Publish or be damned

If dons don’t churn out books and articles – whether they want to or not – they will lose funding. Rachel Johnson wonders whether that’s what education is about

Our rendezvous is the new laptop-and-latte bar on the first floor of Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford. The history don is a few minutes late and this gives me time to reread an extraordinary document, which reveals that he (and thousands like him all over the country) is being subjected to a production quota for published work that makes Stalin’s five-year plans look positively market-driven.

The document, circulated to ‘postholders’ in the faculty of Modern History, concerns the nationwide process called the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). The exercise, based on the premise that those in receipt of public money must be quality-controlled, audited and assessed on a continuous basis, determines the allocation of dosh to departments. The higher the assessed score (there are seven grades, from 0 to 5*) the more dosh the dons get, and the gradings are based almost entirely on how much ‘research’ (i.e., written work) the dons are doing.

This year, the don tells me as background, his history department ‘lost its star’. This is not a case of a reasonably bright child getting only an A rather than an A* in Biology GCSE. The loss of the star resulted in the deduction of a full £1 million from the faculty’s government grant.

That was bad enough, but donnish pride took a further kicking when the history department at Oxford Brookes University (aka the poly) was given a higher rating than the one at the university, where titans have numbered Richard Cobb, Richard Southern and Eric Hobsbawm among them. The former poly’s history department was graded 5* to the university’s 5.