I make it into the latest Britblog Round-up, No 201.

It led me to this latest tirade against Government Targets in the area of officially supported academic research activities:

Government blithely assumes that management is weightless; but the direct cost of writing detailed specifications and special software, and assembling 1,100 panellists to scrutinise submissions from 50,000 individuals in 2,500 submissions, high as it already is, is dwarfed by the indirect ones – in particular, the huge and ongoing management overheads in the universities themselves.

As with any target exercise, the RAE has developed into a costly arms race between the participants, who quickly figure out how to work the rules to their advantage, and regulators trying to plug the loopholes by adjusting and elaborating them.

The result is an RAE rulebook of staggering complexity on one side and, on the other, the generation of an army of university managers, consultants and PR spinners whose de facto purpose is not to teach, nor make intellectual discoveries, but to manage RAE scores.

Thus do societies decay, as sprawling resources get steered by stultifying process into wasteful dead-ends and malignant new bureaucratic life-forms rapidly evolve in the dank ooze.