Programme director
Vice chancellors
Director-Generals
National Research Foundation (NRF) officials
Distinguished guests
Good morning, I want to talk about four issues that I have been giving some thought to over the past year: the dual system of research funding, the NRF rating system, research niches for universities, and expanding the number of science and technology graduates.
The “dual system” provides diversified support for research in universities
Government funding for research flows to universities in two streams
The first stream comes from the Department of Higher Education. It’s for “basic research”. The original idea was that this stream would fund a basic level of research activity among university academic staff and give each member “a well found laboratory”.
That was the original idea in the English system (from whom we inherited the system of “dual support”). However, as universities grew bigger, it no longer made sense to give everyone a “well found laboratory”, and the system was adapted in the UK through the research assessment exercise and here through the South African Post Secondary Education (SAPSE) system and latterly the introduction of the new funding formula in 2006.
I am told that the new formula has increased research funding substantially. It now stands at something like R1.5 billion a year.
The second stream comes primarily from the Department of Science and Technology. It’s for “projects”. The stream flows to the research councils and through the NRF into the universities. The original idea was that this stream of funding would support promising lines of research, provide central facilities, and encourage research in particular fields believed to be of national importance.
Other departments also contribute to this stream through their respective agents or programmes (for example, the Department of Health through the Medical Research Council, the Department of Trade and Industry through Technology and Human Resource Industry Programme (THRIP), which is managed by the NRF).
In other words, the Department of Science and Technology and the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) are jointly responsible for South Africa’s research and development capacity and activities at universities.
It’s time to review the dual system of support, as a new higher education department has just been established. We are going to give this some more thought and the outcome of this conference might well give impetus to the process. Certainly, the budget pressures over the medium term require our departments to discuss a rational framework in this regard.
I have not heard any grumbling about the dual support system, although there are a number of issues that need to be improved, notably how to expand the number of science and technology graduates. I will come back to this in a moment. I must say, though, that there is very little, if any, engagement between the Department of Higher Education and Training and the universities to align the use of Department of Higher Education and Training funds with national research priorities.
Yet Department of Higher Education and Training funds are larger on an annual basis than the contribution the Department of Science and Technology makes, via the NRF, to the costs of research in the universities. It’s not clear that Department of Higher Education and Training funds are being fully re-invested in research and development support at individual institutions.
The point of this observation is not that the state ought necessarily to increase its control over those funds, but that the Department of Higher Education and Training and the Department of Science and Technology (and the Department of Trade and Industry) need to have a conversation over the rationality and coherence of the “dual support” system.
There is no clear support among academics for the current NRF rating system
Last year two South African science researchers won R1 million each from the Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges in Global Health, a $100 million program. They were two in a group of 262 researchers from 30 countries who were awarded grants for innovative, early stage projects.
One of the South Africans was Dr Tumi Semete (aged 29), a researcher at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, based in Cape Town. She won a grant for a proposal to use cutting-edge nanotechnology to save the lives of tuberculosis patients who forget to take their pills.
Now we welcome South African scientists winning awards of this kind.
Only the other day Dr Lucas Ntyintyane called on politicians to invest in more research because we apparently ‘underestimate the economic benefits of investing in research and development. He said that this was the main reason that young researchers were leaving South Africa. He was perhaps thinking of himself. He is a recipient of the 2009/10 international clinical research fellowship from the Fogarty Institute and Vanderbilt University, Washington, DC.
Well done to Dr Ntyintyane; his success in undertaking further study abroad is not our failure. Rather it is the exact reverse; he would not have been able to win such a prestigious award without receiving an excellent basic scientific education here. Moreover, he is not lost to us. He will be part of a wide connection of scholars collaborating internationally. His success abroad will be another way of promoting South African success abroad.
Knowledge is not a zero-sum game. New knowledge discovered in one country is now available to all countries in more rapid and more immediate ways than ever before. For example, the huge expansion in the number of Doctors of Philosophy in China doesn’t disadvantage us.
Besides Chinese and Indians make up the largest components of foreign students in the United States.
Why would the United States encourage foreign students, if the benefit accrues only to their home countries and not to the United States itself? The point remains though: we need to maintain and improve our basic scientific training in our universities. We cannot rely on other countries to do it for us. But the complaint of a brain drain, when our excellent students are lured abroad by better funding and better resources, is not sustainable.
This brings me to the issue of ratings. There is a new elite in our universities. Not the A-rated scientists. Not any rated scientists. The elite are those scientists who win, like Dr Semete, massive project funding from abroad. These funds put our NRF funding literally into the shade. The national rating system was created in the early 1980s in an attempt to measure research quality.
“The idea was to use international benchmarks in evaluating the quality of a researcher’s recent output and reputation, in the belief that this would be a reliable predictor of likely scientific outputs, outcomes and impacts of the proposed research”.
I am quoting from the NRF internal review 2005.
Recently and controversially this system was extended to the social sciences. A-rated scientists were supposed to get large grants for large projects. That was what the second stream of funding under the dual system was supposed to be for. Well it hasn’t worked out that way. In fact, recently I asked what had happened to grants for “blue-sky” research and was told to have a look at the 2005 NRF Review report. I did and found the following:
“As a review panel, we are sceptical about the merits of the NRF’s rating system, and we are in unanimous agreement that a fully merit driven competitive process of awarding NRF grants on the basis of proposals, weighing track-records into the evaluation, would be an improvement on the current NRF policy of using ratings as a gateway to longer-term and continuing funding”.
