As someone who’s keen on collaboration, working in unity, etc, this is a story of concern:
The concentration of research funding in a few elite universities has been described as a “policy trap” that fails to reflect the modern trend towards wider academic collaboration.
Sir David Watson, professor of higher education and principal of Green Templeton College, Oxford, said policymakers were ignoring the fact that researchers were increasingly working across institutions and national borders.
In a speech due to be delivered at the annual conference of the Society for Research into Higher Education, of which he is honorary president, on 7 December, he said that there was already a “stark conclusion” that funding had been concentrated in the UK “to the point where it has become dysfunctional”.
But the issue was also reinforcing an obsession – among vice-chancellors, politicians and funding bodies – with institutional competition, rather than with the real world of partnerships.
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