Update, October 16.  I have censored this post at the insistence of Professor Trevor McMillan, Pro Vice-Chancellor (research) at Lancaster University.  I indicate passages that have been altered or removed by angle brackets <>.

Since my last post on Lancaster University’s selection of History staff for inclusion in the 2014 REF, another case has come to light that is no less absurd–and troubling–than Professor Palladino’s.  After reading and evaluation of his four research outputs by the Department’s external assessor, another of my colleagues had an aggregate score of 2.75 (3 x 3 and 1 x 2).  He was nonetheless excluded from the REF as a result of one of his articles being re-read by a second external reader and given a lower grade of 2*.  The Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at that point refused to commission a further specialist review.

What is particularly troubling is that the article in question was published in Past and Present, which is regarded by most UK historians as one of the top historical journals, if not the leading historical journal in the English language.  My colleague had also been urged by the editor of a major specialist journal in his field to withdraw the article from Past and Present (who had not at that point definitively accepted it), with the promise that it would be published quickly as a lead article in this second journal, where it would form the centerpiece of a themed issue.  Once again the subjective judgments of University-appointed assessors have trumped the peer evaluations (in this case three) commissioned by distinguished professional journals.

My colleague is now appealing the decision, which is why I have kept his name anonymous (though I am posting this information with his permission).  But appeals are permitted only on procedural grounds—one cannot appeal the judgment of quality as such.  As I pointed out in an earlier post, the truly Kafkan reasoning behind this is that (to quote Lancaster University’s Code of Conduct for the 2014 REF): “The judgements are subjective, based on factual information. Hence, disagreement with the decision alone would not be appropriate grounds for an appeal.”

In the surreal spirit of the enterprise, but with the intent of questioning Lancaster University’s procedures for selecting History staff for the 2014 REF, I decided to submit a formal appeal of my own.  The appeal is against my being selected as part of the History Unit of Assessment (UoA) in the 2014 REF.

Here is the full text of my appeal.  The only change from the version sent to the Director of Human Resources at Lancaster is that I have removed names of individuals, except where I am quoting from already published material.

 REF 2014: APPEAL

1.  I wish to appeal against Lancaster University’s decision to include me as part of the History UoA in its 2014 REF submission.

2.  This is not an appeal against the judgments of quality of my four outputs, on whose basis this decision was taken.  It therefore does not fall foul of the requirement that “disagreement with the decision alone would not be appropriate grounds for an appeal” (LANCASTER UNIVERSITY REF 2014: Code of Practice V5 27 September 2013, p. 5).[1]

3.  This appeal is based exclusively upon “concerns about process,” one of the two grounds permitted by LU Code of Practice (p. 5).   These concerns are:

(i) that the procedures used to select staff for inclusion in the Lancaster University History UoA for the 2014 REF do not satisfy the criteria set out by HEFCE in its document Assessment Framework and Guidance on Submissions[2] in respect of either transparency or accountability;

(ii) that the procedures used for assessing my own work for inclusion in the 2014 REF were incompatible with LU Code of Conduct‘s objective of ensuring that “The primary factor [in selection] will be the quality of the research outputs as defined by the published REF criteria contained in the Guidance on Submission and Panel Criteria documents” (p. 2); and

(iii) that the procedures used in assessing the quality of my own work for inclusion in the 2014 REF were de facto discriminatory toward several of my colleagues in History, who are not being returned in the REF, breaching HEFCE requirements of equality, fairness, and consistency.

I outline these concerns more fully under (4), (5) and (6) below, respectively.

4.  HEFCE’s Assessment Framework and Guidance makes clear that while “It is a requirement of the REF that each submitting institution establishes a code of practice on the selection of staff for REF submissions … It is the responsibility of HEIs to ensure that their codes of practice, and the manner in which they participate in the REF, are lawful” (39).

I am aware that LU Code of Practice was submitted to and approved by HEFCE.  I believe, however, that the actual implementation of this code, at least as regards the History UoA, has not conformed to HEFCE’s requirements.

Specifically:

204.  a. Transparency: All processes for the selection of staff for inclusion in REF submissions should be transparent. Codes of practice should be drawn up and made available in an easily accessible format and publicised to all academic staff across the institution, including on the staff intranet, and drawn to the attention of those absent from work. We would expect there to be a programme of communication activity to disseminate the code of practice and explain the processes related to selection of staff for submission. This should be documented in the code (Assessment Framework and Guidance, p. 39).

