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Fighting back in the history wars: Some practical ideas https://dominicdean.wordpress.com/2021/02/15/fighting-back-in-the-history-wars-some-practical-ideas/ via @wordpressdotcom
This is a great post by Dominic Dean, but it mostly concerns the government’s and its allies’ public and populist stroking of the heartless and mindless that we see today. 1/6
Important as it is to take this on in public forums, the decisive battles will take place behind closed doors, in interviews between line managers and researchers conducted according to scripts written into REF and KPI requirements etc. 2/6
As the post says, the Haldane principle means “politicians cannot intervene in or determine specific project funding applications, which must rather be determined by peer review.” So, politicians will ramp up what they already do. 3/6
They’ll write conditions into funding application forms, impact assessment criteria etc. that implicitly conform with the agenda they’re promoting. And let academic peer reviewers, and line managers with their eyes on institutional league tables, do the rest. 4/6
It’s good to take on the government and its bad faith arguments in public, but their policies will be enforced in private by (how can I put this?) your more "managerially-minded colleagues." 5/6
The only way to fight this front in the battle is to engage in union-supported, mass boycotts of the externally imposed but internally operative surveillance/discipline structures such as REF, KPI, and interviews that aim to define what we as researchers can and can’t do. 6/6
Btw, I refused to do peer reviews for the last REF, on the grounds of being unqualified to judge the quality of my departmental colleagues’ research. My publications were given low scores, I wasn’t entered for the REF…, 7/6
and I discovered that my “managerially-minded colleagues” had been ringing around my subject peers to verify my reputation (they had my back, I’m happy to say). 8/6
