Turning the tide of admin requires hard thinking

There are many forms of research assessment working in parallel in universities. While they all have in common is that they are imperfect and time-consuming. Even easily accessible metrics (citation count, h-index, journal impact factor) all have to be slavishly inputted for personal developement review every year, 6 months or even every 3 months. It is entirely unnecessary (as Philip Moriarty points out) to try and determine the precise 'value' of a piece of work. You even wonder whether it is worth the time of publishing at all when each 'output' is evaluated, first by the journal editors, secondly by your closest colleagues in an internal mock REF, thirdly by management who may question the judgement of that process if there are too many 3* and 4*, fourthly by external mock REF reviewers in the sort of exercise Moriarty describes, and fifthly by the REF panel itself. Only in the last of these is the author not faced with a numerical judgement for which they are called to account. This is an absurd state of affairs. Nobody can live like this long-term. I have lost count of the number of my colleagues leaving academia around age 50. The debate over age caps in academia is irrelevant when academic careers are unsustainable because of the regime of surveillance and punition we have created. Dorothy Bishop is right - let's have funding based on a headcount of researchers. Then watch universities scramble to undo all those 'teaching and scholarship' contracts when it is a case of claiming for research funding.