The Royal Netherlands Academy for Arts and Sciences (KNAW) recently elected a new president to succeed the outgoing post-holder, Robbert Dijkgraaf.  The President-Elect, Professor Hans Clevers, was only two weeks previously announced as winner of the prestigious Dr. A. H. Heineken for Medicine, and as the notice of prize award makes clear, is a distinguished scientist with eminent qualifications to lead the Academy through the anticipated difficult period of public funding cuts to Dutch science.  

So why is the influential newspaper NRC Handelsblad reporting a disquiet around his appointment?  The text of the article argues that because the election was unopposed, and the candidate was, following physicist Dijkgraaf, once more a ‘hard’ scientist that some humanities members – in fact more than one third of voting Academicians – spoiled their ballot paper or left it blank.

The Academy consists of two Divisions of Academics, ‘Humanities and Social Sciences’ and ‘Science’, totalling around 500 members: every Academician is a member of one of those two Divisions.  At the same time, there are five Advisory Councils, who provide a great deal of the work of the Academy in terms of its formal role as an advisory body of the Dutch government.

There is an Advisory Council for the Humanities as one of these five, and this body is currently involved in attempting to develop research impact indicators (for both scientific and social impact) for the humanities, as part of the regular research evaluation process.  But it is at this higher division, between the Divisions, that the unrest was reported as having broken out.

The article gives a hint at two reasons why this protest emerged, and once more it goes to the persisting sense of crisis in humanities in the Netherlands.  In a previous blog post, I highlighted the fact that a survey by the same newspaper revealed that university boards are scrapping many more language courses, and this appears to have in part fuelled Academicians’ disquiet.

The article quotes an unnamed source that says that the scientific climate for the humanities outside the universities is clearly a problem. This could be read as implying that increasingly equating the value of subjects with demand for them from industry (the Top-sectors policy) is an extremely negative development for the humanities.

At the same time, the report says that in the meeting at which his candidature was announced, he set out a vision for the development of science in the Netherlands in which the humanities was only mentioned twice.  The implication is that the humanities need better defending at this difficult time.

It is important to stress that NRC is just one source, and at least three other papers mentioned his appointment, albeit very briefly, without mentioning this sense of disquiet.  But this nevertheless raised the question for me of why has this story appeared.

The story is interesting for a number of reasons.  Part of it goes back to the previous blog post, that there is apparently an appetite for news about the humanities in the Netherlands.  But beyond that, the media are willing to report humanities voices in its coverage of science (albeit as part of a much bigger coverage of the appointment that is otherwise extremely positive in its tone).

The second is to illustrate a point that emerged in some of the HERAVALUE research interviews, namely that there has been a shift in the coverage of science in the Netherlands from the content to the style, or what one interviewee called the human interest dimension. 

So this can be read as not just a story about the place of humanities in Dutch science, but as almost a soap opera of appointments, the ‘cherry on the cake’ of what is otherwise a fairly dry, technical coverage of the appointment.  I am sure this ‘soap opera’ dimension is not what the humanities mean when they say they bring the human dimension back to science and technology!

On this soap opera note, it  is perhaps worth adding to the coverage of the Stapel affaire, in which a psychology professor fabricated research data.  Diverse media including Teletekst, NRC, Trouw and de Volkskrant reported yesterday and today that the independent inquiry into his publications at his last employer had found that 12 of the 20 papers, and chapters in at least three Ph.D.s, contained fabricated data. 

An inquiry into fabrication practices at his previous employer will report in 6 months’ time.  The facts are now established, the rest is now human tragedy, soul searching and rubber-necking.  Perfect for media attention.

Paul Benneworth, Enschede, 28^th March 2012.

Thanks to UTNieuws for the coverage.

Photograph appears courtesy of Prebal.

There was an interesting report on the Dutch TV teletext last night, concerning the shrinking number of humanities courses offered at Dutch universities.  The meat of the report is that smaller subjects are being either integrated into larger, broader studies or disappearing altogether.

The Teletekst report notes that with the special protected budget for humanities courses in the Netherlands disappearing, their low student numbers mean that they are no longer sustainable.  This is part of a longer process that has been going on for at least 30 years, since the Dutch government began its Specialisation and Concentration programme (TVC) in 1982.  But what is interesting to me is that this story appeared on Dutch teletext, two weeks after the original story appeared in NRC Handelsblad. 

