So. The results of the REF (Research Excellence Framework for non-academics, or non-UK academics or UK academics that have been hiding in a cave for eight years) are in (or out, depending on your preferred idiom). Consult the lists to your heart’s
desire. They will be spun one way or another,
stressing one performance index over another, on every university website
across the country for months to come.
This seems as good a time as any to resume my thoughts on ‘The State We’re
In’ (Part 1; Part 2; plus search for the 'State we're in' label for other scattered interim thoughts on various issues)
Well, there’s (I suppose) good news, bad news and (actual) good
news.
First the (I suppose)
good news. My department came 2nd
out of the 83 history departments in the exercise. Yay, woo!
And actually this is in some important ways good
news. It is good news because
some of my colleagues, notably our chair of the research committee and our head
of department put in very long hours of tedious work, not always helped enormously
by somewhat thuggish ‘powers that be’ higher up in the university, and it is
very good news that that hard work gets some sort of serious recognition. It is also good news in that it represents
in some ways the culmination of a process that has been under way for ten years
and in which I think I have played a significant part, of turning the
department from one that had for decades had no ambition (other than to be
some sort of Oxford feeder college) and had more or less institutionalised
mediocrity, into a serious player in historical research in the UK. This provides some reward to all the people
who have contributed to that. It is also
good news because we are a
very good history department. I have
some very good and interesting colleagues, especially at the younger end, doing
good work in new areas. It is good to
have some sort of public indication of that fact; it is good to get some reward
for the hard research work we have all put in.
It is, furthermore, good news to see some departments who are
somehow supposed to be ipso facto the
best in the country slither down to something approximating their actual intellectual
worth, though only because it might (though actually it won’t) make them think
twice before assuming that anyone graduating from or working at another
university is somehow some kind of lesser intellect, and about instilling that
misplaced sense of intellectual superiority in their students. It might make someone in the general
non-academic world realise that there is a disjuncture between privilege and
prestige on the one hand and merit on the other. It might even make prospective students (graduate
and undergraduate) realise that going to those gilded places will not
necessarily get them the best tuition, or expose them to the best historical
minds.
It is also, and I think this is very important, good news
– indeed an excellent outcome – given the generally humane way in which
my department (and our university management on the whole) have managed the
whole REF business, compared with horror stories from elsewhere. There have been no threats or other bullying
strategies, and I hope that perhaps university management culture might make a
note of this. Sadly that wasn’t the case
in the institution which produced the top placed history department, which
drove at least one fine historian out of the profession altogether.
[Personally – and I
take no pride in this but I have to be honest here – I also take some
unedifying satisfaction in seeing departments that drove me out through
bullying, or which have serially considered me to be beneath them, or which
contain other people who have actively hindered my career, come out many places
lower than the department where I work. This, the 'ha, fuck you then' response, is the natural response; it is the response encouraged by the system; it is the wrong response.]
But (the Bad News) this all comes at a
cost.
I am happy for my colleagues that they have got a serious
reward for their hard work. I am happy that we have serious recognition as a
good history department. Don’t get me
wrong about any of that.
But I am very
wary indeed of the bragging that might ensue, wary of suggesting that this means
we really are better than (almost)
anyone else, even contingently, temporarily, even taking (as I said in part 1)
the exercise to be a sort of FA Cup contest, as though historical scholarship
were like a race or FA Cup contest where one side definitively could be better
than another. I am wary of suggesting
that my colleagues in other departments might be worse than us on this basis.
The risk of suggesting the above is serious and inherent in the league
table culture. We must work hard to
counter it (though we won’t for the reasons I set out in Part 1)
Then, where is the real reward? When the REF (or RAE as it was then) started,
the point of the exercise was to divvy up the money the government gave out to
universities to fund research. Now of
course, the government (and indeed the last Labour government – let’s be clear)
has basically cut that to more or less zero.
