Whither UK academia? Last month scientists blossomed with anger when Vince Cable, a man of advanced learning no less, wildly misrepresented the state of research excellence. Such a transparently false ’empirical’ case for cuts depends heavily on the trope of pointless, money-sucking academics [1], as if billions in state rescue packages had been precipitated by feckless spending on the Large Hadron Collider. Although social science and humanities is a sideshow [2], the claims are just as misleading for those of us working in politics, since 72% of the stuff we pump out is ‘world leading’ or ‘internationally recognised’.

The travesty of the RAE is what provides the commonsensical gloss for this redoubling of efforts to ‘magnitise’ investment, realise profit and ‘link to’ (read: subsidise) business. All of which conforms wonderfully to k-punk‘s diagnosis of capitalist realism, business ontology and nu-bureaucracy:

…the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labour which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of work itself. Continue reading →