I'm a Scientist Get Me Out of Here showcases the brains, passion and humble curiosity of our academics
It's Universities Week, highlighting the impact higher education institutions have on UK individuals, communities, culture and businesses. In the wake of the Browne review, you'd think the stakes would be high this year; that it would be worth crafting the campaign with particular care.
Go to the website, and you're greeted with a "FactShare Generator". Click on "generate fact" and you get a sentence or two about some area of universities' work. There's a reference to an institution, sometimes a department, but usually nothing more. No background, no explanation, no detail. They are pretty banal, so I won't bore you with examples. When you do hit on one that seems interesting, there's no link for you to find out more, simply an invite to click on to the next "fact".
This annoys me. It belittles the work universities do, and patronises the public. Universities are not magic fact machines, and shouldn't be promoted as such.
In contrast, this week also sees the 2011 round of I'm a Scientist, Get Me Out of Here. This might sound awful, but actually it's brilliant. And, if you're the sort of person who likes to click at the internet in search of cleverness – which I'm guessing the FactShare generator wants to attract – it can be incredibly addictive.
Based around a set of online forums, the event invites teenagers to pitch questions at scientists. My favourite this year is "How many rolls of tape would it take to stick someone to the ceiling. I was thinking of trying it and had a go with my cat".
I'm also a fan of "If atoms are mostly nothing, why are things solid?", but it's hard to compete with "what would happen if you put crisps in a particle accelerator?" (and the answer, "I don't know, but back in 1996 someone left some beer in the LEP at Cern …").
It's striking how much humour the scientists reply with, as well as links to further information and more often than not, humility. "I don't know" is a common response, but not in a dismissive way. If anything, it's with a twinkle of "… and so how could we find out?!" As Sophia Collins, who co-ordinates I'm a Scientist, wrote last year, a seemingly innocuous question of "why do magnets attract and repel?" soon led many to the realisation that they didn't actually know.
Many were delighted by this discovery of their lack of knowledge, and apparently the question spun off to a load of magnetism-related discussions at scientific breakfast tables and coffee machines around the country (it's worth reading contestant Tom Hartley's account of this). As a student has already asked this week: "when you find the answer to a question, does it always lead you to a bigger and harder question?"
Importantly, the scientists answering these questions are not the icons we see on TV, they are everyday lecturers, postdocs and students. There are loads of them, and they reflect a diversity of subjects (personally, I don't see why it couldn't be changed to "I'm an Expert" to bring in arts, humanities and social science too). Also, because the questions are not just factual queries, but about the scientists' careers, beliefs and, er, favourite pizza toppings, I'm a Scientist provides a sense of the frustrations and excitements of academic life on a day-to-day level. See, for example, honest answers on religion, the problems one might face as a scientist, or how they are paid. Especially pertinent in Universities Week, there's also one on fees, and the forthright "How will your research affect the people of Britain?".
Universities are messy, complex places that produce messy, complex work about the messy, complex world we live in. That's what makes them so useful. Moreover, universities are made up of people – strange, passionate and playful people who are humbly curious about the world – and that's what makes them so much fun. That's why for Universities Week 2011, I'll be watching I'm a Scientist, not clicking on some magic fact machine.