Welsh Education Minister, Leighton Andrews encountered a first reality check yesterday in his attempt to reduce the number of higher education institutions in Wales through mergers so as to create bigger, world-class universities. Not for the first time the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff (Uwic) rebuffed a possible merger with the University of Glamorgan.
According to the BBC although the University of Glamorgan told the Minister that they want to create an academic institution which would be “of a size and scale to compete with its cross-border neighbours”, staff at Uwic have been told that the university intends to remain as “an autonomous institution, working interdependently with others where there is mutual benefit in so doing”.
The strategy being pursued by the Education Minister is not unique. Indeed it has been the policy of Welsh Governments for the best part of a decade. However, as the Welsh Liberal Democrat Education Spokesperson, Jenny Randerson told Plenary last month, there are legal obstacles in the Minister’s way because of the legal status of universities. She asked: “Are you planning to attempt to change that legal status in any way? That might involve taking on the Privy Council. It would be interesting to know if there is a way in which you can approach this issue to secure mergers that would be easier than that discovered by your predecessors,” but got no coherent answer.
A previous education minister put a huge amount of pressure on UWIC, Glamorgan and Newport to merge into a single South East Wales University to little effect and although there are some good examples of collaboration in the sector the sort of revolutionary transformation sought by Leighton Andrews will struggle to break free from the turf wars and the morass of jealousies and rivalries that dominate much of the Higher Education scene in Wales at senior management level.
The Minster does of course have the ultimate sanction of holding the purse strings for HEFCW and of being able to issue explicit instructions to that body as to how they allocate money, but he has less than a year to make a mark before the Assembly elections and no real way to drag the higher education horse to water if it does not want to drink.
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“… the turf wars and the morass of jealousies and rivalries that dominate much of the Higher Education scene in Wales at senior management level”.
I honestly despair at the situation in Wales.
We all know that the Welsh economy is at the bottom of the economic league tables vis-à-vis the rest of the UK economy. The job creation situation remains dire.
But a massive potential source of jobs in Wales, a vast goldmine of IP, is found in our Welsh universities.
Wales should have IP rich indigenous companies springing up all over the place.
But even with all the talk of about spin-outs and job creation, the objective evidence remains clear: Wales and its universities are GROSSLY underperforming.
Take MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), it has fewer students than either the University of Glamorgan or University of Wales Institute (UWIC), and far fewer than Cardiff or Swansea University and yet MIT has over 3,000 issued patents just in the USA, whereas all the universities in Wales combined have a fraction of that number. Cardiff University actually absorbed UWIST (University of Wales Institute of Science and Technology) and it is no exaggeration to write that Cardiff and Swansea universities have massive investment in life sciences and engineering facility ranging from Civil Engineering to Chemical Engineering departments, and the University of Glamorgan is has engineering and life science faculty.
This is what Prof. Dylan Jones-Evans wrote about MIT:
“For example, it has been estimated the 25,800 currently active companies founded by MIT alumni employ about 3.3 million people and generate annual global sales of £1.5 trillion, producing the equivalent of the 11th-largest economy in the world.”
This from a university “With just over 10,000 students” and in 2008 “attracted £383m of external research funding”.
Look at Chicago University, a fraction of the size of Wales’s largest universities in terms of student numbers and Chicago University lacks Engineering Departments. Yet Chicago University has more issued patents than all of the universities in Wales combined. I once gave a talk at Chicago University on IP protection, I found out that their technology transfer department was headed up by a Brit and a senior manager had worked in Cardiff!
So Wales has talent and MASSIVE resources tied up in its higher education institutions, but they are ridden with “… turf wars and the morass of jealousies and rivalries that dominate much of the Higher Education scene in Wales at senior management level”.
Take Swansea University – it has one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world and an enormous amount of assets tied up in engineering and life sciences – take a guess of how many issued patents Swansea University has in the largest market for patented goods and services in the world? As far as I can tell: LESS THAN 10 issued patents. Somebody at Swansea University please correct me if I am wrong.
We have one of the daftest situations developing in Wales. Sir Martin Evans of Cardiff University is widely regarded as the father of stem cell research, has co-founded a company to produce stem cell medicines to treat patients with heart conditions. A very worthwhile cause, but as far as I can tell, Sir Martin Evans did not file any meaningful patents covering this technology and neither has his co-founder, but Sir Martin Evans says 1,000 jobs will likely be created in Wales. Sorry, but absent IP rich coverage his talk is just that, the company he has co-founded absent patent protection can be copied. And the tragedy here is that most people who should know (in Wales) don’t know because of the remaining adverse attitude to filing for patent protection as evidenced by the appalling low issued patent count relative to issued patent counts of foreign universities.
