National Research Assessment Exercises Research Articles

Pay Peanuts and Get Monkeys? Evidence from Academia

Does the payment of peanuts tend to result in the hiring of monkeys? Unfortunately, privacy and other constraints on data mean that surprisingly little is known about this issue. In this paper, I use some unique data from the New Zealand academic system to provide direct evidence that pay levels do matter in determining the available pool of quality workers. Academic salaries are independent of discipline in New Zealand universities, but because different disciplines face different outside labour market opportunities, their ability to recruit high-quality academics is also likely to vary. Utilising the results from a national research assessment exercise first undertaken in 2003, I find that discipline research performance is indeed negatively related to the value of outside opportunities: the greater a discipline's average salary in United States universities, the weaker its research performance in New Zealand universities. The latter apparently get what they pay for: disciplines in which the fixed compensation is high relative to opportunity cost are best able to recruit high-quality researchers and/or motivate their researchers to be productive. Paying (relative) peanuts attracts mainly monkeys.

University Performance Evaluation: The Business Of Research

The study examines the impact of national research assessment exercises for the visual arts discipline in a university structure. It encompasses issues of evaluation, benchmarking, performance management, performance indicators and explanatory factors. We find that whilst the definition of research is broad enough to include most of the activities of visual arts academia. The actual operationalisation of the measurement models may well exclude many current activities. The need to clearly demonstrate quality peer review is the largest hurdle. Analysis is also made of the impact of a ‘national research quality assessment exercise’ such as the New Zealand and UK initiatives (Tertiary Education Commission. 2004; RAE, 2001). Whilst visual arts academia research performance activity was ranked low in both countries, we find that their position on the need for quality and peer assessment offers a potentially broader and more accurate depiction of activity. Obtaining a balanced broader assessment of both traditional performance measures such as research publications along with the more creative elements of visual arts such as exhibitions is paramount. The national assessment exercises show that visual arts academics are struggling to compete with their academic brethren in other disciplines. We argue the need for national assessment exercises engenders an acceptable peer review system to better assess their broad research activities for non-traditional areas. We also make calls for more research presentation training for the visual arts discipline to assist them in the recognition of quality research productivity. The implementation of a national research assessment system which focuses more on quality output and outcome measures instead of input measures such as research income will engender this debate.

Whither biochemistry and chemistry?: Supporting Excellence in the Science Base

At the start of the 21st Century both biochemistry and chemistry appeared well-placed to capitalize on the ‘century of biology’ and the exciting possibilities promised by ‘nanotechnology’. In addition, both appeared to be essential elements in understanding and monitoring environmental quality and its impact on human health, with major sectors within the UK economy critically dependent on the flow of highly trained personnel in these fields. The future, surely, looked rosy. However, in the last 6 months, three major UK university chemistry departments have been closed down, and over the last 5 years or so, the numbers of biochemistry departments returning separately under the National Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) has fallen dramatically. Here, we explore the background to these apparently incongruous developments and what they could portend for the future.

The Uncanny: An Introduction (review)

Reviewed by: The Uncanny: An Introduction Havi Carel The Uncanny: An Introduction. Nicholas Royle. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Pp. x + 340. $85.00 (cloth); $22.95 (paper). Freud has influenced culture in general and philosophy, literature, and cultural studies, but has been incorporated into each discipline in a very different manner. The Uncanny focuses on a particular notion within Freud's work, the notion of the uncanny (das Unheimliche) and its influence and manifestations in literature, film, religious iconography and other cultural spheres. Royle's book is complex and contains a very advanced level of scholarship, which makes it far from introductory despite its title. Moreover the text is studded with references, allusions and gestures towards Derrida, Shakespeare, Freud, Milton, Todorov, Pope, Foucault, Rushdie, Žižek and many others (the six-page index contains, literally, hundreds of names), which makes it a book meant for those who are already in the know and nearly impossible for anyone not already au fait with the work of these authors. Someone who is completely unfamiliar with psychoanalysis and with Freud's 1919 essay (which can be found in volume seventeen of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud) will not find this book an easy read. [End Page 598] To its credit, the book engages in a comprehensive and original manner with various manifestations of the uncanny. These range from the phenomenon of the double (der Doppelgänger)—yes, there are two Nicholas Royles, apparently, as the photo on page 195 shows—to literary descriptions of being buried alive (from Antigone to Poe's The Premature Burial), to cannibalism and Freud's notion of the death drive. The book includes one very uncanny digression about the RAE (the national Research Assessment Exercise that rates the productivity of academic departments in the UK), in which the author attempts to deconstruct the "programming" to which academic institutions subject their employees. It is also a self-reflexive poke at the fact that "[e]verything in the present book, as the work of an academic employed by a British university, has been assembled in the shadow or night of the RAE" (112). On the one hand, the style of the book is refreshing and playful. The section discussing different authors' descriptions of being buried alive places each paragraph in a little coffin; the chapter entitled "Night Writing" uses little stars to mark each paragraph (which is also an ironic reference to the RAE term "starred items"); the chapter on film is made up of "subtitles" of varying lengths, and chapter six ("Silence, Solitude and . . . ") consists of four lines of dialogue, and nothing more. On the other hand, the style of the book does little to aid understanding, and I found its level of vagueness disturbing. It is difficult to find a clear argument, a commitment to a position, or a sustained structured analysis of a topic in the book. Often the writing has an almost studied vagueness, on evidence in phrases such as "Ewer's film is uncanny because film is uncanny" (77), "an intimate cohabiting between being buried alive and writing" (160) or "this is perhaps not unrelated to the death drive" (96). Another disturbing tendency in the text is for too many things to be "about" each other. "There is a shade of the surreal about the death drive and a shade of the death drive about surrealism" (97), "the model ghost, the ghostly model" (316) or "letting Beyond the Pleasure Principle invade 'The Uncanny' and 'The Uncanny' invade Beyond the Pleasure Principle" (90). The book's irreverent and self-reflexive style is appealing, as is the impressive erudition behind the discussions of particular texts. The references to secondary literature are engaging and the work draws various connections (for example, between the death drive and telepathy) that are imaginative and thought provoking. But as a sustained argument or a structured analysis, this book has limited success. Havi Carel University of York Copyright © 2004 The Johns Hopkins University Press