“Those happy souls who live in the real world will not know that last Thursday saw the culmination of nonsense on stilts in the British university world — the release of the latest Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) results. In a nutshell, RAE is the extension of ‘targets’ and bean-counting to the world of ideas, and it’s a crazy system. In one major academic department I know, the most creative and original member of the department was excluded from the RAE by his colleagues because his pathbreaking work ‘didn’t fit the narrative’ — i.e. the story being carefully crafted to impress the bean counters. The mainstream media know nothing of this, however …” (more)
[John Naughton, Memex 1.1, 21 December]