When a sports team manager poaches a player from a
rival side, fans make plenty of noise but the end result is generally a
more exciting league. It is a different matter when a team scout
manipulates the transfer market in the academic world. Headhunter tactics
seek out the biggest names in science and recruit them to their side with
offers of better financial rewards and bright new labs. But, the research
repertoire of poached department is left with a gaping hole in the field
and the league tables are distorted.In the UK, over the last few years there has been a worrying increase in the incidences of poached professors with events in September highlighting the state of play in the ivory towers. Although a spokesman for HEFCE, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, vehemently denies that they have found any evidence of poaching at all, others hold the opposite view.
Reaching the top of the league and winning the cup are, as in sport, great motivators for research. Almost every scientist wants their name at the top of the rankings and their department to get the five star awards in assessment programs. Indeed, once every four-five years, the UK government instigates a championship tournament among the universities to provide it with a league table on which research funding can be based.
The RAE enables higher education funding bodies to distribute public funds for research on the basis of quality. The best institutions get the biggest slice of the pie, with about £5 billion being likely to be distributed after RAE 2001. Research assessment is now considered an essential element in selecting departments for funding. The RAE cost about £37m ($50m) in 1996, but advocates emphasise this is a tiny fraction of the rewards. Interestingly, some 44% of universities have departments that were awarded a 5 or 5* grade.
The RAEs are hard work - for the assessors and the assessed - and come under severe fire from several quarters, not least those departments that, having put in great efforts to improve their profile under the system, then find themselves graded lower than they had hoped. On the other hand, the departments who obtain the highest scores can be proud of their achievements and use their status to the full in attracting, not only better funding, but students of a higher calibre too.
In the run up to RAE 2001 though, there are increasing worries that transfers between university research departments are again being manipulated, not because of the personal aspirations of the individuals involved, but at the faculty level. The result is that possibly previously lowly ranked institutions can boost their record simply by recruiting a famous name. It is easy to see why this might be considered a fruitful tactic to employ. One of the criteria of the RAE adjudicators is the quality of published research. Even if you have a decent group in a particular department their papers may not have as high an impact factor because of the degree of speciality in a small research niche. Recruit a big name with lots of highly cited papers and you can bump up the statistics instantaneously.
According to Brian Iddon a former chemist and now the Member of Parliament for Bolton, South-East in the North of England, the research assessment exercise created divisions between universities and has led to poaching of staff from excellent science and engineering departments, especially where large research groups published many papers. The administrators of RAE 2001 hope to sidestep the problem. One approach to stopping this seemingly unsporting behavior might be to weight the impact of individual scientists who excel in small niche areas against their counterparts in wider fields. This might ultimately reduce what some observers have described as 'the wasteful disruption of research caused by the poaching of research stars'. It would not, however, inhibit the normal movement of academics between institutions for sensible, personal reasons.
Moreover, those to be assessed during RAE 2001 have the option of including big-name 'A*' ex-members of staff who transferred to positions in other institutions in the year leading up to the final assessment date. This option is turning into something of a bureaucratic minefield though with departments having no way of keeping track of hundreds of research assistants and whether they left at the same time as their research supervisor to got to the same institution and so determining whether someone's team was poached or not. The individual's new institution will also have the option of including their new recruit in their return to the assessor too.
According to Bahram Bekhradnia, HEFCE Director there was actually more movement of academic staff after the last RAE than there was in the year or two before it. Although it has been reported that at least 500 more academics moved during the so-called 'poaching season' before RAE 1996 than was predicted. Bekhradnia said, in an assessment of the assessment, that 'Some selective recruitment and poaching does take place, but there is absolutely no evidence that it is on a wide scale or that it is damaging.' Others have pointed out that there is more movement in the USA, and that the UK might actually benefit from more of it.
New universities, the former polytechnics and institutes of higher and further education, are all now included in the RAEs so there is a much wider market from which to poach and more centers keen to cream off the top intellects. One worrying side-effect of this has been highlighted by Lord Dainton, a former government scientific adviser, who believes research quality will suffer as the best scientists are spread ever more thinly.
Several of the newer British universities, which were generally considered to be vocational learning centers under their previous remit as 'polytechnics' (which changed in 1990), have recruited many new researchers ahead of the next RAE. But, it is not limited to the new universities.
Seven polymer chemists from Lancaster University moved to the University of Sheffield last year with the enticement of better funding from an already highly rated department. The group is internationally rated and Tony Ryan, Head of Chemistry at Sheffield, said at the time, 'The arrival of this group creates one of the largest clusters of polymer academics in the UK and will make us an important player on the world stage.'
Dainton has pointed out that the older leading universities such as Oxford and Cambridge were supposedly less likely to be poached from because they can already offer better perks and more pay, in September London's Imperial College grabbed three leading researchers from Oxford together with their research teams amounting to some 80 new staff. Brian Spratt, Geoff Smith and Roy Anderson, who was the subject of recent controversy surrounding recruitment of an Asian female member of staff at Oxford, will help establish IC's new center for infection, immunology and epidemiology at the former medical school attached to St Mary's Hospital, London. These star players will take with them grants amounting to £7m from the Wellcome Trust, the UK's biggest medical research charity. For its part, Oxford pointed out it had recruited new teaching and research staff from Israel, Texas, Australia and Russia and two scientists from Cambridge and another from IC.
So, is the movement that is seen in academia simply a consequence of institutions actively upgrading their research departments and therefore a positive thing? Or, is it manipulative behavior? 'One of the more usual perks for 'poaching' is promotion to professor from say reader or senior lecturer, says Charles Christacopoulos, of the Secretary's Office at the University of Dundee, 'In practice, you get professors in their early thirties, with little understanding of the wider world and 'all' the implications of their research.'
The poaching concept is rather more serious than the difference between a nice report and a great report. A five-star department can expect 20% greater financing from HEFCE than a grade-5, while departments achieving the lowest standards might face amalgamation, or worse, closure. Other efforts to create disincentives to poaching might be to force departments to consider a minimum percentage of their staff in their report to the RAE assessors for them even to be considered for the highest banding.