Axed staff on submissions leaves bad taste as REF deadline passes

Scholars have said it is “unethical” that universities have submitted the work of academics who are facing redundancy or have lost their jobs into the UK’s next research excellence framework (REF).

A rule change for the 2021 REF – the submission deadline for which was on 31 March – allowed institutions to submit outputs from staff who had been made redundant, as long as they were employed on 31 July last year, the census date for the evaluation. Institutions were required to submit at least one output from every academic with “significant responsibility for research”.

However, there has been a slew of redundancies across the UK sector since the census date, after coronavirus wreaked havoc with institutional finances.

The rule change was condemned by academics at the time, especially as research funding bodies had originally proposed prohibiting submitting work from fired researchers for fear of creating “potential negative incentives”. Yet, in guidelines published in 2019, funders said it would be impossible to tell who had left on bad terms – the end of a fixed-term contract counts as a redundancy, for example – and scrapped the plan.

One academic at the University of Leicester said that until recently the institution had supported their research and used it as a REF impact case study. They had now been told that their area was “no longer a strategic priority” and placed at risk of redundancy.

“It feels very cynical, to make the decision to use all that material for the REF and afterwards to change direction and to make redundancies,” the academic said.

A Leicester spokesman said that year all “eligible staff must be submitted to the university’s return” and therefore all staff employed by the university up until 31 July 2020 had to be submitted.

David Whyte, vice-president of the University and College Union branch at the University of Liverpool, said that it was “unethical” to not only make people unemployed during the pandemic but also to “essentially use them to generate revenue after they’ve gone”. REF results are used to inform the allocation of quality-related research funding.

At Liverpool, 47 research jobs are set to go from the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences. A university spokesman said that “no outputs were returned for any members of staff who were made redundant during the REF period and all staff with responsibility for research were included in the REF return”.

At the University of Roehampton, there have been at least 60 voluntary redundancies, with the arts and humanities bearing the heaviest burden.

One Roehampton academic who took redundancy said staffing decisions based on finance had led to “two or three really highly rated research units” getting “heavily stripped down”.

“People were hired by the university for their research, but now the university’s commitment to sustaining people’s careers has disappeared. It’s pretty damning that our forms of research assessment simply don’t punish that kind of behaviour,” they said.

Roehampton said that its policy for submitting staff to the REF followed national guidance. “We have written to all individuals whose research has been included in our submission to inform them,” the university said.

anna.mckie@timeshighereducation.com