Research excellence and the origins of the managerial university in Thatcher's Britain

ABSTRACT This article is the first properly historical treatment of the intrusive regime of research (and now teaching) assessments that are now familiar to all UK academics. Eight times since the mid-1980s, British universities have been required to participate in ‘research selectivity’, ‘research assessment’, or ‘research excellence’ exercises conducted on a national scale, and designed to introduce corporate management techniques into higher education. In seeming paradox, a system of top-down steering, hands-on regulation, and artificially engineered competition was created by governments committed to free market principles, deregulation, and privatisation starting under Margaret Thatcher. This article shows how the drive for research excellence made Thatcher’s Britain into the pioneer of a new kind of intrusively managed university that has since become a global model. Making use of a rich vertical archive and a sophisticated policy literature, it provides a nuanced, empirical, historically grounded corrective to an often polemical debate on the ‘corporatisation’ or ‘neoliberalisation’ of higher learning over the past forty years. It should be of interest not merely to historians of higher education, but to anyone who views with concern the metrification of university performance in Britain and beyond.