In the early to mid-2000s, there was a recognition that Scotland had a range of clusters of excellence in research, but the join-up between the clusters wasn’t necessarily great. We’ve also got a tradition of investment in research in Scotland, which meant that Scotland was pulling funding above and beyond what the numbers might suggest. To some extent, we still outperform. I think if you look at the latest report, Scotland outperforms every geographical region apart from the Southeast of England. Scotland also has a tradition of institutions being close to one another, both physically and intellectually. This has enabled us to work together in ways that are more difficult elsewhere. I think we’ve seen others copy that Scottish model. Well, I wouldn’t say copied necessarily, I would say inspired by or have paid attention to what’s happened.  

I think research pooling made a big difference when it was first initiated by the Scottish Government, but I think there’s always a tension between institutions. On the one hand, their desire to be seen as independent power houses and agents of their own fortune, and on the other, a tendency to want to clump together. What we should be doing is collaborating where we absolutely should collaborate, but also be prepared to compete with one another because we do exist to deliver world-leading research excellence. If we let that vision slip, we risk becoming parochial. 

MH: To what extent do you think changes that have happened in the last 20 years in teaching have affected our ability to do world-leading research? 

TB: I think teaching is a fundamental part of what we do. My view is that universities exist to change the world and we change the world in two ways largely: one is through our research and its application, and the second is by the quality of the people we deliver into the wider world. Over the last 20 years, what hasn’t changed is the quality of the students, the quality of the experience that we provide our students with, and the teaching that we deliver to them. What has changed over the last 20 years here at St Andrews is the increasing number of students we teach from the poorest areas in Scotland. There has been a national push to address those cohorts to allow the universities to understand their role in delivering that social change for Scotland. We’re also seeing more initiatives around teaching together and sharing content. Interestingly, certainly in graduate-level teaching we see universities teach and work together. That’s not a new phenomenon, St Andrews and Heriot-Watt delivered the key leadership of almost all of the UKs photonics industry and many global photonics leaders for a joint-taught course, which has been running since the 1970s if I remember correctly.

“That idea of working together when it’s in everyone’s best interest is something I think comes naturally to Scotland in a way that may be less familiar to others. That idea of working together when it’s in everyone’s best interest is something I think comes naturally to Scotland in a way that may be less familiar to others.”

MH: One of the things that came up a year ago in the Westminster committee hearing on research in Scotland was about how research, not just in Scotland but in the UK, is cross-subsidised through teaching and the pressure that it puts on research. How was it 20 years ago for research? Was it better funded on its own? 

TB: 20 years ago, I was funding my own projects with UKRI funding. I was applying for it and the money was coming in. It was great and we could go on and do it. I think that model has probably changed. The amount of money we get paid for a Scottish student hasn’t changed much in the past decade. That requires more cross-subsidisation, which has brought in a greater requirement for cross-subsidisation from international students. The costs to do research have meanwhile increased too, and while some of our funders recognise the full cost of doing research, others don’t. 

I suspect we’re probably having to cross-subsidise more now than we did 20 years ago due to the rising costs of research, staffing, and so on. We also compete on a global playing field, which has expanded massively in the last 20 years, particularly in Asia. The field is more competitive, and the top-end salaries have to reflect the fact that we need to be competitive. We must be careful about how we sit in that marketplace to ensure we can have the right people to deliver that inspirational leadership and research, which also feeds into inspirational teaching. 

I think many institutions are under real financial pressure at the moment. Some institutions will make decisions about who they accept funding from based on what that funding is going to pay for and whether it’s going to cost more to do the research than it would not to. Personally speaking, I think if universities exist to push the frontiers of knowledge, it sounds very trite. We need to get funding, and we need to be open-minded about where that funding comes from. I’m lucky I work for an institution which still absolutely values that ability to do research and so far, we remain completely open to working with any funder that will enable our researchers to do what they want.  

“…I think if universities exist to push the frontiers of knowledge, it sounds very trite. We need to get funding, and we need to be open-minded about where that funding comes from.”

MH: What do you see as some of the challenges and opportunities today? 

