“Burnout, demotivation and lack of collegiality are the order of the day. Everyone is fearful for their jobs.” These are the words of an academic working in a British university reflecting on the impact of the Ref, the results of which are published today.
For most of us, this will be the first we’ve heard of the 2014 Ref, or Research Excellence Framework, an arcane process by which the quality of research in 154 British universities is judged. But for academics working in those universities, the Ref has already dominated their lives for years, and today’s results will have consequences for years to come – not all of them good.
The Ref results determine not only what share, if any, your university will get from a £2bn pot, they can also make or break reputations. For every academic celebrating today, there will be others worried about their future. A recent survey in Times Higher Education revealed that almost a quarter of academics believe the Ref results could lead to redundancies in their department.
And apart from job losses, critics say the Ref has affected the culture in universities, creating divisive hierarchies within departments and fuelling bullying. “Ref exclusion of a number of staff, myself included, has created a group of academic staff who are second-class citizens in the department,” one academic told the survey. “This leads to being assigned low-status, time-consuming admin, and to being treated disrespectfully by some [‘first-class’] colleagues.”
Another survey by the Guardian’s higher education network found that more than half of those questioned said recent policy changes such as the introduction of the Research Excellence Framework had fuelled campus bullying.
Derek Sayer, professor of history at Lancaster University, has written that he believes the Ref is not fit for purpose on the grounds that it costs too much (£59m); it is not peer review, as it claims to be, and it discourages risky, innovative research in favour of safer bets. He is also concerned about the “enormous divisiveness and negative impact on staff morale at the level of individual universities”.
“It puts colleagues against colleagues,” he says. “People are worrying about speaking on the record. If you speak out, you are at risk of being pushed out.” Steve Sarson, an associate professor of history and classics who describes himself as a “Ref reject”, blogged this week about the internal pre-Ref review process at Swansea University where he worked, which resulted in his colleagues not selecting his work as part of the Ref submission.
“I’m not saying I was judged on anything other than the real or perceived quality of my work. I accept that my ‘peers’ genuinely believe my book is shit. But if they wanted a ‘professional’ disguise with which to stiff a ‘colleague’ for some other reason, they had the perfect opportunity to do so.”
He only felt able to speak out, he said, because he had found alternative work in France. “I hope my Ref story adds a little bit to the due discreditation of this appalling exercise, or Framework, or whatever stupid thing they call it in the future. I hope others will add their stories. And then, as much as I can’t believe this thing has gone on as it has as long as it has, equally, I cannot believe it cannot be stopped.
“To my particular ex-university’s credit, senior managers promised that Ref entry [and presumably non-entry] would not affect people’s future careers.”
Even the winners of this year’s Ref process acknowledge that it is not perfect. Professor Andrew Hamilton, vice-chancellor of Oxford University, said: “It’s a complicated question. There’s a lot of interest in using other metrics to judge the quality of research and the impact of different outputs. It’s challenging, because what works in engineering also has to work in other subjects just as well, as the best way of getting the efficiency of the research exercise to match the consequences.
“I hope very much that we will all, in the sector, participate in an assessment of other, better, more efficient ways of assessing research quality. But it has to work for the entire breadth of intellectual activity.”
Professor Andrew Cooper, whose chemistry department at Liverpool University fared brilliantly, coming top for internationally excellent research, said: “I think we need to be careful it does not become a business in its own right that consumes all of people’s time. It should be a measurement, not a whole industry.”
Cooper and his department will be having a party today to celebrate their success. Elsewhere, the postmortems will begin.
