The RAE is a process used by successive canny governments to exploit the vanity and gullibility of academics partly to justify the chronic underfunding of higher education and basic research in the UK. The process is fraudulent philosophically and methodologically. It does not do what it claims to do and nor could it do so. It has destroyed the delicate balance between research and teaching in higher education by overvaluing mediocre research and devaluing teaching. It has corrupted the process of research by introducing a pernicious form of competition.
Paradoxically, it threatens the future health of research in the UK by the narrowness of its vision and the stifling of diversity. It has illustrated that academics, who should be the most critical and questioning of groups, are the most gullible and easily tempted by appeals to their vanity.
R. J. Wootton
Llanbadarn Fawr