While the LU Code of Practice was made available on the University intranet, that document contained only the most general account of the “processes for the selection of staff for inclusion in the REF.”  It is my contention that the processes actually employed in the case of the History UoA were anything but transparent.

Specifically, History staff knew that their four outputs would be read by the Department’s external assessor Professor ___________ , and that his evaluation would in some (unspecified) way feed into the University’s final decisions on inclusion and exclusion.  Individuals were also informed that their work might be sent out for further, specialist readings.

But History staff were not told, at least until the final decision on inclusion was communicated to them by the HoD in September 2013:

(i) the scores Professor _______ had given their individual outputs;[3]

(ii) the circumstances that would trigger a second reading of their work, or a “re-review” by an independent specialist of an item already read and scored by Professor _______ ;

(iii) the basis on which external assessors (other than Professor _______ , <removed>) were chosen, or who was responsible for selecting them;

(iv) the overall aggregate score needed to qualify for inclusion in the University’s submission to the 2014 REF.

When I asked my HoD to tell me where information on the specific evaluative procedures used with regard to selection of staff for the History UoA had been published on the University website, I was told: “As far as I’m aware, the evaluative procedures for arriving at decisions have not been published on the website, and in any case they will differ from Faculty to Faculty and department to department” (email from [HoD] , 3 October 2013).

In short, several key elements of the evaluative procedures that determined whether or not individuals were included in the 2014 REF submission were not transparent, and were never clearly communicated to the staff concerned.

This in turn makes it difficult to appeal the University’s decisions: Lancaster has constructed a Kafkan scenario in which grounds for appeal include “concerns about process (including if it is felt that procedure has not been followed),” but one cannot know whether or not procedures have been followed if the procedures concerned have not been clearly communicated in advance.

204. c. Accountability: Responsibilities should be clearly defined, and individuals and bodies that are involved in selecting staff for REF submissions should be identified by name or role … Operating criteria and terms of reference for individuals, committees, advisory groups and any other bodies concerned with staff selection should be made readily available to all individuals and groups concerned (Assessment Framework and Guidance, p. 39, emphasis added).

The LU Code of Practice says that “selection decisions regarding the University submission to the REF will lie with the Vice-Chancellor on the advice of the REFSG,” whose membership the document details.   While I accept that this may be the formal legal position, it is not a complete or accurate description of what has actually happened.  I dispute that these are the only individuals or bodies at Lancaster University “involved in selecting staff for REF submissions.”  Others who have been involved, at various stages of the process, include Heads of Department, Departmental Research Directors, Associate Deans for Research, Faculty Deans, and external assessors.  Though none of these may be formally responsible for the final decisions on inclusion or exclusion, their inputs have contributed to those decisions.  In the case of external assessors who read and scored individual outputs, that contribution may often have been decisive.

When I was HoD for History (2009-2012) I sat on what were in effect ad hoc committees involved in the early stages of making recommendations—though not final decisions—for selection of staff for the 2014 REF for both History and the Department of European Languages and Cultures.  In the case of History, the relevant meetings involved, at various points, the Dean of FASS _______ , the Associate Dean Professor _______ , the History Department Research Director _______ , and the external assessor Professor _______ .  In the case of DELC, I was personally asked by the Dean, Professor _______ , to assess DELC staff members’ outputs as an “internal/external” reader.  The context was the need for FASS to take a strategic decision or whether or not DELC should be entered in the 2014 REF as an independent UoA.  So far as I recall, also present at that meeting were Dean _______ , [the FASS AD for Research], the DELC HoD _______ , the DELC Research Director _______ , and DELC’s external assessor, whose name I no longer recall.

I respectfully submit that (i) these were “bodies involved in selecting staff for REF submissions” in the sense intended by HEFCE paragraph 204c above, and (ii) their operating criteria and terms of reference were not “made readily available to all individuals and groups concerned.”

