The RAE always seems to go through a roller-coaster of unpopularity: as the day of judgement approaches, those who have fared well in previous rounds go into paroxysms of anxiety, manifested by vociferous attacks on the necessity of the exercise. ‘Is all this stressful misery necessary? Shouldn’t the results this time be frozen for ever—or at least a decade?’ they cry, overlooking the way in which such a freeze might sometimes end up rewarding incompetence or complacency in the management of quite substantial sums of public money as research efforts taper off.
On the other hand, those who have not done well in previous RAEs scramble to finance further improvements, hoping to be able to magic from an ever-dwindling unit of resource a means of sustaining sufficient research activity to rise up a notch or two in the ratings. For them the approach of the RAE is a time of hope.
However, as soon as the verdicts are announced, those who have fared well—almost always those who did well in earlier rounds (unsurprisingly, given the financial advantage provided by past success)—fall to celebration, whilst those who entirely missed out on funding give way to lamentation. To my mind such lamentation is reasonable. Most academics do not wish to teach at undergraduate level without engaging in some kind of complementary research activity, in the belief that teaching is greatly advantaged if underpinned by some related research.
By denying many departments, sections or teams (I will call these ‘departments’ henceforth) any support from the RAE’s coffers, HEFCE condemns the staff in them to a five-year stint of pursuing their research as some kind of on-the-side hobby, draining them of energy (part of the reason they may teach less well). It is testimony to these academics’ determination to underpin their teaching with research that they repeatedly manage to produce sufficient outcomes to warrant further attempts by their departments at obtaining RAE funding—sometimes, almost miraculously, attempts meeting with success.
By now I may appear to be close to teetering on the edge of an inconsistency in my argument: on the one hand urging that the RAE is necessary in order to arrive at judgements about how well departments are sustaining their research activity whilst on the other seeming to imply that every Unit of Assessment should be funded no matter what.
But I don’t think I am. What I want to argue has two main strands. First, quite modest levels of support directed at departments left unfunded after obtaining ratings of 1 or 2 in the RAE would seem like manna from heaven, and help lift the siege mentality that makes it hard for staff in these departments not to hunker down to a few years’ exhausting ‘hobby-research’ before making an ‘escape-bid’ application to another institution. The negative result of this stalag mind-set is a constant process of rather demoralising staff churn-over, as I call it. We should be concerned about the effect of this on the English academic community.
Secondly, I am prepared to take up the unpopular position of suggesting that, except at the bottom end, where funding starvation applies, the RAE does not seem to be doing too bad a job. Of course a list of complaints can be drawn up, and some of these have merit. (I myself would wish to arraign the harshness so far brought to bear on judging English submissions, compared to the relative generosity shown in other UoAs.) However, after all these complaints have been heard, shouldn’t we be forced to return to the compelling fact that each RAE has successively shown that more English academics are being entered as research active and that on average departments are scoring higher rankings than before? In other words, quite simply, the RAE is stimulating more research and this research is being judged as of better quality.1
If there is going to be any acceptance at all of the idea that some sort of accountability needs to exist, that improvement should be rewarded, that any decline should be reciprocally penalised and that no-one really thinks that every RAE submission should be funded at the same level, then the challenge to critics must be: design something decisively better—no less fair, no less responsive to change, and no less effective at improving both levels of research activity and the quality of the research itself (which, I have to repeat, is what the rankings in successive RAEs have shown).
All this matters when turning to the issue of learning and teaching because of the ‘cultural’ impact of research on teaching. I have already indicated one way this impact occurs: the way in which there has long been a belief that undergraduate teaching should be underpinned by an engagement with research. Perhaps it is time for this argument to be more fully articulated and exemplified, not least because more and more often it is being asserted that the RAE has stimulated an obsession with research that impacts negatively on teaching. I do not believe any such damaging gulf has opened up. Let me explain why.
