flynn002

OK, I've only had an hour to look at REF results, so this will be brief, but I'm far less interested in league tables than in the question of how the REF results will translate into funding for different departments in my subject area, psychology. I should start by thanking HEFCE, who are a model of efficiency and transparency: I was able to download a complete table of REF outcomes from their website here. What I did was to create a table with just the Overall results for Unit of Assessment 4, which is Psychology, Psychiatry and Neuroscience (i.e. a bigger and more diverse grouping than for the previous RAE). These Overall results combine information from Outputs (65%), Impact (20%) and Environment (15%). I excluded institutions in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Most of the commentary on the REF focuses on the so-called 'quality' rankings. These represent the average rating for an institution on a 4-point scale. Funding, however, will depend on the 'power...

©CartoonStock.com As Fergus Millar noted in a letter to the Times last year, “ in the modern British university, it is not that funding is sought in order to carry out research, but that research projects are formulated in order to get funding ”. This topsy-turvy logic has become evident in some universities, with blatant demands for staff in science subjects to match a specified quota of grant income or face redundancy. David Colquhoun’s blog is a gold-mine of information about those universities who have adopted such policies. He notes that if you are a senior figure based in the Institute of Psychiatry in London , or the medical school at Imperial College London you are expected to bring in an average of at least £200K of grant income per annum.   Warwick Medical School has a rather less ambitious threshold of £90K per annum for principal investigators and £150K per annum for co-investigators 1 . So what’s wrong with that? It might be argued that in times of financial stringe...