The Academic Contribution Framework: a flawed, discriminatory response to a failure of management’s making
We shouldn’t be surprised. Yes, the same people who brought us People and Money – a £37 million management trainwreck with zero accountability – want to roll out a mechanism by which, they say, they will secure the financial future of the university.
It’s hard to know which is worse: the problem they have narrowly defined, or the punitive anti-intellectual, career-wrecking solution that they call the Academic Contribution Framework (ACF).
First things first. We keep saying this, but we need to say it again, and louder for the back:
There. Is. No. Deficit.
Edinburgh is one of the wealthiest universities in the UK. It has assets of £3 billion, and significant reserves with which it can ride out fiscal challenges. Yes, the higher education sector is facing tough times. There certainly are universities facing financial crisis. Edinburgh is not one of them. There is no accepted rationale for redundancies. An isolated university leadership is attempting to impose cuts to conceal its own long-term negligence and groupthink.
How will the Academic Contribution Framework measure academic contribution?
The ACF is the mechanism by which management will size up workers for redundancy targets that we already know are arbitrary. The ACF is obviously bad. It will be personally devastating for many colleagues. It is discriminatory. If the process is allowed to continue, it will bring about redundancies that are illegal. Longer term, it will also bring about a university that will be badly placed to meet the needs of future students precisely because it has been warped by its own perverse metrics.
The plan is to create pools of academic staff who are deemed to be at risk of redundancy because of a “change or reduction to their work or role”. There is no further detail as to how management will identify and delineate pools. That should concern us. After pooling groups of staff, the ACF will be used to determine who will keep or lose their job. The ACF measures four kinds of contribution (publications, grants, teaching, citizenship and collaborations) over a three-year period from 2022 to 2025.
There are so many problems with this crude metric approach: there’s the short timeframe, the narrow quantitative markers, and the small and often inexpert panel of evaluators. The ACF essentially weaponises the worst elements of the promotions criteria against staff.
The 2022-2025 timeframe is incredibly short. It’s absurd to use a three-year performance window given the long periodicity of academic careers. It realistically takes 12 years of academic training and work to be eligible for a lectureship. Even the Research Excellence Framework – not exactly a model of fairness – will evaluate outputs over eight years. Everything about academic work is long-term: academic productivity ebbs and flows inprolonged cycles of reading, thinking, funding, and writing that fit around the obligations of life. We are not robots. The biographies of academic superstars invariably show many lean times alongside years of bounty. That’s not a failure – that’s the pattern. Over the course of a career, these differences can even out but a narrow snapshot builds in an inequality.
Management justifies a 2022 start to avoid the mitigating circumstances of COVID but given publication lag times, this is precisely when Covid’s impact hit. As any journal editor can testify, submissions dropped in those years.
Initial ranking and decisions around people at risk are going to be made solely on quantitative data. Have the senior leadership team heard of social science? Numbers tell us only about quantities. Whatever happened to the emphasis on quality over quantity in REF, or the importance of teaching and student support, or the value of a rounded CV that speaks to citizenship and collegiality as well as research outputs?
There’s no discussion of how their categories will be weighted. Nor do such basic metrics take into account disciplinary differences, varied academic career patterns, and the inherently collective character of academic work. How does a science multi-authorship publication model compare with a humanities monograph model? We’re not told.
The ACF suggests a small number of evaluators to avoid conflict of interest and bias when the opposite is true: there’s less expertise and accountability. We have no idea how panel members will be chosen, nor how conflicts of interest or bias will be avoided in their selection processes. There is no requirement that panel members include people with EDI expertise. All of this runs contrary to how we organise promotions, where these wider criteria are accepted as more accurate markers of academic contribution.
It is discriminatory and likely illegal
The ACF states:
“assessment must take account of individual circumstances, including start date at the University of Edinburgh, career stage and grade, periods of extended leave, academic discipline norms, and systemic barriers to progress for specific groups. Staff must be explicitly encouraged to share any relevant personal circumstances and reassured that they will only serve to reduce the risk of redundancy.”
But there is no information of how this will work in practice, what stage in the process parental leave will be considered, and if the scoring mechanism only focuses on the period of official leave or encompasses a more nuanced understanding of the impact of leave on academic careers.
More generally, it is unclear how the ACF will avoid discriminating against part-time colleagues (or those who were part-time 2022-2025). Given colleagues are often part-time for childcare, elder-care or health reasons this has obvious EDI implications.
Other EDI effects will result from the ways in which the ACF will likely identify colleagues who teach disciplines and research topics outside the mainstream, many times from epistemic positions that are necessarily entangled with marginalised communities or approaches.
It’s clear that the ACF is being introduced to mitigate legal liability of management when it comes to dismissing staff. The focus on narrow metrics is likely in deference to the legal requirement that redundancy criteria be ‘fair, objective, and measurable’. Anything which introduces subjective assessments of e.g. quality, risks opening the University up to litigation on the grounds of unfair dismissal. But, as outlined above, there are many ways in which the criteria are not, in fact, ‘fair, objective and measurable’.
There’s a basic paradox here: that the ACF is designed to appear as if it’s avoiding discrimination in line with employment law yet will reintroduce discrimination in ways that will likely be subject to legal challenge.
The ACF will end careers and devastate the university
Some staff might think we are being alarmist. But we know from similar exercises carried out at other universities how these things play out:
Diverse and important contributions to research, teaching, student support, and community are reduced to quantitative metrics
A panel of anonymous non-experts apply scores to individuals
Management decide on an arbitrary cut off score, such as you need 70 out of 100 to keep your job
Anyone with a score below 70 is earmarked for redundancy
Staff in areas currently popular with ‘the market’ may feel some short-term personal relief that this framework is not imminent for them. In reality, nobody is ‘safe.’ Even if you keep your job, the job you keep will not be the same. How do you like the prospect of larger class sizes, increased marking loads, less time with students which means less meaningful contact? How will you like more referred responsibility from the smaller number of Professional Services staff?
What about the character of academic life in successive years, where everyone knows that a fallow year might mean redundancy? What will this do to the idea of service and collegiality?
We do not consent to this harm
No-one, anywhere, has made a well-substantiated case for why this is happening, beyond “weakening income streams, alongside increasing costs”. The cruel reality is that these cuts will bring about precisely what they purport to address: an expensive upheaval that will damage our core mission and income.
None of this is to say that there aren’t financial challenges. But if management has borrowed more than it can comfortably repay on reckless and unfounded projections of income from international students, then accountability and clarity should come before equally reckless fiscal surgery. We know that there’s been wastage in recent years: rash investments on building projects and disastrous finance systems, through to unsustainable ideals of growth.
And still the salaries of management increase! Plus another 20 new strategic change staff just since January.
The real dereliction is that needless austerity and turmoil has replaced the kind of sober long-term financial planning and strategy that the university needs.
Management withholds the only information that could possibly substantiate their case –for good reason. There is no viable case. It’s why Senate have taken the unprecedented step of a vote of no confidence. Politicians need to take notice that Senate does not consent to this. Nor do we.
At heart, the intention of these appalling ACF metrics is not to evaluate the university but to reshape it: more lean, more mean – where competition is the point. In the world of the ACF, losing your job is bad. But keeping it? It’s also bad.
