At 1 minute past midnight on December 18 the RAE results are released. We already know the results for the University of Manchester but we are not allowed to talk about them outside our own University community until the official release time. All Universities got their own scores at 9.30 this morning and there has presumably been feverish activity in the VC’s office preparing press releases, redundancy letters, congratulation communications etc.

I am waiting up to see the RAE website and get the data when it is released so that I can see how my department has done relative to the competition our colleagues. The new exercise will produce a more complex metric but still understandable and league tables will be ready in tomorrow’s press. We are in an intersting position, having achieved 5* status for the past 2 exercises and of course we wish to retain our status and position in the ranking order. The complicating factor for us is that we have now merged with a textiles department and thus will be a combined unit of assessment. Our textiles colleagues (about 25) recieved an RAE grade of 4 last time. In addition the research outputs in textiles research are very different from those that we are used to dealing with in the sciences, including for example Fashion Shows and anlyses of the sociology of retail management.

I forgot to press submit

OK our department came in as 3rd or 5th depending on interpretation. If you include small departments we were 5th but if you eliminate Liverpool (11 staff submitted) and Kent (6 staff) we are 3rd after Oxford and Cambridge (We submitted 49 staff, Cambridge and Oxford each submitted about 30).

Manchester as a whole comes in 6th (again chopping out Inst of Cancer Research and London School of Htgeine and tropial Medicine). Not a bad result, crack open the champagne.
Next post in an hour or so when we see how we have done.