Specifically, these advisory groupings, whose recommendations will have formed the initial Department- and Faculty-level bases for the decisions on individual inclusion or exclusion by the central REF Steering Group and V-C, did not satisfy HEFCE’s requirements that:

209. Where a committee or committees have designated REF responsibilities – whether it is at departmental, faculty, UOA or central level – these should be detailed in the code of practice, including, for each committee:

• how the committee has been formed

• its membership

• the definition of its position within the advisory or decision-making process  …

210. The following details should be provided about its mode of operation:

• the criteria that it will use in carrying out its functions …

(Assessment Framework and Guidance, p. 40, emphasis added).

To my knowledge such bodies have no formal standing in the process at all, though their recommendations may well turn out to be decisive for individual members of staff.  They are likely to have been the most important decision-making bodies in all cases where department-level initial readings of outputs yielded a score sufficient for inclusion, a category into which my own case falls.  These bodies are not detailed anywhere in LU Code of Practice (as the Assessment Framework and Guidance para 209 requires), nor are their existence, composition, terms of reference, or operating criteria publicized on the intranet.

In short, the LU Code of Practice that was endorsed by HEFCE does not sufficiently describe the processes of staff selection for REF 2014 that have actually been used—at least with regard to the History UoA—at Lancaster University, while the processes that have actually been used to select individuals do not satisfy HEFCE’s stated criteria for either transparency or accountability.

5.  HEFCE’s Assessment Framework and Guidance is clear that: “The purpose of the guidance in Part 4 is to support institutions in promoting equality and diversity when preparing submissions to the REF, through drawing up and implementing a code of practice on the fair and transparent selection of staff. This will aid institutions in including all their eligible staff in submissions who are conducting excellent research, as well as promoting equality, complying with legislation and avoiding discrimination” (para. 187, p. 34, emphasis added).

I draw two inferences from this:

(i) HEFCE very clearly does not intend institutions to exclude any “eligible staff … who are conducting excellent research” from their submissions;

(ii) institutions’ procedures for deciding which staff are included in or excluded from submission in REF 2014 must be capable of judging whether outputs do or do not in fact constitute “excellent research,” as well as of satisfying HEFCE’s concerns regarding the separate issue of “promoting equality, complying with legislation and avoiding discrimination.”

Lancaster University likewise claims that: “”The primary factor [in selection of staff for the 2014 REF] will be the quality of the research outputs as defined by the published REF criteria contained in the Guidance on Submission and Panel Criteria documents” (LU Code of Conduct, p. 2).  Again, the logical expectation would be that its procedures for judging quality of outputs are fit for purpose.

I believe that the procedures applied within History at Lancaster University are manifestly not capable of judging the excellence or otherwise of my four outputs, and that my inclusion in the REF, without further specialist review of my work, is therefore contrary both to HEFCE Assessment Framework and Guidance and to the LU Code of Conduct as quoted above.

“Excellent research” has a very precise meaning within the discourse of REF 2014.  The word “excellent” is used only in connection with items ranked as 4* (“Quality that is world-leading in terms of originality, significance and rigour”) and 3* (“Quality that is internationally excellent in terms of originality, significance and rigour but which falls short of the highest standards of excellence”) (Assessment Framework and Guidance, Annex A, p. 43).  The specific criteria used to judge a work’s degree of excellence are originality, rigor, and significance.

On inquiring of my Head of Department whether my four outputs were read and evaluated by anybody other than the History UoA’s external assessor Professor _______ , I was informed that: “my understanding is that in your case all four outputs were evaluated only by [Professor _______] – I’m not aware of any being sent out for additional review” (email from [HoD], 3 October 2013).

I have the utmost respect for Professor _______ , who in my experience as HoD did his job as a Critical Friend with the utmost integrity and conscientiousness.  He is, however, a historian whose interests and expertise are very far from my own.  His website defines his research interests as <removed in order to preserve the reviewer’s anonymity>”[4]  I do not believe that he is remotely qualified to judge the excellence or otherwise of my research.  I write about none of the things in which he claims a research interest and has a record of publication.  I research twentieth-century history, not <removed>; Czech history, not <removed>; modernism and surrealism, with a particular focus on architecture and the visual arts, not <removed>.  My primary sources are all in Czech and French, languages Professor _______ does not read—as is much of the secondary discussion in the field.  I do not see how Professor _______ can be expected to evaluate the originality, rigor, and significance of my research if he has little or no knowledge of the fields to which it contributes.  Frankly, this is absurd!

