This virtual London BUIRA seminar is focused on changes in higher education and their implications for employment relations and we are fortunate to have two expert speakers.
- Prof Dorothy Bishop (Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford) on REF and TEF: Whose interests do they serve?
- Dr Olga Kuznetsova (Manchester Metropolitan University) on Employee Relations in Marketising Universities: A case study
Programme
The seminar begins with considerations by Dorothy Bishop of the history of how the Research Excellence Framework and Teaching Excellence Frameworks came into being, the rationale for their development and their subsequent evolution into their current forms.
Public accountability and transparency in the allocation of funds was the stated motivation for developing the REF, but it has since taken over other roles, and now is used as a management tool. The stated reason for needing a Teaching Excellence Framework was to force universities to take teaching more seriously, and to provide information for prospective students. In practice, both REF and TEF have had unintended consequences, and in both cases, there are reasons to question the validity of the processes used to allocate rankings.
Dorothy will be followed by Olga Kuznetsova who will speak about her research with Prof Andrei Kuznetsov, published as: ‘And then there were none: what a UCU Archive tells us about employee relations in marketising universities’ in Studies in Higher Education. The study engages evidence from a University and College Union branch archive to explore developments in employee relations (ER) that reflect the organisation-level effects of marketisation of UK universities. The evidence exposes points of strain in ER at a level of professional divide between managers and academics and helps to understand their root. It also reveals new ethical challenges (some of which are connected to the demands and constraints put by REF and TEF) faced by the academic profession and individual academics. Some recent reflections will be drawn on the meaning of 'distant' and 'distance' in management.
The seminar is an opportunity to air and discuss these issues in an open forum and consider their implications for industrial relations. Anyone interested is welcome to attend.
Event recording
Speakers
- Dorothy Bishop, FRS, FBA, FMed Sci is a member of the executive committee of the Council for Defence of British Universities, which she joined after becoming concerned about the way in which the REF was distorting academic life in the UK. With the advent of TEF in 2018 her concerns multiplied, with evidence that the statistical framework behind the evaluation was deeply flawed – concerns which have since been amplified by the Royal Statistical Society. She has blogged about these issues: relevant posts can be found by Googling 'Bishopblog catalogue'. She also discusses academic life on Twitter, as @deevybee.
- Dr Olga Kuznetsova is Reader in Comparative Business Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University.
How to book
For further details and to reserve a place, contact Linda Clarke ([email protected]), who will send you a link before the seminar.
About ProBE
ProBE (Centre for the Study of the Production of the Built Environment) is ideally placed to organise this symposium as a joint research centre between Westminster Business School (WBS) and the School of Architecture and the Built Environment (ABE), committed to the development of a rich programme of research and related activities, including projects, oral history, film, exhibitions, and seminars. ProBE provides a research hub, a forum for debate and discussion and a focus for interdisciplinary and international activity related to the production of the built environment, as a social process, and its members have long experience of research on VET in the construction industry in Britain and abroad.