This followed just over a week after the passing away of the Professor who oversaw the introduction of the special producted budget, Frits Staal.  His passing also attracted substantial media attention, with NRC, Het Parool, AD and Trouw all carrying obituaries of a prominent philosopher who since 1967 worked and lived outside the Netherlands.  This was unsurprising, as his reputation in the Netherlands was such that his letter to Elsevier concerning the impact of the 1980s cuts on the humanities that triggered the special commission that designed the protected budget.

The coverage of Professor Staal in 2012 is understandable from a human perspective: it was an appropriate moment to celebrate the life and works of a prominent scientist.  The current story is altogether drier fare, and arguably offers an interesting insight into the importance of humanities to the Dutch media, and to their audiences.

It is worth explaining a little about Teletext and the way Dutch public broadcasters use it.  Teletext emerged in the early 1970s and provided pages of information carried within TV transmission broadcasts.

Teletext as a medium is based on ‘scarcity’ – there is an absolute maximum of information that can be carried on each page, there are 900 pages in total and pages refresh roughly every minute.  Each page can carry a maximum of 960 characters and in reality about 80 words.  Even if every page number were to carry six sub-pages, the absolute maximum information that can be carried at any one time is 72,000 words, but the reality is that it is far less, and anything that cannot be conveyed in 80 word chunks does not fit well into the format.

Teletext systems typically introduced an ordering system, always carrying certain information on particular numbered pages.  This further reduced the scarcity, with the amount of information being carried having to fit into the number of pages available to it.

On Dutch Teletekst, domestic news is carried on the pages 104-120 (plus ‘shorts’ on pages 121-122).  That means there are a total of 17 pages available for significant domestic news, although the particular stories do change their place on the page during the day.

So to return to the case of the “Humanities courses threatened” story, it is significant that this story was given one of these 17 ‘scarce’ pages, making it at that point one of the 17 most important or newsworthy stories on the Dutch news at this time.

As I already noted, this is not a particularly intrinsically interesting story: there is no human interest or substantive political agenda, it is not reporting a struggle, or the outcome of a conflict.  Unless, that is, that it is a story about a threat that has a wider negative consequence.

In common with the majority of news broadcasters, NOS has to have a reason to broadcast a story, that is to say that something makes it ‘news’. The trigger for what makes something newsworthy include that something has happened recently, no-one else has reported on it, and knowing about that change or event is necessary for the audience to function as citizens, or desirable to consume in some way.

It is this link back to the audience that is interesting in the context of this report, and in particular, when thinking about the public value of the humanities.  The fact that a threat to humanities provision is newsworthy suggests that the public have an emotional attachment to humanities courses.

It would be easy to dismiss this prominence of news on the humanities as the work of a narrow clique of liberal ‘commentariat’. That would be a populist position that would need you to ignore the fact that the Dutch media have been reporting on developments in the humanities for decades now, dating back to the original Staal Commission, and even earlier than that.

What it does clearly do is that the audience place some value in knowing about the humanities, and a story that they are threatened generates audience interest, suggesting they have some emotional engagement or empathy with the need for humanities courses.  It also illustrates the chains that exist by which the value of humanities becomes visible, and the need to better understand those chains before being able to pronounce authoritatively on how publics’ value humanities and arts & humanities research.

Paul Benneworth, Enschede, 19^th March 2012.

The illustration is © NOS teletekst 2012, all rights reserved, and is used by kind permission of the NOS Editorial Team.

The overarching problem of current measures for arts & humanities research valorisation is that they are framed in terms of measurable individual transactions.  A collective property rights approach to the humanities exploitation ecology may offer some useful pointers for better understanding the ‘value’ of arts & humanities research.

There is a common criticism made of some of the most regularly-used measures for research’s social impact.  That criticism is that they focus on something that points to a particular kind of transaction which suggests that knowledge transfer has occurred.

So a common, and highly problematic, measure of impact can be taken from patent income. What that does incontrovertibly show is that someone has found the intellectual property useful, and is willing to pay for exclusive or non-exclusive rights to its exploitation.

Part of the problem – and also part of the advantage – of patent information – is that it is allows attribution back to the source of the ‘benefit’. 

Property rights define ‘who’ is the originator of the idea. The presence of a transaction allows the ‘idea’ both to be sold, but also to become identified as an input to the product, which is taken as a proxy for an output.

The World Intellectual Property Office argues that progress is dependent on investment in research, and investors need the certainty that IP protection, including patents, can bring. This issue is resolved by the use of intellectual property (IP). 

The point of the ‘transaction’ is that it shows that there is user value, in that someone is willing to pay for it.

Let us reflect on that last requirement, that impact is demonstrated when someone is willing to pay for it.

This chimes with the critiques emerging in public value theory that not everything that matters or is valued is, at the same time, something that someone is willing to pay for.

