriol links to:
'Can individuals do it? Give them the power and the resources
Can communities do it? Give them the power and the resources
Can local authorities do it? Give them the power and the resources
MUST the centre intervene to persuade, prescribe, or fund?'
The AHRC should take this advice.
It is more than ironic that the Funding Opportunities document to which Seiriol linked has a section entitled 1. Giving Away Power, Not Money. This is exactly what the Government are not doing. They don't trust academics any more than New Labour did. Hence they continue to micromanage them. Only they don't have to, because the research councils are so craven that they instinctively try to anticipate what the Government wants them to do, and to do it in advance of being given a steer or an order.
For Blair, Brown and Mandelson read Cameron Cable, and Willetts. Only where the former only dared to set cross council strategic research priorities, and to ring fence public funds for these (thus reducing the funds available for open research and free inquiry), the latter are happy to see public funds flow into the attempt by academic researchers to give some intellectual substance to a vacuous party political campaign slogan. So much for 'reinterpreting' the Haldane principle, to which Willetts claimed to be committed!
Actually, it is very likely that the AHRC volunteered to do this. Why? Because they know that if they play the tune that the Government is about to call, the Government will pay. Their priority is to continue to attract funding, not to preserve academic freedom. It makes them feel important and counts as success. This has been happening for a while now. I’m surprised that Mike is shocked that they could have voluntarily come up with this idea. They probably asked the question: What research theme can we dream up that this Government is most likely to throw money at? It is like an institutional analogue of Stockholm syndrome.
Gordon: I'm surprised that you take me to be 'shocked' that the AHRC could have come up with this on its own.
There is going to be a statement on the AHRC website refuting these allegations tomorrow. The Observer newspaper misreported.
Having just read the document to which Seriol linked, I don't know what to think. The empty phrases, terrible (and I mean TERRIBLE) layout… it has to be an elaborate joke, right?
OK, not elaborate, then. Perhaps generated and posted by a member of the Young Conservatives with a talent for hacking websites and trolling them?
I echo the general wailing and gnashing of teeth. Two further thoughts (i) people would be silly to distort their medium/long-term research (even from a cynical point of view) to fit with the current buzz-phrases of government, given that chances are there will be a new buzz phrase in a few years; (ii) the real long-term damage is the expectation that from now on politically driven agenda items are going to be inserted directly into research documents.
Re the document Seriol links to (with the eye-wateringly painful colours; feeling sick after viewing it is rather overdetermined). This actually seems to be a presentation by a government minister, rather than an AHRC-produced document. So you'd expect the fawning citations of Cameron. I haven't a clue why it's posted on an AHRC site, and their hosting explicit government propaganda is, to put it mildly, not encouraging. Seriol: in what context did you find the link to it?
To be fair to the AHRC, the document to which Seiriol links was written by a civil servant (Bert Proven), not the AHRC themselves. See here:
http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/FundingOpportunities/Pages/connectcommpast.aspx
And here:
http://www.insidegovernment.co.uk/other/digital_inclusion/speakers.php
Here's a summary of the AHRC's own take:
http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/FundingOpportunities/Documents/ccshearerpresentation.pdf
Of course, none of this explains why the AHRC is engaged in this in the first place.
Interesting to read this blog post
in which someone with a sort of revolving door civil service/academic background deplores the lacks of cravenness on the part of the AHRC's social science counterpart, the ESRC.
"The term ‘Big Society’ appeared only in passing—disappointing given the Prime Minister’s focus which is likely to make it an important theme during the period of these delivery plans. Big Society is a challenging—even paradigm-shaking—idea for the policy community in Whitehall. It is a shame that ESRC staff and board members have not picked up the challenge."
The councils shouldn't _set_ research themes at all. On almost any half-decent account of good inquiry that I can think of, in the history of philosophy of science, this kind of external influence is detrimental. For Popper, it suppresses criticism (and especially critical discourse about which problems are most pressing). For Kuhn, the dominant paradigms define the important puzzles; and these are readily apparent to the relevant practitioners (in a way they couldn't be to managers not familiar with the relevant exemplars). And so on. (OK, some may say that philosophy isn't science. But there's an important sense in which many thinkers in this tradition were concerned with _wissenschaft_.)
This case is especially blatant. The same thing happens regularly in the social sciences, e.g. in educational research, too. I agree with James that action is appropriate, although I fear that few will have the inclination or guts. Specialists in relevant areas should be determining which research should be funded, on the basis of its merits, on a case-by-case basis. (Or at the very least, there should be _real_ consultation with _real_ power for academics to veto inappropriate proposals such as this.) It's enough for the government to choose how much they wish to devote to each discipline, and even that should be in consultation, as I've argued elsewhere.
It's disgusting that taxpayers' money will be wasted in this way.
I have drafted a petition to remove "The Big Society" as a strategic funding priority here: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/thebigsociety/
I urge everyone to sign. I am a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council Peer Review College.
