It's a Don's Life (23 page)
Authors: Mary Beard
21 December 2008
As every university teacher and administrator in the UK knows, the results of the Research Assessment Exercise were announced
last Thursday. The reaction since then has been fairly sick-making, especially from those who came well out of this dreadful
process.
Me included, I’m afraid. According to most calculations, Cambridge came out ‘top’ overall (unless you use a different method
of calculation, which lands the LSE at the top of the table). And in the Classics race alone, Cambridge came top, ‘beating’
Oxford by a whisker. And yes, I’ll ’fess up, I have shared a self-satisfied smile or two about that with colleagues here since
I got back.
But hang on. Have we all forgotten what a dreadful process this is? And isn’t it the responsibility of those who have done
well out of it to speak out loudest against it? For them, at least, it doesn’t look like sour grapes.
Now, I don’t mean to insult all those hardworking academics (over a thousand of them) who gave up weeks of their time to assess
the submitted work (and make the process as fair as it could be). And I don’t mean to insult all my colleagues in Cambridge
who spent years trying to make sure that our submission was as good as possible. In fact, I’m really grateful to them. Besides,
I was on my own Faculty’s RAE committee and spent many hours strategising.
But let’s remember that the real point of this exercise is to divide up inadequate research resources under the cover of ‘objectivity’.
But how objective can it ever be – when the main element of the process involves grading each of up to four ‘outputs’ written
by every academic ‘lucky’ enough to be entered into one of four/five grades: 4* – world-leading in terms of originality, significance
and rigour; 3* – internationally excellent in terms of originality, significance and rigour, but which none the less falls
short of the highest standards of excellence; 2* – recognised internationally in terms of originality, significance and rigour;
1* – recognised nationally in terms of originality, significance and rigour; and ‘unclassified’ – falling below the standard
of nationally recognised work, or outside the guidelines in some way.
OK, there must be some open and shut cases, but an awful lot must be much closer calls between 4*, 3* or even 2*. And if we
knew the individual gradings, I bet there would be some we would take issue with.
And this is not to mention the vast amounts of university time and resources that went into trying to figure out how to work
the system best (would it be financially better in the end to submit more academics, even if the average ‘score’ went down?),
assembling all the information, writing the department’s statement about itself, and chasing up all the submissions which
had to be sent off to the RAE hq somewhere.
And it’s not to mention either the nasty culture of competition that resulted, as strategic appointments were made – and anxious
deans put pressure on anxious heads of department, who then put pressure on their overworked staff to come up with another
book ... It’s no secret that all this chased some people out of the profession, and made others terminally miserable.
Less discussed are the bigger changes of academic culture that have resulted. In particular, there is now a tremendous pressure
and incentive to
publish
– and no longer much sense that it might be possible to have a good idea
without
getting in print. There is too much publishing going on in British academic life, not too little – and that has been encouraged
by the RAE.
Just to make matters worse, most newspaper accounts have failed to get to the bottom of the complicated grading system in
use. The results came for each department (I mean ‘Unit of Assessment’) under 5 heads, with the percentage of ‘outputs’ submitted
by each department awarded each of the 5 grades (with some adjustment for various other factors also taken into account and
which are far too complicated to explain). My own Faculty scored like this: 4* – 45%; 3* – 25%; 2* – 30%; 1* 0%.
That does NOT mean what many newspapers thought it meant – that 45% of Cambridge classicists were world leading (though that
might also be true!). It means that 45% of the individual submissions (up to 4 per academic) were judged world leading. Most
of us will have made submissions that were given different ratings – our ‘big book’ maybe getting a 4*, a more popular book
something ‘lower’, etc., etc.
In my case, as I remember, I submitted my Triumph book, my Parthenon book, an article on Cicero’s letters and an article on
William Ridgway. I would (now I’ve seen the figures) be a bit surprised if the Triumph didn’t get a 4*, but the Parthenon
was a book with a lot of research behind it aimed at a more general audience – which should
not
have got a 4* (but was nevertheless an important contribution – I think – for an academic to make).
Oh well, this is the last RAE. The trouble is that its replacement (which almost certainly will be more mechanistic) will
almost certainly be worse.
