An End To Universities Massaging Their Research Rankings

Media Release
Tertiary Education Union
12 April 2012

An End To Universities Massaging Their Research Rankings

TEU members welcome the Tertiary Education Commission’s attempt to end gaming of research funding.

"Universities have tried to change their research rankings compared to other universities by 'hiding' staff they consider will compare poorly in terms of research output," said TEU national president Dr Sandra Grey. "Universities have changed people's employment agreements, restructured departments and people's jobs and in some cases made academics redundant simply so that they can appear higher on a rankings ladder than other universities."

Today the commission released the initial audit of the performance based research fund exercise carried out by KPMG. The audit shows a range of issues with the way institutions are engaging the exercise, confirming that gaming has been occurring in the research funding exercise.

"The Commission is now consulting on ways to end the gaming of the system, though this attention to the process has come too late for staff that have lost their jobs in institutions wanting to manipulate their quality ranking."

"TEU has consistently and publicly lobbied the commission about this issue for a long time and we are glad to see that our concerns have been recognised," said Dr Grey. "I hope that this review and consultation on performance based research funding will mean that good teachers and emerging researchers at universities can have more job security."

http://teu.ac.nz/

ENDS