Richard Bowring, Master of Selwyn College, Cambridge, writes a note to the London Review of Books (March 11th) on the measurement and assessment of research in the humanities in British universities and its implications for funding.

“Say you are a lecturer just starting out and you come to me as head of department for advice about research. I am now almost duty bound to warn you off a project that might take more than a year or two because it won’t be ready in time for its impact to be measured and, worse, you will be letting your colleagues down by having a nil return ... Forget the book that may take ten years to produce but will last a lifetime; forget the dictionary that might take 20 years but last a hundred ... The periodic reviews of research that we have seen imposed over the last 25 years have done untold damage to research in the humanities in this country.

“There is another, possibly more serious, side-effect to this pressure to churn out ‘stuff’ all the time. It is research that brings in the money, not teaching, and parents and students alike should be on the warpath, because teaching is no longer being rewarded.”