Universities, funders and governments need to get a grip on bullying and harassment.Credit: Getty
What do you do if your country has a serious problem with bullying and harassment in academic research? The United Kingdom is among those with such a problem, as acknowledged by its largest public funding body, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), in an evidence review that was published in 2019 (see go.nature.com/48mehd9).
The future of universities
The answer should not be that research culture isn’t important enough to qualify for assessment in official measures of universities’ research excellence. Yet that is how many are interpreting the government’s decision, three months ago, to hit pause on UKRI’s plans to assess the quality of research culture as part of its Research Excellence Framework (REF), a periodic assessment of universities’ performance.
Whether a government should have the power to interfere directly in how research is assessed is, in itself, highly questionable. The current REF team is not the only one in this predicament, however; governments around the world are increasingly interfering in decisions that are usually the domain of researchers.
The REF team must have the courage to hold the line. This won’t be easy, and the team must be supported by researchers. Any decision must not risk efforts already under way to recognize and deal with poor behaviour in research.
The REF is a competitive star-rating system for measuring excellence, from four stars (world-leading quality) to one star (recognized nationally for being original, significant and rigorous). The exercise takes place every seven or eight years, and the results are hugely important for institutions, because they are used to distribute some £2 billion (US$2.6 billion) a year in funding.
More carrot, less stick: how to make research assessments fairer
Historically, the REF has measured three things: the quality of outputs (such as journal articles and monographs); the quality of the research environment (including facilities and research income); and the impact that research has on society, the environment or the economy.
In the past, UK policymakers have taken pride in the fact that the nation ‘punches above its weight’ in terms of international measures such as share of publications and number of Nobel prizes. Periodic research assessments, which the United Kingdom will have been conducting for 40 years next year, are seen as one driver of such excellence. But the REF has also created a hierarchical infrastructure in universities that values performance indicators such as grant income and publication metrics, and rewards some types of research over others, along with competition over collaboration. Some researchers have suggested that this infrastructure is a factor in encouraging a culture of bullying — which occurs when people with power misuse it to undermine, humiliate or cause harm to someone else.
... continue reading