My REF story; or, Confessions of a REFFail and REFugee

This Thursday, 18 December 2014, at the end of a long term and just in time for Christmas, sees publication of the results of the Research Excellence Framework (formerly called the Research Assessment Exercise). If the name doesn’t immediately tell non-academics precisely what this thing is, as indeed it may not, then it’s a survey of the quantity and quality of research done by academics in UK universities. Except for the fact that it isn’t. But it pretends to be, and based on that pretense it does a vast amount to damage to many individual academics, to most universities, and to all of UK Higher Education in general. It diverts research and writing away from the risky and the long-term in favour of the safely and the rapidly publishable. Even then, problems with assessment of “outputs” means that many results are wrong, enough of them to call the whole vastly time-consuming and expensive exercise into question. Yet those results will nevertheless be used to justify career-ending decisions for some academics by senior managers who are exempt from the REF by virtue of being senior managers, and institution-breaking decisions by ministers who are either ignorant of or hostile to academia or both. Follow the following link to see Derek Sayer of Lancaster University explain in detail what a hilarious-if-it-weren’t-so-serious farrago the REF is: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/one-scholars-crusade-against-the-ref/1/2017405.article

One of the points that Professor Sayer makes is that the REF has become such an all-consuming monster that universities now run on-going internal REFs throughout the five-or six-year intervals between censuses to determine who will be entered in those national censuses. These internal REFS are, as Professor Sayer says, “highly divergent,” but a common feature in the run up to 2014 is that universities use your own departmental colleagues, and a “critical friend” from outside, to peer review your putative entries (of which there must be four—books or articles, whichever, but the key thing is there must be four of them), and then grade them on a scale of 1 to 4 to determine your REFability. The problem is that this involves “frequently ad hoc and generally anything-but-transparent staff selection procedures [by] individual institutions.” As Professor Sayer explains, this means “peer” reviewers are often not, and indeed usually not, actually peers.  They may be colleagues whose fields are closest to your own, but usually not close enough that they would be asked to review your book or your article for an academic journal. The institutional pool is just too small. And the “critical friend” from outside may happen to be in the same field as one or two members of the relevant department, but cannot possibly be qualified to comment on the quality of the work of every member of any department or even subsection of a department (medieval, early modern, or modern). Plus, book and article reviewing for publishing houses and academic journals, besides being done by actual peers who know your field, is normally also done double-blind, to prevent any kind of abuse. Not for internal REFs, though, where you don’t know who the reviewer is—but they do know who you are.  In short, then, your REFability rests on the judgments of people who are mostly inexpert in your field and who may have something against you personally or more generally against your sex, gender, sexual orientation, skin colour, religion, class background or whatever else. And that REF judgment may affect your future career development, even to the point of determining whether you have a future career or don't.  Yet, as Professor Sayer also says, the process’s “victims are often reluctant to speak on the record and universities hide their selection practices behind firewalls of confidentiality.”

It was this point, and the Times Higher Education twitter hashtag #MyREFstory, that got me thinking I should tell my REF story.  Professor Sayer tells his, from the point of view of someone who was all set to be a REF success, but, to his enormous credit, requested not to be entered into an exercise he considers so flawed as to be a fraud--his university denied his request and then rejected his appeal against the denial, so he was entered after all.  My REF story, though, is different.  It is one of a REF reject, one of the REF Riffraff, if you will.  One of the victims who has been reluctant so far to speak on the record.  But Thursday’s coming, and there are many who are still too vulnerable to speak out.  I’m not vulnerable any more, for reasons explained below.  So this is for all the REF Riffraff who still are and who can't speak for themselves. 