Comments
Mary, I too work in a shit-hot department. And it’s true, there are nutty elements of the system. But don’t you agree that
there must be some form of evaluation of research? and that this must involve some form of ‘better’ or ‘worse’ measurement?
and that this may as well involve numbers as not?
The new system will indeed be worse. Points will be awarded for amount of research income awarded. So if I write an article
on Cicero with the aid of a 500000 pound grant, it’s
de facto
better than your article on Cicero, if you did yours without a grant. It’s like giving an art prize on the basis of the quantity
of paint amassed by the artist rather than on the artwork.
SW FOSKA
Might we not be just as well off with a system in which judgements as to who got what did not have to be justified (so that
there were no long reports to write), but we relied on the wisdom of crowds? This would be like the free market, where we
all make our purchasing decisions but are not required to justify them.
First decide how much to spend on a given discipline in total, for the whole country. Give each professor or lecturer in the
discipline a list of all of the institutions, except his or her own, showing the number of staff in the discipline at each
institution. Ask each professor or lecturer to say how the funds for the discipline should be spread across all of the institutions.
Average the results. There is the answer. The inability to allocate funds to one’s own institution would work against the
larger departments, but so long as there were a fair few large departments, that effect should not be too bad, and if it were,
an adjustment could be made.
My reservation is that the wisdom of crowds, whether as a general principle or in precise mathematical guises such as the
Condorcet Jury Theorem, only works if the members of the crowd make their choices independently. I have heard a malicious
rumour that academics gossip to one another. That could undermine their independence in this exercise.
RICHARD BARON
There are many just criticisms that can be made of the RAE, but the claim that it has led academics to publish too much is
surely not one of them. After all, the maximum that can be submitted to the RAE is four articles; and there are surely very
few academics – either in the UK or anywhere else – who don’t publish at least 4 articles over each 7-year period!
RALPH WEDGWOOD
So learned academics would not have admitted Socrates to their universities and fully justified their arbitration by several
different and competing bureaucratic arguments. Curious world.
FEATHERSTONEHAUGH
25 December 2008
Sometimes it’s hard to keep up with new Roman discoveries. I would like to blame my own single-minded attention to Pompeii,
and then to Roman laughter. But the particular discoveries I’ve got interested in today were made several years ago – so I
just can’t have been paying attention.
An archaeological friend of the husband who came to pre-Xmas lunch on Tuesday pointed us to the Comacchio shipwreck, not far
from where he usually lives.
Comacchio, near Ferrara, is a kind of mini Venice, built on thirteen little islands connected by bridges. And in the late
1980s, as I now know, the remains of an ancient boat were discovered near the city, in an area that had once been an ancient
beach. The boat had run aground in the first century BC and been covered with the sand.
What intrigued me were the contents of this vessel. They included not just the usual kind of cargo: in this case amphorae,
pottery, logs of boxwood, over 100 Spanish lead ingots (many stamped with the name Agrippa), plus the usual bric-à-brac for
a voyage (tools, clothes, sandals, etc.). There were also 6 small lead portable shrines, in the shape of mini temples, of
a sort I’ve never seen before. Some have mini images of Mercury in them, others Venus.
Were they cargo intended for sale? Were they picked up somewhere to be flogged back home (perhaps a bit of commercial speculation
... someone spots them on sale and reckons he can sell them for profit back home). That seems more likely than that the set
were all part of the crew’s personal possessions. Either way, it seems like a striking piece of Roman evidence for what may
well have been a personal religious object, and so personal religious devotion. Or were they elegant ornaments without much
active religious significance at all?
Anyway, I soon found myself on the trail of more Roman boats.
No fewer than 16 Roman boats (dating from the second century BC to the fifth AD) have recently been discovered at what was
the ancient river port of Pisa, wrecked in the harbour. I’d missed these, too, despite a few reports in British newspapers,
as I have now realised.
The cargoes of these are no less striking. One, which seems to have come from north Africa, had a lioness on board, as well
as three horses. Another came from south Italy, carrying peaches, cherries, plums and walnuts in re-used amphorae (their improvised
stoppers were made of fragments of marble statues and bits of Vesuvian lava). There were even remains of a crew member, too:
the skeleton of a man in his forties, with a dog.
