Many UK universities pop the champagne when they get the results of a national research-performance review. But burnt-out academics see no cause for celebration, say Richard Watermeyer and Gemma Derrick.
On ice: many academics feel UK universities’ celebrations over research-performance results are misplaced.The past few weeks have generated a flurry of excitement for universities in the United Kingdom with the release of the latest assessment by the Research Excellence Framework, the country’s performance-based research-funding system.
The irony is that universities are racing to their megaphones to crow about success in the assessment while imposing precarity, pension cuts and poor working conditions on the very people who built that success.For international colleagues who might not be familiar with it, the Research Excellence Framework is a mechanism by which the UK government distributes around £1.6 billion in annual research funding to the country’s universities. Assessments occur roughly every seven years.
These effects might have been unintended, but they are now a widely acknowledged truth — and, for the institutions themselves, an inconvenient one. For UK universities, the REF has become an obsession, not only for securing research funding but also as a means of gaining bragging rights about research superiority. And for academics, assessment rankings are a feature of their self-presentation as ‘REFable’ researchers who produce the highest grade of outputs.
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