Susan Bassnett: At last! The truth about research funding is out

Sometimes it's hard to restrain oneself from shouting "I told you so" when what was obvious to hundreds of us is suddenly proclaimed by the great and good. That's how I feel right now, reading the report of the House of Commons select committee on science and technology, which has strong things to say about the deleterious impact on university life of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). Some of us have been saying for ages that the RAE skews research, that you can't quantify research in such a crude manner, that the whole process was flawed.

Recently, as the awful truth dawned that only a tiny number of institutions was going to benefit financially from the latest exercise, anger has been rising and questions have been asked about the future. Now, with this report come public admissions of what we have all known: that the RAE is divisive, that it can damage research rather than enhance it, that it stifles innovation, that it drives academics to undertake short-term, quick-result research to the detriment of long-term projects.

Tough luck if you are working on an important medical research project that will take years to come to fruition, hard cheese if you are putting together a dictionary, because if you aren't able to knock off the four items required for submission to the RAE, then you won't count as a researcher. I never believed the RAE had much to do with genuine research quality. Take me as an example: I submitted four items, carefully chosen for a) status of publisher, b) links with colleagues' research, c) avoidance of anything that might appear "marginal" such as translations. This means that I did not include a book that has been translated into several languages and is used all over the world, anything published by less well-known publishers or anything that had appeared in journals not deemed to be top flight, regardless of impact. Clearly the strategy worked, because we gained top marks. But the picture I gave of my research was an unbalanced one.

Not, however, a dishonest one, which is more than can be said about some cases. There are tales of people being leaned on to take early retirement, of people who retired years ago being bought back on bogus contracts so that the institution could claim they were still part of a research culture, of people being "disappeared", of people omitted from the submission despite having four good items because they didn't fit the profile. The report suggests that the RAE may have contributed to the closure of some departments and to the decline of some subjects. Surprise, surprise!

When it first started, the RAE was useful. It made universities think seriously about research productivity, and showed up the emptiness of claims that all academics were serious scholars. But it has had its day. Just as the Quality Assurance Agency is having to rethink, so this should be the end of the line for the RAE. There will have to be a sensible way of assessing research, because no sane government is going to hand out money without strings, but this system is bankrupt.

The problem with the RAE is that it is a cumbersome, expensive structure put in place because we have no way of dealing with weak academics. If we had a tenure track system instead of automatic nodding through at the end of a period of probation, the academic family might be strengthened. Instead, we have a system that allows anyone who gets through an interview to remain in post until they retire, with no hurdles to jump apart from promotion. We penalise good teachers by ranking teaching lower than research, and let people who are good at neither collect salaries with an annual increment. We need a way of funding research that will act as an incentive to individuals and to subjects. World-class research needs money, time and no distractions. The recommendations of the report are a start. The Higher Education Funding Council needs to get its act together before it loses all credibility. Starting now.

Susan Bassnett is pro-vice-chancellor of Warwick University