PBRF

I do not miss having to worry about PBRF evidence portfolios.

The 2018 results are now up.

I hadn't realised how small Canterbury's econ group now was relative to the econ contingents at the other universities - at 10 FTE, they're now the smallest economics group in the country. Note that the measure doesn't count R ranked staff as those staff would not draw PBRF funding; I doubt including Rs would change that since there are only 10 in econ at Canty.

It's a good group - only Waikato seems to have a stronger research ranking, per capita, on an eyeball metric. So kudos!

Update: that eyeball metric is wrong. Waikato is top with 85% A or B-ranked. Otago's next with 73% so-ranked. Canterbury's very slightly behind on 70%. Everyone else is miles behind that.

I keep remembering an economics department of about 16-18 people from 2007. I miss that place.

PBRF games

Martin Lally warned about contracting shenanigans meant to game New Zealand's academic research ranking exercise. Recall that while keeping "R" graded staff has no direct effect on a University's funding, the number of R staff falling into the denominator of the Average Quality Score will affect league tables; consequently, Universities faced no downside cost to ensuring that likely Rs are off the books on the census date.

The Tertiary Education Commission seems to have agreed with his critique.

People are keeping Rs off the books:

40 As part of the preparations for the 2012 Quality Evaluation, the TEC has contracted KPMG to undertake an audit of TEOs. The first stage of the audit process has indicated that there appears to be differences in Human Resource practices across TEOs. In particular, differences in the way in which TEOs are applying the staff eligibility criteria in relation to staff whose EPs are not likely to meet the standard for a funded Quality Category. 

41 The extent of these differences indicates that there is potential for these practices to affect the credibility of the published results of the 2012 Quality Evaluation, including the way in which TEOs are ranked (at both the overall organisational level, and by subject areas), and for the reporting of the relative quality of research by panel, subject area, and nominated academic unit generally.

42 In addition, the TEC has received information from TEOs which indicates that the overall number of PBRF-eligible staff whose EPs are unlikely to meet the standards for a funded Quality Category has declined significantly between 2006 and 2012.

Dave Guerin's excellent ED-insider [subscription, sorry; blog version here] notes some of the fun highlighted in the KPMG report: Otago deems a higher proportion of their staff as being PBRF-eligible than does Canterbury, but then manages to exclude them as being "under strict supervision".

TEC's preferred option is to drop Rs from the denominator for AQS calculation. This seems the most obvious tidy solution. They say universities would then have no incentive to game contracts. I wonder whether that's true. Where universities previously had strong incentive to keep Rs off the books, they'll now have some incentive to keep Cs off the books as every C necessarily brings down the average.

Incentives to game on Cs have to be weaker than gaming on Rs because C-ranked researchers still do bring in some incremental funding to the university.

We'd expect then that universities will crank through an optimization balancing the marginal increase in tuition income (foreign and domestic, with different expected elasticities) with a higher AQS against the marginal decrease in research income from dropping a C. We'd also expect that contractual shenanigans with more research-active staff are more expensive than those for less research-active staff, so total shenanigans ought to go down even in the absence of an income trade-off.

It's hard to imagine a fix that will be immune to gaming. The TEC-proposed one will improve things, but there will still be incentives to game.

Meanwhile, in Economics at Canterbury, we're likely to be punished for working harder to get our two teaching specialists research active; their becoming research active will now wind up hurting our AQS.  Our own fault for not responding to incentives as we should have and getting them officially off the books on census date.

Who Speaks?

Chris Barton in the NZ Herald wonders why so few academics join public debate in New Zealand.

The faint voice of academics seemed odd, especially in light of the Education Act 1989, which requires universities to "accept a role as critic and conscience of society". Bridgman found some reasons why: universities, made over by the market reforms of the 80s and 90s, did little to encourage the critic and conscience role; academics believed making regular public contributions would harm their careers; taking a public role was time-consuming, meaning less time for publishing research in academic journals, which are vital to career advancement.

There were also concerns about being misquoted; fears that comments would be seen as a "dumbing-down" of academic knowledge; plus not having the skills to communicate with a wider audience. A common theme, says Bridgman, was the influence of the PBRF system and its bias against research on the New Zealand context, which is harder to get published in the higher rating international journals. In other words academics were, by and large, frightened, self interested and confined by oppressive research demands to their rarefied sphere of influence.

Then there is the long Kiwi tradition of regarding the word "intellectual" as a term of abuse. In his essay The Public Intellectual is a Dog, Auckland University English Department lecturer Stephen Turner sums up the problem: "Just talking about public intellectuals make you, or rather me in this case, a wanker rather than a well rounded bloke." The British have also been bagging intellectuals for a couple of centuries, as Auckland University associate professor Laurence Simmons points out in his introduction to Speaking Truth to Power. It's a stereotype which says experience rather than abstract ideas, the supposed currency of intellectuals, offers the better guide to social and political practice.