My former university adopted exactly the same internal REF procedures described above, with all its inherent problems. I submitted my publications to it: an eight-volume edited collection of documents about the British-American Empire published in Pickering and Chatto’s Major Works series; an article published in a well-rated journal in my field; and a monograph published by Palgrave Macmillan. The problem with the document collection was a problem with the REF in general—that edited document collections don’t fit into the REF definition of research publications. In fact, the collection required a lot of research, has three historical essays in it, headnotes for every document, explicatory footnotes, and it’s a published thing; eight things in fact.  But whatever....  So I was on the back foot there already. The article got a 3, which made it REFable.  But the book was rated a 2 by the internal reviewers, not REFable for most universities, including my former employer. And here’s where problems with the internal reviewing system begin.  First, the article, which got a 3, was based on some of the same material as one chapter of the book, although the book and indeed the relevant chapter in the book took a different approach, with more research included and wider conclusions drawn than was the case with the article. Yet the book got a lower mark of 2.  But these anomalies are often the outcomes of subjective judgments (a subjectivity that is admitted in the REF rules, but only, as Professor Sayer shows, as a pretext for disallowing appeals against decisions).  So I want to leave that aside now and focus instead on the processes by which judgments, whatever they are, are arrived at. 

As is generally the case (I am not singling out my former institution), my peer reviewers weren’t peers. In a department of just over 30, with expertise ranging from classics and ancient to contemporary history, the early modern cohort to which I belonged numbered seven. Include the nineteenth century, into which my book went, and we’re talking 10 people max.  None of them are specialists in American history, none of them would be asked to review my work for book publishers or journals. I thus refused to participate in REF reviewing. If I'm not qualified to review my colleagues' work for a journal, how can I be qualified to review it for the REF?  Two of my "colleagues" were not of the same mind, however, and gave my book that non-REFable score of 2, with all the career-threatening possibilities that carries with it. Career-threatening for me, that is, not for them: they will gain a marginal career advantage for gamely collaborating with the REF. And, as above, as is common, they did this anonymously. At best, this creates a work environment that is utterly inimical to collegiality—you don’t know who among your colleagues did this to you, so you can’t trust anyone.  Except of course that you pretty much do know who did it.  You can’t be absolutely sure, but in a field of 10 at most--where you can eliminate some on the grounds that they had other roles that precluded peer reviewing and others who you know are too honorable to ignorantly do a “number two” on anyone else’s career prospects--then you’re not left with many candidates to choose from.  The department and university cannot guarantee the anonymity it promises to even its closest collaborators, and anyone who thinks it can is being very foolish indeed.  No matter how much paper-trail burning they are urged to do to protect themselves from the Freedom of Information Act (as detailed in the Sayer article), the departmental world is simply too small to hide in. These potentially corrupt and corrupting factors are other reasons wny I refused to particpate in the REF reviewing process.  

But it’s all worse than this anyway. One-way anonymity, no matter how imperfect, still allows for all sorts of abuses. Or at least suspicions of abuses, which is still deeply corrosive.  I’m not saying I was judged on anything other than the real or perceived quality of my work. I accept that my “peers” genuinely believe my book is shit. But if they wanted a “professional” disguise with which to stiff a “colleague” for some other reason, they had the perfect opportunity to do so. And in turn they handed the perfect opportunity for the non-anonymous then Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research to stiff someone he has more than once referred to as a “Midlands peasant,” had he wanted to.  Of course I am not saying he did anything other than simply follow the guidance of my peers in the internal REF, or that his comments about my background were anything other than mere inconsequential banter. My rejection may have been for another entirely professional reason too; my refusal to participate in REF reviewing, for example.   

To my particular ex-university’s credit, senior managers promised that REF entry (and presumably non-entry) would not affect people’s future careers. Given the same senior managers’ form for changing their policies, however, and given that they know that we know they move goalposts all the time and do it with impunity, these promises have no more practical (or moral) value than barefaced lies.  And indeed already my former colleagues are being asked to include their REF entries on Professional Development forms, and have been told that promotion boards can take these forms into account.

So, anyway, predicting these changes, I was not accepting that 2 for my book.  Luckily for me, the department’s “critical friend” had recommended a 3 (though, given their equal inexpertise, this is of no more worth than the 2s), and so had the two members of the department charged with overseeing the internal REF (both among the department’s early modernists and nineteenth-century historians, but still not Americanists). The Head of College confirmed the 3, and that’s the matter of record, but I was out of the REF anyway--due to some crossover between the article and book (notwithstanding that this happens in the normal course of academic publishing, and notwithstanding there being differences between the article and book anyway), and due to the inability of this massive and vastly expensive Research Assessment Framework to categorise an eight-volume document collection as a research publication.

