Research support in British universities

Abstract

In Britain the provisions for governmental financial support for universities, and governmental provision for scientific research, have grown up as relatively independent traditions, although the decision of 1889 to introduce an annual university vote was probably influenced by a preceding Royal Commission on Technical Education. The origins of our present university grant system may be traced back as far as 1889, but it was only when the University Grants Committee was formed in 1919 that its recurrent grant to British universities came to be allocated on the quinquennial principle. It is important to point out that government grants are made without any directive as to how the major portion of the money should be spent by the individual university. Each institution has been allocated a sum based upon the requirements of its current activities with an extra sum for approved expansion and new developments; it has then been at liberty to dispose of the funds as it has seen fit. The rationalisation of governmental financial support for research in physical science may be said to date from 1916, with the foundation of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, which was to advise the Lord President of the Council and the Committee of the Privy Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. (The University Grants Committee was, in contrast, responsible to the Chancellor of the Exchequer.) The Department of Scientific and Industrial Research always had, as two of its major functions, the provision of support for trainee research workers and for research projects " of special timeliness and promise ". These were always the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research's main arrangements for contributing to academic science, and after the Second World War they came to absorb a substantial portion of the council's budget.1 In 1920, the Medical Research Council was formed, and although of rather different administrative constitution from the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, it has always had rather similar obligations towards university research. The third main administrative division of research in the United Kingdom provides for agriculture and fisheries. This,