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Universities And Research

By Dr. F. J. Llewellyn, Chairman, Universtiy Grants Committee. This article is taken from a discussion at the May Science Conference.

Research—by Government or University? The question seems to assume that research should be conducted either by the University or by Government. And if this is the alternative which is posed, then I say there is no alternative.

The answer is, of course, that research has to go on both in the university and in state departments. That is if you define research as an activity designed to find an answer to some question or questions.

Whether a particular piece of research should be undertaken in one or the other depends in large measure on the kind of answer you want and your purpose in seeking the answer.

It depends, too, on what you think is the primary objective of research in the university and of research by the state.

Let me take the university first. The main function of a university is to educate students and to create an environment in which they will educate themselves. Undergraduate courses seek, apart from any vocational content, to equip a mind with organised factual material, a knowledge of sources and the experience to deduce logically, generally with the framework of what is known and understood. Postgraduate training, again apart from its vocational content, seeks to widen the experience of application of the processes which have been described and played with in the undergraduate courses, in new circumstances.

The end product of this process of undergraduate and postgraduate university study is a person of potential. His potential depends on himself, his intrinsic ability, and on the effect his university environment has had on him.

The fundamental prerequisite for most undergraduate and for all postgraduate university work is an atmosphere of enquiry. An atmosphere of lively and stimulating doubt. And this is only possible where real enquiry is being undertaken by experienced and devoted enquirers. And the key word here is real. The enquiries must be meaningful. They must have purposes, and perhaps answers, which are satisfying to the intellect. Or if not to the intellect, then to some other human aspiration.

The sine qua non for the university to fulfill its purpose is the prosecution of this real enquiry and the transmission of the enthusiasm for information and knowledge which this engenders throughout the corpus of the university to the most junior and unsophisticated fresher. And this means that research must be prosecuted by all, or nearly all, of the faculty members of a university and by the postgraduate students of a university, if the university is to fulfill its purpose.

The nature of this enquiry is in some ways unimportant. Save that it must be a real enquiry and save that satisfaction of the enquirer must be ensured in the prosecution of the enquiry. If there is a genuine pursuit into the depths of the reality of the enquiry, then the enquiry justifies itself in that it creates, or helps to create, the proper environment for teaching.

All this applies to humanities, to the social sciences, to the technologies, as well as to pure science.

This is only another way of saying that one of the principal duties of a university is to prepare itself for the benefit of posterity. It has to preserve at all costs its spirit pi enquiry, its position in the forefront of developing knowledge, so that it may almost automatically establish the proper environment for the full exploitation of the various minds and personalities of the students who come to it each year.

This means in its turn that its enquiry must be uninhibited. It must be directed by the ambitions, the intelligence and the interests of those who prosecute it, irrespective of any economic or political or financial advantage which the enquiry may bring. This is an enquiry for the sake of enquiry and this atmosphere which I have described is known as academic freedom.

If you accept this thesis, that only against a background of lively enquiry in research can one establish the proper environment for undergraduate teaching, then you must accept that the converse is equally true.

It is by no means an accident that the significant development in knowledge, or nearly all of them until very recent years, have come from the universities. There is an interaction between research and teaching which is mutually beneficial. In my view all those who are engaged in research and enquiry should teach, and all those who are being taught should be taught only by those who are engaged in research.

This then to my mind is the prima facie case for research in the university. It has nothing to do with the practical and economical usefulness of the results of research. And it covers all kinds of intellectual activity and all kinds of vocational training within the university.

If by any means, or by any arrangement, it is found possible to extract an economic benefit from the researches conducted in the university, or alternatively if it is possible for the university or certain members of it to be persuaded to engage themselves in research which is likely to lead to economic benefit, then this is a bonus. It is a bonus which should be sought diligently and with tact and it is something that the state should be very grateful for.

If you accept this basic state for research in the universities, the purposes of it and the kind of results that are going to flow from it, you must accept also the fact that the state, which is concerned with the economic growth of the activities of the people of the state, cannot rely directly on the university to produce them. It may well rely upon the products of the university, namely the graduates, when they come into the employ of the state, or of industry within the state, to produce the answers, but it cannot rely directly on the university to produce the answers.

But there may well be, and there always are, problems besetting the state and the industries within the state and the social organism which is the state, which demand answers and demand them urgently. And to secure these answers the state, and industry, must establish systems of enquiry and research organisations of its own whose purpose is to find these answers.

Here we see, then, the essential and fundamental difference in motive which a university has on the one hand and the state or an industry has on the other, in engaging itself in research. Here we see immediately the differences in attitudes with which research are regarded.

And it is a commonplace thought that so many who are not engaged in research and have no real idea of what research is about, seek to typify the kind of research which should be prosecuted by the university on the one hand and by the state and industry on the other.

The fact is, of course, that the university, starting from the standpoint of academic enquiry, finds itself almost inevitably drawn into the application of the results which that enquiry produces. And on the other hand, the scientists engaged by the state or by industry, setting about the solution of a problem which is of immediate economic or practical importance, finds himself drawn almost automatically into the fundamental issues which the problem itself in that form poses.

