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Report of Discussion

Tuesday, 13 October 1998. A Discussion was held in the Council Room of the following Reports:

The Annual Report, dated 22 July 1998, of the General Board on the establishment of personal Professorships and Readerships (Reporter, 1997-98, p. 963).

Dr D. R. J. LAMING:

Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, in response to increasing concern about the fairness of promotions in this University the General Board has, over the past two years, gone to great trouble to revise the procedures for consideration of applications, making those procedures a little more transparent and accountable. In particular, it has formulated in detail the categories with respect to which each applicant's work is to be considered - but not too closely. In fact, not closely at all, because, as is explained in the Annual Report, the General Board has at the same time directed that:

All members of Faculty Committees are expected to give equal consideration to all applications and the process of evaluation of applications should be a collective activity. Although members of the Faculty Committee may have personal knowledge of a candidate or have read their work, each candidate must, as far as possible, be treated on the same basis, and Faculty Committees must make their evaluations on the basis of the evidence in the documentation. (Reporter, 1997-98, p. 964)

That is to say, if any member of a Faculty Committee happens to have read some of a candidate's work, knowledge of its content should be put out of mind during the Committee's deliberations.

If a candidate's actual work is not to be examined by the Faculty Committee, what does the General Board intend by 'Originality of research', 'Nature of the contribution to knowledge', and so on?

Consider: each Faculty Committee receives applications from candidates in diverse fields of work, especially in the natural sciences, but from candidates who are superficially similar in their volume of publications. If the Committee does not enquire into the content of those publications - if, instead of forming its own opinion, first-hand, it borrows opinions from elsewhere - how is it to discriminate reliably according to the categories which the General Board has set out? We need to distinguish between the criteria listed in the Yellow Book and those criteria which actually inform Faculty Committees' decisions; they may not be the same. Since, by the injunction I have cited, the General Board has made its own criteria more or less ineffective, what are the criteria which really matter in the deliberations of Faculty Committees, those factors which cause one name to be put forward for further consideration and another not? If the General Board can afford to tell us, they should do so. It will clear the air.

Since Faculty Committees are enjoined not to examine the content of an applicant's publications, there will be anomalies in their evaluations, anomalies sometimes of outrageous enormity. Accordingly, the revised procedures incorporate an appeal process, introduced for the first time this year, but promised as long ago as 1987 (Reporter, 1986-87, p. 437). But the Yellow Book said nothing about what might constitute grounds for appeal. That was curious. What the Yellow Book carefully omitted was that the General Board had privately agreed to emasculate the appeal process.

…the role of the Appeals Committee, as approved by the General Board, [is] as follows: 'The Appeals Committee will consider and make a determination on the grounds specified by the officer concerned for appealing against the Faculty Promotions Committee's decision. The appeal will not be a re-hearing or a general review of the Faculty Promotions Committee's decision. It will be confined to the issues raised in the grounds of appeal. The Committee will consider whether there has been an error or fault in the procedure or in documentation or its contents or otherwise e.g. where it is alleged that the Faculty Board Committee must have overlooked or misapprehended a significant fact, or there is an allegation of breach of natural justice or failure to follow the set procedures.

The role of the Committee is not to consider fresh evidence in support of the officer's case unless relating to a default on the part of the Faculty Promotions Committee.'

(Letter from the Secretary to the Appeals Committee, 27 February 1998)

That is to say, the remit of the Appeals Committee has been restricted to procedural matters of which an applicant would ordinarily have no knowledge. But, of course, a member of a Faculty Committee itself might privately advise an unsuccessful, but favoured, candidate of the terms in which he or she might usefully appeal to the Secretary General.

Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, on the face of it there is a question urgently needing to be addressed, a question about the sincerity of the General Board in producing these particular revised procedures for the consideration of applications for promotion.

Professor D. N. DUMVILLE:

Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, this is the first outing for the new promotions procedure and the Report therefore raises a variety of questions of interest. I should like to begin by welcoming the positive results of the exercise - in the areas of study of which I have some knowledge the promotions recommended are manifestly well deserved, and it is a pleasure to congratulate those recommended for promotion. Also welcome are the further allocation of funds to enable the lists to be lengthened, the breakdown by Schools (which regularizes divisions which have long been assumed to have operated), and the conquest of some difficulties which Dr Reif raised in a Discussion on this subject in this place some years ago. Inevitably, however, what one is left wondering is about those highly deserving colleagues who have not achieved promotion.

