Tag Archives: United Kingdom

REF and the changing face of Academia

21 Monday Jan 2013

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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A while back I was doing a roundtable discussion for the Religious Studies Project and during the discussion one of the participants, Kevin Whitesides, refused to be allowed to be confined to a particular “box”. As is the way of this sort of thing myself and a couple of the other participants turned this into a running joke that Kevin doesn’t wear hats. Unlike Kevin the rest of us are quite happy to wear our academic hats that mark us out as anthropologists, sociologists, phenomenologists or whatever.

I happen to like my phenomenology hat and I imagine all those that do wear hats enjoy wearing them too. In fact our hats are quite important to us, putting on a hat helps us approach our subject because contained within our hats is a wealth of background knowledge. More exactly while I’m wearing the phenomenology hat, it determines the way in which I go about studying my subject. In a similar fashion if I were to wear the sociology hat I would go about my subject in a very different fashion. Now, to talk about wearing or not wearing a hat has always had the flavour of a joke but recently Michael Marten wrote on this blog about the encroaching REF and I started thinking about the wearing of hats in a more serious fashion.

The REF is meant to develop “overall quality” profiles of various departments to assess how much funding they should be recieving and sifting through the website which is sparsely detailed you can find the criteria for assessement here. The overall profile has five levels, four stars to no stars, that will determine how much money a department is due. Stars are awared according to the “quality” of the work an institution provides. I have placed quality in scare quotes because quality is a highly subjective terms and the REF does its best to assess this in terms of the department’s “originality”, “significance” and “rigour”, another set of highly subjective terms that have no definition whatsoever on the REF website. However, these terms don’t really need definition for REF because really the quality profile is determined by three further subprofiles, all graded from four stars to no stars, entitled “Outputs”, “Impact” and “Environment”. Of these three subprofiles “Outputs” occupies a whopping 65% of the overall profile and this again repeats the terms of “originality”, “significance” and “rigour” and again there is no definition as to what is meant.

What I suspect is that “Outputs” will have very little to do with “originality”, “significance” or “rigour” at all. It’s hard to see in fact how the words connect with one another. The title of this subprofile is a quantitative word suggesting that what this subprofile is concerned with is the amount of content a department can produce in a given amount of time. This association is all the more obvious when you notice that it is “Outputs” and not “Output” which is the only plural title among the profiles and sub-profiles on REF. Yet the criteria for this subprofile are all qualitative words which puts them at odds with the quantitative overtone of the profile title. There is no such thing as an originality scale where you can number your work on a scale of one to ten, and even if you could originality is one of the most elusive qualities to be found in academic work. Speaking personally I am acutely aware that more often than not the brilliant ideas I come up with have already been had by some previous scholar. But this does not as such invalidate the work that I do and certainly some of the best work going on right now is building upon what others have already done. Not everything needs to be original in order to be good.

There is a tension between quality and quantity and its one I feel quite regularly. In another podcast I found myself quite intimidated by Carole Cusack’s take on getting a job in academia when she advocated a much higher output of material than I have so far achieved in the second year of my Phd. And having attempted to increase that level of output I’m certainly feeling the strain as various commitments have ground together as they vie for supremecy (book reviews, article publications, tutoring, Taekwondo, my job, the actual thesis itself…). As Nietzsche pointed out, a person led by many virtues will find themselves in situations where those very virtues tear them apart. REF intends to exacerbate this situation by expecting four outputs (articles) by each researcher for each of its submissions. The chances of my getting two “outputs” done by the time I finish my Phd are slim at best but that’s what REF expects. Eventually the choice will have to be made to go with either quantity or quality because I doubt very few people would be able to successfully manage both. And ironically if REF pays attention to the level of journal your “outputs” are going to then the situation becomes ever more difficult. In order to reach the four “outputs” the researcher would have to scimp on quality and thereby send their “outputs” to lower end journals only to have REF deny them because the “quality” isn’t high enough. Admittedly I should temper this by pointing out that four is the maximum “outputs” expected of a researcher for a submission. But with funding becoming scarcer and competition fiercer I wonder how long it is before four becomes the minimum.

