UK research ‘foundations are crumbling’, Cranfield v-c warns

A vice-chancellor has warned that the foundations of Britain’s research system are “crumbling” owing to a sharp fall in income caused by student visa restrictions imposed by the last Conservative government.

Addressing the House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee on 12 November, Dame Karen Holford, vice-chancellor of Cranfield University, said the “finely balanced” ecosystem of the UK’s research and development (R&D) sector had been disrupted by a sharp fall in income from international students, whose fee income has traditionally cross-subsidised research activity.

It follows the decision to prevent postgraduate taught students from bringing dependants with them to the UK from January 2024, with early data suggesting that overseas enrolments this autumn are down by around a quarter.

“The whole ecosystem of R&D relies on universities – and that ecosystem is finely balanced – but our ability to drive economic growth relies on that balanced ecosystem being fully supported,” explained Dame Karen, who leads the UK’s only postgraduate university specialising in science and engineering.

Noting the “huge impact on universities” caused by the visa changes, Dame Karen told MPs that the “decline in international students affects our talent pool and our ability to drive growth locally”.

On the industry-academic research on which Cranfield excels, she added: “This ecosystem has been working so well [but] its foundations are crumbling and we need to address that.”

“The importance of some [immigration] policies are fundamental to that,” she added, noting that the sector “had not yet recovered” from the visa changes introduced earlier this year.

At the same committee, the Royal Society’s president, Sir Adrian Smith, also reflected on the “angst in the sector over financial sustainability” and the “negative feeling” within academia over the international student issue.

While welcoming Labour’s first budget since taking office in July – in particular, the additional funding to cover the UK’s Horizon membership, which some feared may not be provided – as “welcome news”, Sir Adrian observed that the UK was “not there on bigger investments” and therefore “had to keep an eye on the talent pool”.

“Even with the very positive signals in the budget, we remain 11th in the OECD table on investment in R&D,” he said, adding this position was “not where you want to be if you want to be a leading science nation”.

At a separate hearing in the House of Lords, Ilan Gur, chief executive of the UK’s new “high risk, high reward” research funder, the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria) was also discussing research, alongside the agency’s chair, Matt Clifford.

Mr Clifford told the Lords’ Science and Technology Committee that he was keen for the “level of ambition” and “risk appetite” at Aria to remain high, even if that meant most research projects failed to hit their stated objectives.

“There will always be a temptation to look for quick wins – to find something to report quickly that looks good,” he said.

“That is one of the biggest risks [Aria] faces – if it is to stay true to its mission, the reality is that only a fraction of its programmes will succeed. That’s how we’ve chosen our missions.

“If only one of our missions succeeds, it will change the world,” he said, adding: “We would be very comfortable if all but one of early programmes fail to achieve their objectives.”

However, Dr Gur was asked how the agency’s research could be judged given it was accepted that most of the project’s objectives would not be met. Among its first seven projects include efforts to reduce the computing cost and energy consumption of AI chips by a factor of 1,000, and use of computational biology to reimagine global agriculture – the latter of which is a goal already being pursued for more than a decade by the Gates Foundation-backed effort to create carbon-enriched “C4” rice.

“Failing to meet [our targets] will not be a failure of progress,” Dr Gur explained, continuing that a project may “fail to meet its objectives but it will drive progress in terms of our learning towards the type of invention that Aria was designed to do”.

“By the end of the programme if it is successful [a project] will have changed the conversation globally about what is possible or valuable in this space,” he said.

“That change in the conversation means we have shifted the trajectory of what might be possible, towards a capability of where there is a reasonable chance to having a transformative effect on society,” he added.

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