Let me digress for a moment to tell you where I am coming from. I am from a pretty poor Welsh family. I still remember my family in absolute despair though as a kid your parents protect you as much as possible but the anguish and stress was tangible – I could feel it, there are few things worse than seeing your mum under massive stress. My father’s grandparents took us in. My mother couldn’t cope any longer with the awful digs my parents rented in Cardiff, the place was awful and among other things it did not have an indoor sink to wash clothes. So we decamped to live in one room in my grandparents rented accommodation in Grangetown, Cardiff – my mum somehow managed to use the kitchen to wash clothes and somehow get them dry; their was me and my younger brother and my dad and mum sleeping in one room. I slept on cushions my mum would rob from a settee, mum would say something like: “lie down here and fall asleep” – it was like a Robocop mantra, “When you sit in this chair you will sleep” – but Robocop or my later love for action sci-fi movies would come later. A dirty mobile oil fire was on for much of the evening – there were patterns of dark smoke mixed in with gorgeous red colour; my parents both left school early so did not know any ‘equation’ chemistry. I fell asleep watching it. Of course now I know that the dark smoke was indicative of inefficient combustion of the oil, and CO (carbon monoxide) is a by-product of poor combustion. How we survived in that room without succumbing to carbon monoxide poisoning I will never know. My father went down with suspected TB of the lung (turned out to be an abnormality of his heart which caused a shadow on an X-ray), and I contracted appendicitis about the time we finally got a council house in Llanishen. Life was very grim. My Welsh father was unemployed as often as he was employed (worked as a painter and decorator and that work was up and down, he was hired ‘as needed’) but got a permanent full time job with a Welsh steel factory and things improved for a while, but then there were mass layoffs and in despair my father took the whole family which by now included a sister and another brother to London via a vile council house exchange to an enormous council house estate on the east side of London. By now I was maybe 9 and quite old enough to join a local street gang some of whom were armed with knives. The gang was recruiting, though I did not understand the term, the older boys would come and play on our street so we got to know them. My parents did another council house exchange this time to a much smaller collection of council houses that were not isolated on one estate like the one we came from (bordered on one side by electric rail tracks – we actually went on them scouting/investigating, we were not all bad, and sometimes very curious, one boy got burned bad, an adult saved him but he had a big scare – he also carried a large knife. You always knew which boy had weapons, because they would show them to you. Luckily there was no other competing gang, so we did not have intra-council estate gang warfare.
I know the impact unemployment has, I know what’s it like to live on what are regarded by many as awfully bad council housing estates – did I forget to mention that a sixteen year old kid next door to us on Lansbury Park knifed someone to death? He sniffed glue – there were burned out houses on the estate, and boys on the estate congregated in empty houses to sniff glue, sometimes setting the empty house on fire – believe me, he was a very nice respectful kid except when he was high on glue fumes and got in with a gang carrying weapons. That is the reality I come from, it should NOT BE the reality of working people in Wales. Wales needs JOBS JOBS JOBS JOBS JOBS JOBS. Something I said while in the audience at BBC’s American Special of Question Time. If you don’t believe me, ask Glyn Davies, he saw me utter that sentence on his TV in his own home.
Senior Welsh University managers should either buck up or be shipped out. Wales can not afford, “… the turf wars and the morass of jealousies and rivalries that dominate much of the Higher Education scene in Wales at senior management level”.
Welsh people suffer for lack of opportunities… there’s a HUGE opportunity cost.
PS
The General Hospital group in Boston has over 1,000 patents. There’s a children’s hospital in Boston that employs nine professional staff in the “Patents and Licensing Group”, several of them with PhDs and a couple with JDs (Jurist Doctor law degrees) and specialism’s in IP law. See, e.g., http://www.childrensinnovations.org/Pages/WhoWeAre/PatentsAndLicensingGroup.aspx
Here’s the support for my statement that MIT has over 3,000 issued patents in the world’s largest single market (meaning: a market with a single patent office covering all 50 states of the union):
Results of Search in US Patent Collection db for:
AN/((Massachusetts AND Institute) AND Technology): 3422 patents.
and the Boolean seach string for the General Hospital group of Boston:
Results of Search in US Patent Collection db for:
(AN/(general AND hospital) AND AC/boston): 1008 patents.
“AN” is short for assignee and “AC” is short for assignee city. Since there are likely to be several “General Hospital” groups “AC” was added to limit the patent search to Boston.