As a result of being a REF reject, I could now be facing a very uncertain future.  But because of REF, and for other reasons I’ve blogged about here before, I decided a while ago to seek academic work overseas.  Happily for me, in 2013, I got the French "habilitation" that qualified me to apply for professor posts there, and in 2014, a few weeks after learning ly REF rejection, I got my current job as Professor of American Civilisation at Jean Moulin University in Lyon, all of which rather helped with the old self-worth issues that might otherwise have come with that rejection. Of course, not everyone can escape as I have.  But I hope my REF story adds a little bit to the due discreditation of this appalling exercise, or Framework, or whatever stupid thing they call it in the future.  And that if you too are a REF reject then it doesn't really mean a thing about you. I hope others will add their stories.  And then, as much as I can’t believe this thing has gone on as it has as long as it has, equally, I cannot believe it cannot be stopped.

 

 

The idea that arts and humanities are “useful for all kinds of jobs . . . couldn’t be further from the truth”, says Nicky Morgan, the UK Education Secretary.

I have blogged several hundred times on the issue of “employability” in UK Higher Education. The latest effort, just last week, is here, and at the start of it are links to the several thousand other posts I’ve written on the subject: http://sonofsar.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/eew-gew-new-development-in-ideological_24.html

But in case you don’t want to read these several million posts I will sum up the key arguments now.  1. “Employability” is not about getting students into jobs. If it was, the time and resources put into it would be invested in University Careers Offices in which there are people who are experts on how to get jobs, as opposed to people who are experts on other things and have other things to do, such as teaching, researching, and writing. The policy of “embedding employability” in academic curricula thus suggests that 2. “Employability” is actually about indoctrinating students in neo-liberal economic ideology and behaviour, an “agenda” even more amply revealed in attempts to embed “entrepreneurialism” in curricular and even in extra-curricular activities. And 3. While there is nothing wrong with helping students get jobs via teaching “transferrable skills” such as how to write, speak, and make arguments more effectively etc., and via writing references for them and so on, there is something deeply wrong with embedding employability and entrepreneurship in places where free thinking is supposed to be. Something that in my view betrays the very principle of education, a betrayal that in turn corrodes the foundations of a free and democratic society.

Of course there are many people who don’t agree with me. Some reject my arguments because they think that embedding “employability” and “entrepreneurship” is just about jobs and isn’t about neo-liberal ideological indoctrination. Others might agree with the arguments but reject the conclusion that the employability and entrepreneurship agenda should be explicitly and loudly resisted because there’s little they can do about it, and in any case they must obey as the current HE environment explicitly and loudly threatens them with unemployability (though I know many of these people are quietly subverting the agenda by simply requiring students to think in various ways anyway). And others may agree with my arguments but reject my conclusions on the grounds that employability and entrepreneurship are the very essence of free thinking and are the actual foundations of a free and democratic society.

Now, there is no point in me addressing the people in category three. These free-market Stalinists are as unpersuadable of my views as I am of theirs. And, of course, as an advocate of free-thinking, I have to admit that they are entitled to their stupid opinions. To the others, though, there is one more argument against “employability” and “entrepreneurialism” I would offer. Or, rather, I’ll let the Education Secretary Nicky Morgan argue it for me, here (though you’ve probably seen it already): http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/education-secretary-nicky-morgan-tells-teenagers-if-you-want-a-job-drop-humanities-9852316.html

Here, the UK Education Secretary is quoted as saying: “If you wanted to do something, or even if you didn’t know what you wanted to do, then the arts and humanities were what you chose because they were useful for all kinds of jobs. Of course, we know now that couldn’t be further from the truth – that the subjects that keep young people’s options open and unlock the door to all sorts of careers are the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths).”

