Worries on disciplinary trends

Abstract

If the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) is anything to go by, the social sciences in the UK are in trouble. 'Hard times for the dismal science' glares one headline (Patel 1 999c), which Area readers might regard as just reward for a discipline whose vices we were warned about long ago (Floyd and O'Brien 1976). Sociology comes in for a blast as well, although cynics might argue that the answer to Alison Utley's (1 999a) question of whether this discipline is lost or misunderstood is both. Not that geography misses out on the trauma. Perhaps the THES has not deemed it worthwhile to proclaim the discipline's demise in recent months, but there are worrying signs to be going on with. By way of example, note the drop in the number of geography graduates entering the teaching profession over recent years. When added to the downgrading of the subject in the UK core curriculum, if this impacts on the quality of geography teaching, we might see a reduced undergraduate entry in the future. All this when employers are complaining about deteriorat ing standards of university education (Tysome 1999). If you want a more research-oriented example to depress you, those who see themselves as scholars should gain no comfort from the heavy withdrawal of publishers from research monograph production (Darnton 1999). The response to this from governmental circles seems to be to extract another ounce of blood from institutions that are already suffering from a height ened sense of initiative fatigue. The bureaucratic and mechanistic procedures proposed for the Institute of Learning and Teaching are at least getting a good hiding in reactions from senior university manage ment (Utley 1999b). Here, my sense is that manag ers are venting their anger over the multitude of frustrations that beset them. For one, there is the drift toward a new binary divide, with a small group of universities likely to be research-funded and many more looking at heavier teaching loads. Already we see signs of this in the inverse relationship of research funding and extra budgetary allocations for promoting wider access to higher education-with the negativity of the relationship reinforced in the paltry sums afforded for access compared to research-derived payments (Thomson and Goddard 1999). For some universities, the milch-cow of dis tance learning and franchising has helped to boost income flows into research. But the profits from such enterprises are now reported to be attracting private sector interest. These new players are not using profits from teaching to subsidize research; conse quently, they are reported to be well placed to undercut university fees, so research premiums are threatened (Hinde 1 999a). The uncertainties of gov ernmental (and other) funding for research appear to be pushing senior university managers toward harsh decisions about whether an institution's future is teachingor research-oriented. This is leading to strident efforts to ensure that institutions fall on the 'right' side of any new binary line. The recent pro nouncement by management that 1 8 per cent of Loughborough academics are not 'research active' (so the university needs to impose teaching-only contracts) hints at what might be to come on a broader front (Baty 1 999b). These trends will worry many geography aca demics. Making the situation worse are potential and actual threats to research funding. Two markers highlight the scope for concern. The first comes from demands from the UK Treasury, which not only expects: