Dawkins Revolution - Criticisms

Criticisms

There has been extensive criticism of the Dawkins reforms, which have been described as the application of neo-liberal ideology to universities. Critics regard the Dawkins reforms as an attempt to reduce public funding of universities, 'commercialise' university education, and expose research to 'subjective' market pressures.

The reforms have led to a culture of "corporate managerialism" in universities, and have been related to a rise in bullying tactics among university management, a decline in the freedom of academic speech and inquiry, and a loss of academic collegiality.

Among the Dawkins reforms is the encouragement of the use of various metrics to assess and rate research output. These measures have been subjected to intense criticism. For example, the pressure placed on academics to seek external research grants, and be rated on their ability to do so, has been criticised on the basis that different fields of research require different levels of funding, and external grants may not even be necessary. University managements are accused of shifting the responsibility for acquiring funding onto academics. Academics are also critical of allegedly objective ratings of the "quality" of research output, often determined by looking at the "impact factor" of journals in which they publish (the 'impact factor' is the ratio of papers cited from a journal to papers published in that journal) - considered an inappropriate measure of research quality, as the impact factor of a journal is not necessarily related to the relevance of that journal to a given field.

Other critics, especially those among the Group of Eight, saw these reforms as "dumbing down" higher education, as college diploma students became university graduates overnight. The traditional universities were forced to compete for research funds with the newly designated and amalgamated universities, although they still continue to dominate competitive research funding.