Rank Hypocrisies: The Insult of the REF

Citation

David Stuart (2016), "Rank Hypocrisies: The Insult of the REF", Online Information Review, Vol. 40 No. 4, pp. 560-561. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-12-2015-0376

The research excellence framework (REF), the latest manifestation of a long line of research assessment exercises in the UK, is an extremely expensive and time-consuming exercise, the results of which increasingly take precedence over other academic considerations, and it drives the agenda and policies of many of the UK HEIs. Estimates of the cost of this mammoth exercise range wildly, with early estimates of the most recent exercise (REF2014) ranging from £47 to £200 million. Whatever the exact price, the exercise is without doubt costly, especially when compared with alternative metrics-based approaches. In Rank Hypocrisies, however, Sayer argues that UK universities have very good reasons for continuing with the increasingly burdensome REF, and it has little to do with the limitations of alternatives.

In Rank Hypocrisies Sayer challenges the claim that the REF provides anything comparable to a true process of expert peer review, and considers its limitations, alternatives, and the potential reason for its continuance in four chapters. The first chapter considers the role of benchmarking within academic institutions, and the gulf between peer review as practiced in North American universities and peer review as practiced in the REF. Chapter 2 covers the development of research assessment of UK universities, from the limited ambitions of the first assessment to the impact studies and the submission of almost two hundred thousand research outcomes in the most recent assessment, highlighting the current process’s many limitations. Chapter 3 explores the limitations of the process regarding how researchers are selected for submission to the REF within individual universities, with particular reference to Sayer’s own experience in Lancaster University’s history department. The final chapter considers potential alternatives to the REF, and possibly reasons for its continuance despite its obvious failings.

Rank Hypocrisies is a short and eloquent polemic, and a welcome addition to other calls for the defence of academic scholarship from the dominant neo-liberal ideology in UK universities. Part of the SAGE Swifts series, it is a short work of only 128 pages, and readers could do worse than reading Rank Hypocrisies alongside another critique of the state of universities from the same series in Doherty (2014). These works deserve to be read by all who believe universities have an important role to play in society, and have not yet been beaten down by the “moral ballast”, to use Sayer’s phrase, that accompanies terms such as “modernization” that make the audit culture seem inevitable and resistance futile.