I'd add to that some pretty serious thin market problems: we just don't have the think tank environment in New Zealand that is found elsewhere to help encourage academics to take on a more public role.

In any case, of the 24 academics listed as providing expert public analysis on New Zealand's business climate, I'm the only one listed from the University of Canterbury. I'm a bit worried that the other hundred-odd academics in the College of Business and Economics know more about Canterbury's system of incentives, rewards, and (in the current environment of redundancies) punishments than I do.

I would have added Canterbury's Glen Boyle to the list of academics who speak on business. I'm also surprised that they missed Matt Nolan at TVHE in their list of occupational economists; he's done rather more than I have on topics around the financial crisis.

PBRF rorts

Martin Lally of the University of Victoria at Wellington forwards the following email, which I have published here with his permission. I do not know anything about the claims there made, but they are consistent with rumours that floated around concerning the prior PBRF round and ... shenanigans around contracting allowing some universities to count people overseas towards their portfolio.

Dear colleagues  

I am sending this email in the interests of correcting some rumours that I have heard.   Over the past several weeks, I have heard claims from a number of senior staff in the University to the effect that Victoria University management have varied or sought to vary the employment contracts of a number of staff who are not active researchers, so as to ensure their temporary absence from the University at the June 2012 PBRF census date and thereby to improve the University’s PBRF result.  If true, such actions would clearly violate the spirit of the PBRF process and the Tertiary Education Commission requires universities to observe both the letter and the spirit of the process.  In short, any such actions would constitute accounting fraud.  

My first reaction to these (second-hand) claims was scepticism.  However, upon speaking to some people who had direct knowledge of some of these events, I was left satisfied well beyond a reasonable doubt that some such events had occurred.  Accordingly I conveyed my concerns to both the Tertiary Education Commission and the University Council.  As a result, the Chancellor has appointed a QC to investigate the allegations and provide a report to him; naturally I hope to see a copy of the report in due course.  I have been interviewed by the QC and have provided him with an overview of the information in my possession, but in such a way as to protect the confidentiality of my sources.  

Martin

I hope that the QC finds everything at Vic is fine, and that similar diligence is pursued at other universities. Some places would use a QC to find ways of rorting the system; it's a credit to Vic [and, in particular, those on Vic's Council that worked toward this outcome] that they're ensuring that individual units' incentives to rort the system do not work to denigrate the institution's overall reputation.

Budget 2011

Assorted first impressions on the budget.

• Using a dedicated bond issue to partially fund Canterbury reconstruction is a good idea (previously noted here). Not sure how many folks will take bonds paying 4% nominal interest when inflation's set to run reasonably high; hope sufficient numbers of investors will go for it.
• Slowed spending increases coupled with inflation running close to the upper bound means real cuts over time larger than those advertised. It's an election year budget: can't make many real cuts, so nominal spending freezes coupled with increased nominal tax revenues with inflation do some work. Shame there wasn't more courage, but little was expected. I hope the government's growth projections hold up.
• Increased mandatory employer KiwiSaver contributions increase a payroll tax from 2% to 3%, but are scheduled for 2013. That gives plenty of time for employers to shift the burden onto employees as part of general salary negotiations. I think that's a good thing as it reduces disemployment effects. I'm personally disappointed that I'll be losing the beneficent effects of the exemption from the Employer Superannuation Contribution Tax when it's scrapped next year. But it's decent policy as it removes a distortion in total compensation bundles. With the cut in the tax credit, a lot of folks may have to re-evaluate whether Kiwisaver is their best retirement savings vehicle. The loss in flexibility was worth it when the subsidy was high. But for $521 per year, not so much. Remember this if KiwiSaver inflows drop: folks may well be shifting out of the minorly tax preferred retirement savings scheme and into other retirement investments that provide more flexibility.
• I'm not at all averse to the government's selling off partial stakes in SOEs to raise money. The efficiency gains of partial privatization aren't strong relative to full privatization, but it's not particularly bad. But this bit of Key's speech worries me:

  KiwiSaver funds are well placed to participate in the Mixed Ownership Model, which I will come to shortly.
  
  Where State-owned Enterprises raise outside equity, New Zealand investors will be at the front of the queue to invest. We expect KiwiSaver funds to become substantial long-term holders of these investments.

