Welcoming and opening remarks: Science and the academic system in transition—The role of evaluation

Abstract

Approaching the Millennium, there will be even more evaluations over the progress humanity has achieved. The academic has contributed fundamentally to these changes through ist scientific discoveries. One role of evaluation is to help us to understand better the contributions of science for the advance of society and economy. It also helps to ensure that the academic world continues to do research of high quality and can identify itself and rise with the challenges it will face in the future. In any survey of the achievements of science during the past millennium, the identification of the process of natural selection must be one of the most important. This is one model for evaluation. However, applying the natural law of the survival of the fittest directly to our universities encounters at least two serious objections! First, our democratic principles will not tolerate a process whose timescale is in itself measured in millennia. Furthermore, our civilisation prefers to give those who are not selected the opportunity to learn rather than perish[ But we do need to consider evaluation seriously so as to maximise its benefits. Particularly with regard to publicly funded research programmes, we must ensure that the evaluation, which is done is both effective and constructive. The practical experience of the evaluation of the European Union's research programmes now extends back to the early 1980s. It has been very positive. It has shown that, above all, good evaluation depends on the experience and the commitment of those individuals who carry it out and the good sense of those who apply its conclusions recognising both the potential of evaluation, but also its limits.