Haldene principle ‘clarified’: trampled all over and dumped in the bin more likely.

I am incandescent, disbelieving, upset and depressed all at once. I didn’t actually think I could be shocked any more than I already am at government policy and then I read this. Here is the second paragraph,  just to give you a flavour:

The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) will spend a “significant” amount of its funding on the prime minister’s vision for the country, after a government “clarification” of the Haldane principle – a convention that for 90 years has protected the right of academics to decide where research funds should be spent.

Apparently, this is ‘non-negotiable’. I cannot recall, but am willing to be corrected, any government in recent years tying in research funding so closely to a particular ideology. Even if we leave on one side for time being the fact that this ideology is mendacious, pernicious and many other things ending in ‘ious’, the principle that a government can override academic freedom in this way is absolutely terrifying.

I hope to blog about this issue in more detail later, but thought it worth flagging now.

EDIT

The AHRC today issued a denial of The Observer‘s allegations, which you can read here. Although there is clearly more to this than meets the eye, I am still suspicious, mainly because of information located on this page. The fact that so  many people chose to believe yesterday’s article speaks volumes about the way the AHRC is currently regarded by those of us who have to deal with it. You can find more comment with links to other blogs at Guy Halsall’s Historian on the Edge.

Impact

If you keep up with the Higher Education pages in the UK newspapers, you will know that there has been a great deal of comment on  a mysterious entity called ‘impact’ lately. Impact is the latest government and research council buzz word for why our research must have some definable economic or social goal: where is the next technological gadget or government initiative coming from in otherwords. Impact will also replace esteem in the REF, which in itself, replaces the RAE, except with a bigger percentage

After journal rankings what next?

Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the news for those that haven’t read yesterday’s Times Higher Ed, that those crazy people at the European Reference Index have logically concluded that the next step from a journals’ ranking is to rank monographs!

Textile Conservation Centre: no help from the government

I have blogged previously about the imminent closure by the University of Southampton of the Textile Conservation Centre at Winchester School of Art, and exhorted people to sign the petition. The government has made its response and a, frankly, unhelpful one it is too.

Leading scholarly journals in history

For anyone else experiencing dilemmas as described in the previous post, I managed to find, buried in the AHRC website, a list of so-called leading scholarly journals drawn up in conjunction with the European Science foundation. It can be accessed here in the little table. Do I agree with all of this? Of course not.

Textile Conservation Centre under threat

The renowned Textile Conservation Centre at the Winchester School of Art is under threat of closure. Originally located at Hampton Court, the centre is important internationally as a leading body into research into historic textiles; it also provides training for potential conservators. This would be a huge loss were it to close. Please sign the petition to keep it open.

The School of Art is part of the University of Southampton. This university has found the money to rebuild the Mountbatten building, revise its logo and send the vice-chancellor on global temperature increasing flights on private jets across the Atlantic. Whereas the former is necessary to the continued success of the university, the other two certainly aren’t. The proposed closure of the centre seems to be one of many closures and job cuts happening in other academic areas of the university, which is potentially very worrying, especially for a university that prides itself on being part of the Russel Group and in the top 10 research universities in the country.

Yes, I am angry, very angry.

The sacred and profane

One of the main dichotomies I wrestle with in my work is that of the sacred vs the profane: temporal authority vs spiritual. More often than not, the dichotomy is shown up, if not to be false, then not really meaningful. Recently, both through my teaching and through reading other comment and blog sites, I have begun looking at this dichotomy afresh in terms of modern British society, or to put it another way, are we living in such a secularized or individualistic society, that there is no place to seek understanding of or tolerance of faith or ideologies in society?

What’s wrong with this library catalogue?

Human beings have an almost irresistable urge to categorise things, so correct me if I am wrong, but a library catalogue should be a means of determining what stock a given library has and its probable location by means of a unique classmark. In order for the library to function effectively, there should be a certain logic to the cataloguing – similar books should be located in proximity to each other. As any researcher will tell you, many an interesting tome has been discovered through the sheer joy of browsing the shelves of a well-stocked library when seeking a particular volume.