If you have only learned about the proposed changes to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) from Professor Sir Nigel Thrift’s recent HEPI Policy Note, then you are likely to be alarmed. According to Thrift, the proposal to reduce the weighting on research outputs in REF 2028 from 60% to 50%* to allow for an increase from 15% to 25% on the environment statement, newly expanded to consider People, Culture and Environment, means that:
- the world has turned ‘upside down’;
- outputs are ‘in danger of becoming a footnote’ in REF assessments, having been pushed ‘off the end of the table’;
- one of the main lines for defending government investment in research in UK universities has been ‘removed’; and
- instead of ruling the waves as a ‘science superpower’, the UK is now destined to sink beneath them.
Worse still, in Thrift’s telling, UKRI and the HE funders in charge of the REF have suffered ‘an attack of the vapours’; they now prefer to stoke the warmth of collegiality through a greater focus on People, Culture and Environment (‘whatever that means’, says Thrift) and to cast aside any considerations of individual merit.