Professor _______ is not qualified to evaluate the quality of my contributions to a field of historical inquiry so distant from his own, let alone make the necessarily fine distinctions that separate a 3* from a 2* output (the latter being defined as “Quality that is recognised internationally in terms of originality, significance and rigour,” Assessment Framework and Guidance, Annex A, p. 43).  He would not be asked to evaluate these items as an expert reviewer for a journal or publishing house, or in connection with tenure or promotion proceedings, not because he is not an eminent historian, but because his expertise lies in a very different area of the discipline.  His appointment as the single external assessor for the entire History UoA at Lancaster University is in contradiction with all normal professional norms of peer assessment and review.  Since Professor _______ is the only one to have read my work for REF purposes, I therefore submit that the procedures used by Lancaster University to evaluate that work, on the basis of which I am being submitting in REF 2014, are not consistent with HEFCE’s stated objective of ensuring that universities include “all their eligible staff in submissions who are conducting excellent research.”

After I learned I was to be included in the REF submission, I wrote my HoD with the following request: “In the interests of upholding the integrity of this process of quality evaluation, as well as of ensuring equitable treatment between colleagues, I would like formally to request that my outputs be sent out for further appraisal by subject-matter experts before I am submitted in the 2014 REF” (email to [HoD], 30 September 2013).  I received the following response: “I can see why you are asking for this, but I am afraid that it is no longer in my power to comply with your request for specialist reading of your work. The REF process is now at a stage where appeals on procedural grounds can be made, but not on any other grounds, and I have therefore been advised to decline your request” (email from [HoD], 2 October 2013).  Further communication with my HoD established that “Even before I opened your email of 30th Sept I had already been received messages from the Dean, AD Research and Pro VC for Research advising me that there was no longer any option for specialist reading of any work” (email of 3 October 2013).  That is to say, Lancaster University has closed the possibility of further specialist readings of work even before the deadline for making appeals (October 8) has expired.

It is worth noting, finally, that Lancaster University senior managers have admitted the inadequacy of the procedures that were eventually used to evaluate my work for inclusion in the REF.  Writing at an earlier stage of the process, the Associate Dean (Research) for the Faculty of Science and Technology accepted that “some weaknesses in the mock REF exercise are apparent, for example in many cases there was only one external reviewer per department, no doubt with expert knowledge but not in all the relevant areas” (Michael Koch, “In preparation for REF2014 – Mock REF and Units of Assessment,” SciTech Bulletin #125).[5]  This was exactly my case, and forms part of the basis of this appeal.  HEFCE expressed the hope that: “Institutions that conduct mock REF exercises might consider using them as an opportunity to apply their draft code and refine it further” (Assessment Framework and Guidance, para 203, p. 39).  Evidently in this case Lancaster, or at least FASS, chose to ignore that very sensible advice.

6.  HEFCE’s Assessment Framework and Guidance enshrines both a repeatedly stated commitment to “equality and diversity” and “fairness” (see e.g. para 187), and a specific requirement of:

204.  b. Consistency: It is essential that policy in respect of staff selection is consistent across the institution and that the code of practice is implemented uniformly (Assessment Framework and Guidance, p. 39).

I do not know how consistent staff selection procedures within History are with those used for other UoA’s, because as stated above, the procedures employed at individual UoA level have never been made public.  Within the History UoA, however, staff members have not been treated equally.  While some, like myself, have been included in the 2014 REF submission on the basis of one external reading of all outputs (i.e., Professor _______’s)—even when that reading has not been by an expert in the relevant field—others have had some or all items of their work additionally read by further external assessors.   Since these assessors are claimed to be field specialists, one might expect them to set the bar higher in terms of their ability to recognize originality, rigor, and significance.  In some cases this second reading has involved outputs that were originally given a grade by Professor _______ being downgraded, with (in at least two cases known to me) the staff member being excluded from the REF submission as a direct result.  I submit that this is inequitable insofar as some members of staff within the same UoA have been subjected to double or triple jeopardy and others not.