TB: Good question. I think we’re seeing a research environment that is driven more by challenge-led research. So, answering the question and solving the challenge without caring so much about strict disciplinary boundaries. I think we’re also in a situation where we are being held ever-more accountable for the money we receive to do research. We need to be able to talk about how our research is making change through impact, changes in behaviour, and culture. I think we’re sitting in a very unfortunate position where much of the rhetoric around research funding is driven by STEM, which only recognises one part of the solution to so many of the problems in the world. So many of the problems in the world are ultimately driven by human behaviour. To understand and work with human behaviour, there is a really strong role for the arts, humanities, and social sciences. The scientists and engineers are excellent at developing technological solutions. We can invent the world’s best technological solution, but if we can’t persuade people to use it, then we’ve failed. My view is we need to consider the human angle in everything we do. Meanwhile, I’m seeing less funding. It’s always difficult and I’m seeing how much more difficult it can be to get the message across about the importance of research and for that to be listened to. 

MH: To whom does that message need to be delivered? 

TB: Sometimes to funders, often to politicians about the real deep-seated importance of what we’re doing and the importance of protecting our cultural heritage. Research is another way of protecting the cultural heritage, and many hundreds of years of that heritage exist in Scotland. My view is we need to be continuing to back and support that. 

MH: That’s a challenge. If we think about something like the Alliance that seeks to bring together all the research institutions in Scotland, across disciplines and sectors, reaching outside of universities into industry, government, community, organisations, charities. In that space, what do you see as a big challenge? 

TB: Well, I think how we work together is always a challenge. There are some fundamental and boring challenges within that space, for example, enabling money to pass between organisations when we have a whole range of individual approaches, even for relatively small amounts of money. 

In that multidisciplinary, multi-partner space, learning to talk one another’s languages is also really challenging because someone running a company may have a very different view compared to somebody who’s running a social enterprise or a university. That’s the challenge. But that’s also why it’s interesting and that’s why it’s fun to do. It’s about trying to identify what threads are joining us together. Why has everyone come together in that room? What are we all trying to do and how can we support one another? Because if we support one another to do that, everybody is going to come out of this positively. 

I think there’s also a challenge around funding across those very disparate groups. We are bound up in regulations and meanwhile you’re going to see organisations at very different ends of the wealth spectrum. For some, it may be incredibly difficult to even get the money to travel to a meeting, whereas for others, that might be very easy but it might be very hard for them to engage with members of the public in a way where they’re not seen as the big bad guys in the process. I think we all have different challenges. Again, it’s about how we reconcile those challenges to deliver what it is we need to do. 

MH: From your position as VP in Research, Collections and Innovation, what keeps you up at night? 

TB: What keeps me up at night? Well, we live in a world that is apparently less secure, from the viewpoint of, for example, what’s happening in Ukraine and we are going to see the climate crisis driving security issues. Those macro issues are always there. In a sense, in those macro challenges, there are real opportunities for us.  

What keeps me up at night from a university perspective is that we have a real challenge around postgraduate student funding, PhDs in particular. Most of the funding agencies have cut back on the number of PhD students they will fund. Now, for good or ill, PhD students are often the engines of research and they will be the next generation of thought-leaders. I was at a meeting recently and someone posed the question of “how many PhD students does the UK need?” That’s a good question in and of itself when you look at the future career trajectories of these individuals. What’s also recognised is that the support provided isn’t enough, so effectively more money is needed, which is fine but we’re playing a zero-sum game on money here. There’s not new money coming into the system. We’ve seen a move to much more cohort-based approaches and there are some real positives in that around training. I think, overall, financial challenges in universities keep me up at night, but generally speaking, I sleep pretty well. 

MH: I’m worried about research, because it seems to me, that it’s teaching that brings income, and research sits as a ‘nice to have’ but not essential for the economic model. 

TB: Certainly, in the research-intensive universities, the reason why we attract staff is their ability to carry out research. If we want our students to be taught by the best people we need to be doing that research. 

MH: The best researchers might not be the best teachers. 