The Report as a whole, rather than the lists of names, now needs consideration. The General Board has expressed its view that the revised annual procedure should continue to operate, that continuity is now important; indeed, it has said twice in paragraph 8 that it 'believes' this. One hopes that before long this faith, even fervour, will grow cool and that it will see that there are preferable procedures. I have stated my views here before about what I think to be wrong with the new, as with the previous, procedures, and how they should be replaced: I shall not go over the same ground now. I hope that we shall get a Syndicate and that it will encourage the General Board to be less timid, less conservative, in its approach to these matters.

I shall organize my remarks on this Report in six brief sections. First, there is the issue of applying for a Readership and/or a Professorship. It seems to be unnecessarily restrictive to forbid applications for both at the same time, but, if the objection is to the extra volume of potential paperwork, then there is an alternative, which is to give the General Board's committee the authority to recommend that someone who has applied for a Readership be appointed to a Professorship. This system works in other British universities. There are enough University Lecturers for whom such a recommendation would be a just decision.

I turn now to the timetable for the procedure. Sufficient evidence has emerged in this last round to suggest that it is simply too tight, that (in particular) administrators are being asked to do too much in the time currently available, at both Faculty and General Board level. I hope that the General Board will think about this some more. One possibility would be to begin each round in the first half of the Easter Term eighteen months prior to the date of the intended promotion: clearly the problem with this is that successive rounds would overlap. Alternatively, a full calendar year could be the usual format, with promotions to take effect nine months after the publication of the General Board's Annual Report on the subject.

Next, there is the question of the Faculty stage. I see two particular difficulties. Form 3, the 'factual statement' about teaching, is, apart from whatever the candidate may say in the initial application, the only admissible evidence likely to be available to the Faculty Committee. It would make more sense to arrange for this to be an agreed statement by the candidate and the Head of Department or Faculty Chair, and for the evaluation section of Form 5 then simply to have a pass/fail test on this matter. Otherwise, the 'judgment' will be easily challengeable. In terms of the evaluative scores it is clear that 2, not 1, is the most damaging, while the relationship of 1 and 3 is confusing and inadequately thought through. I hope that this can be revised.

Fourthly, there is a problem about confidentiality. Forms 4 and 5 are marked 'strictly private and confidential', yet feedback is presented in terms of Form 5. It would make sense to revise this aspect of Form 5, and indeed to think again about this aspect of Form 4 - it is not self-evident that that needs to be kept from the candidate's eyes.

Fifthly, it seems to me that there is a problem with applications received by the central committee as a result of an appeal. It would be useful if the Board would reconsider whether it would be more to the advantage of the candidate for the application simply to be included among all the other incoming applications, rather than marked specially. Clearly cases will vary, but one is bound to wonder whether being marked in this way can be a disadvantage. It would be useful to know this year's experience: could not the Board publish some observations based on that section of its committee's report?

Finally, I turn to feedback. This seems to me to be a very worrying aspect of the process. A fair number of colleagues whose applications were unsuccessful have shown me their feedback sheets. These seem to consist, in their particular prose sections, of a single-sentence summary. Those which I have seen have been generally discouraging, and some have contained outright factual errors. This is a matter which must be handled with both tact and accuracy. If a candidate must be told that the application is hopeless, then so be it, as long as it is true. But, for that to be implied, and implied apparently on the basis of error, is unforgivable. This part of the procedure must be reformed at once.

I hope that these observations may be helpful pointers on this one year's exercise. They are offered in a constructive spirit, even though my personal opinion is that the entire procedure requires radical overhaul. It would be good to know that the General Board has been thinking about these particular questions, among - no doubt - many others.

Dr G. R. EVANS:

Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, I suggest three things.

The first is that we set out a list of requirements for the next stage of reform.

'In accordance with the procedure' (Reporter, p. 963). This year's trial run has shown up problems with the interpretation of the intention of the new 'legislation' the Regent House passed by Grace and failures to foresee where there would be hitches in the system. We have to put that right before we begin the next round.

On 27 July, I wrote a letter to the Secretary General. I quote:

  1. Those who apply directly for Chairs must be allowed to be considered for Readerships by default if they so wish and the committees constituted so as to make that possible.
  2. We must have definitions of the achievements required for Readerships and Chairs respectively, or we cannot appoint to these offices.
  3. Discrepancies in the opinions of referees must be properly looked into.
  4. Referees must be asked to instance or give evidence for any critical or negative assertion.
  5. Referees must be required to say what they have read of a candidate's work (that is, on what evidence they base their comments).
  6. We must have appeal at the final stage, to a truly independent body, as envisaged in the amendments already to be balloted on.
  7. At all stages we must have a clear understanding that appeal committees:
    1. are to take decisions de novo
    2. will be separately constituted with relevant expertise for each candidate
    3. will hear the candidates in person if they so request and read their work and give them an opportunity to know points made against them so that they may seek to answer them
    4. will devote to their task for each candidate at least an amount of time commensurate with that which would be given to a graduate student making an appeal.
  8. We must have proper provision for the evaluation of the work of interdisciplinary candidates as an intellectual whole.
  9. Feedback and minutes must be ratified by the committees and be sufficiently detailed to meet the terms of the Sedley judgment.
  10. The Promotions Committee of the General Board must have a duty to frame evaluations itself and not merely review those of the Faculty Committee.
  11. All members of all committees must make individual evaluations which will be recorded and tabulated.
  12. Each subject committee must define the criteria in a manner appropriate to the discipline and publish the definitions (as the RAE panels are obliged to do).
  13. There must be a clean break every year with no carrying over of documents or evaluations.
  14. Candidates must be able to require declarations of interest and to know of any which have been made in their own cases on request.
  15. Provision must be made for candidates who so request to have their applications considered outside their own Faculty altogether.

We must also get something done about the fact that at present no one on the committees reads any of our work before judging us. In some other universities the Chairman of the Faculty Committee has to appear before the central committee. Someone on the central committee reads the candidate's work and reports to the committee, and the Faculty's Chairman is questioned by the reader of the candidate's work to establish whether the Faculty really has a sense of its quality and can give a detailed account of the way it has arrived at the evaluations. In other universities the candidate is allowed to have an advocate present to speak up for him or her.

What prompted all this? That takes me to my second and pressing request, which is that we be told a good deal more. For I fear that those promises that the new procedures would be marked by transparency and accountability have got lost somewhere in the Old Schools.

The sending out of the Yellow Booklet was good. But it stopped there. (And if the Board approved the Yellow Booklet (Reporter, p. 963) it did not read it very carefully. It contained illiteracies. It contained discrepancies with the Graced procedures - for example there are two different versions of the appeal procedure, so that it was not clear whether an appeal committee with the relevant expertise should have been set up for each appellant or a single committee for all.)

We must insist on being given all the procedural advice and guidance on which the committees worked, and not only the instructions to Faculty Committees which you are now at last, after a year's hard pressure on my part, allowed to consult in the Old Schools. We are entitled to know of the procedures by which decisions affecting our interests are to be taken.

Let me quote the Reporter of 1995-96, p. 238: 'The General Board, with the support of the Council, are committed to … ensuring that information on procedure … is published and made known to all academic officers and persons involved in the consideration of proposals.'

That is an undertaking. It has been broken again and again in my correspondence with the Secretary General this year, and at the beginning of this month he was still refusing to send me a copy of the instructions the appeal committee had worked under. There ought to be some means of calling to account for this breach of a promise in the Reporter made to you all.

I took the matter of the appeal procedure to the High Court in May. The University refused to disclose its instructions to the appeal committee, and I did not get leave. The University pursued me for costs, at two costs hearings. It tried to tell the judge that I should, in effect, be punished for seeking to call the University to account. The judge took that to be 'tendentious and embarrassing' to the University and stopped it in its tracks. He accepted that, had I been given the information I sought, I would have withdrawn the application. He ordered the University to bear the costs of the costs hearings, so it will have cost it more to get its costs against me than it will extract from me when we have finished discovering how much money the University threw at its lawyers to save itself sending me the document containing the General Board's instructions to the appeal committee. (You should know that the University's £125,000 bills in this matter up to April 1998 were paid without the solicitor producing an itemized list of where the money had gone.)

Mr Justice Turner said that had the appeal committee had a duty to take the decision afresh, the case for giving leave for judicial review would have been almost irresistible. For that committee was, in law, not competent to evaluate candidates in all disciplines in the University. It consisted of four scientists and one philosopher.

If this is not changed - and this is going to affect Senior Lecturer candidates, too - it means that, if your Faculty is prejudiced against you or your work, the evaluations of the 'local barons' cannot be challenged.

On p. 964, you will see that the General Board's committee had before it a special category of document for those who had succeeded on appeal (only one to my knowledge).That is in direct contravention of the intention of the Grace that such candidates should not bear the mark of having been rejected at the Faculty stage.

The feedback is now admitted officially (cf. Reporter, p. 930) to have been written by the Secretary General from his own unchecked notes and not to be the work of the General Board's committee at all. I invoked Statute K, 5 to establish whether that was indeed the case. The Master of Selwyn was appointed as the Vice-Chancellor's Deputy. I objected that he is not a lawyer and that the issues about the duty to give reasons are legally extremely complex, especially with the full judicial review on last year's process looming. My objection was pushed aside and he ruled that it was entirely acceptable for the Secretary General as an administrative officer to undertake the 'sensitive' task of explaining to leading scholars in their fields why their work is not acceptable to the University of Cambridge. There was no need for the Promotions Committee itself to have anything to do with it, or to see what he had written. Of the manner in which this task was discharged the recipients of the feedback will be able to judge. Of Sir David Harrison's ruling you have seen nothing, because this too has not been published to the Regent House.