This might be justifiable, had clear criteria governing when outputs are sent out for further specialist evaluation been articulated and published in advance.  They were not.  From what I can glean from what I have been told by colleagues who have been excluded from the REF, the circumstances in which second readings have been sought include (but may not be limited to):

(i) where the external assessor, Professor _______ , himself expressed doubts as to his competence to evaluate an output in a field with which he is not familiar; and

(ii) where the aggregate score of all four outputs left the individual on a borderline in terms of the University’s (as yet unpublished) threshold for inclusion in the History UoA.

Since I fell into neither of these categories, assessment of my outputs was much less rigorous than that of several of my colleagues.  My outputs were read by only one external reviewer, as opposed to two or more, and that reviewer was not a subject matter specialist.

This is not consistent treatment of Lancaster University staff, nor is it by any reasonable standards fair to the colleagues in question.  Nor does it encourage representation of “diversity” of research within the Department, since the opinion of one individual, the external assessor, Professor _______ , plays a disproportionate role in determining who is or is not included in Lancaster University’s History UoA as submitted to the 2014 REF.

Derek Sayer

3 October 2013

Update, October 16.  I have censored this post at the insistence of Professor Trevor McMillan, Pro Vice-Chancellor (research) at Lancaster University.  I indicate passages that have been altered or removed by angle brackets <>.  

Times Higher Education recently reported that at Leicester University, “The position of all staff eligible for the [2014] REF but not submitted will be reviewed. Those who cannot demonstrate extenuating circumstances will have two options. Where a vacancy exists and they can demonstrate ‘teaching excellence’, they will be able to transfer to a teaching-only contract. Alternatively, they may continue on a teaching and research contract subject to meeting ‘realistic’ performance targets within a year.  If they fail to do so, ‘the normal consequence would be dismissal on the ground of unsatisfactory performance’” (08/08/2013, see full article here).   We live in interesting times.

1.   How it works—the context and the stakes

Having worked in North America from 1986 to 2006, when I took up a Chair in Cultural History at Lancaster University, I have spent most of my academic career in blissful ignorance of the peculiarly British institution that used to be called the RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) but has recently—and in good Orwellian fashion—been renamed the REF (Research Excellence Framework).   Many of my UK colleagues have known no academic life without such state surveillance.  But in most other countries, decisions on university funding are made without going through this time-consuming, expensive, and intellectually questionable audit of every university’s “research outputs” every five or six years.   Their research excellence has not conspicuously suffered in its absence.

The United States—whose universities currently occupy 7 of the top 10 slots in the THE World University Rankings—have no equivalent of the RAE/REF. This does not mean that research quality, whether of individuals or of schools and departments, is not evaluated.   It is continually evaluated, as anybody who has been through the tenure and promotion processes at a decent North American university, which are generally far more arduous (and rigorous) than their UK counterparts, will know.  But the relevant mechanisms of evaluation are those of the profession itself, not the state.  The most important of these are integrally bound up with peer-reviewed publication in top-drawer journals or (in the case of monographs) with leading university presses.  Venue of publication can be treated as an indicator of quality because of the rigor of the peer review processes of the top academic journals and publishers, and their correspondingly high rates of rejection.  Good journals typically use at least two reviewers (to counteract possible bias) per manuscript, who are experts in their fields, and the process of review is “double-blind”—i.e., the reviewer does not know the author’s identity and vice versa.  After an article or book has been published, citations and reviews provide further objective indicators of a work’s impact on an academic field.   The upshot is a virtuous (or, depending on your point of view, vicious) circle in which schools like CalTech, MIT, Princeton, or Harvard can attract the best researchers as evidenced mainly by their publication records, who will in turn bring further prestige and research income to those schools, maintaining their pre-eminence.

What immediately strikes anyone accustomed to the North American academy about the British RAE/REF is that at least in the humanities—which are my concern here—such quasi-objective indicators of research quality have been purposely ignored, in favor of entirely subjective evaluative procedures at every level.[1]  All those entered in the 2014 REF by their universities are required to submit four published “outputs” to a disciplinary sub-panel, whose members will then read and grade these outputs on a 4-point scale.   These scores account for 60 per cent of the overall ranking given to each “unit of assessment” (UoA), which will usually, but not always, be a university department.   The other 40 per cent comes from scores for “environment” (which includes PhD completions, external research income, conferences and symposia, marks of “esteem,” etc.) and “impact” (on the world at large, whose measurement has been the subject of considerable more or less entertaining debate), assigned by the same sub-panel.