So, there it is. The argument I haven’t made yet is easy enough to see from this: there is no point in trying to appease or collaborate with the promoters of “employability”, at least for the arts and humanities. For all the efforts made at my former UK HE College of Arts and Humanities and other similar institutions to promote employability and to be seen to be promoting employability, and there has been *a lot* of effort, the Education Secretary—the Education Secretary—still says that the idea that the arts and humanities are “useful for all kinds of jobs . . . couldn’t be further from the truth”. You don’t even have to agree with me that employability and entrepreneurialism represent a neo-liberal ideological plot to see that it is highly dangerous to flirt with an undeniable instrumentalism in which a degree is seen as a route to work rather than (and not as well as) a pathway to intellectual growth and good citizenship. And it’s clear enough that obedience to these doctrines is not going to promote the survival of these disciplines or the employment of those who work in them.

So what can you do? Keep on subverting surreptitiously for sure. But perhaps it’s time for more open resistance to this ideological agenda, or at the very least to this instrumentalist fundamentalism. Maybe lobby heads of department, heads of colleges, and even senior managers and Vice-Chancellors. Possibly lobby the union not only about defending pay and pensions (important as they are) but about defending what universities are supposed to be for. Maybe join and act with The Campaign for the Public University [http://publicuniversity.org.uk/]. Or even perhaps write trillions of blog posts or letters to and articles in newspapers about the value of free education. It’s alright for me, you might think, as I’ve fled to France from these and other developments in modern UK HE, and of course it’s harder to kick against a system you’re still in. To be fair, though, I did write about a bazillion blog posts before I left, and I was prepared to risk being unpopular with certain people for something I believe in so strongly (or madly, if you prefer). After the Education Secretary has spoken the words above, however, I’d suggest that the biggest risk now lies in staying silent.

 

 

Ooh, ha ha, look at the French economy! (Don't look at the British one!)

There has been a lot of France-bashing lately. One notable recent example involved Andy Street, boss of Penguinosexual retail outfit John Lewis. And there’s another one in today’s Sunday Telegraph. Here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11218338/Life-in-France-Now-is-our-winter-of-discontent.html

Let’s leave the Street incident behind, in part because his words reveal him to be a ludicrous buffoon who deserves no further attention, and in part because although the other one comes from the Telegraph and would normally therefore deserve exactly the same amount of further attention, it is actually written by a French person, namely Anne-Elisabeth Moutet. We can therefore be sure that the opinions therein are not merely the unpleasant emissions of a xenophobe, and we can take them seriously as a genuine critique of the state of things. Moutet is very clearly a Sarkozist, an ultra-Sarkozist, actually. Her one criticism of the former and probably next President of the Republic is that his “reforms and cuts” were “timid”. Her critique, then, is an ideological one, not a bigoted one. Great, good, and fine, but it doesn’t make it a truthful one.

That’s not to say there isn’t truth in some of Moutet's words. François Hollande is, she writes, “a graduate of the École Nationale d’Administration (ENA), the incestuous, elite civil service school that shapes most French political and economic leaders.” Fair enough. And, apart from the risible comparison to an unelected, despotic Soviet regime, she may be right that “The Brezhnevian intricacies of the tight circles of power in France” in which the “énarque” Hollande “only hired other énarques in his cabinet” and “even narrowed it down to giving three dozen top jobs to the friends he had made in his very own ENA class, between 1978 and 1980” is a serious problem for France.

Yet there is also contradiction and confusion here, as her support for David Cameron is apparently undiminished by the Bullingdonian intricacies of the tight circles of power in England, in which the Etonarque Cameron only hired his chums from Eton and Oxford (apart from the one who went to Westminster school and who the others thus call oik, and never mind that the British private school elite is by all accounts a good deal more “incestuous” than the French ENA one).

There is also omission and the trickeries it tries to hide. While Moutet is right that the French have a problem with too many voters attracted to the far right, including many working-class voters, she nevertheless makes no mention of Britain’s identical problem. Presumably because the explanation may at least in part be that Hollande and self-styled Blairite Manuel Valls have lost touch with their grassroots supporters in the same ways that Tony Blair and Ed Miliband have. By moving to the right. But, of course, pointing out that there is no genuinely socialist alternative to the main parties in their modern centre-right manifestations does not fit well in a thesis that blames the Left for the popularity of the Far Right.

