In 1837 the Royal Danish Academy announced a prize for the best essay on the foundations of morality. There was only one entry, from the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. He didn’t get the prize, partly on the grounds that he had been indecently offensive about the philosophers Fichte and Hegel – but his entry, the book On the Basis of Morality, is now considered one of the key works of moral philosophy. He did not take the academy’s decision with good grace, venting his fury with the judges and amplifying his derision of Hegel in the preface of the published version.
A year earlier Schopenhauer had won the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences prize for his essay On the Freedom of the Human Will. This is also justly celebrated, but many regard On the Basis of Morality as far more important.
Oddly, Schopenhauer’s experience echoed that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau almost a century earlier. In 1750 Rousseau, on his way to visit philosopher Denis Diderot who was in prison for sedition, saw a competition announced by the Dijon Academy, asking “Has the restoration of the sciences and arts contributed to the purification of morals?” Rousseau reports that the truth came to him in a flash and he drafted an essay arguing that the development of the arts and sciences had done more to corrupt than purify. This essay became his prize-winning Discourse on the Arts and Sciences.
No doubt flushed with success, he attempted to win a second prize, this time in answer to the academy’s call for an essay on inequality. Like Schopenhauer, though, Rousseau didn’t win second time round, even though his entry, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, is regarded as a classic of political philosophy and of far greater significance than his earlier prize-winning book. Students take note: Rousseau’s brilliant essay greatly exceeded the word limit and didn’t focus on the question asked.
But still, the tales of Schopenhauer and Rousseau tell us that committees constituted specifically for the purpose of judging scholarly work are not always good at it. This, of course, brings to mind, for me at least, the REF – the Research Excellence Framework – in which committees constituted specifically for the purpose, judge scholarly work of approaching 50,000 academics in the UK, and then distribute not exactly prizes, but a lot of money.
I have no doubt the REF judges act in good faith and do a tough job under incredible time pressure. Nevertheless, they make mistakes, missing the merit in some future classics – although we will never know, as the committee’s detailed judgments on individual submissions are shredded even before you can say “freedom of information”.
The next REF is looming so here is my modest plea for one important change.
The exercise exists so that financial resources follow scholarly excellence, to sustain the environments that produce it. On an all-important census day, publications are submitted for assessment. One temptation is to construct a Potemkin village, bringing in stars from overseas on short-term fractional contracts to boost the ranking, then sending them home again. Then there is the genuine transfer market in which high performers are tempted away from their current job so their previous work can be submitted by their new institution.
Transfer markets, as well as retirements before the census date, mean a department does not always get the benefit of the work it has nurtured, often at considerable expense. And so here is my suggestion: the REF should give credit for work produced in a department during the assessment period, whether or not the researcher is still employed on the census date. It would also be nice to know if we have been marked down for being rude about Hegel, but that, I realise, may be too much to ask.
•Jonathan Wolff is professor of philosophy and dean of arts and humanities at University College London