And the result — a mixture of pure and applied, of long-term fundamental and ad hoc — both in the university and in the state or industrial laboratory, becomes so interwoven that it is difficult at first sight to say whether the work which is being done in the university should be done in industry and the state, or vice versa.

Whilst then the kind of research work which goes on is often difficult to relate to the primary purposes of the engagement in that research, the attitudes of mind of those who prosecute the research are very different the one from the other.

This kind of schism in attitudes has led to unfortunate circumstances in New Zealand in years gone by. It has led the university to a refusal to recognise work done in state departments, for example, as contributory towards higher degrees. It has led state departments on the other hand, who by and large have been better equipped than the universities, to decry the efforts of the university as being reminiscent of the ivory tower and unrelated to the real problems of life.

These differences have, I think, been more apparent in the minds of those who organise affairs than in the minds of those scientists and others who actually prosecute research. This particular situation is not peculiar to New Zealand. In recent years, however, there has been, I think, a significant change.

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Universities & Research

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The establishment, for example, of the National Research Advisory Council to co-ordinate the activities of the state, does not include the surveillance of university research activity and here is an implicit, if not an explicit, recognition that university research should not be directed by the state. The National Research Advisory Council, however, has to take cognisance of what goes on in the universities and in industry in formulating the priorities of the state and this is right and proper.

For many years the co-operation which has taken place between the geology departments of the university and the Geological Survey of S.I.R. has seemed to me to be an example which could well be followed by other departments of both organisations.

This has been co-operation at the bench and it seems to have been achieved in the great outdoors where, after all, on the side of a mountain or in the Mackenzie country or far removed from paper and from the trials and tribulations of struggling man, the realities are more obvious.

Whatever may be the reason, the geologists, both of the state and of the universities, have set an example of cooperation and mutual understanding which should be an example for us all.

Both Dr. Hamilton and I have in recent years sought to increase this interplay between the university and the state without impairing the major objectives of either. And this I think we have achieved, or will achieve, as the years go by.

More and more it is becoming possible for units of state research activities to be located in close proximity to the universities and to engage in interchange, both of information and of actual duites, teaching and research the one with the other. And so long as this can be done without either party losing sight of its objectives, then the mutual benefit will be enormous.

But this still leaves the organisers of research with a problem.

And that is how to dispose of the financial resources of the country between university research on the one hand and state research on the other so that a proper balance is achieved, so that the interaction the one with the other is the greatest, and the net result the most beneficial both in terms of short-term and long-term economic return directly and in terms of the education and development of the kinds of minds which will be required now and in the future by our developing society.

It is not an easy matter to sort out from all the monies which flow into the university those which are appropriately attributable to research. From the enquiries of the universities which the Grants Committee has made in the past few years, it is clear that the universities support research in a number of ways.

The academic staff are engaged in teaching, in departmental organisation and administration, and in research and in training research students. The technical staff on the payroll of the universities devote some of their time to the maintenance of undergraduate laboratories and some of their time as quasi research assistants to the postgraduate students and members of the academic staff.

The money that the universities spend on equipment, on materials and on library books, is in part devoted to the maintenance and development of undergraduate teaching and in part to providing the wherewithall for research.

The administrative costs of the universities — the heat, the light, the water, electricity, power and so on, are in part attributable to the administation of the universities, to undergraduate teaching, and to the postgraduate activity of the universities.

It is not possible, with existing information and data, to establish with certainty the total expenditure of universities in this country on research. However, from the many documents that I have studied, and from the enquiries that I have made, it seems that about 20 per cent of the total expenditure of the universities is attributable to research. This means that in this year, 1905, when the recurrent income of the universities is about £6 million (this figure does not include capital acquisitions such as land and buildings) that between £1 million and £1.3 million is spent by the universities on research.

I don't quote this figure with any degree of certainty, but it is the best estimate which I have been able to make with the information that is available. I hope that within the next few years, following the year by year returns which the Grants Committee will be getting from the universities on the way in which they dispose their recurrent funds, we shall be able in due course to make a better assessment of their research effort.

Of course, there are other monies which come to the university for research purposes and these amount in all in 1965 to something like three-quarters of a million pounds. They are made up of the research grant, the Kiwi Science Committee's grant, the Kiwi Medical Research Committee's grant, the monies of the Medical Research Council, the contributions which the state departments make towards the cost of sponsored research of one sort and another in the universities, and the maintenance of students either by the Postgraduate scholarship scheme, the new one, which came into force this year.

And these additional monies will grow, probably, in 1969 to some in excess of a million pounds when the probable contribution of the universities from their own resources will have reached about £1.8 million or £2 million.

So, summing it all up, we can say that from all sources, the universities deploy this year, 1965, nearly £2 million on research and postgraduate study in a gross expenditure of £6¾ million, and in 1969 this figure will have risen probably to something in excess of £3 million, out of total gross income including all monies to the universities of about £11 million.

In other words, of their total resources, the universities are disposing something between 25% and 30% on research activity. The corresponding figures for the United Kingdom for the year 1962 are £74 million gross income, with £42 million on research. That is, something over 50%. Perhaps in the discussion we elaborate on this comparison which in terms of raw figures is not a very profitable one.