Better Than You

From the office of Prof. Neville Morley, Supreme Plenipotentiary, Überboss and Vice-Chancellor of Ex University, Earth 2: Your ever-caring and responsive senior management team has heard your pathetic whining about the Why On Earth Should We Keep Paying You? pro-formas, the ever-shifting timescale for their completion and the sheer opacity of our plans for making use of them. Naturally our first concern is to minimise distress and anxiety among members of our HR department and legal team about possible employment tribunals if the rationale for the redundancy process remains “because we feel like it”, and so we have decided to introduce a set of fully robust and objective tests in order to rank staff within redundancy pools for termination. Supportively. (1) Research Performativity Questions have been raised about colleagues’ research performance being evaluated, without the use of provisional REF grades or journal metrics or actually reading any of it, by managers with no expertise in…