> Aren^Rt they related? Keeping your RAs and technicians in a job,
especially
> if it^Rs a publicly-funded one, is surely linked to public
> acceptance/understanding of what they are working on. Lose that and
you
> lose even more of your funding^E^E..
Not really and certainly not in the short term. In the short to medium
(and in a lot of cases long) term, it is about writing sucessful grant
applications, which doing successful research is useful for.
Doing effective PEST may have a long term impact on the amount of
resources allocated to your whole sector, and how many people choose to
study it in the long term. But doing outreach it is not going to have a
measurable effect on an individual researcher, unless the research
councils are actively giving people research grants because they do good
PEST (which would be a stupid idea - I want good researchers doing
research not good PESTers).
So I don't blame researchers for not doing PEST, but that is not to say
that there shouldn't be some way of encouraging them to do it. Hence why
having a seperate grant scheme is a much better way of doing it than
integrating it into every application - this way someone who is keen on
(and therefore on average better at) outreach can get money (and therefore
departmental brownie points) to do outreach.
That is not to say that there shouldn't be some more sensible way of
paying for departmental outreach officers so they don't have to spend most
of their time applying for funding - but that is a general problem with
public funding of everything in the higher education sector...
Dave Ansell
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