Our debate on university science a couple of weeks back has been picked up by
Times Higher. It served the important, and possibly therapeutic, purpose of getting some things out into the open. As someone with
strong opinions in this area, I found my independence as a chair stretched. But my desire was to expose some unacknowledged tensions and start a genuinely new conversation about where science in universities is going and what assumptions are steering it.
The debate was instigated by
Philip Moriarty, professor of physics at Nottingham University, a blue skies scientist who, in his own words, "could not care less" about applications. His offered a brave and possibly reckless challenge to the Research Councils, who fund the vast majority of his work, and claimed that countless other scientists secretly shared his view that public science is increasingly conducted in the interests of the private sector.
An unpredictable consensus emerged with
Terence Kealey, VC of the Unviersity of Buckingham (the UK's only private university), who argued that his model gave his university more independence from Government and therefore better results. The Government, he argued are the single greatest threat to academic freedom, not industry.
John Pethica from the National Physical Laboratory, who has worked for universities and companies, in the US, UK and Ireland, gave us a balanced view of public/private research partnerships. And
Ben Goldacre was enlightening as ever with his cautionary tales of how private funding frequently produces bad science.
Ian Gibson MP spoke about the
embryology bill and the interaction of politics and science.
So is public science still a public good? And is it funded as such? I have no idea. But in talking about these things, we get to some questions about science and public value that are absolutely vital. It was great to have so many scientists and academics in the room, but also to have the Research Councils there. Hopefully the debate got them thinking...