TB: No, they might not. I think universities always struggle with that one. I think we see a generation of students who are now probably better taught than they were in the past. There is a significant uptake in professional teaching education for university researchers, but there is also a growth of staff who spend more of their time on teaching than they do on research in universities. I think one of the reasons students come to university is to be taught by people who are ahead of their game in what they’re teaching, and that’s often through research leadership.  

You do see some challenges across the sector in particular disciplines. Some of those are due to wider societal issues at play than just strictly research and the costs of doing research. But am I optimistic? Yes, I’m always optimistic. You wouldn’t do my job without being optimistic! The weather is a bit heavy, but I really think we should remain committed to that vision of excellence and delivering change. If we do that alongside high-quality research, by and large we will be able to fund it. We need to be able to communicate that. 

We hear the student voice far more than we ever did when I was at university. We listen to it and involve the students much more in our decision-making and that makes us a much stronger place to be. I think if we were an exclusive teaching sector, we’d lose much of the vitality and DNA of who and what we are. I wouldn’t be working here if that was the case. 

MH: My final question, looking to the future, what do you think we can do to create the best possible research environment for collaborative, interdisciplinary, cross-sector research? 

TB: We’ve been trying to do that for the last 20 plus years, and I think it’ll always be something we have to work at. What can we do? Well, I think we need to make sure that the work within those partnerships is seen as valuable by the institutions and we need to make sure that people have the time, space, and resources to be able to engage in those partnerships. 

I think we could look at how we streamline the ability to make those partnerships work together, because as we’ve said, there are many petty barriers that get in the way. We also need to be much better at talking about what we’re doing and why it makes a difference, because that will bring people in and make the groups larger and more visible. 

We need to be visible to the researchers that we want to involve, and the people who are going to fund us. I think we have a duty to be visible to the wider population who are often ultimately paying for this. So, we must consider all the stakeholders, not just those taking part in the research. You might also want to think about how you prioritise where your limited investment lies in that. At the moment, I think we need to be close to government and funders, but to make that message really loud we need the voice of the end-users to be heard as well. 

MH: I just jotted down that there’s three things that were important at an institutional level. These are recognition, time, and resources. Could you speak to each of these? 

TB: I can. Recognition. We need to recognise that the work in those interdisciplinary or inter-institutional relationships is valued and fits into university structures of recognition and reward. That could be promotions or any of those kinds of structures and we need to make sure that that activity is valued.  

Time. Enabling people to have the time to carry out their research is the single biggest challenge for universities at the moment. For example, researching while still being able to deliver teaching and administration. Somehow or another, we’ve got to work in a space where people have got enough flexibility to do that. Part of that is about enabling people to let go of things that don’t need to be done or could be better done by others.  

Resources, which is a really difficult question at the moment, because to my mind if you’re going to do something, you need to be prepared to put some resourcing behind it. Now, that might be a relatively low cost. We always see good activity around seed funding, but we’re doing that with an eye to it developing into something bigger. If you are thinking about what a model could be, you need to be thinking about the value propositions that you’re selling to the universities. I know that sounds horribly like business speak. It’s not because we’ve only got so much money we can invest. What are we going to get back? Why should we be putting money into that? How then do you design the best structures for doing that?  

MH: Thanks. This really reflects the multiple and interlocking challenges we are facing at the moment. And now, final question…. What’s your vision for research at St Andrews?  

TB: My vision for research at St Andrews is to deliver world-class research that makes a difference in the world, which we currently do, but we could always do more of it. 

My role is to enable you to do the research that you want to do. What’s really important is that the great research that we do is recognised in the wider community as well and I think there’s still work to be done in that space. There’s work to be done in ensuring that we can do research by bringing outside funding in to pay for it, because as a university, we can only afford to pay for so much. There are choppy waters around at the moment.  

If you look at our strategy, we want to grow industry funding for research. We want to grow research council funding for research. We want to grow all those areas. Why do we want to do it? Not because we want more money, but because we want to be able to do high-quality research and get it out there.   

MH: Thank you so much, Tom.