I cannot tell from the Secretary General's feedback why it is that, as he tells me, I do not deserve to be a Professor. He does not explain. I am told by my Faculty Promotions Committee Chairman, Professor Quentin Skinner, our Pro-Vice-Chancellor to be, that he too has no duty to explain why I failed this year. In any case, Professor Skinner has now refused to meet me for feedback at all. I expect Machiavelli, to whom he has devoted so much of his scholarly life, would have taken the same line, if there had been tape-recorders in sixteenth-century Italy.

I have asked Professor Skinner, and I do not think this is unreasonable, how I am to know what to put right unless he can tell me what I did wrong? And indeed the OUP and CUP may wish to know how they can have made a mistake sixteen times in accepting my books for publication; and in having them reprinted and second editions put out; and in selling foreign language rights. Other publishers in various countries and the editors of many learned journals, and those who have invited me on so many occasions to lecture all over the world, will want the same answer. They have apparently all been in error about my work. I am sure other candidates have similar questions on their own account.

I labour the point, because the sincerity of the General Board's assurances that in future all would be open and rational seems again to be in some doubt here.

What of the forming of a collective judgement? No one on any of the committees had to own up to his or her marks by putting them down on paper. The 'collective judgement' formed for interdisciplinary candidates involved no one from the other discipline.

And was this 'collective judgement' unanimous? A majority? Dependent upon the old trade-offs of favours between members of our committees?

There are other kinds of detail we need, too. How many applied? How many were put forward by their Faculties to be considered by the central committee of the General Board? How many Lecturers applied directly for Chairs in the first instance and how many of those changed their plea to a Readership when the Secretary General told them that they risked being left again with nothing at all if they did not do so? How many appealed? How many of the appeals were rejected? What was the subject-match between the appellants and those who constituted the appeal committee? For how many candidates was further evidence taken and for how many was an attempt made to explore reasons for negative comments in references or to establish the accuracy of any criticism, or to discover what of the candidate's work the referee had read and how recently? What were deemed to constitute the special circumstances for the two who are to be promoted directly to Chairs? Others need to know what will count as special circumstances for them.

What was done about complaints of failures to declare an interest prejudicial to impartial consideration of a case? The guidance sent to committees but not to candidates says, expressis verbis, that there should be a declaration if there is any doubt at all, and that the issue is 'whether, given the circumstances, a third party would have real doubts about whether the member could be wholly free from bias. The question in other words is not whether a member can act impartially so that justice is in fact done but whether it is clearly seen to be done' (my italics). If you ask whether a given individual declared an interest in your case, you are not allowed to know. What is the use of that?

My third proposal is that all those not satisfied with the outcome in their own cases this year be allowed the resort to an independent panel envisaged in the ballot already afoot. We could call a further ballot on that point by amending the Grace to promote this year's lucky winners. A right of appeal, real independent re-examination of the strength of the case at every stage, will be won in the end. Why not give it us now?

It has been my observation that we get there in the end with the reforms, but only by extreme persistence. It has also, alas, proved necessary to be suspicious of the promises and protestations the General Board puts before us. A sentence beginning (p. 964) 'The Board believe …' should always alert you to read it carefully. It means the General Board knows it is in a weak position but it is digging its toes in.

Please do not let the force of these points be weakened in your minds by the widespread slander that I have only my own promotion in mind. It must be obvious to everyone by now that I have sacrificed my own professional future for the common good in the pursuit of these reforms. Consider the personal cost of the public humiliation, first of the speeches which were orchestrated against me on 12 May, and now of having the outcome of the vote, which the Council insisted on, posted on the Senate-House notice-board in a few weeks' time. No one can imagine that the ballot will give me (or the others who should in fairness have it) machinery by which they may have independent consideration for promotion. I would like it to be possible for them even if it will now never be possible for me. I feared what would be the consequence for myself when I first called the Discussion on a topic of concern to the University which began the present reforms in the autumn of 1994. I did not imagine how crude would be the brutality of my treatment at the hands of the central bodies. One of the conspicuously few women entitled to walk in the full scarlet of a higher doctorate in the Honorary Degrees procession has been made a marked woman as a result of seeking to play an active part in the life of the University as a reformer. Ask some questions about that on the 'Springboard' courses.

