He who pays the piper, calls the tune – Less independent research at our university

Door Nina de Winter
‘Imagine the unimaginable’, said Ben Feringa when he received the Nobel Prize for chemistry in December. According to Feringa, researchers always have to keep looking for new ideas. Ideas nobody ever had before and ideas with an uncertain path. Who would have thought 100 years ago, that we would be able to fly around the globe in a Boeing 747? The problem, however, is that research is increasingly dependent on external sources of financing. The question here is, whether revolutionary research that seems to be impossible in the beginning can even attract sufficient financial support.

A current trend in higher education is the growing share of financing spent on feasible and practical research that is oriented towards the desires and need of external parties, such as large corporates or international organizations (1). By now, the University has to attract about 60% of the financial resources needed for research by itself. The trend puts researchers in a position in which they have to attract financing for their research projects themselves. In that way, they effectively need to sell their plans. External parties then choose the preferred researcher for a certain research project.

Academic research will therefore be less “free”, because fewer financial resources are available for research projects rooted in curiosity. Research projects should be more practical and in particular more feasible. Especially research without direct and straightforward results, however, is valuable and important for innovation. Unfortunately, research with a chance of failure becomes less attractive to do, simply because it cannot guarantee sufficient financing.

A large share of the financing for research comes from the European Union. ‘Horizon 2020’ is a program by the European Commission that invests in academic research. To ensure that part of this money is invested into research at our university, the UG even has a lobbyist is Brussels. For next year, it is important that the program ‘Horizon 2020’ will be succeeded. In our opinion, it is of utmost importance that a major share of this money is invested into fundamental research.

Chances are big that in the future the share of external financing for research will increase even further, which is also visible in the UG’s long-range budget. Of course, we understand that UG cannot stay behind and has to follow the global trend of externally financed research. Furthermore, the board of the University emphasized the importance of fundamental research and therefore expenditures on fundamental research several times. At the same time, we witness the University’s efforts to attract external financing. The UG is the only University in the Netherlands with a lobbyist in Brussels and last year they even hired a Dean of Industry Relations. Her task is to improve and strengthen the UG’s relations with the business world.

Lijst Calimero thinks that the University of Groningen needs to choose more often for investing in independent research. The University is after all an academic and additionally public institution. The subject of research should matter the most. Quality over quantity for both, education and research!