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With hindsight, perhaps the legacy of the research excellence framework on all researchers has been distilled in the tribunal judgement ¡°responsibility for allowing their own vanity and self-interest to draw them into an utterly destructive conflict which could yield no winner¡± (¡°No winner in ¡®destructive conflict¡¯ that led to researcher¡¯s dismissal¡±, News, 17?April).

In the fictional Hunger Games, most competitors fall in the mutual blood-letting. I?cannot imagine many scholars would volunteer to initiate a system such as the REF unless they were caught up in a national momentum for comparing each academic status against all others. While Rowan Williams (¡°No fooling about impact¡±, Opinion, 17 April) was primarily concerned with individual ¡°intelligent citizens¡±, at least he realised that scholars need to be challenged to recognise the ¡°quality of a different sort of skill from their own¡±.

Recently I gained fresh hope from a meeting at the Royal Society. The title of that event, which was organised by the Centre for Science and Policy, was ¡°Evidence, networks and policy: translating new ideas into better outcomes¡±. A vital theme was making better policy through collaboration. Learning to collaborate with people with different skills is a good antidote to vanity and self-interest.

Rather than research policy mimicking the adolescent Hunger Games, perhaps out of the mouths of babes and sucklings comes advice for the Higher Education Funding Council for England, in a song that refers to a Nobel prize. I am amazed at how many children know the ¡°Lego¡± song from The Lego Movie; ¡°Everything is awesome, everything is cool when you¡¯re part of a team¡±.

Perhaps, instead of funding conflict, Hefce should fund cool connections?

Woody Caan
Editor, Journal of Public Mental Health