At this point the husband had something to add, because he is just back from Istanbul, where he had seen the excavations of
the Byzantine harbour. Here over 30 boats have been discovered. As well as lots of evidence for the harbour installations
– plus skeletons of horses, presumably used to cart the cargo (vast quantities of wine, to judge from the smashed amphorae)
away on dry land.
Anyway, that’s what has been keeping me amused and away from what I should be doing over the last day or so. Now, in just
a few hours, it’s off to get the turkey, stuffing, etc. in the oven.
Happy Christmas everyone.
Comments
It’s always irked me to hear other men talk of ‘the wife’ – nice to hear ‘the husband’ for a change.
DAVID MOORCRAFT
David Moorcraft may be interested to learn that I have already begun to restore the correct reading ‘the husband’ in place
of ‘my husband’ in the whole of English literature. I decided to make a start with Shakespeare. And so we now have, for example,
in
The Comedy of Errors
, ‘Neither the husband nor the slave return’d’, and, in
Richard III
, ‘When he that is the husband now’. I nearly missed ‘he so takes on yonder with the husband’ from
Merry Wives of Windsor
. It looks like being a long task.
MICHAEL BULLEY
31 December 2008
This is the last post before the end of 2008 and a piece of news (OK – a confession) to share with you.
There is more than a chance that a selection of
A Don’s Life
posts will be gathered together into that old-fashioned thing called a BOOK, coming out next autumn. You and I may share some
initial anxieties about whether a blog translates well into print media. But the team at Profile Books convinced me that the
answer was yes. Or, at any rate, worth a try.
If you’ve got any favourite posts that you think might get missed, let me know.
Now, the next question is about the comments – because I think that they give this blog its distinctive character.
My line has always been that a blog is about dialogue. So the plan is to include a few comments, certainly not a huge number,
to capture that character.
Anyway, while you’re reading this, I’m in Sudan ... practising my Arabic, visiting the daughter, seeing the antiquities of
Khartoum and around, and celebrating my 50-somethingth birthday.
On all of which, more soon.
Comments
I am happy to go on record as saying ‘Prof. Beard is wonderful – I want to be just like her when I grow up – her blog is one
of the best around, and her books are pretty cool too’.
DOROTHY KING
A book of blog contributions would be another example of the ephemeral being treated as the lasting and valuable – a mere
piece of bookmaking. If Dorothy King really took Mary Beard’s contributions to Classics seriously she would have put her books
first.
PETER WOOD
In the book version will all the apostrophes be added to the donts, wonts and cants? You could view this as a public health
issue. Regular readers of these pieces know to grit their teeth gently to anticipate a rise in blood pressure, but some unsuspecting
soul, buying the book on a whim, might be overwhelmed by a lot of donts all in one go. I hear the ambulance siren already.
Or will historical accuracy and the author’s preference be respected? I’m assuming that slips that are not part of Mary Beard’s
idiograph (coined word) will be corrected: I noticed bosses for boss’s a couple of blogs ago, for example. In view of the
origin of these pieces (blogs, rather than carefully checked articles), I’d say the publishers needed the services of a top-class
proofreader, who would spot things you wouldn’t normally expect to find in an MS. Good practice dictates that the checking
should not be left to the author. Even authors who are eagle-eyed when it comes to mistakes in other people’s work are likely
to overlook things in their own (you read what you thought you wrote rather than what you did).
MICHAEL BULLEY
[Ed. writes: We took Michael Bulley’s point and corrected (i.e. added) the apostrophes. He had earlier made the same point
with this ditty:
‘Apostropoem’
When Mary Beard writes ‘cant’,
It’s not the word that rhymes with ‘rant’.
And when she writes a ‘dont’,
It isn’t French. It’s just her wont.]
I am intrigued to know what arguments from Profile Books allayed your initial anxieties about this
propositum haud necessarium
.
NICHOLAS WIBBERLEY
The book-from-the-blog reads like a cool idea, go for it!
GI
I had a feeling it might come to something like this. It will be interesting now to see what effect the prospect of inclusion
will have, whether in terms of reticence or elaborate garrulousness in an effort to get noticed. But, included or not, we
are supposedly being read by thousands. Maybe it is fame, at last.
FG