Coase famously framed it is a problem of externalities, that is the way that other people consume it impacts on your own ability to consume it.  An economist might frame this as a ‘free-rider problem’– people may not be willing to pay for something of value because others benefit from it without themselves paying for it.

If the solution is left to the market, then there will be an under-consumption of the product.  Demand is held artificially lower by an unwillingness for people to pay for something that others will benefit from. The role for the state in such circumstances is to identify the socially-optimal level of demand and then fund that out of general taxation.

In a sense, there is a free-rider problem around arts & humanities research.  The benefits are so general and so diffuse that it is hard for a consumer to see the link between the tax paid and the benefit that emerges.

The issue is that focusing on intellectual property frames the problem here as one of coming up with the right kind of individual property framework that defines transactions that can then be measured.  Reducing things to ‘property’ has the advantage of attributability but the drawback is the emphasised focus on individual property rights for things that are effectively common or collective goods.

The idea of collective property rights is by no means novel, and indeed in the UK, it can be argued that they preceded private rights which had to be constructed through a succession of Enclosures Acts.

People still ‘value’ the commons. Peasants would typically use the common land they to graze their animals, gather fire-wood, fish and hunt, and pace Hardin’s argument about the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’, may develop collective co-ordinating structures to avoid overexploiting and degrading it.

Indeed, this model of many peasants roaming the Commons to meet their own needs seems far closer to the way arts & humanities research impacts on society than the idea of a pharmaceutical company investing billions in a block-buster drug.  The ‘value’ of the Commons is evident not in people paying a price, but through their activity: there is clearly a real value to the peasants in the Commons.

We know that just counting the transactions, all the hunting, wood-gathering, grazing and fishing that takes place in this Commons is not a solution to the value conundrum that faces arts & humanities research.  It’s exactly the same problem as comparing visitors to a museum, readers of a newspaper column, beneficiaries from an assisted charity and buyers of a book.

So the interesting question is if you had to reframe the idea of knowledge exchange in the humanities in terms of a notion of collective rather than individual property rights, how would you do it?  More importantly, how would the link between the users and the creators be framed, if not as a series of individual transactions?   Answer that question, and we have taken a vital step towards defining what kinds of indicators we can use.

Paul Benneworth, Enschede, 15^th March 2012.

Photo appears courtesy of BCClimateChampions.

 On the one hand, I am effectively trying to think through an approach to public policy that does not imbue a supremacy of economic interests through with an air of rationalism and a faux veneer of pragmatism.  One of the key tools that imbuing process is happening in the valorisation debate is through league tables and rankings, which are produced by aggregating outputs into ‘scores’ and comparing individuals’ supposed public worth to those scores.

 As a geographer, I know that one of the ways in which that that air of rationalism builds up is through conversion technique, which take something arbitrary and apply a technique to which makes it seem more certain and definite.  So if you want to rank researchers you need a technology to run the technique of converting a living document into a dead score. 

 These lists have gained in popularity in recent years: CWTS at Leiden University here in the Netherlands produced a new ranking in which the university of Twente came out as the top Dutch university.  But still, they rely on a series of techniques to create certainty from variability, and when they move from the academic to the policy worlds, that nuance and uncertainty can easily be lost.

 On the other hand, I find myself using a list that was so egregious that it is not even used any more by its sponsors, the Australian Excellence in Research Evaluation list to get a sense of how papers in journals emerging in the public values debates do rate.

 I am interested in controversy as a potential indicator of public value failures, that is  when rational policy produces a result wildly out of kilter with what public values will accept, such as GM Foods, or irradiation, or BSE.  And so I am interested in this paper Transgenic plants: Successes and controversies published in Biotechnology and Molecular Biology Reviews.

 As an experiment, I looked the paper up on the ERA 2010 list, and it did affect the way I felt about it. It is ‘C’ rated, which is the lowest but at least it is a proper journal.  I have a couple of papers in ERA 2010 C-rated journals, and so that gives me a framework to ‘place’ the value of the contribution.

 I was surprised by this – that the list had an effect on the way I felt.  I had a rational response to it – in that ‘C’ ranking fitted the paper, which was more a review of ideas going round than an experiment-based  or concept developing article.  But I also had an emotional response, I felt reassured by the ranking.

 That emotional response was highly unexpected, and for me is a highly interesting insight into the strength of the hold that this economistic framing has on the world of science.

Paul Benneworth, Enschede, 8^th March 2012.

Photo appears courtesy of Stuart Chalmers.

(Note: edited to clarify point that BMRB is a proper scientific journal.  Ed's apologies)