There is also, if you’ll excuse the technical terminology, total bullshit. Such as Moutet's claim that “The French, especially in the public sector, go on strike on the flimsiest of pretexts.” No. No they don’t. No one gives up pay, inconveniences others, and risks their jobs on “the flimsiest of pretexts.” Not even the French. They may strike more often than the British, though not as often as many British and even some French people think they do. But when they do, it’s to stop their wages and working conditions being driven down to, say, British levels. And that's no flimsy pretext at all. Moutet may not like their 35-hour weeks, decent pay, and job security, but most French people who have them seem to like them very much indeed.

I could go on and on in the vein of the above, and a Sarkozist could go on and on rebutting me, and we could both could go on and on in an endless cycle of reciprocally unconvincing interpretations of the facts as each of us sees them. But my main point here is not about facts anyway; it’s about tropes. Because what Moutet does in this article is pile up exactly the same tropes about the French economy and French society that British French-bashers so often do. And not just the xenophobic British. These tropes are repeated so often that they have become truisms even among thoughtful British people. Which of course is exactly the point of rhetorical tropes. They are axes that you grind until they eventually become axioms. The tropes, the axioms, are these. That France is a soviet republic (if you think I’m exaggerating, I refer you back to the Brezhnev reference). That the French go on strike for the “flimsiest of reasons”, despite only working 35 hours a week and enjoying “golden contracts”. And that for these reasons France has higher unemployment and lower economic growth than Britain, France is sclerotic, France has no future, and the French are angry and alienated.                   

I’ve addressed the first and second of these points already and my imaginary Sarkozist interlocutor and I could argue them out all day long. In any case, they’re only the premises for the final and concluding points, the ones about economic performance and the future. And it’s these conclusions that really matter, despite the disproportionate amount of time the French-bashers spend on the premises. In fact, the reason the French-bashers spend so much time on the premises is probably precisely because their conclusions are so very shaky they can’t stand up on their own. Let's look at them a little bit.

First, yes, Britain’s unemployment is lower. (Slightly.) Because successive British governments, the current one and its supposedly leftist Labour Party predecessor, have colluded with business interests in driving down wages (and simultaneously legally disabling trades’ unions so they can get away with it), to the point that many British people with jobs still require state welfare and Big Society food banks to survive. (So much for the anti-statism of the right.)

Second, yes, Britain has higher economic growth. (Slightly. For now.) Because Britain has sold off or is selling off its public infrastructure to the same private sector that is impoverishing poorer working people. And privatisation is even impoverishing the better-off as well. Take my own university sector. British students now pay £9000 a year in tuition fees, and that, plus their maintenance costs and years of lost income when studying, will impoverish large sections of the future middle classes. Except those whose parents are rich enough to pay for their educations for them. And except for those who never earn enough to repay their universities, leaving a massive black hole where the British Higher Education system used to be.

France is sclerotic? The sclerotic metaphor always amuses me, given its implications of poor circulation and movement. Which brings me to transport. Some French-bashers have actually started criticising the French transport system and other of the nation's essential services. Take Moutet: “the country's vaunted infrastructure – trains, even the electrical grid – has started falling apart, because maintenance is neglected in favour of paying a workforce with golden contracts.” Well, the French transport system may not be perfect, but it is not falling apart and it still makes Britain’s look like that of a fourth-world country of centuries ago. You can get caught in traffic jams in France, my home city of Lyon is notorious for it, but you can often drive around for weeks without seeing road works. As opposed to Britain, where you have to allow two hours to go to the bog in case they’ve coned off your hallway. Again. I commute to work on a E1.50 ticket for Lyon's integrated transport network that lets me use all the buses, trams, metros, and trains I can get on and off of in an hour if I feel like it. And the buses, trams, metros, trains, and stations are clean and safe. And there hasn’t been a strike in the 10 weeks I’ve been here. All thanks to the ministrations of a combined state-run and state-regulated private economy. In Britain, on the other hand, it costs a billion pounds for a ten-hour, two-mile journey in a filthy, stinking train full of vomiting drunks that you will thankfully avoid anyway because the service has been cancelled. Again. All thanks to the non-ministrations of a privatised sector in which maintenance is neglected in favour of paying shareholders with golden bonuses. Also, I’d like to ask Moutet who owns much of the privatised British electrical grid. Why, it’s EDF, the French state-run energy corporation.

