Tom Wakeford writes an open letter to Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society

Dear Lord Rees,
What a bold start you have had as the new President.

The press have applauded the RS’s criticism of Exxon Mobil, the oil corporation that values its shareholder dividends above what Al Gore calls ‘an inconvenient truth’ – human-induced climate change.

Your website lists Esso, UK subsidiary of the climate change-denying Exxon, as having been a valued ‘benefactor…who has supported us as one of the leading scientific academies in the world’ as recently as 2004. Exxon has not changed its views. It is a relief to see that, under your leadership, the RS responded to the growing environmental crisis by criticising their distortions.

Science in society initiative

A deeper problem for the future contribution your academy seeks to make to the world is embodied by your Science in Society (SiS) initiative. Funded by a million pound Kohn Foundation donation, it has just published a report(1)celebrating the end of its five year programme.

In 2002, your Society trumpeted its foray into this new realm with a quote from a leading SiS academic, Brian Wynne, who also sat on the advisory group. ‘This new mood is not…about subjecting specialist scientific decision making to non-specialist votes or choices,’ said Wynne. ‘It is about helping scientists to engage in a mutually respectful way with non-scientists.’ 

Our hopes were therefore high when our team at PEALS started working in partnership with the SiS initiative a year later. Together we designed a programme of workshops involving scientists and non-scientists, called Speaking Out.

Dialogue or PR?

While the PEALS team encouraged participants to use the initiative as exactly the sort of two-way conversation between specialists and the rest of us that most see as common sense, it was not clear whether the initiative was an RS public relations exercise or a genuine experiment in democratic dialogue.

Immediately after we had facilitated the final workshop, your staff wrote to government ministers, selectively quoting the conclusions reached by the workshops and thus making the RS’s existing policies appear to be endorsed by the ‘voice of the people’. No copies of these ministerial letters seem to have been sent to participants. We believe that workshop participants have a right to a say in how their voice is used in this context.

Arrogance

Despite many of its members being charming and well intentioned, we found the RS to be institutionally arrogant on at least three levels.

First, the reports produced by the scientists and non-scientists who took part as participants in the workshops were, we were told, the intellectual property of the Society. Second, when a group from the University of East Anglia (UEA) was commissioned to evaluate the Speaking Out workshops, its report remained a highly restricted internal document, rather than something to be published and discussed with peers.

Finally, despite our status as academic partners, we were banned from publishing or disseminating any analysis of Speaking Out without the permission of the Society. Yet your society proclaims openness, publication and peer review to be the cornerstones of reliable knowledge.

Rigorous scholarship

Science’s interaction with society has been the subject of more innovative scholarship over the last ten years than almost any other area of social research. Your twenty-eight page report released this autumn(1) fails to cite a single piece of conventional academic literature. You thus miss out on the considerable depth of knowledge that the rest of us have been trying to generate in recent years.  This omission results in a glossy brochure that resembles the corporate spin that, in other contexts, you criticize.

What the report does reveal is the enormous turnover of RS staff within the SiS initiative. The UEA evaluation – the nearest the programme had to peer review – gave some clues to the causes of this haemorrhage of talent. I hope you, at least, are allowed to see a copy.

Hardest battle

Other learned societies, the research councils, some medical charities and even government departments are slowly learning how to involve people in their decisions in new ways. Meanwhile, it seems doubtful whether some of your Society’s work in this area even complies with the Council for Science and Technology’s recent universal ethical code, as it does not respect the workshop participants’ rights to have their voices heard.  

Given what I know of your personal commitment, I suspect Esso’s days as a Royal Society benefactor are numbered. But if you share my wish that non-Fellows should be treated as something more than ignorant saps, it seems to me that your hardest battles will not be with multi-nationals, but within your Society’s own walls.

Reference

1. Royal Society report  

Dr Tom Wakeford
Director of Co-Inquiry,
PEALS, Newcastle University