Professor Paolo Palladino, whose (so far unanswered) Open Letter to the Vice-Chancellor and management of Lancaster University following his exclusion from the 2014 REF was reported in my earlier post Kafkarna continues: REF gloves off at Lancaster University, has now written a long piece on the UCU RefWatch website on “Why the REF is bad for the very idea of the university.”  

This is how it ends:

“I have asked … for formal confirmation that I am not failing to meet any of my responsibilities as a member of the Department of History. I have also asked for confirmation that, in future years, the balance of my teaching, research and administration, as reflected in the workload allocation model, will not be outwith departmental norms, and that I will continue to benefit from the mechanisms within the Department of History and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences to support the engagement of individual staff in academic research and bids for external funding. No formal acknowledgment or response to the request has yet been received. I have spoken to my Head of Department about this and all that he could do was to smile knowingly about the absurdity of our predicament. In the meantime, my sense is that what will happen next, and, in some sense, this is already happening within the research councils and related charities, is that interdisciplinary research will be conflated evermore with multidisciplinary research, so that collaboration between academics in different disciplines will be regarded as delivering ‘interdisciplinary’ inquiry. There are far from insignificant costs to this semantic transformation because the individual scholar thus ceases to be the site of interdisciplinary inquiry and testing of the foundations upon which each discipline rests. Exercises such as REF are deceptive because what they reward is that which is familiar and conforms to the most widely shared expectations of what counts as knowledge, not that which challenges us to think deeply about who we are and what we do. In so doing, these exercises fail to live up to the very idea of the university and its one unflinching command to each one of us, to ‘dare to think’. I leave it to you to consider what might be the long-term implications of the failure to encourage such critical reflection among those students we are called upon to prepare for the challenge of creating a more just and more humane society.”

The full article can be accessed here.