The research assessment regime developed in the UK over the last 30 years, culminating in REF2014, is indisputably “world-leading” in its scale, complexity, and costs in public money and academics’ time.  Yet by any reasonable criteria the REF is seriously deficient as a means of evaluating research quality and grossly inefficient as a vehicle for allocating research funding. Derek Sayer argues that the ever greater role assumed by the REF regime in British HE is best understood sociologically.  It has been the key mechanism through which the UK’s traditional academic elites have managed to preserve and reproduce their hegemony in a neoliberal era, while simultaneously reducing faculty members from a self-governing profession to a disciplined and docile workforce who are largely complicit in their own abjection.  Sayer ends by asking whether metrics (including alt-metrics) or other alternatives to the REF might deliver a fairer, cheaper, and less disruptive basis for allocation of research funding between institutions that offers a basis for breaking from this model of “Old Corruption.”

Thursday 18 June 2015, 16:15-17:45 in Columbia House (COL) Room 8.13

You can now listen to a podcast of this talk here