UK HE bureaucracy ‘a bit of a monster’, says REF creator

The vice-chancellor who oversaw the creation of the UK’s research excellence framework has admitted that bureaucracy has become a “bit of a monster” in higher education.

Rama Thirunamachandran, vice-chancellor of Canterbury Christ Church University, told Times Higher Education’s THE Live event that sector workloads were “high” and “had increased over the past decade or two because of some of the administrative and bureaucratic requirements imposed by regulators and external agencies”.

“We need to take a better look at the totality of regulation that universities are facing,” said Professor Thirunamachandran, who developed the 2008 research assessment exercise (RAE) – the forerunner of the REF – while he was director of research, innovation and skills at the Higher Education Funding Council for England.

“Having been on the regulation side, I now look back and think…we have created a bit of a monster here in terms of the amount of regulation,” reflected Professor Thirunamachandran on the “considerable bureaucracy” that researchers and university leaders now faced.

The initial research assessment exercise had been introduced for good reasons in the 1980s when research was a “residual activity” for most academics who generally concentrated on teaching, which had led to concerns that research funding would not provide the taxpayer with value for money if academics were not required to account for their activities, he explained.

“But the pendulum has perhaps swung too much the wrong way,” he added of the current oversight versus academic autonomy balance.

Professor Thirunamachandran also called on research-intensive universities, in particular, to limit their use of fixed-term research contracts by creating more permanent positions for researchers.

“Large research-intensive universities now have large pools of research coming from QR [quality-related research funds], government, the Wellcome Trust, industry and other sources – that should allow particular research groups to employ staff on open-ended contracts, which deals with issues of casualisation by [helping people to] secure mortgages and have a family life,” he said.

Professor Thirunamachandran, who was appointed head of Canterbury Christ Church in 2013, having left Hefce for academia in 2008, also suggested that the recent push towards marketisation had been a “double-edged sword” for higher education.

“Those who believe in markets – and I generally support markets – have to be careful in what we create and, having been in the system for a very long time and coming to the end of my career, I see the current market environment is creating bad incentives for the system as a whole – be it teaching, research or universities.”

“It is becoming counterproductive and possibly toxic for both staff and students,” said Professor Thirunamachandran.

The comments came in a panel discussion that examined whether casualisation, short-term research funding and competition were making research careers increasingly unattractive.

Daniel Akinbosede, doctoral tutor in biochemistry at the University of Sussex, also told the event that the financial pressures caused by marketisation created a “vacuum” in place of research leadership.

“It limits the ability of researchers in managerial positions to provide the mentoring and support…and in that vacuum of mentoring and support you get early career researchers left out in the cold,” he argued.

This lack of leadership meant junior researchers were “unable to realise what transferable skills they have – they become stuck in this rut of thinking that academia is the only place in which they can progress, but…there are only so many [academic positions] that can be funded,” said Mr Akinbosede, who concluded that “the way in which universities are funded is a key issue and a root cause” of despondency among many early career academics.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com