There are signs that departments are beginning to favour quantity over quality as pointed out by Michael Marten already which is why I started off speaking about hats. What it comes down to is that in an effort to work REF and get as much money out of it as possible we are starting to take off our hats, but unlike Kevin who refused to wear a hat we are putting on a new hat. The REF hat. What I see with the emerging REF is that people are going to start to cast off our sociological, anthropological and phenomenological hats because these hats won’t gain an institution any money.

It may seem as if there is some defence against this when we look at the neat little categories that make up the 36 units of assessment. But do departments really fit into nice neat little boxes like that? Departments that straddle the nice neat units of assessment (like this one) will suddenly find themselves in danger because they don’t fit so easily. We might be called Critical Religion, but the work done here and by those departments like us covers all 36 of the REF’s units. We belong nowhere and everywhere, and even though our work can and does cover many units this is not likely to score us any points – quite the contrary. If funding is determined by unit and a department covers multiple units it is at a disadvantage because it is not clear which unit it should draw from. Could it mean that when applying for funding in one area, this will be denied because the department doesn’t match all the criteria for that unit? And the danger is that when the pressure’s great and the money’s thin we’ll allow ourselves to remove our hats and wear the REF hat as the only way to survive. But what would the cost of that really be? What sort of work can any department achieve when it is fenced into a little box with no room to manoeuvre of its own accord? Unfortunately, we may find out in 2013/2014…

Creativity, academia and Critical Religion

17 Monday Dec 2012

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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It is widely acknowledged amongst those who still care that academia in the UK is in very serious trouble.  The most infamous embodiment of the current malaise is a mechanism imposed upon universities by successive Westminster governments: a system of ‘research assessment’ driven by an ideology of neo-liberal commodification.  Until 2008 it was called the Research Assessment Exercise; it now operates under the equally Orwellian name of the Research Excellence Framework (REF).  Readers fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with the blight that is the REF may need an explanation: universities submit publications by their scholars to subject-oriented panels of academics, who will assess their relative ‘excellence’, awarding them scores from 1-4 to indicate just how ‘excellent’ they really are.  An accompanying ‘environment’ narrative describing how wonderful these scholars’ departments are is also assessed, as are so-called ‘impact studies’ (the devising of specious measurements of the supposed ‘impact’ of academic work upon non-academics, an idea that barely works in the classical sciences, never mind the humanities).  From all this, an overall score for the department will be given.  That score, in turn, will determine the funding that the state gives each university, though perversely, the exact methodology for that decision has not (yet) been made public.  Of course, many academics and most university bureaucrats have strong vested interests in these outcomes.

The broader ramifications of the REF are apparent in numerous contexts, long before the REF submission deadline at the end of 2013.  Most universities appear to have appointed yet more managers, directors and deputy principals whose primary responsibility is to maximise their institution’s overall score for the REF.  It goes without saying that many of these people are on salaries that far exceed those of the academics they are supposed to be ‘helping’.  Varying levels of competency, transparency and accountability characterise such institutional engagement, as conversations with almost any UK academic will verify.  The REF and its implementation corrodes the UK academic environment on all levels: for example, Phil Davis shows how citation records are being falsified in order to improve the supposed relevance of texts.

One of the most important elements of academic thinking to suffer in this context is interdisciplinarity.  The REF’s structures barely cope with scholars who cross traditional disciplinary boundaries, such as those working in Critical Religion.  A quick look through the list of scholars involved in the CRA highlights the nature of the boundaries issue: literature, gender, law, postcolonial studies, art, history, politics, philosophy, music, and a raft of other disciplinary descriptors feature prominently.  Critical Religion is in substantial part about questioning the boundaries and categories that are seen to exist in different contexts, and related to that, to interrogate the power relations underpinning these categories – who benefits from categorisations and whose position is strengthened by maintaining them?  Whether this be about interrogating ‘politics’ (e.g. here) or ‘gender’ (e.g. here) or ‘interreligious issues’ (e.g. here or here), there are innumerable categories that cannot simply be maintained in their present form without distorting the nature of human relationships.  This thinking has its origins in ‘religious studies’, but perhaps the Critical Religion Association should have been called the Critical Categories Association!