Firstly, the QAA English teaching assessment process revealed no such negative impact but rather a happy co-existence. I have carried out a comparative analysis of those English departments entered in both the 96 RAE and the 94/95 TQA.2 You will recall that in the 96 RAE, departments were rated 5*, 5, 4, 3A, 3B, 2 or 1, whilst in the TQA they were rated as ‘Excellent’, ‘Satisfactory’, or ‘Unsatisfactory’. I grouped together firstly RAE 5* and 5 departments, then RAE 4, 3a and 3b departments, and finally RAE 2 and 1 departments (on the basis that 5* and 5 rated departments received by far the most money—since the amount increases ever-faster the better the RAE rating—and 2 and 1 rated departments received nothing at all). I then translated their TQA rankings into numeric scores (where Excellent = 5; Satisfactory = 2.5; and Unsatisfactory = 0), and calculated what the average scores were. So departments rated 5 or 5* in the RAE turn out to average dead on 5.00, since all of them were rated excellent in the TQA. The match I found is pretty compelling; the TQA average consistently rises as the RAE rating rises. As the below table indicates, the rise in the TQA average is exponential, matching the way RAE funding rises:
| RAE Rating | Average TQA Rating |
| 5* & 5 (sample size=8) | 5.00 |
| 4, 3a & 3b (37) | 3.45 |
| 2 & 1 (27) | 2.87 |
| (Excellent = 5; Satisfactory = 2.5; Unsatisfory=0) | |
Furthermore, most of the TQA ‘Excellent’ ratings awarded (64.3%) were obtained by 4, 5 or 5* rated research departments. Exactly three-quarters of these obtained a TQA ‘Excellent’, compared to only 21% of those departments rated 3, 2 or 1 in the RAE—a massive bias. Plainly good research and good teaching do go hand in hand, and unless we ridiculously start to claim that this is ‘naturally’ the case (and if Occam’s razor is used upon all other suggestions as to how this data might be interpreted), the implication must be: research does indeed help you teach better.
This accords with my own subjective experience, and underpins my second suggestion: that researching a subject leads to a greater competency when teaching it at degree level. Speaking for myself, I find this is true—even at Part One level. When giving first-year lectures, I find that if I have been conducting research directly or tangentially relevant to the subject I am teaching I always feel more confident about finding ways to make my material accessible and clear yet not simplistic nor reductive. Confident of my knowledge, I teach more tellingly. When Part Two teaching is at issue, such a feeling of secure competence is matched by a sense that I am in a position to meet better the demands and respond to the insights of undergraduates showing sometimes startling intellectual maturity and shrewd judgement.
Let me provide an example at this point. For almost half a decade I have been carrying out research into the writing of the first female African-African American novelist, Harriet E. Wilson (including the preparation of an edition of her novel, Our Nig). This specific research built upon earlier work and teaching on African-American writing. (Symbiotically, my teaching stimulated an interest in researching Wilson’s novel.) My research enabled me to identify aspects of Our Nig that I wanted to explore with my students—ones that proved fundamentally useful in getting students to address issues of genre in African-American writing. It soon became clear to me these issues of genre could be crystallised in such a way that they would constitute a compelling case-study in a Part One foundation module addressing the general significance of genre in literary studies. And so it has proved: student evaluations support my belief.
Please do not misunderstand me: I am not (reductively) arguing that all good undergraduate teaching stems from the pursuit of relevant research, or that non-researchers are not able and should not be allowed to teach undergraduates. No such simple equation exists. There is probably no great reason why a tutor should not teach Part One seminars on Our Nig and genre without a research grounding in African-American writing (even if, very often, the ability to teach the topic successfully ultimately relies on a solid understanding of the methodological and theoretical issues underpinning the issue of genre, which in turn may flow from research activity of some kind). And it must also be simply true that there will always be charismatic English scholars who can find ways of teaching subjects far removed from their research concerns in an effective and compelling fashion. Nevertheless, I believe that research and good teaching are significantly enchained at degree level.
