William Poole on the ‘dishonesty’ of assessment

Happy New Year, for British academics have just finished being assessed by yet another philistine government in a seven-year exercise known as the ‘REF’.

‘Research Excellence Framework’ — as soon as you hear the word ‘excellence’ in the academe you know it means ‘mediocrity’, and don’t even go near ‘framework’.

‘Excellence’ functions just like ‘terror’ in the current political lexicon, a numinously intangible word that has ousted ‘terrorism’, which was an act, not a state of mind.

Likewise when we say ‘excellence’ rather than ‘excellent’, we replace an adjective of solid achievement with a soul-dulling circumlocution for what has turned out to be banausic box-ticking.

Well, why is the REF so offensive?

It costs a bomb: about sixty million quid, most of that provided by us taxpayers. It wastes staggering amounts of time we might better spend doing real research and real teaching. It generates loads of junk, books and articles no one needs. It is profoundly cynical about academic health – just make sure the prisoners are jumping up and down in the prison yard when the governors come.

It forces academics into dishonest danses macabres — we were assessed, for instance, on ‘impact’, which is a damagingly irrelevant concept for whole continents of the academe. It produces absurd results — Oxford Modern Languages and Cambridge English plummeted literally unbelievably this time around, and that will cost them dear. It disharmonises colleagues, and poisons our commonwealth.

And, finally, it is run within the academe by exactly the kind of people you’d think would be interested in this sort of thing — and the less said about them the better.

But now we are going to do it all again!

REF 2020 is apparently on its way, its ghastly, corpse-piloted ship sailing straight for us, as we waste yet another seven-year circumnavigation, wringing our hands and writing our testaments, more not-that-bad, not-that-good publications choking the seas of academic endeavour.

In pursuing ‘excellence’ we forfeit being excellent, and yet no one will put a stop to this. Why? Because too many people in middle-ranking positions hold their jobs in order to implement and police this anti-humanism, and the rest of us are too busy, fed up or lazy to care or to act.

All walks of life are shadowed by this ship of fools: just think of your own jobs if you are fortunate enough not to be an academic under this pallid regime, and ask yourself what kind of people in your trade enjoy sitting on endless committees, telling less stunted people what to do, moaning with an almost erotic desire for ‘best practice’, ‘quality assurance’, ‘health and safety’.

And has it improved our little lives?

Think of the money and time we would save if we just said no to all this rubbish; ‘REF-Off!’ shall be our cry. We can do so; why do we not do so?

It should be a condition of appointment of the new Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford that she forbid her academics to engage with the unspeakable ‘REF 2020’.