Seriol, I have to correct you there – it's not a "brochure", and it doesn't claim to be written by the AHRC. It is a powerpoint presentation given by Dr. Bert Provan at a conference on 'Connected Communities' in Birmingham on June 2010, hosted by the AHRC, at which he was a guest speaker.
Provan is a Deputy Director at the Department of Communities and Local Government, a governmental organisation which states on its website that its mission is "helping to end big government and create a free, fair and responsible Big Society". It shouldn't be "sickening" that this government official quotes David Cameron and refers to the Big Society in his presentation. But why did the AHRC choose to host this man as a speaker?
At the June conference Dr. Provan's presentation was preceded by a speech by Professor Shearer West, the Head of Research at the AHRC, and Head of Humanities at Oxford University since February 9 this year (for the curious – her background is in Art History). In her June presentation, unlike Provan, West does not mention the Big Society, though she does lovingly quote four pages of coalition propaganda about communities "coming together" and becoming "self-reliant", etc: http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/FundingOpportunities/Documents/ccpresentation.pdf. It disturbs me that an Oxford Professor can write in such fluent managerese.
But in the follow-on conference in December, West does mention the Big Society in her opening speech (p. 15 http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/FundingOpportunities/Documents/ccshearerpresentation.pdf). And she or whatever lackey put together the presentation copied and pasted three photos from Provan's June Big Society presentation into Shearer's new one (compare page 5 and 7, Shearer, and pages 5, 7 and 11, Provan.)
It appears to me that speakers at the December conference were asked to discuss the Big Society in their presentations.
One presentation is called 'Beauty and the Big Society', and quotes David Cameron in its first pages (http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/FundingOpportunities/Documents/ccboltonpresentation.pdf). It was given by Tom Bolton, Senior Research Advisor at the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE). CABE's website explains that it "was the government's advisor on architecture, urban design and public space" until February 2011, when its government funding was cut and it effectively ceased to exist. Bolton was about to lose his job, and he probably knew it. This presentation looks like a pitiful plea for mercy ahead of the impending bonfire of the quangos (mentioned by Shearer in her opening address).
But stranger still, someone named Professor John Hartley, of the University of Technology of Queensland, Australia, was flown approximately 16466.51 kilometres to give a speech on 'Connected Communities and Creative Economy: Clash, cluster, complexity, creativity' (http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/FundingOpportunities/Documents/cchartley.pdf). His job in Queensland is presumably safe from coalition cuts, yet in a footnote on page 3 he makes the claim that Enoch Powell articulated an early vision of the 'Big Society' in 1962, and he mentions the buzzword again on page 4. To me, it appears that he has tacked the words 'Big Society' into the introduction of a preexisting speech after someone at the AHRC suggested he include it, as a key conference theme.
The two other presentations in the conference, 'Connecting excluded communities?' by Dr Paul Benneworth, and a speech by another Professor from the University of Technology of Queensland, do not mention the Big Society.
To me it appears like this: the AHRC held their first conference on 'Connected communities' in June 2009 (http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/FundingOpportunities/Pages/connectcommpast.aspx). They were happy to tie in their work on 'connected communities' with the new coalition's 'Big Society' slogan, and to host guest speakers to give 'Big Society'-titled presentations, from June 2010. They further incorporated the 'Big Society' slogan into conferences in December.
Professor Peter Mandler, according to the Guardian, believes that the AHRC was 'forced' to mandate the 'Big Society' as a topic of study under threat of removal of funding. The AHRC denies this. It seems to me that the AHRC, anticipating future cuts, without needing to be asked obsequiously included the slogan as a topic in one of their ongoing projects and encouraged speakers to mention it. The AHRC clearly pays court to the government. It is a government bureaucracy, and does not operate like anything recognisably belonging to the academic world.
I think the Daniel Boffey, the Guardian journalist, unintentionally flatters the coalition, portraying them as a competently devilish foe who has successfully enforced carefully preconsidered, evil aims. In reality, I doubt if their influence on the AHRC constituted anything so deliberate. I would be very surprised if the AHRC needed to be threatened into giving up principles of academic research, as they don't seem to represent any in the first place.
Most amazing of all is that this research council's way of embarking on a 'research programme' is a series of meetings where people give unrigorous powerpoint presentations about 'connectedness', 'visions for the future' and 'key concepts' that read like something from The Office. It's all terrific bullshit, "a greater enemy of the truth than lies are", in H G Frankfurt's words. I think this council should be cut altogether. Its funding should be distributed directly to researchers, and applications for funding should be peer reviewed rather than be assessed by a government council with spurious motives and the power to institute hazy 'research priorities'.
I am intrigued by Prof. Hartley's suggestion that the 'Big Society' can be associated with Enoch Powell (I cannot get the link to work). If this could be established, Cameron might actually stop talking about it. More research is needed!
