Cheap at any price?

In the United Kingdom at least there now appears to be a belief that assuring quality means measuring things. This, as we have noted previously in this blog, lies at the heart of the Research Excellence Framework (REF – previously the Research Assessment Exercise), and it appears increasingly likely it will also be at the heart of the proposed Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). In fact these exercises tend to consider an intriguing jumble of inputs and outputs and put a relative value on them. The result is seen as a kind of gold standard. The REF in particular is viewed not just as a table of research excellence, but also as some sort of indicator of wider institutional quality. Few seem to think, as perhaps they should, that such massive exercises will often prompt worthy mediocrity much more than intellectual creativity. And nobody much seems to want to ask why virtually no other country thinks this sort of thing is a good idea.

But maybe our fatalism that this is inevitably our destiny might be shaken a little if we thought more about the cost of it all. The journal Times Higher Education has recently referred to studies suggesting that the cost of the most recent REF may have been anything from £214 million to £1 billion. To put that into some sort of perspective, even the smaller of these figures is nearly as much as the entire annual funding of all of Ireland’s universities (including tuition fees paid by the state). For this kind of cost to be worthwhile it would have to guarantee an enormous explosion of research excellence producing massive educational and financial benefits to the institutions and to society. There is really no evidence to suggest this is the case. The history of the RAE and REF does show they prompted a much greater volume of publication, but there is no evidence at all that this generated a greater amount of innovative discovery or scholarly insight. In passing it can be said with some assurance that research funding does have such an impact, and competing for it produces benefits – but no such claims can be proven to be true for REF. And now we are apparently about to load another huge cost on to the system in TEF, almost certainly with similarly uncertain benefits.

We do need to secure high quality teaching and research. But we also need to display much more sophistication as to how this can be assured.

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In this game is the REF to blame?

Anyone working in and around higher education in the United Kingdom will have been obsessing about the ‘Research Excellence Framework’ (REF) over the past week. According to the REF website, it is ‘the new system for assessing the quality of research in UK higher education institutions’. A total of 154 institutions made 1,911 submissions to this exercise, and last week they found out how they had fared. The results will influence a number of things, including league table positions of universities and public funding. They will also have reinforced a trend to focus research attention and funding on a smaller number of institutions.

REF is the successor to the Research Assessment Exercise, which in turn had been around since the 1980s. The first one of these I had to deal with was conducted in 1992, when I was Dean of the Law School of the University of Hull. While I believe I was rather successful in managing the RAE, in that my department improved hugely between 1992 and the next exercise in 1998, I now believe that most of the decisions we took were good for the RAE and bad for research. In fact, that could be the overall summary for the whole process across the country from the beginnings right up to last week’s REF.

And here are three reasons.

1. The RAE and REF have, despite claims to the contrary, punished interdisciplinarity, because the units of assessment overwhelmingly focus on outputs within rather than between disciplines. The future of research is interdisciplinary – but academics worried about REF will be wary of focusing too much on such work.
2. Despite the way in which it aims to reward international recognition, a key impact of the RAE/REF framework is to promote mediocrity. For funding and related reasons, many institutions will try to drive as many academics as possible into published research, spending major resources on pushing average researchers to perform – resources that should really be devoted to supporting those who have the most promise. Of course some excellent researchers have been able to thrive, but in many institutions the RAE/REF process has hindered rather than supported real excellence. On top of that it has diverted some staff from doing what they do really well into doing things they don’t much like. One of the casualties of that, incidentally, is collegiality.
3. The RAE/REF has produced a stunning bureaucratisation of research. A key difference between research management in my last university in Ireland (where there is no such exercise) and in my current one is the extraordinary amount of time staff have to put into the tactical, operational and administrative maintenance of the REF industry. Also, I shudder to think how much time and resources institutions will have spent last week managing the news of the results. Industrial-scale bureaucracy of course also produces huge costs.

Other equally good reasons for doubting the value of REF have been given by Professor Derek Sayer of Lancaster University, writing in the Guardian.

I am not against competition in research, nor do I believe that research performance should not be monitored. But the RAE/REF process is about ranking universities rather than promoting research. I have no reason to think that anyone who matters is listening, but it is time to think again about this process.