Disciplinary sub-panels have some latitude in how they evaluate outputs, and in the natural sciences standing of journals and numbers of citations are likely to be seen as important indicators of quality.  The History Sub-panel has made it clear that it will not take into account venue of publication, citations, or reviews—so an article published in American Historical Review will be treated exactly the same as something posted on a personal website, as long as it is a published work.  The panel has also indicated that as a rule—and unlike with a typical book or journal article in the “real-world” peer review process that the panel has chosen to ignore—only one member of the panel will read each output.  While attempts will be made to find the best fit between the submitted outputs and the panel members’ personal scholarly expertise, in view of the size of the panel and the volume of material to be read this cannot always by any means be guaranteed.

In sum, in History at least—and I suspect across the humanities more generally—60 per cent of every UOA’s ranking will be dependent on the subjective opinion of just one panel member, who may very well not be an expert in the relevant field.   The criteria the panel intends to use for scoring outputs’ quality are (1) originality, (2) significance, and (3) rigor.  It is beyond me to see how competent judgments on these can be made by anyone who is not an expert in a field.   It is easy, on the other hand, to see why every university in the land was so desperate to get their people on REF committees.

For the stakes are high.  The aggregate REF score for each UOA determines (1) the ranking of that UoA relative to others in the same discipline across the country, and (2) the amount of research funding the university will receive for that UoA from the Higher Education Funding Councils until the next REF.   Both are critical for any school that has aspirations to be a research university, since—as all good sociologists know—what is defined as real is real in its consequences.

2.   What’s new in REF 2014—University-level assessment of outputs

In this context, it is important to note that—unlike in earlier RAEs—outputs scored at below 3* now attract no financial reward.  In previous RAEs it was in the interests of all universities to submit as high a proportion as possible of eligible staff with the intention of benefiting from a multiplier effect, and university websites boasted of the high proportions of their faculty that were “research active” as indexed by submission in successive RAEs.  In the REF, outputs scored at below 3* (defined as “Quality that is internationally excellent in terms of originality, significance and rigour but which falls short of the highest standards of excellence”) now dilute ranking relative to competitor institutions without any compensating gain in income.  The last thing any UoA wants is for the GPA that would otherwise be achieved by its 3* and 4* outputs to be reduced by a long “tail” of 2* and 1* valuations.

From the point of view of maximizing financial and reputational returns from the REF, the rational strategy for every research university is to exclude outputs ranked at 2* (“Quality that is recognised internationally in terms of originality, significance and rigour”) or below from entering a UoA’s submission, even if this means that fewer faculty are entered in the REF.  Sub-panels have also urged universities to be more selective in their submissions than in earlier RAEs, to ease their own workload.  All that material to read, often out of their fields of personal interest and expertise.  Why not sub-contract out the routine stuff?

Individual universities have responded differently to these pressures (and many, including Lancaster, have been understandably cagey about their plans).  But it now seems pretty clear that most, if not all schools with ambitions to be regarded as research universities are going to be far more selective than in previous RAEs in who they submit.  Lancaster warns on its internal staff website:

“Lancaster University is aiming to maximise its ranking in each UoA submission so final decisions [on who is submitted] will be based on the most advantageous overall profile for the University. It is anticipated that the number of staff submitted to REF2014 will be below the 92% submitted for RAE2008 and not all contractually REF-eligible staff will be submitted.”

Rumor has it that the target figure for submission may in fact be as low as 65%., but that is, of course, only rumor.

Ironically, one of the reasons first advanced by the funding councils for shifting from the RAE to the REF format was “to reduce significantly the administrative burden on institutions in comparison to the RAE.”  The exact opposite has now happened.  Universities have had little alternative but to devise elaborate internal procedures for judging the quality of outputs before they are submitted for the REF, in order to screen out likely low-scoring items.  Many schools have had full-scale “mock-REF” exercises, in Lancaster’s case a full two years before the real thing, on the basis of which decisions about who will or will not be submitted in 2014 are being made.  The time and resources—which might otherwise have been spent actually doing research—that have been devoted to these perpetual internal evaluation exercises, needless to say, have been huge.