France has no future? France has its poor people, for sure, but it still has a large well-paid and job-secure working class. If you don’t believe me, I refer you back to Moutet’s and others’ complaints about the over-paid and overly-secure French working class. Also, French students pay about £200-300 a year in tuition fees. Not a big problem for most to pay off. These working- and aspiring middle-class people are the future consumers of the French economy. That's the same future in which more and more British working-class people will not spending money but will be begging for survival at food banks. And the same future in which British middle-class people are not spending the money they earn because so much of it gets deducted to pay off their student debts. And as well as cash, the French people of the future will have capital, because the French state hasn’t sold all the country’s infrastructure off to the greedy and the can’t-be-arsed-to-maintain-or-fix-it. For those bits it has sold off, it forces private buyers to look after workers and service users, rather than sacrifice them for the sake of the limitless greed of shareholders and in fetishistic pursuit of deregegulation. So, France is poorer than Britain for now. But France’s future looks fine once the current economic slump is over (which, lest we forget, was caused by unregulated private enterprise, not by the state or by the poor who the Cameronites and Sarkozists and their many supporters in the media seek so hard to blame). Britain’s future, on the other hand, can most charitably be described as post-apocalyptic.

The French are angry and alienated? Yes, many of them are. And often with good reason. But, also, anger and alienation are the political default positions of the French. Which I think is a good thing, on the whole. Unless they vote in a Presidente Le Pen, in which case it’s a terrible thing. I just hope the Left gets itself organised and recovers enough if not all of those voters who think Le Pen is the only answer to the problems of the many who are unemployed or who aren’t well-enough paid and who don’t have "golden contracts". But I’ll bet even these French people aren’t half as angry and alienated as many Britons are going to be, when those Britons stop reading those distracting articles about how France is a soviet republic, that the French are overpaid, underworked, and always on strike, that France has higher unemployment and lower growth than Britain, that France is sclerotic, that France has no future, and that the French are angry and alienated. When they finally look away from all these “look-over-there, not-over-here” tropes and notice what has become of … Britain.  

 

Kubla Cam. Or, a vision in a dream. A Frackment.

I originally did this as "A poem for the Right Dishonourable David Cameron, 'pon the occasion of his appearance before my Lord Leveson. Apologies to the wonderful Samuel Taylor Coleridge."  I now revise it slightly as "A poem for the Right Dishonourable David Cameron, 'pon the occasion of his indebtedness to his fracking friends, and the unrelated £500,000 paid by them unto the fracking Tory Party, and other sundry accomplishments." 

Kubla Cam. 

Or, a vision in a dream. A Frackment. 

In Bullingdon did Kubla Cam

A stately restaurant destroy:

Where Barf, the lumpy river, ran,

And damage measureless to normal man

Was nothing to Bozzer, me, and Oik.

So 10 Downing Street is fertile ground

From walls and towers gilded round:

Outwith were gardens with sinuous drills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And there were forests ancient as the hills,

We vend to fracking friends with glee.

But oh! That deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A fracking place! As holy and enchanted

By tory wailing for her demon-giver

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

A mighty fountain momently was fracked:

Amid whose swift half-intermittent burst

Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

And chavvy grain beneath the fracker’s flail:

And ’mid these dancing rocks once and ever

It stank up momently the sacred river. 

Five miles meandering with mazy motion

Throught wood and dale the sacred river ran,

Then reached the money measureless to normal man,

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:

And ’mid this tumult Cam heard from France

Avaricious voices Totally prophesying cash!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure

Floated midway on the waves;

Where was heard the mingled measure

From underneath the jubilee,

It was miracle of enterprise,

A darken'd dome where sleep and freeze

Those I force to work for free!

A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw:

It was an Abyssinian maid,

And on her dulcimer she played,

Singing of asylum hope’d for.

Could I revive within me

Her symphony and song,

To such deep delight ’twould win me

That with music loud and long

I could build that dome in air,

But instead I sent the scrounger home

That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashman eyes, his floppy hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on you and me hath fed
And fracked the milk of Paradise.