“One of the most salient features of our culture” observed the Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt “is that there is so much bullshit.” Frankfurt advances a theory. The bullshitter’s statements reflect his indifference to the matter of their truth or falsity. That makes his deception distinct from, and in one respect worse than the liar’s. For the liar, who intends to deceive by presenting as true what he knows to be false, honours the truth in his own perverse way. Frankfurt observes that the realms of advertising and indeed “the closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept.” Politicians are prone to bullshit because they are required to have opinions about things they don’t know, and because they often say things merely for effect. Bullshit is among their chief weapons of mass distraction.
 

Recently 28 learned societies and subject associations signed a letter calling for the removal of the mention of “The Big Society” from the ‘delivery plan’ of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), on the grounds that research funds should not be hijacked by Government initiatives, let alone party political ones. Let’s call it the BS initiative – an acronym apparently not spotted by its architects. Most of the hot air vented on this issue by the AHRC, lazy journalists and Government ministers, has been trained on an irrelevant side-issue: the allegation in the Observer that the Government leant on the AHRC to adopt the BS initiative as a condition of its settlement. In a hasty response the AHRC published a note on its website, stating that it “unconditionally and absolutely refutes the allegations”. Strictly speaking the note does not refute the Observer allegation. To refute is to overturn by evidence or sound argument. They simply denied it. Their denials were probably correct. What seems to have happened is that the AHRC voluntarily and opportunistically linked their research theme of Connected Communities to the Government’s BS initiative in the hope of securing a good settlement. Most academics were even more appalled by that.
 

There are several issues here. The least important is whether the BS is a bona fide idea or just another piece of vacuous sloganeering. My view is that it will be much trumpeted then hastily buried. Campaign slogans and sound bites are aspirational phrases dreamt up for contingent strategic purposes. The “Big Society” is supposed to exhibit the difference between Margaret Thatcher’s individualism, and Cameron’s ‘compassionate conservatism’, while simultaneously playing the familiar tune of the “small state” to the Tory Gallery, and inviting everyone to agree that social cohesion is a good thing. It is in the nature of such initiatives to be short-lived and swiftly superseded, like New Labour’s “Third Way” and “Ethical Foreign Policy.”
 

Of more import is the fact that neither the theme of ‘Connected Communities’ nor the BS initiative appear to have salience or relevance to the arts and humanities. They are, if anything, more appropriate to social science.
 

The most important issue is the erosion of academic freedom and the threat to the integrity of our universities. Since the late 80s, successive Governments have gradually chiselled away at the autonomy of Universities. Policy documents such as Sir Alexander Jarratt’s  Report on ‘Efficiency Studies in Universities’ (1985) and Sir Richard Lambert’s ‘Review of Business-University Collaboration’ (2003) have recommended that universities dismantle their committee structures, and replace them with top-down line management structures, in order that they become more efficient and entrepreneurial. Jarratt and Lambert were businessmen, not academics, who served as Chancellors – a largely honorific position – of Birmingham and Warwick Universities respectively. They recommend universities become more businesslike, not just in the services they provide – catering, accommodation, conference facilities etc. – but in their core activities of teaching and research. Lambert goes so far as to state that Government and Business should exert a much greater “influence over university courses and curricula” and that there must be “significantly more business input into the priority setting, decision making and assessment panels of both of the peer review processes.” Contrast this with the view of Jonathan R. Cole, a Professor of Sociology and then Provost at Columbia University, who in his study of The Great American University warns that “research universities should not attempt to imitate corporations in their organizational structure” and notes that in the best U.S research universities Presidents and Provosts have “little control over the curriculum itself.”
 

Notwithstanding the fact that politicians and businessmen lack the expertise necessary to participate in peer review of research (not being peers in the relevant sense) successive administrations have eagerly implemented these baleful recommendations. This contravenes the so-called Haldane principle, a principle invoked by Lord Hailsham, Conservative Minister for Science in 1963, summing up the spirit of the Haldane Report of 1918. The Haldane Principle is the convention that researchers rather than politicians should decide where research funds should be spent, therefore that the Research Councils, which are QUANGOs made up of academics appointed by government, should be largely autonomous from political control.
 

The two major funding streams for University research both involve peer review. One funding stream comes through the Research Councils. Though they fund “blue skies” projects in “responsive mode” (i.e. projects whose content is not directed) much of the funding is ring-fenced for areas of strategic importance. These are decided by Government and designed to maximise the demonstrable social and economic benefit, or ‘impact’ of research. Research Councils, in consultation with Government and the academic community, come up with Strategic Research Priorities or Themes. They do this in order to attract a good settlement, and to provide assurance that they are doing something useful.
 