These crossings form an integral part of the creative process.  I have written here before on interdisciplinarity: it often involves a kind of creative thinking that needs a certain kind of space to be available.  No scholar I know can squeeze meaningful engagement with their research into half-an-hour between lectures.  Creativity needs a different kind of space, a space that may well lead, for example, to a loss of a sense of time or awareness of one’s immediate surroundings.  In my own writing, I sometimes find myself working through the night on a chapter or an essay, not realising that I have completed 8 or 10 hours of intensive work – and outside it is becoming daylight again.  These creative periods can lead to substantial leaps forward that push in some way at previous understandings, giving birth to new ideas or imagining new ways of interpreting old problems.  As I have argued on my personal site, academic creativity is not substantially different to creativity in other contexts, though the forms it takes may differ.  Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi calls this ‘flow’ – the creative energy that enables us to engage our creativity to the full:

As Czikszentmihalyi explains, entering a state of creative ecstasy presupposes certain training and experience.  In an academic context, the degree pattern – undergraduate, taught postgraduate, and doctorate – is a way of developing this experience.  Creativity, however, also needs more than just technical prowess, precisely because transgressing boundaries requires imagination: after all, the boundaries that we are seeking to overcome are frequently ossified and maintained (whether consciously or unconsciously) by vested interests.

The REF directly hinders this creativity, as do the endless funding applications we are expected to pursue (given the ridiculously low success rates, they’re largely pointless), the mindless form-filling for TRAC, and so on (Ross McKibbin eloquently describes some of the other manifestations of commodifying academia).  These are mechanisms ‘human resources’ management (HRM) deploys in order to control the transgressive creativity of academic research.  After all, although the REF ostensibly encourages ‘international level’ creativity that HRM desperately seeks to control, the REF’s regimentation of research activity maps onto HRM’s aims.  Hindering interdisciplinarity, requiring endless completion of ‘accountability’ exercises, and rewarding only certain kinds of work… all minimise the spaces needed for ‘flow’ – or even kill them off altogether.

And yet these things will not last: as David Jasper once remarked, we may one day be remembered for writing an important book, but we will not be remembered for our funding applications.  As the REF deadline draws ever nearer and overpaid managers exercise ever more unwanted pressure on academics, I sincerely hope that mechanisms of solidarity, perhaps through the union or the CDBU etc., can enable resistance to these attempts at commodification to flourish.  If we care about our universities, we need to resist, not least by constantly reaffirming that the preservation of creative ‘flow’ leading to boundary transgressions are the things that really matter.  In so doing, we may yet manage to subvert the rampant managerialism that is destroying higher education.

(I would be interested in comments that discuss more specific ways in which this might happen…)

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Warm thanks to Jason Theaker (photographer and academic at Bradford University, who sent me the video link in relation to a discussion about this image and text), and to Alison Jasper and Richard Roberts for helpful comments on a draft text).

What is a University for?

31 Monday Jan 2011

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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The University is in a crisis. Even casual readers of the broadsheets know this. But the crisis is not what most people think, including those who run the University itself. The crisis is not that the University is underfunded, and therefore has to start cutting back on staff, programmes, and services. Nobody would deny the University is underfunded, and that the breadth and quality of education it once offered is now being seriously eroded. But funding is not where the real crisis lies. Cutbacks are just the symptom of a greater underlying problem. The real crisis is an identity crisis.

What, in this early millennium, and at this present stage of modernity, is the University for? What is its role in society? What is its fundamental raison d’être? We are being told one thing, and one thing only: it is to be an engine of the economy. It is to be, alongside several of other central engines, a crucial driver of economic activity. The government tells us this. The economists tell us this. Business tells us this. And now, increasingly, those who manage the universities – the Chancellors, the Vice-Chancellors, the Principals, the top administrators – tell us this. And thus, as part of the economic machine, the University must become more efficient, more corporate, and run on business models that have proven effectiveness towards economic growth.