But more important, perhaps, is the fact that the whole character of the periodic UK research audit has significantly changed with the shift from the RAE to the REF, in ways that both jeopardize its (already dubious) claims to rigor and objectivity and could potentially seriously threaten the career prospects of individuals.  For the nationally uniform (at least within disciplines) and relatively transparent processes for evaluating outputs by REF Sub-panels are now supplemented by the highly divergent, frequently ad hoc, and generally anything but transparent internal procedures for prior vetting of outputs at the level of the individual university.   A second major irony of the REF is that if people at Leicester—or elsewhere—are fired or put on teaching-only contracts because they were not entered in the university’s submission, the assessments of quality upon which that decision was taken will have been arrived at entirely outside the REF system.

In previous RAEs all decisions on the quality of outputs were taken by national panels comprised of established scholars in the relevant discipline and constituted with some regard to considerations of representativeness and diversity, even if (as I have argued above) their evaluative procedures still left much to be desired.  In the REF, key decisions on quality of outputs are now taken within the individual university, with no significant external scrutiny, before these outputs can enter the national evaluative process at all.

3.  Down on the ground—enter Kafka

As I said earlier, most universities are playing their cards very close to their chests on what proportion of faculty they intend to enter into the REF and how they will be chosen.  I therefore cannot say how typical my own university’s procedures are.  I have no reason to think they are especially egregious in comparison to others’, but they still, in my view, leave considerably cause for concern.

The funding councils require every university to have an approved Code of Practice that ensures “transparency and fairness in the decision making process within the University over the selection of eligible staff for submission into the REF.”   Lancaster’s Code of Practice is published on the university website.  It is long on promises and short on detail, with all the wriggle-room one expects of such documents.  It says: “Decisions regarding the University submission to the REF will lie with the Vice-Chancellor on the advice of the REF Steering Group.  No other group will be formally involved in the selection of staff to be returned.”[2]  The Steering Group (whose composition is specified in an appendix) is tasked inter alia with adopting “open and transparent selection criteria,” ensuring “that selection for REF submissions do not discriminate on the grounds of age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation,” and detailing “an appeal process that can be used by all members of eligible staff in order to seek further consideration for submission.”  All good stuff, though it is not discrimination on these grounds that most of my colleagues are worried about so much as the university’s ability to come up with procedures that will deliver informed and fair evaluations of their diverse work.  But what actually happens?

History department members were asked to identify four outputs for potential submission to the REF together with one or more “reserves.”  These items were then all read by a single external reader, who was originally hired by the Department in an advisory capacity as a “critical friend”—<removed>—but who has since been appointed by the university as an external assessor for REF submissions.   This assessor ranks every potential History UoA output on the four-point REF scale.  As far as I understand the procedure,[3] his ranking will be accepted by a Faculty-level Steering Group as definitive, unless he himself indicates that he does not feel competent to evaluate a specific output.  In that case—and in that case only—the output will be sent for a second reading by an independent specialist.   We are not told who chooses second readers or on what criteria; and colleagues have not been consulted on who might appropriately be approached for informed and objective assessments of their work.  All specialist readers remain anonymous.[4]

History is an enormously diverse discipline, in terms of chronology (at Lancaster we have historians of all periods from classical antiquity to the 20th century), geography (we have historians of Britain, several parts of Europe, the Middle East, India, South-East Asia, the Caribbean, and the United States), subject matter (economic, political, social, cultural, etc.), and methodology.  To expect any one historian, no matter how eminent, to be able to judge the quality of research across all these fields is absurd.   At least when outputs are submitted to REF Sub-panels there is a reasonable chance that the person who winds up grading them might have some expertise in or at least knowledge of the field.  The History Sub-panel has 24 members and a further 14 assessors.  Lancaster’s procedure, by contrast, guarantees that decisions as to whether individuals are submitted in the REF at all depend, in most cases, on the recommendation of the same individual, who is very likely not to be technically qualified to evaluate the quality of the work in question.  This is not a criticism of this particular assessor; no one individual could possibly be qualified to assess more than a minority of outputs, given the diversity of the historical research produced within the UoA.  Again, the relevant contrast is with peer reviewers for journals, who are chosen by the editors precisely for their specialist competence to assess a specific manuscript—not for their general eminence in the profession, or their experience of sitting on REF panels.[5]

I find it poignant that so cavalier an attitude toward evaluating the research of colleagues should be adopted in a university that requires external examiners for PhDs to be “an experienced member of another university qualified … to assess the thesis within its own field” and—unlike in North America—also requires all undergraduate work to be both second-marked internally and open to inspection by an external examiner before it can count toward a degree.   Why are those whose very livelihood depends on their research—and its reputation for quality—not given at least equivalent consideration as the students they teach?

