Boycott the REF?

As there are increasing reasons for disaffection with the academic system here in the UK a campaign has begun to boycott the next Research Excellence Framework exercise. This is the process whereby academic research is assessed and its merit in relation to "national" and "international" standards of excellence is graded by selected panels and is subsequently somewhat loosely related to the awarding of funding, which, somehow, always ends up in the hands of the same institutions who had it to begin with, despite increasing evidence of "excellence" being rather more widespread than such findings would suggest. The campaign for a boycott of this exercise now has a blog.

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