It is this belief that motivates me in advancing my final point. And, ironically, it involves introducing a second reservation about the RAE as it exists at present: I was very disappointed that HEFCE’s generic criteria for RAE 2001 do not finally allow clear penalisation of departments returning low levels of research-active staff—very much against the drift of previous, albeit informal feedback. It had been widely expected that entering a high proportion of research active staff in RAE 2001 would be clearly advantageous whilst entering a low proportion of research active staff would be punished. But HEFCE finally drew back from this, instead stipulating that any department entering low proportions of active staff could not be penalised on that basis alone.
While the intentions behind this decision may have been the laudable (but anachronistic) ones of allowing departments just starting off on the research track not to be scuppered from the start and enabling brilliant lone researchers to win some funding, its consequences have been far from benign. All departments instead became involved in a kind of grotesque gamble: should they enter a bare minimum of researchers and aim for the highest possible rating, or enter more staff and risk receiving a lower ranking, or seek some middle passage. The ‘blind bet’ lay in trying to guess which strategy would pay off best (quite literally, since money is at stake). Since possessing a relatively higher proportion of ‘research inactive’ staff carried no penalty, it became essential to second-guess what the consequences would be of retaining a few less middle-ranking researchers and reluctantly jettisoning others to become part of an inconsequential tail of ‘non-active’ staff (demoralisingly discarding their research).
The implications of this were appalling. RA5 could still be devoted to demonstrating a thriving research culture, but the most obvious indicator of this—high levels of research-active staff—could now only matter in a minor way. No major penalisation could occur if instead a department entered only a few staff plainly of international standing with first-rate research outcomes. Baldly spelt out, this policy strongly favoured both incompetent research departments, who negligently allowed a few researchers to progress rapidly at the expense of others, and the cynical, who disregarded all the early talk of ‘fostering a thriving research culture’ and cold-bloodedly concentrated resources upon a few whilst relegating all others to a ‘teaching only’ status. With hindsight, it is plain that handsome dividends accrued from deliberately establishing two cultures in parallel (a research culture for some and a teaching-only culture for the rest)—by means of casting a cold eye upon a department’s middle-ranking researchers from the outset, and supporting only the most promising. Furthermore, using large chunks of a department’s research income to poach staff from other institutions, rather than foster the development of the department as a whole, paid off handsomely, too. The term ‘research active’ became devalued—a term of infinite variety, defined purely by how a research department decided to pitch its gamble.
But my main point here is to highlight the way this impacts on teaching and learning. If I am correct in asserting that good teaching and good research exist in a happy symbiosis, then HEFCE’s switch of emphasis meant that, since it was now ‘good management’ to allow ‘two-cultures’ to emerge in a department, some staff would find it difficult to keep up their research, and the advantageous link between teaching and research could become damagingly etiolated.
So: I end with two suggestions. Firstly, the English Subject Centre might want to test my claim, and seek to collect together examples of the ways in which a strong research culture promotes good teaching (and not just harken to the siren claims that somehow research and teaching are antipathetic). It could help discover, articulate and disseminate models of good practice in this arena. Are tutors able to provide examples like mine readily? Or are they more likely to come up with examples of how the need to do research impedes teaching – and in what circumstances? Secondly the Subject Centre may (perhaps subsequently) want to enter into a dialogue with HEFCE about how far it is sensible to countenance—even encourage—downplaying the importance of sustaining research activity across a whole department, if teaching consequently suffers. What I am urging, overall, then, is that the Subject Centre undertakes a careful identification of all the mutually reinforcing ways that research and teaching come together in English, in what I hold to be the well-founded belief that such positive interactions heavily outweigh any negative dimensions to the research/teaching interface.
Notes
1. See Kate Fullbrook and R. J. Ellis, ‘A Slap in the Face of Ambition’, Guardian Education (Higher), 31 March 1998, p.vi.
2. There are inevitable flaws to doing this: in the TQA all English department members contributed to the rating, whereas the RAE rating was based only on selected, ‘research active’ staff. Also lumping 5* and 5 departments together, 4, 3a and 3b departments together and 2 and 1 departments together could be challenged. My data is taken from Quality Assessment of English Subject Overview Report (HEFCE 00 12/95) and 1996 Research Assessment Exercise: The Outcome (HEFCE RAE96 1/96).
