Teaching Architectural History in Great Britain and Australia: Local Conditions and Global Perspectives

Abstract

Over the past two decades, enormous changes have been imposed on British universities. Readers from other countries may be perplexed by the world of acronyms that now characterizes British academia, but it has had such a dominating effect on our lives that it may be useful to explain the wider context before turning to the specific issues relating to architectural history itself. In an effort to improve accountability, the state has devised complex procedures of external monitoring. Both teaching and research in all British university departments are regularly assessed under the auspices of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE-or, in Scotland, SHEFC) and the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA). Hardly any British university teachers are immune to the stress and administrative demands imposed by these repeated government inspection processes. The Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) is a quinquennial procedure that assesses the calibre of research produced by academic staff in defined subject areas. Architectural history falls in two main categories: Unit of Ass ssment or UOA 33, Built Environment; and UOA 60, History of Art, Architecture and Design. Some architectural historians occupy posts in other areas, such as history, Oriental studies, or English, and are assessed with their own department. The bureaucracy involved in preparing a department's submission to the RAE is enormous and occupies valuable time that could well be spent on scholarship and teaching. In essence, each a ademic staff member has to nominate four pieces of significant, published research in the relevant five-year period, and the research profile of the department is assessed in terms of its national or international reputation. The number and size of research grants are also important criteria; therefore, more scientific and coll borative p ograms are favored over individual scholarly p rformance. In theory, a high rating in the RAE leads to increased government funding, but since the rewards are passed to the central university authorities, individual departments may never receive any noticeable benefit. The competitive aspect of the process encourages the poaching of prolific scholars from other universities and may even l ad to the employment of high-profile academics in nonteaching positions. Moreover, the emphasis on speed of publication discourages major scholarly contributions and favors quicker projects, such as edited books. Although the RAE does not, in itself, involve teaching, the pressures on staff to produce a steady flow of publications inevitably distract them from teaching. Whereas the RAE affects teaching only indirectly, the QAA inspects teaching performance in all subject areas. The stressful and time-consuming aspects of the process have left many scars, but objectively some benefits must be acknowledged. Problems of amateurish presentation and poorly structured courses have been addressed, and students now expect well-prepared course documentation and handouts. Over the past decade or so, all university departments in the U.K. have undergone a Teaching Quality Assessment (TQA), an exercise that led to bureaucratic demands even greater than those imposed by the RAE. As a result, several prominent universities have declared that they will not cooperate with future TQA inspections. It therefore seems unlikely that the exercise will be repeated in its present