The REF is gross! It's moronic and it's bad for everyone. That's my thought for the day.

I mean, it's harmful, corrosive, & divisive. But it's also embarrassing; it makes me cringe, this denigration of the humanities & critique, this capitulation of the language that *we* have to describe the world, to the inappropriate metrics of science & social science

the language of 'methodology' and 'findings' is not appropriate to a literary essay; why are we having to pretend it is, even while knowing and acknowledging that it is not?

it matters, this resigned application of the wrong language to literary writing; it makes writers seem like slightly dappy researchers; and even if we all profess to 'know' the REF is bullshit, the consistent application of wrong metrics to art is profoundly damaging

Related: if anyone who has read and liked Daddy Issues can tell me what my ‘findings’ are I’d be grateful

& the fact is that, regardless of how well given departments and individuals handle the universally hated REF process, it inevitably reproduces inequalities & thrives on pre-existing power structures

not least because, in order to do the REF, one has to fall in line with the assumption that different kinds of work have to defer to a single (& highly positivist) measure of success

& one has to go along with the fiction that using language instrumentally is OK as long as we all know it's instrumental

but that is not true; large swathes of critical enquiry are *about* language, about refusing certain kinds of language, & about refusing a purely instrumental & technocratic use of language

& many creative endeavours are likewise about refusing certain language games, & creating others

& so the grimness of the REF process is exacerbated for creative writers, who find themselves having not only having to go along with the moronic & troubling use of language the REF imposes, but also having to explain themselves to the 'discipline' of their academic colleagues

this is the least of the REF's problems (there are so many to choose from!), but it's not unrelated to how the REF creates painful and divisive atmospheres, and exacerbates existing hierarchies of power and status

anyway, I like my job, and I hover between creative and critical and can be an academic with one hat on and a writer with another, but the REF fucks us all up, vote Labour, let's halt the marketisation of universities!

small mercies: I wasn't in a permanent post when Unmastered came out, can you imagine trying to make that book amenable to a REF narrative, I absolutely would have had a nervous breakdown