This all may seem sensible enough, especially as the global economy becomes more homogenous, while still struggling to emerge from a recession that has made every institution (except banks) more fiscally aware, and more fiscally parsimonious. But the problem is that the University, as an institution, never began as an economic generator, run on the model of business. Nor have its main contributors, those who make the University what it is, the researchers and lecturers, ever seen themselves, except only very recently, and then not by choice but by coercion, as in the business of business. We did not undergo seven or more years of post-secondary education to become experts in fuelling the economy by providing qualified workers and immediately transferable research. Thus the crisis of identity. The University is being told it is one thing, but the very “cogs in the machine” do not, either by definition or by training, operate towards that end. They do not buy the metaphor of the machine or the engine itself. They do not buy the metaphor of buying. But they are now equally hard-pressed to tell us what they do accept.

The modern University has lost sight of its roots as liberal education. This is most salient in the area of the humanities: the University no longer has a sense of the “liberal arts”. Here, if we follow the theories of higher education that were forged during the 18th and 19th centuries in the West, “liberal” meant free from control of the State, from control of the Church, and from control of Business. This did not mean liberal arts subjects did not treat the domains of politics, religion and economics in their thinking. Far from it. But it did mean these domains did not set the agenda for research and teaching, did not dictate the curricula. Research was free to investigate all areas open-endedly, without vested interests, without being directed and governed by spread sheet logic and statistics. This was more than merely knowledge for knowledge sake; it was based on what it understood as the proper culturing, or cultivation, of humanity, and of the structures by which humanity should live. Research was free to probe, to question, to critique, to innovate the very paradigms under which we might find ourselves trying to live our lives, or better them. And these paradigms included those ruling within the domains of the State, the Church, and Business (which now too must be “capitalised”).

We now have a ruling global paradigm of liberal, free-market democracy – a politics so deeply entwined with an economic ideology (or a political ideology so deeply entwined with an economics) the two cannot be separated or distinguished – which, as a matter of course, is sold to us as truth. By imposing this paradigm upon the University, where now is the legitimate and legitimated voices who can, in the name of open-ended enquiry, ask the critical question: Is this the best paradigm available? Is this the only one we should be cultivating, and at all levels?

It might be. I can’t say I know the answer. But I do know the question needs to be asked, the matter debated, and no more than within the University itself. We need to address the fundamental issue of identity: what is the University now for? what is the University for now? And we need to debate this outside the context of a corporate understanding of balance sheets, of key performance indicators, and of government-led funding-driven research exercises. Must teaching and researching the disciplines of the arts and humanities necessarily lead towards some economic liquidity? Must careerism be the only motive for studying a subject like religion, or philosophy, or history, or literature? No one is debating these questions within the academy.

And the crisis is precisely that we cannot, under the present paradigm, find the space or the time to debate these questions. We are too busy administrating our way through the system, too busy conforming our research projects to maximise our minimal chances of being awarded external research funding from sources wholly wedded to the ruling paradigm, too busy writing departmental narratives that align ourselves to economic justification, too busy adjusting to managerial restructuring, too busy trying to attract “customers” through marketing schemes, too busy trying to achieve top-rate status as teachers and researchers who validate the ruling assumptions, too busy simply trying to survive what has become a profession with its own deep psychoses.

My own area, the study of religion (and theology), like so many of its cognate disciplines, will never be able to justify its existence on the grounds of economic contribution, careerist employability or spread sheet empiricism alone. Nor should it have to try. But it does, like others, have a tremendous amount to add to the debate about ruling paradigms. As we know, it had a monopoly on this subject – for better or for worse – for a good portion of the last millennium. And it should be given every chance to continue in that debate.

But the debate is not happening. Not in the halls of the government. Not in the aisles of the churches. Not in the boardrooms of the corporations. Not in the files of the so-called independent think-tanks. And not, worst of all, in the academic classrooms and research centres.

Perhaps blogs might be the only truly liberal sphere available these days.