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Universities: Research Assessment Exercise

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Rees of Ludlow, on his absolutely outstanding maiden speech. The noble Lord and I go back quite a long way, to a time when we were both fellows at King’s College Cambridge—I still am a fellow at King’s College. The noble Lord, Lord Rees, is the author—believe it or not—of more than 500 scientific papers. How does one person manage to do that? He is the president of the Royal Society and master of Trinity College. How elevated can you get? He will be a major addition to your Lordships’ House and I am very pleased to welcome him here. Let me begin by thanking my noble friend Lord Williams of Elvel for initiating this debate. I must say that during my brief time in this House, he has been an important figure in pushing universities to the forefront. At one point, I was director of the London School of Economics. I used to say to the graduating students, ““The LSE stands for many things: Let’s See Europe; Long Stay in England and””—my favourite—““Lots of Study Expected””. In the Tube on the way here, I had a bit of fun playing around with RAE, which yields the following pearls: ““Ridiculous Asinine Endeavour””; ““Really Absurd Experiment””; and ““Rewards Assiduous Eggheads””. The Minister is a very creative person, so I invite him to produce his own version in his summing-up speech. I prefer the third of those because, as other noble Lords have said, the RAE has, on balance, been very successful. Some of us here are, if I may put it this way, mature enough to remember a time when things were very different. I used to teach at a university in the centre of the UK—not too far from Leicester—that was said to be the site of Kingsley Amis’s novel Lucky Jim, in which the main character spends a lot of his time throwing darts at a picture of his professor on the back of his door. Well, we did not do that, but we did the functional equivalent. How different things are now. The RAE is one of the main factors responsible for that difference. If we consider my ex-institution, the LSE, it put 97 per cent of its staff in for the most recent research exercise. Most of those whom we could not place were people that we could not place in the categories—not people who were not research-active—so the institution was almost 100 per cent research-active. We got that way without too much of what is currently called games playing in the rest of the system. According to government statistics in the aforementioned Treasury document, in the 1996 RAE, 32 per cent of the staff submitted worked in departments rated as excellent. By 2001, that had risen to 55 per cent. The RAE has been pretty popular among academics—at least in the research-based universities. There is one major reason for that. Despite all the work that is involved, it also involves peer-assessment and evaluation. Evaluation by one’s peers is the prime reason for its success. As far as research universities are concerned, the QAA does not fall into that category and is therefore much less popular. The problems with the RAE are well known and I shall not go through them in detail. The excellent Roberts review, which has already been referred to, mentioned eight major difficulties with the RAE. The obvious one is that it is very expensive. The cost of the 2008 RAE, according to the Treasury document, is estimated to be at least £45 million, but some have suggested that the real cost may be closer to £400 million, because of the foregone research activity and productivity of the diversity of academics involved. Secondly, there is the core problem of distortion by evaluation mechanisms. All evaluation mechanisms distort the outcomes that they are supposed to measure, but in the case of the RAE, the distortion is pretty large. Finally, as the noble Lord, Lord Rees, mentioned, it is not clear that the RAE makes place for people who are not popular or whose ideas are not popular. They may even be scorned, but they are the very people who can be most productive and important for future generations. The Treasury document, the Budget Statement, seems to say that the RAE has met its demise. I am not sure that that is the normal route by which to announce that. Unless I have missed something, I ask my noble friend to comment on that. In my view, it is right to scrap the RAE; it did its job but it is no longer clear that it can do much more. Few people here seem to want an American-style competitive system, so if it is to be scrapped, we will have to pay a lot of attention to what will replace it. It is one thing to say, ““Scrap it””; it is another thing altogether to say what should replace it if we are still going to have dual-funding as the Treasury says. So here is my list of things that might be worth considering as a replacement. First, it is simply not an option to dispense with the 2008 RAE. I do not think that the Government should even have suggested that it might be. I am not quite sure whether that means that certain science-based departments, for example, could opt out of it, but I think it should go ahead as planned. Secondly, in whatever replaces the RAE, we must not squander what has been achieved. The RAE has created an enormous database which very few other countries have, with the possible exception of Australia, and this must be used in the future. Thirdly, the RAE, or whatever replaces it, should be redesigned as a productive resource that helps the scholarly community at large and also helps more practical people who want to make use of research. Quite a few universities have explored how this might be achieved. Southampton and Loughborough universities have been in the lead by suggesting that all refereed articles might be self-archived on the internet if the permissions problem can be resolved, and a system called DARE in the Netherlands will be set up along these lines. This might make everything available to the international community, as well as provide a monitoring system. Fourthly, it is crucial that whatever replaces the RAE should not be simply science-driven; I very much agree with the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, about that. In science, there is a very close correlation of more than 0.9 per cent between citation indices and the RAE results in quite a few subjects. That is not the case in the arts or the social sciences. We must ensure that this is not just a science-driven enterprise, and it is a pity that it emerged in a document that is purely about science and technology. In my view, you can exaggerate the degree to which science and technology will dominate in a knowledge-based economy. You need creativity in the application of technology just as much as you do in the invention of technology. Fifthly, the new system could be oriented to universities overall, rather than to departments or individuals. In other words, it could be allocated by the Government in the same way in which it is organised in universities. That might give the so-called new universities in particular some incentive in the future. In conclusion, I would say, ““RAE: RIP””, and, if noble Lords want another exploration, the words ““Really Appropriate End””. But it will not be easy to replace. I remind noble Lords that the Roberts report looked in detail at so-called metrics. This is the report’s conclusion:"““we are now convinced that the only system which will enjoy both the confidence and the consent of the academic community is one based ultimately upon expert review””." The RAE might be dead, but I do not believe there will be sweet consensus over what follows it.