Universities, funders and governments need to get a grip on bullying and harassment.Credit: Getty
What do you do if your country has a serious problem with bullying and harassment in academic research? The United Kingdom is among those with such a problem, as acknowledged by its largest public funding body, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), in an evidence review that was published in 2019 (see go.nature.com/48mehd9).
The future of universities
The answer should not be that research culture isn’t important enough to qualify for assessment in official measures of universities’ research excellence. Yet that is how many are interpreting the government’s decision, three months ago, to hit pause on UKRI’s plans to assess the quality of research culture as part of its Research Excellence Framework (REF), a periodic assessment of universities’ performance.
Whether a government should have the power to interfere directly in how research is assessed is, in itself, highly questionable. The current REF team is not the only one in this predicament, however; governments around the world are increasingly interfering in decisions that are usually the domain of researchers.
The REF team must have the courage to hold the line. This won’t be easy, and the team must be supported by researchers. Any decision must not risk efforts already under way to recognize and deal with poor behaviour in research.
The REF is a competitive star-rating system for measuring excellence, from four stars (world-leading quality) to one star (recognized nationally for being original, significant and rigorous). The exercise takes place every seven or eight years, and the results are hugely important for institutions, because they are used to distribute some £2 billion (US$2.6 billion) a year in funding.
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Historically, the REF has measured three things: the quality of outputs (such as journal articles and monographs); the quality of the research environment (including facilities and research income); and the impact that research has on society, the environment or the economy.
In the past, UK policymakers have taken pride in the fact that the nation ‘punches above its weight’ in terms of international measures such as share of publications and number of Nobel prizes. Periodic research assessments, which the United Kingdom will have been conducting for 40 years next year, are seen as one driver of such excellence. But the REF has also created a hierarchical infrastructure in universities that values performance indicators such as grant income and publication metrics, and rewards some types of research over others, along with competition over collaboration. Some researchers have suggested that this infrastructure is a factor in encouraging a culture of bullying — which occurs when people with power misuse it to undermine, humiliate or cause harm to someone else.
After considerable consultation with the UK research community and taking advice from international experts, the REF team announced in January that the composition of the REF rating system would be changed to include measures of research culture, underscoring the idea that excellent research benefits from a supportive and collegial working environment. The international advisers suggested putting equal weight on outputs, impact and the expanded category of ‘people, culture and environment’, which would replace the previous research environment category. However, the REF team settled for respective weightings of 50%, 25% and 25%.
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Researchers were invited to submit ideas for new indicators to show that people are valued and that an institution has a supportive and collaborative research culture. Such indicators could include data on the gender pay gap or promotions, or showing how institutions are meeting the requirements of external initiatives such as the Declaration on Research Assessment and the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment. Earlier this year, universities also had an opportunity to participate in a pilot project to explore the use of these indicators.
However, the changes were put on hold by science minister Patrick Vallance in September. Although the pause is set to be lifted next week, the pilot results have yet to be released. Researchers are bracing themselves for news that the weighting for research culture will be reduced. Some have told Nature that they fear the word ‘culture’ might even be removed from the headline in the assessment framework, even if the elements of a supportive culture remain in the components being measured. This would send all the wrong signals, indicating that the UK authorities are diminishing the importance of research culture at a time when universities need to talk about how to better deal with bad behaviour.
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A key problem is that although harassment is against the law in the United Kingdom, workplace bullying is not. At universities, complaints are mainly dealt with through internal grievance processes, and data on such cases are hard to come by because there is relatively little involvement of external bodies such as regulators. As a result, in the past decade, organizations have been set up to support people being bullied in academia, among them the 21 Group and the Academic Parity Movement. These are calling for more external scrutiny of what is happening in universities.
Big change sometimes results from small steps. Incorporating a supportive research culture into the REF is one such step. Bullying and harassment are serious problems, and excellence in research and a supportive environment are not mutually exclusive. The UK authorities should do everything in their power to champion both.