I think we should take another look at the rating system. It’s one of the issues that the DST and the DHET should discuss together with a view towards a stakeholder reassessment.
Universities of technology must develop research niches. This brings me to my third point.
Over 75 percent of higher education expenditure on research is spent in six universities. The Organisation for Economic cooperation and Development (OECD) innovation review (2007) makes the point that the research component of the funding formula is not targeted at developing research capacity in Human Development Indexes (HDIs) or technology universities.
Similarly it appears that not much of the DTI annual transfer for research and development goes to HDIs or technology universities, although there are dedicated interventions for start-up Black Economic empowerment (BEE) companies. Even THRIP is skewed towards the research intensive universities.
The OECD innovation review suggests that there is a Scandinavian model to follow for development in regional (or rural) areas. The model is that research funding for rural or regional universities should be ring fenced. These focus on setting up small research centres so that the new universities can establish their own research profiles, typically in concert with regional industry.
It’s imperative that universities of technology develop research profiles and research capacity, while also training higher levels of qualified technologists. The national plan for higher education (2001) rejected the structural differentiation of universities into teaching universities and research-intensive universities.
However, it accepted the principle of differentiation. By that is meant: each university should set itself a mission that suits the region in which it is situated and is aligned to national development targets. Most technology universities have done this and yet the debate goes on.
For example, Glenda Kruss’s work on partnerships in universities indicates that there are technology universities that have built partnerships in high technology areas, others that are focusing on excellence in teaching, and yet others that are concerned with sustainable rural or regional development.
The government has invested large sums of money in upgrading infrastructure since 2007 and proportionately more has been earmarked for those institutions that have not had a research legacy. We need to review the impact of this investment and its support for innovation.
Upgrading university infrastructure is not the only component of improving research capacity. The linkages between universities and business and improving the qualifications of staff at technology universities are critical.
The low numbers of staff with Doctors of Philosophy qualifications is a concern in our country’s higher education institutions in general. However, it’s a major concern for universities of technologies, especially because of their newly attained status as universities and the concurrent expectations in terms of research development and innovation.
Universities of technology have to make sure that they develop their human capital and research capacity. We are looking to establish a national, postgraduate, development programme
I come now to my last point.
The Department of Science and Technology’s science, engineering and technology human capital development strategy, which was jointly developed by the Department of Science and Technology and Department of Higher Education and Training, is near completion.
A key constraint to improving the throughput rate of M and D students in the university system is that only 33 percent of academics have Doctors of Philosophy (although this does vary across faculties) and are therefore technically competent to guide research students. This problem is compounded by the fact that many of these 33 percent are not actively engaged in research activities.
A well formulated, focused and properly resourced national staff development strategy is needed for universities. A staff development levy could be utilised for this purpose, or alternately the DHET could, in principle, earmark a portion of its HEI subsidy for this specific intervention. Currently the Department of Science and Technology’s interventions make only a small contribution to this challenge.
The capacity of established researchers to absorb more master’s and doctorate students (in order to increase the annual graduation numbers in pursuit of the Department of Science and Technology, Department of Higher Education and Training SET HCDS targets) is limited by mainly two factors:
* their personal capacity to make sufficient time available for supervision, and
* the physical constraints of the researcher’s environments (especially in laboratory based sciences).
Because the research training of master’s and doctorate students is squarely a joint Department of Science and Technology and Department of Higher Education and Training responsibility, such an intervention would ideally require close cooperation between the departments, should be jointly supported, and could be implemented using the agency of the NRF.
The Department of Science and Technology has adopted a pipe-line approach in its own human capital development initiatives, its current programmes including bursaries (from honours to doctoral levels), and fellowships at post doctoral level.
The Department of Science and technology’s flagship programmes are; Centres of Excellence programme, physical or virtual centres of research that concentrate existing capacity and resource and the South African Research Chairs initiative.
The major challenge that the Department of Science and Technology faces is the scaling up of these interventions particularly of bursary values and numbers, size and number of centres of excellence, and impact and number of South African Research Chairs Initiative (SARCHIS). Considering the ambitious targets that the government has set itself of producing 3 000 science engineering and technology Doctors of Philosophy by 2018 the current initiatives require scaling up.
The NRF currently funds about 10 percent of the Doctors of Philosophy enrolled in the universities. This is a very small percentage. While a number of initiatives are under development, including the next generation of academics driven by Higher Education South Africa, there seems to be a clear gap in developing mid-career level researchers at senior lectureship level with the aim of getting them to well established status. Such an initiative would positively contribute towards creating a clear path towards being well established scholars and scientists.
In closing, let me indicate a few key areas under current review.
The Department of Science and Technology and the Department of Higher Education and Training are engaging the South African Revenue Service in discussions on the need to reduce tax on bursaries, scholarships and fellowships.
The Department of Science and Technology and the Department of Higher Education and Training are also engaging the Department of Home Affairs in developing a skills importation strategy for scarce and exceptional skills.
Lastly, the linkages between the seven national research facilities and universities could be significantly enhanced. The National Research Facilities provide additional laboratory space and equipment to cognate departments in universities, and their research active staff could be utilised to extend the capacity of university researchers to enrol master’s and doctorate students.
Thank you.
Issued by: Department of Science and Technology
12 March 2010
