A British exit from the EU would be catastrophic for universities and scientific research, leading academics and scientists say, warning it would cost tens of millions of pounds in funding and leave prestigious UK institutions struggling to compete on the world stage.

'Brexit would weaken UK universities' Read more

Vice-chancellors warned of inevitable damage to centres of learning and teaching, arguing that EU membership was a critical factor in British universities’ global reputation for excellence.

Scientists from fields as diverse as neuroscience, astronomy, robotics, immunology, particle physics, sustainable agriculture, molecular biology, nanotechnology, cancer and photon therapy say a “Brexit” would lead to funding cuts, make recruiting and retaining top academic talent harder, and – crucially – cripple the cross-border collaboration on which research thrives.

Though it is far from clear what relationship Britain could maintain with the EU were it to leave, an overwhelming majority of academics who contacted the Guardian feared the worst. Many pointed to the example of Switzerland, a non-member whose EU research funding was slashed last year after it voted to restrict free movement of European citizens.

“Nothing good can come of it,” said Mike Galsworthy, a visiting researcher at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and director of a group of scientists – including Martin Rees, the astronomer royal; Tom Blundell, president of the Science Council; and Anne Glover, former chief scientific adviser to the president of the European commission – so alarmed at the prospect of a Brexit that they have launched a lobby group, Scientists for EU.

Whatever you do, don't become Switzerland, Swiss academics tell UK Read more

“The EU is one huge community of talent,” he said. “You can put together multinational, innovative, bespoke teams to tackle the really big global challenges. It’s not just the money; that could, maybe, be compensated. It’s that we’re on top of this massive engine, driving us all forward together … Hoping British science would do as well if we weren’t is like imagining Lionel Messi would be the player he was without the Barcelona first team playing all round him.”

Brexit proponents argue that EU funding shortfalls would be made up from the savings generated by ending British EU contributions. They say EU funding is a bureaucratic obstacle and that the government could strike bilateral deals – as have Switzerland, Norway and Israel – to continue to pay into, and benefit from, pooled resources. Galworthy and many others are not so sure.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest According to Universities UK, more than 15% of teaching and research staff at Britain’s 132 universities are non-British EU nationals. Photograph: David Burton/Alamy

“First, what happened in Switzerland after they voted to restrict EU immigration is instructive: they lost a big chunk of funding, instantly,” Galworthy said. “These models are also irrelevant because the countries are a 10th of the UK’s size, and have never been EU members. Politically, it’s impossible for the biggest recipient of EU grants, which we have been, to be a country that has deliberately chosen to leave the EU. It’s just not going to happen.”

A Brexit could, in any event, have a significant impact on the makeup of British universities’ student and academic bodies. According to Universities UK, more than 15% of teaching and research staff at Britain’s 132 universities are non-British EU nationals, including some of the most highly regarded researchers in the country: more than half the European Research Council’s (ERC) prestigious mid-career grants in UK universities are held by researchers from other EU countries.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Julia Goodfellow, vice-chancellor of the University of Kent, said her institution was ‘built around the EU’. Photograph: Graham Turner/The Guardian

Furthermore, British students benefit from EU freedom of movement rules: more than 200,000 UK students and 20,000 university staff have studied or worked at European universities under the Erasmus scheme – including nearly 15,000 undergraduates and more than 2,000 academics in the last academic year. EU students make up about 5% of the UK student body (and contribute, according to one recent estimate, £2.7bn to the British economy).

Some universities are more European. Dame Julia Goodfellow, vice-chancellor of the University of Kent, which has study centres in Paris, Brussels, Athens and Rome, said nearly a quarter of her academic staff were non-British EU citizens. “This university is built around the European Union,” Goodfellow said.

British universities also have access to European money beyond research grants. Several have used cash and loans from the EU’s regional development, structural or cohesion funds to build new education or research infrastructure such as laboratories or lecture theatres; Swansea this year opened a major £475m science and innovation campus that could not have been built without EU help.

“I’m convinced that all our universities would be far poorer, in every sense, if Britain left,” said Goodfellow. “It would seriously dent our capacity to compete, and we’d be toying with our young people’s future – they need, all of them and more than ever, an international outlook.”

Sir Steve Smith, the vice-chancellor of Exeter University, said bluntly: “Leaving would be a disaster. Of course, it would damage UK research and universities in terms of attracting the best staff, students and funding. But to be honest, that’s not the biggest issue.”

Smith, an international relations theorist, said “all the evidence in the world” shows that “the best research is done by people working internationally”. He added: “The most successful knowledge economy is where people publish together with people in other countries. EU membership makes that immeasurably easier.”

By this yardstick the UK does “unbelievably well”, Smith said. In 1981, 84% of UK research was published bearing just a UK address; by last year, the figure was 48%. In the US, it remains 67%.

That fact alone – that a higher proportion of UK than US research is authored by scientists of more than one nationality – explained why Britain, which represents just 0.9% of the global population, 3.2% of research and development expenditure and 4.1% of researchers, now accounted for 15.9% of the world’s most highly-cited scientific research articles, Smith said – a score that put it in first position globally, ahead of the US.

“Ultimately,” Smith added, “it’s about the quality of the work. Even if you could make up the funding shortfall from leaving the EU, you would be running counter to the way the world knowledge economy is moving.”



Major multi-partner health projects involving up to 25 countries such as EuroCoord, which seeks to improve the lives of people with HIV, or the Swiss-based Human Brain Project, which could ultimately help find cures for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, would be difficult if not impossible without EU backing, said Alistair Jarvis of Universities UK.

With Britain’s own national research budget below international averages and under increasing pressure, European funding’s share of UK universities’ total income has risen by over 30% in five years, to as much as 15% or more in some cases.

And proportionately, British universities do very well indeed out of the pooled EU resources. The UK contributes just over 11% of the EU’s budget, but during the last seven-year EU funding programme, known as FP7, won 15.5% – about €7bn (£5bn) – of the sums awarded. Last year alone, under the current Horizon 2020 funding programme, British institutions secured £687m of EU research funding.

“Leaving the EU would be a major threat to the overall international success of the UK sector, which punches well above its weight for a relatively small amount of government funding compared to other countries,” said Sir Ian Diamond, vice-chancellor of the University of Aberdeen. “For my university, it would certainly be one of the biggest threats we could face in terms of maintaining our quality.”

Universities, Diamond said, were first and foremost about “teaching the next generation, who will be part of a global community in a way I was not. There’s no question that the EU facilitates that, and any closing up will not be good. Nor will it make my job of recruiting the best staff any easier .”

The UK also does disproportionately well out of EU academic mobility and foreign exchange programmes such as the Marie Skłodowska Curie Actions (Maca), which allow European university staff members to spend periods of time working abroad. British institutions collected almost €1.1bn, or nearly one quarter of the total pool available, over the duration of FP7.

And in the most prestigious research programme of all, the ERC, whose grants are awarded solely on the basis of research excellence, UK-based research has so far secured more than a fifth of all funds disbursed. From 2007-13, in fact, four British institutions – Oxford, Cambridge, UCL and Imperial – were among the 10 most successful recipients, between them hosting some 380 ERC projects, each worth between €1.5m and €2.5m and typically employing a team of six top scientists.

“The point is that the European Union is the body through which all this funding is channelled and all this international collaboration organised,” said Sir David Bell, vice-chancellor of Reading University,

“If we left, all that infrastructure would have to be replaced – and there’s no indication of how the UK would be treated. And what a signal we’d be sending … Unless we get some clear answers on what an exit would really mean, especially in terms of free movement of labour, it represents a clear and present danger.”