Two rounds enough: ERA does more harm than good | The Australian

"THE invitation is out to some academic staff to take part in the third Excellence in Research Australia round as peer reviewers. This time, I’m saying no. Academics spend a lot of time doing things of service to the scholarly community that are not directly recognised or rewarded: journal editing, refereeing articles, refereeing ARC and overseas grant applications, helping to run conferences, marking theses for modest honoraria. We do these things because they are of benefit to our colleagues and we hope our efforts will be reciprocated. It’s a kind of academic karma, even if it isn’t recognised in the sort of quantitative performance indicators university managers increasingly obsess about. However, after two rounds of ERA I believe the evidence is now in that the ERA is doing more harm than good. It is driving intensified managerialism, creating invidious status hierarchies between and within disciplines, and undermining collegiality. Potentially, it may also threaten academic freedom as managers seek to direct staff more and more to where to publish, and even not to publish. The ERA has led some universities, including the University of Queensland, to adopt modified versions of the widely discredited and abandoned ARC journal rankings list, against the explicit advice of the ARC. In my discipline of history, there may be a few journals generally acknowledged to be highly prestigious, but to shoehorn hundreds of other journals into league tables involves constructing arbitrary and invidious hierarchies­­ ­between sub-disciplines, national and regional specialisations, methodological approaches, and different languages. What ultimately counts is the quality of our work in the eyes of our relevant peers — and the status of the publishing outlet is only ever a very rough proxy for that ..."