So where do the rewards lie for all the hard work put in by chairs of
department, chairs of research committees, and the ordinary rank and file
researchers? The reward is located first and foremost in university bragging
rights (‘we did better than you, ha ha ha’ [see
italicised paragraph above!]), league table positions and so on. This is good news for Vice Chancellors
looking for an excuse to increase their pay packet yet further (while putting a
brake on that of all the people who did the hard work) but not so much for the
rest. Why? Because now there is precious little
government funding so universities have to find other means of finding
money. And those means put them all in
competition with each other. To get
funding we have to attract students, in a zero-sum game, and the league tables’
only value is in that game. Or we have
to get grants (in a situation that has led to at least one suicide in recent
months), in a climate where grant income counts for more than actual research
value. All this ends (well, it ended
some Time ago) the situation which ought to exist, where academics see
themselves as collaborative, cooperative, fellow seekers after knowledge rather
than members of competing cells. Second
the participation, the general gloating and publicity all strengthens the whole
dynamic that I discussed in Parts 1 and 2, which produces the situation where
any government can get the HE sector to dance to any tune: that, in other
words, produces the state we are in.
This is all a high price to pay. It
is bad news. I feel that someone
in a department that (deservedly) did well in the exercise and who has put in good
submissions in the last two exercises is best placed to make that criticism.
The other bad news is that proportionately far less
goes on recognising actual quality research than it used to. On the one hand part of the submission in
terms of research environment concerns research income (see above). But research income is not a valid
recognition of research quality. For one
thing it is what comes out of a
project that should count, not the amount of money that went in (however much the latter delights
university accountants). Secondly, what
gets the money very often constitutes intellectually pretty lame projects,
listing things and putting them on line.
On the other hand, a large part goes on ‘Impact’ – the many drawbacks
with which have been pointed out over and over (not least by science
departments, who have done best by the system and thus are best placed to make
the critique) and hardly need repeating.
As far as history is concerned though, one additional problem is that
the system provides little benefit to those who do not work on British or
modern (or preferably modern British) history.
A third piece of bad news concerns the numbers
themselves, which are entirely subjective judgements made by small panels, not
always of the most respected or research productive academics within
fields. Some would say that the data are
not robust. More to the point, the fact
that the numbers can be arranged sequentially is highly misleading. Look at the history list and you will see that
Lancaster University comes in twenty-three places below my department. “Woo”, you might say, “the Lancaster historians must
be loads worse than those at Poppleton.”
But look again at the evidence (and essentially to be a historian is to
master the art of looking again). If you
count the GPA of Birmingham (in 1st place) as 100%, then Lancaster
came in with 94%, whereas we got
99.6%. That is a pretty fine difference
for twenty-three places in the league (or visually, on the page or computer
screen, a big drop of the eye). Indeed by
the same reckoning, the history department that came in thirtieth was still scoring near enough 91%. So all these league tables, all this
listmania, have a seriously misleading
effect, in addition to all the other detrimental effects the league table
culture has on higher education, scholarship and research. Yet, those big visual drops of the eye (rather than the actual numbers) are what will put some people's jobs under pressure.
But here I want to shift tack again and spin this a slightly
different way to end on what I think is some (actual) good news. One bit of good news is that the table does
at least shake things up a bit and suggest that the many good universities of
the UK are all really pretty similar – that it is not a case of Oxbridge and a
couple of others versus the rest of the pre-‘92s and then all of them against
the post-‘92s. What I would hope is that
this shaking up might make research students apply to the university where the scholar
best –placed to supervise them is working, rather than according to established
institutional prestige.
More importantly than that, using the criteria mentioned
above, even the bottom-placed history department scored 58% compared with the
top. The departments at the bottom of
the top 51 were scoring 85%. What I
would like to suggest this means, and what I would like to suggest would be the
best, the most humane, conclusion that the British historical profession ought
to take away from the REF league table is that historians working in UKHE –
across the board, from the top to the bottom of the list are producing
significant amounts of good work. That is actual good news and I want
to end on this point, for now. This is what
as a profession we should be proud of, not institutional bragging rights. Or, as Young Mr Grace used to say, “you’ve all done very well.”