The announcement that undergraduate physics teaching is to be phased out at the University of East Anglia (UEA) has sent a shiver through the UK physics community. Students admitted last year will finish their course, hopefully graduating in 2000, but there will be no fresh intake into physics this autumn, and staff who retire will not be replaced. However, the remaining staff will form a graduate school in physics to carry out research in semiconductors and liquids.
UEA is the fourth physics department to find itself in serious difficulty this academic year. De Montfort University in Leicester and Coventry University have already announced that they are closing their departments of applied physics, while physicists at Birkbeck College in London are fighting a decision to close the physics department. Other departments are rumoured to be facing similar predicaments.
Birkbeck is something of a special case in that, uniquely among British universities, it offers only part-time undergraduate degrees, although it admits full-time postgraduates and has a long tradition in research. It could be argued that De Montfort and Coventry are also special cases – they are former polytechnics and did not enter their physics departments for the last research assessment exercise (RAE). But UEA is a traditional university, albeit one established as recently as 1963. Moreover, the eight research active staff at UEA received a ‘4’ in the last RAE – that is, national excellence in all areas and international excellence in some.
The four departments have two things in common: they are small departments and they are in deficit to their universities. The minimum feasible size for a physics department has long been a subject of debate. Frequently this debate has centred on the number of academic staff, but in these four cases it is the low number of student admissions – and the resulting loss of £3000 or so per year that each full-time student brings to the university – that has been the problem. This shortage of students is one of the main reasons why the departments are running a deficit. However, this problem is not restricted to smaller departments. An informal survey of 27 departments two years ago found that 20 were in the red, some to the tune of £20000 per staff member per year. For even a small department of just 10 staff, this could amount to an annual deficit of £200000, something that most bursars are unlikely to look kindly on, especially if it shows no signs of improving.
Many reasons have been advanced for these deficits – mostly to do with physics departments receiving a low “unit of resource” from the higher education funding councils and an inadequate overhead on grants from the research councils. Physics is feeling the pinch as more and more universities insist on “balancing their books” on a department by department basis. But the most worrying long-term trend is the low numbers of students choosing to study physics at universities. Numbers have been stable around 2900 for the past three years, but with total student numbers increasing, and the funding for each student falling, this status quo has worked against physics. The decision at UEA was forced by admissions falling from 25-30 in the past to around 18 last year and the year before.
If we look at schools, the number of students in England and Wales sitting A-levels, a pre-requisite for admission to most universities, in physics has dropped from 45000 in 1988 to 33000 in 1996, a fall of 28%. A lack of good physics teachers, a perception that physics is difficult, doubts about careers in physics, and a wider range of choices at A-level have all worked against the subject.
What can be done? The Institute of Physics is launching a £1m campaign to bring the 16-19 syllabus up to date, efforts to convey the excitement and relevance of science to the public continue, and the Teacher Training Agency is doing its best to recruit more science teachers. Applications were up by a third last year – one can only hope that all these initiatives are not too late.