The Report, dated 22 July 1998, of the General Board on the establishment of a Strategic Committee for the Natural Sciences Tripos (Reporter, 1997-98, p. 971).

Dr F. H. King:

Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, I must declare an interest in this matter. I am Chairman of the Inter-Faculty Committee for Teaching Mathematics to Biologists but I am speaking today in a personal capacity.

I welcome this proposal by the General Board to implement a key suggestion in the Report of the Review Committee. That Report made a number of comments on the first-year teaching of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences Tripos. In particular, it recommended a 25 per cent reduction in the material taught in the principal Mathematics courses. As one who has presided over a significant reduction in the material taught in the Elementary Mathematics for Biologists courses I readily concur with this recommendation. Nevertheless I trust that we all lament the reasons which lie behind it.

The dumbing-down of Mathematics teaching in schools, the change from O-level to GCSE, and the move to modular A-levels should concern us all. The result is that school-leavers at all levels are generally less mathematically competent than they should be. As tax-payers we might note that it is much more expensive to make good the 25 per cent deficit at university than at school or sixth-form college.

Before we place too much blame elsewhere we might consider where this University has itself been guilty of dumbing-down and see whether it is possible to turn the ratchet the other way.

Forty years ago, the matriculation requirements here included O-level Mathematics and indeed O-level Latin. For many applicants, securing both these O-levels was a tough assignment but the consequence was that every Cambridge undergraduate could prove Pythagoras's Theorem. In those days, everyone in statu pupillari could calculate the exact advantage it was to a Fellow of a College to walk diagonally across the lawns. Today, both these matriculation requirements have gone. Latin was ousted altogether decades ago and O-level Mathematics has been replaced by GCSE Mathematics, which is a very pale shadow of its predecessor. In terms of matriculation requirements, even this University has steadily lowered its sights.

There is a terrible dilemma. Any suggestion that we attempt to reverse this decline risks incurring the wrath of every Admissions Tutor in town and generating protests from almost every school in the country. Competitive devaluation is very seductive. Even I balk at the idea of lobbying for a return of Latin but, although I keep being told that I might just as well propose mass suicide, I should like to advocate a stiffening of the entry requirements in Mathematics. The pick'n'mix nature of modular A-level, together with generous resit options, means that one can as readily pass A-level Mathematics today as one could pass O-level Mathematics in 1960. My apparently unpopular suggestion, therefore, is to make A-level Mathematics a matriculation requirement. Those who feel that this would be an impossibly stringent imposition simply do not appreciate how dumbed-down A-level Mathematics has become. Already this term I have encountered a first-year Natural Scientist who has A-level Mathematics but who had to ask the meaning of the word 'evaluate', couldn't add simple fractions, and certainly couldn't prove Pythagoras's Theorem.

Yet more dumbing-down is imminent. Early in its existence, the Strategic Committee will have to worry about A1 and A2, the proposed public examinations which are to be taken in the first and second years of the sixth form and which are to replace A-level. There are scant details at this stage but the Committee will need to be alert to the effect on Mathematics.

Let me offer a final thought on the present arrangements and I'll leave it to others to explain why current reality is preferable to my fantasy.

For a normal United Kingdom applicant our formal examination requirements constitute hurdles of infinitesimal height when compared with the actual requirements that a typical College demands. Nevertheless, Colleges occasionally accept undergraduates who have omitted one of these infinitesimal hurdles and the Matriculation Board then invariably agrees to waive the requirement. Do the present matriculation requirements serve any useful purpose?

No remarks were made on the following Reports:

The Report, dated 27 July 1998, of the Council on the refurbishment of laboratories at the Department of Chemistry (Reporter, 1997-98, p. 958).

The Joint Report, dated 27 July and 22 July 1998, of the Council and the General Board on the establishment of a joint course in Law between the Universities of Cambridge and Paris II (Reporter, 1997-98, p. 959).

The Report, dated 22 July 1998, of the General Board on the Directorship of the Institute of Criminology (Reporter, 1997-98, p. 968).

The Report, dated 22 July 1998, of the General Board on the establishment of a BP Professorship of Petroleum Science and related matters (Reporter, 1997-98, p. 969).

The Report, dated 22 July 1998, of the General Board on the establishment of a second Professorship of Psychiatry (Reporter, 1997-98, p. 971).

The Joint Report, dated 27 July and 22 July 1998, of the Council and the General Board on the implementation in Cambridge of the 1998 pay agreement for non-clinical academic and academic-related staff (Reporter, 1997-98, p. 994).


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Cambridge University Reporter, 21 October 1998
Copyright © 1998 The Chancellor, Masters and Scholars of the University of Cambridge.