Dear all,

I advise (as we were advised by our Sub-Faculty chair at our last 
meeting) submitting pithily worded objections on the HEFCE's website's 
REF comments form about the thoroughly misguided attempt to apply 
criteria to the assessment of humanities research (and indeed to any 
kind of university research that is not directly linked into economic 
practice) which are derived from the sphere of commerce. The relevant 
webpage is here:

http://www.hefce.ac.uk/Research/ref/

Click on 'Consultation' on that page and you will get through to the 
statements about the criteria for the REF and eventually, towards the 
end of the documents, to a form on which one can return comments - 
either as an individual or as a professional body.

It would surely be a good idea to have a coordinated AGS response, if 
one is not already in the offing. But it is surely also not without its 
purpose for individuals to respond with comments.

I'm afraid the document displays with all too great a clarity the lack 
of impact of any kind of humanities discipline on the people who write 
the REF criteria, since the prose is dismayingly poor and often 
ungrammatical, and thus makes for unpleasant reading. Plough through the 
statements on Impact, though, and you will see that the whole thing is 
not at all thought through (they are still working out how to measure 
it). There should be no concession on our part to trying to think of 
ways of adapting our research to these criteria. We must simply 
ruthlessly point out the inadequacies of the scheme to measure something 
which in the case of our research cannot be measured.

Regards to all,
Georgina


Weninger, Robert wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
>  
> 
> I posted the following on the REF blog for German Studies, but a 
> colleague suggested that I circulate this more widely since not all will 
> be accessing that web blog… I wrote:
> 
>  
> 
> It strikes me that this reformulation of the former RAE into a 25% 
> impact-driven REF will, for the majority of us in modern languages, 
> sound the death knell of our department's identities as they are today.
> 
> The impact factor is clearly meant not to include our publications, or 
> how far they are disseminated around the globe, or even how much 
> discussion they elicit (that all falls under research), nor any teaching 
> or outreach-related activities. It is primarily an economics driven 
> indicator of the documentable/measurable surplus value to society that 
> we produce (again: not intellectually but socially and/or economically:
> 
> that is quantifiable beyond our publications and their circulation 
> numbers). As was noted above [[in other comments on the blog, that is; 
> R.W.]] this was not a focus in the past, and indeed might have been 
> penalised as popularising our research (and thus deflating its research 
> quality). Thus, my response would be twofold:
> 
> first, as was also said above, we cannot agree to this, certainly not 
> for 2012/13 since we do not have any lead-in time to change our habits 
> and create the kind of impact they envisage here: we are already fifty 
> percent into the REF period. Second, to point out that if HEFCE insists 
> on this at this level (25%), they will effectively be reducing modern 
> language funding by the same percentage AND we will fall FAR below other 
> fields' scores and hence also look bad in statistical comparisons 
> (institutionally this will spell catastrophe, both on the funding front 
> as well as in terms of perception of our research standings/qualities: 
> too many departments have already been forced to shut down: this will 
> speed up the process and eliminate many more of our departments). Even 
> the alternative to reduce this factor to 10% or more (15 or 20) strikes 
> me as risky if not suicidal for us. But since I believe this is what 
> HEFCE will introduce sooner or later - they will hardly be swayed to 
> listen to us - the least we should do is to ask that they introduce this 
> factor progressively, starting at 5 to 10% in the first round. This 
> might allow (some of) us to figure out how to actually refocus our 
> research activities to achieve this kind of impact outcome. The one 
> question I have is whether any of our past esteem factors might be 
> allowed to count towards the impact score: membership on boards, panels, 
> reviewing in newspapers or such? Or would these still be considered 
> 'only' research-related in the old sense?
> 
> On another note: I am in full support of us being required to submit 
> 'only' three pieces of research in light of the fact that we have only 
> five years rather than seven. And I always already considered seven 
> years in our field(s) to be too short (ten years would be far 
> preferable). You get out of one RAE/REF to already be half way through 
> the next by the time you get the results.’
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> Best regards,
> 
>  
> 
> Robert K. Weninger
> 
> Professor of German
> 
> Editor, Comparative Critical Studies
> 
> [log in to unmask]
> 
> http://www.kcl.ac.uk/ip/robertweninger/index.html
> 
>  
> 
> Department of German
> 
> King's College London
> 
> Strand
> 
> London WC2 R 2LS
> 
>  
> 

-- 
Dr Georgina Paul,
Fellow and Tutor in German, Tutor for Graduates,
St Hilda's College,
Oxford OX4 1DY

Tel: +44 (0)1865 610311