Here's the Enoch Powell-Big Society link again (page 3) http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/FundingOpportunities/Documents/cchartley.pdf
Mike. OK I take it that you were not shocked. I just meant, of course this is exactly what we should have expected the AHRC to come up with! Interestingly Andrew Chitty pointed out to me the national priority areas The ESRC has identified as critical to the UK economy and society. They are:
– Economic Performance and Sustainable Growth
– Influencing Behaviour and Informing Interventions
– A Vibrant and Fair Society
The ESRC Delivery Plan for 2011-15, states that the aim of the second topic is “creating a better understanding of how and why people and organisations make decisions, and how these can be managed or influenced”. It goes on to talk about investigating “how interventions can promote a beneficial change in the behaviour of citizens”, “how people and groups might respond to different information and interventions” and “the appropriate role of public policy in terms of coercion through legislation, persuasion via incentives or social marketing, or coherent combinations of approaches”. All this is suspiciously reminiscent of the so-called ‘Nudge Unit’ set up by Downing Street to investigate ways of getting people to behave better through environmental signals, following David Cameron’s enthusiasm for this idea (see for example ‘David Cameron’s ‘nudge unit’ aims to improve economic behaviour’, Guardian, 9 September 2010, and ‘Nudge unit: how the Government wants to change the way we think’, Belfast Telegraph, 3 January 2011).
So the ESRC are also in the business of researching Tory Party ideas. Now the ESRC it might be thought at least have more interest in researching this kind of thing. After all if there are disciplines which might legitimately want to conduct research on the Big Society, whatever that is, it is the social sciences, not the humanities. Now unlike the AHRC, the ESRC are not in any danger of being legislated out of existence. So It is unlikely they are acting out of fear. I guess they are just in the business of sucking up to whomever is in power, in order to get as much money as possible. What else could be the explanation?
Anyway, it seems that the Research Councils are becoming an arm of the state, or a think tank for the Conservative Party, which is not good, and which clearly violates the spirit of the Haldane principle to which David Willetts claimed to want to return.
Some relevant facts, that are in danger of being lost here.
1. The AHRC does not, as the petition which Prof. Leiter linked to suggests, have "The Big Society" as a research priority, or even as a funding initiative. It is involved in a cross-Council programme entitled "Connected Communities", which began before the present government came to power. More recently, the consultation documents on this theme seem to involve the phrase "Big Society", as Naomi O'Leary's post points out.
2. According to the 2011-15 delivery plan, the AHRC plans to spend £2.2 million on funding connected to the "Connected Communities" theme in 2011/12, rising to £5.5 million in 2014/5. This compares with an overall budget of £99.9 million for 2011/12 falling to £98.4 million for 2014/15. Excluding the budget for postgraduates (MA's, PhD's etc.) the budget for research is £51.2 million in 2011/12 and £50.9 million in 2014/5. (These figures are all from section 4.5 of the 2011-15 delivery plan, which is linked here: http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/Pages/default.aspx)
3. The AHRC website on the "Connected Communities" theme (http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/FundingOpportunities/Pages/connectedcommunities.aspx) notes that the theme is under continual development, and says: "We are current [sic] undertaking further consultation activities with a range of stakeholders and are considering potential further development activities. We would welcome further input and feedback from interested researchers and stakeholders as a part of these further consultations. Please send any further comments or inputs to Gary Grubb at the AHRC."
(The worry that prompted me to highlight these facts is that some of the present criticism directed at the AHRC may be misguided. What we should perhaps worry about is the increasing proportion of resources spent on rather nebulous 'themes', and the processes whereby these themes are chosen.)
Anonymous – there seems little doubt the "Connected Communited" research theme has been linked to funding projects exploring the idea of "The Big Society" and this terminology is noted several times in the AHRC's delivery document. "The Big Society" was a political campaign slogan of the Conservative Party in the last general election spelling out their vision for the country.
The objection stated in the petition I drafted is based on principle, not politics. The principle is that political campaign slogans of any party ought not enter into strategic funding priorities of the AHRC. There is a simple solution to this problem and that is to remove all references to "The Big Society" in their documentation: this is precisely what the petition calls on the AHRC to do. The fact that the relevant amounts involved are a small part of the larger budget is irrelevant: party politics should be divorced from all considerations of strategic research funding.
If the theme is under the continual development that you mention, then it is certainly in the power of the AHRC to do so and I hope you will lend support to the petition. If nothing else, the popularity of the petition speaks to a tangible widespread concern that stretches across political party sympathies about the inclusion of "The Big Society" in the AHRC's documentation on its strategic funding priorities. This is the most central fact and why a change is needed.
I'd like to draw the attention of colleagues to Prof. Ladyman's latest fine foray into front-line journalism:-
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/cultural-capital/2011/03/society-research-ahrc-arts
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