  I don't like partial privatization where KiwiSaver providers are leaned on to invest in the SOEs. Why? Imagine that, 30 years from now, Solid Energy is 51% government owned, 49% owned by the retirement funds. Changes in Solid Energy dividend flows then become of strong public interest as they affect retirement incomes. I worry that political pressure to maintain dividend flows over investment and maintenance could distort SOE decisions over the long term. Hopefully here Key is just saying what he thinks might happen rather than that there will be any particular encouragement. But he repeats it later in the speech - that KiwiSaver, NZ Superannuation Fund, and ACC should all be investing in the mixed ownership SOEs. I've argued before that it's nonsense to require the NZ Superannuation Fund to invest domestically; pushing these investments into the SOE mixed ownership vehicles doesn't help. If the funds raised by partial privatization are just funds held by the government elsewhere in the system, it's a bit hard to see the point.
• I like that they're issuing inflation-protected bonds, if only because relative bond market prices then give a very quick indicator of whether the market thinks RBNZ is meeting its statutory mandate of keeping inflation between one and three percent over the medium term.
• Key committed nothing in promising to support ACT's two bills through to committee as it's always easy to kill them after committee. And spending caps, in practice, are difficult to make binding; there's always some potential emergency that can justify lifting the cap.
• The changes to WFF save money but worsen the EMTR distortions. The latter I think is worse. Abatement rates rise to 25% from 20%. So the non-working spouse in a WFF family considering taking a job paying $14K - $48K per year would face a 45% effective marginal tax rate (17.5% income tax, 2.04% ACC, 25% WFF abatement). Ignoring the moving of the threshold for WFF abatement, you can probably just ratchet this graph up by five points.
• Looming risks. Here's some of Treasury's list of risks, generally unquantified, that might affect revenue and expenditure projections: AMI Support Package (earthquake); Kyoto obligations (hopefully we'll just ignore it like everyone else); Leaky home assistance (risk exceeding the billion already provided for); Rugby World Cup (unquantifiable contingent liability).... It's harder to find plausible upside risks.
• Biggest personal disappointment: that @adzebill's early tweet hearkening the end of PBRF wasn't true (but was reported). It would have been comedy gold. After seven years or so of NZ universities (the other ones, unfortunately for us) working out how best to game the system: which staff to put on which kinds of contracts so they wouldn't count as being PBRF eligible despite effectively being faculty; how to rig a contract so an international high-flyer who's only here a few months of the year gets to count as full time PBRF-eligible and a guaranteed A for the Department (looking at you, Auckland, with a tip of the hat); endless resources put into presenting sow's ears as silk purses ... it's been all kinds of fun. Having the whole thing turned into block grant funding would have been much funnier than Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown. Alas, no sense of humour.
• Tertiary funding also gets real declines, though nominal increases. Unfortunately, Canterbury will be hit reasonably hard by the CPI increase as wage contracts are CPI (not CPI less already-compensated GST changes) linked. Things will be a bit tight.

Putting Canterbury on the map

Writes Canada's national broadcaster:

In 1984, he became a philosophy professor at Canterbury University in Wellington, New Zealand. [emphasis added]

When he launched Arts & Letters Daily, he continued to champion sprightly writing and another of his interests, freedom of information.

Dutton told Salon he hoped the site would prompt everyone to explore fresh ideas and challenge preconceived notions.

Unusual course

"A vegetarian gun-control advocate who opposes capital punishment is fine," he told Salon.com in a 2000 interview. "But what pricks my interest more is the vegetarian anti-capital punishment cowboy who carries three shotguns displayed in the back window of the cab of his truck."

Dutton's book, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, argues that art appreciation is not a result of education and exposure, but a natural evolutionary adaptation.

He taught an unusual course at the University of Canterbury titled "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" that explores how Darwin challenged conventional thinking and the impact of his ideas on philosophy throughout the 20th century.

He was a passionate defender of public radio and served on the board of public broadcaster Radio New Zealand.

September's earthquake might have moved Christchurch a few feet closer to Wellington, but it's still pretty far away. I'd make jokes about not expecting anyone at the CBC Igloo in Iqaluit to know that, but the rest of the obit is rather nice.

There is no other academic in the whole of New Zealand whose obit would be of this kind of international interest. It would be interesting to see what New Zealand's PBRF would have done with him had he made it through to the 2012 round. My bet: they'd have entirely discounted ALD as it's not peer reviewed (doubtful they'd ever have heard of it), would have given the book about the same weight as a couple of journal articles, given him some points for peer esteem and wound up with a B. Now if he'd given up that silly website and concentrated on getting lots of refereed journal articles in second tier philosophy journals, he just might have gotten an A. I'm glad he ignored PBRF.