Even universities nowadays have research themes. This is supposed to allow them to focus their activities, and to establish a brand, but chiefly they are magnets designed to attract Research Council funding. University research themes, which are of necessity vague, unsurprisingly tend to mirror those of the Research Councils. Their rationale is almost entirely administrative and financial, not intellectual. Academics are encouraged to fit their research to the existing themes, which means either that they spend time making their grant applications appear to fit in with some theme, or coming up with research projects that do so. As a consequence there is a general UK wide homogenisation of research. Worse, the funding merry-go-round has a deleterious effect on the quality of research. As James Sumner bluntly puts it: “The interesting thing about high-impact economically targeted world-leading synergistic innovation research strategies in the arts and humanities, is that they’re bollocks.... All will disappear off the face of the Earth when your funding cycle comes to an end and nobody renews your website.”  They are bollocks because they involve too much bullshit, made up primarily in order to satisfy administrative criteria.
 

The second main stream is called QR (Quality Related) funding, which the government gives directly to Universities for research. Since 1988 periodic audits of research quality (Research Assessment Exercises) have been conducted. These began as a means of assuring the Government paymasters that universities were providing value for public money. But audits cease to be merely a means of verification once financial rewards and penalties are attached to their results. The audit percolates into the original practice and changes it. This is what has happened with the RAE. The financial pressure on departments and individuals to produce good results gave rise to a general incentive to prioritise research rather than teaching, which warped the practice of university lecturers.
 

Second, the audit morphs from a mechanism of verification to one of political control. New Labour seized on this power and proposed to use the RAE as a means for maximising the ‘impact’ of research, in order to make universities more socially and economically useful. Thus arose the present parlous situation where research outputs under the disingenuously named Research Excellence Framework will be assessed not only for their excellence, but also for their ‘impact’, i.e. for their social and economic ‘usefulness’.
 

What can be wrong with a Government trying to reap more social and economic reward from its investment in University research? The problem is that it is extremely difficult to predict what research will have ‘impact’. Academics working in the philosophy of mathematics and logic did not know that their research would give birth to the discipline of informatics and to the invention of computing. The route from research to impact is highly diffuse and uncertain. Certainly businessmen and politicians are not best placed to make such tricky predictions, and the experts on peer review panels may not fare any better. Enforcing the impact agenda will mean that resources will tend to be diverted to projects with the best impact statement. It will no doubt also spawn a lucrative cottage industry in providing training courses for impact statement writing.
 

But awarding grants to proposals on the basis of the plausibility of their ‘impact statements’ is not a reliable way to pick winners. An impact statement is just an auditable account of the usefulness of a project, which may not correlate at all with its research excellence. Factor in the ‘concentration’ of research funds on fewer, bigger projects, and fewer bigger universities, that the Government is currently proposing, and the effect is multiplied. The government is behaving like a bank, which instead of diversifying its portfolio of investments and spreading it risks, puts all its money on the winners it thinks it can pick.
 

The strategy is not just pointless, it is probably self-defeating. ‘Impact’, i.e. social and economic benefit, is achieved (when it is achieved) largely as a by-product of research. It cannot be made into the goal of research. Incentivising academics to do high-impact research is like Arsène Wenger’s instructing his players to go out and deliver increased revenue to shareholders. The economic success of the club depends on footballers focusing on playing well on the pitch, not on making money off it. In short, if the Government were really interested in impact, rather than justifying its expenditure, it would be cheaper and better for it to back off, not to enforce the impact agenda.
 

The real reason why 28 academic organisations have complained to BIS and the AHRC about the references to ‘The Big Society’ in a document setting out the AHRC’s research themes, and why 3,200 academics have signed a petition calling for their removal, is that it is another crass example of the erosion of academic freedom and the independence of research. And these matter, in turn, because the vibrancy and health of our research culture depend on them.
 

The moral of the story is that while governments pay lip service to academic independence, they rarely cede control of matters they can interfere with. The recent “clarification” of the Haldane principle in a BIS document signed by David Willetts and Vince Cable, is a case in point. In the words of Peter Mandler, Vice President of the Royal Historical society, it has been interpreted so narrowly that it has been “neutered.” Ironically, as Lord Haldane, a Liberal peer, and Lord Hailsham, a Conservative minister, well knew, this hands-on tendency offends against a principle that both parties claim to cherish, the principle of the limitation of government. And the principle is a good one in the domain of university teaching and research, since Government interference in this sector generally leads to mediocrity.
 

In a reply to Frankfurt’s essay entitled ‘Deeper into Bullshit,’ Gerry Cohen counters that there are several varieties of bullshit. Frankfurt analyses one of these, and claims that it is distinct from lying, where someone intends to “lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality.” But, Cohen points out, politicians and advertisers whom Frankfurt holds to be paradigm bullshitters frequently “lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality” in the course of their artistry.
 

To take an example, the 'Big Society' initiative supposedly involves Giving Away Power not Money. Yet this Government, like the previous one, is exerting more power and control over universities than ever before. In clarifying the Haldane principle, they neuter it. While paying lip service to academic independence, they try to reshape university teaching and research. The Government cooks up an initiative it thinks it will be popular and beneficial, and then does the very opposite of what it says should be done. In other words ‘the Big Society’ is a demonstration that sometimes bullshit and lies come to the same thing, thus refuting Frankfurt’s theory.