A particular casualty of this approach is likely to be research that crosses disciplines—something, in other contexts, both Lancaster University and the Research Councils have been keen to pay lip-service to—or that is otherwise not mainstream (and as such may be cutting-edge).  Given the stakes in the REF, it always pays universities to be risk-averse.   Outputs may be graded below 3* not because their quality is in doubt but because they are thought to be marginal or unconventional with regard to the disciplinary norms of the REF Sub-panel, and what may be the most adventurous researchers excluded from the submission.

Though there is a right of appeal for individuals who feel they have been unfairly treated in terms of application of the procedure, Lancaster’s Code of Practice is crystal clear that: “The decision on the inclusion of staff to the REF is a strategic and qualitative process in which judgements are made about the quality of research of individual members of staff.  The judgements are subjective, based on factual information. Hence, disagreement with the decision alone would not be appropriate grounds for an appeal” (my emphasis).

This is the ultimate Kafkan twist.  The subjectivity of the process of evaluation is admitted, but only as a reason for denying any right of appeal against its decisions on substantive grounds.  These are exactly the grounds, of course, on which most people would want to appeal—not those of sexual or racial discrimination, though it might be argued that the secrecy (aka “confidentiality”) attached to these evaluations—we are not allowed to see external assessors’ comments—would make it impossible to prove discrimination in individual cases anyway.

4.   What comes next?

For whatever reasons, the funding councils for British universities have chosen to allocate that portion of their budget earmarked for research in ways that (at least in the humanities) systematically ignore the normal and well-established international benchmarks for judging the quality of research and publications.  Instead, they have chosen to set up their own panopticon of hand-picked disciplinary experts, whose eminence is not in doubt, but whose ability to provide informed assessments of the vast range of outputs submitted to them may well be questioned.  The vagaries of this approach have been exacerbated in the 2014 REF by putting in place a financial reward regime that incentivizes universities to exclude potential 2* and 1* outputs from submission altogether.  The resulting internal university REF procedures are not only enormously wasteful of time and money that could otherwise be spent on research.  More importantly, they compound the elements of subjectivity and arbitrariness already inherent in the RAE/REF system, ensuring that evaluations of quality on whose basis individuals are excluded from the REF are often not made by subject-matter experts.   Research that crosses disciplinary boundaries or challenges norms may be especially vulnerable in this context, because it is seen as especially “risky.”

Whatever this charade is, it is not a framework for research excellence.  If anything, it is likely to encourage conventional, “safe” research, while actively penalizing risk-taking innovation—above all, where that innovation crosses the disciplinary boundaries entrenched in the REF Sub-panels.  The REF is not even any longer a research assessment exercise, in any meaningful definition of that term, because so much of the assessment is now done within individual universities, in anything but rigorous ways, before it enters the REF proper at all.

Having made clear its intention to exclude from submission in the 2014 REF some of those faculty who would uncontentiously have qualified as “research-active” in previous RAEs, Lancaster University informs us that: “Career progression of staff will not be affected and there will not be any contractual changes or instigation of formal performance management procedures solely on the basis of not being submitted for REF2014.”  I hope the university means what it says.  But it is difficult to ignore the fact that Leicester University’s Pro-VC (as reported in THE) also reiterated that: “the university stands by its previously agreed ‘general principle’ that non-submission to the REF ‘will not, of itself, mean that there will be negative career repercussions for that person,’” even while spelling out his university’s intention to review the contractual positions of all non-submitted staff with a view to putting some on teaching-only contracts and firing others.

The emphasis on the weasel words is mine in both cases.  If universities truly intend that non-submission in the 2014 REF should not in any way negatively affect individuals’ career prospects, then what is to stop them saying so categorically and unambiguously?