voi Cesand reaccreditation’ (Bradley et al. 2008: xxi), but also applying sanctions, including
reduced funding and de- accreditation, against higher education providers that do
not measure up against these standards (see, for example, gillard 2009). university
research rankings are now not only publicly available, but leagues tables of institutional
and subject results are widely published and discussed in the press and low achieving
departments are under threat (notably, despite an international campaign to save it,
the Centre for Contemporary Cultural studies at the university of Birmingham was
closed in 2002 after it received a 3a result in the Rae).
The contemporary environment is thus one that, under the ‘carrot and stick’
approach to research management, demands a measurable level of institutionally
recognized research outputs from all academics, regardless of the discipline in which
they practise. The stick is, of course, the risk of sanctions; the carrot includes those
benefits that attend academics and disciplines engaged in research. These take the
form of institutional, cultural, symbolic and intellectual capital: that is, the resources
that ‘define the chances of profit in a given field’ (Bourdieu 1991: 230–1). a discipline
that can boast a body of substantial research projects and research outcomes acquires
institutional capital in the form of recognition as a research body. Research- active
members of that discipline acquire cultural capital in the form of expertise; symbolic
capital in the form of, say, the prestige inherent in publications in high impact journals;
and intellectual capital in the form of the knowledge that is then available to other
members of that discipline. There is also, of course, economic capital – gaining the
financial resources to conduct research, and any economic rewards that flow from that.
Research, when strategically organized, can become a self- perpetuating system too,
because the more research that is undertaken, the more likely it is that researchers will
be able to identify further areas that need attention.
We note this because a result of the initiatives in this area is that academics have
recognized not only that measurable research outcomes are part of university core
business, but also that appointment, tenure and advancement depend on successes
in this area. This has been a particularly significant shift for academics in the creative
arts who in many cases were initially appointed to their university positions because
of their art form expertise rather than their academic background. in creative writing,
many of the early appointments to academic positions thus went to novelists, poets,
scriptwriters or non- fiction authors of some professional standing. in the past decade,
though, as a result of the institutional changes noted above, professional esteem has
dipped in importance; prestige and credibility now more commonly rest on achieving
a combination of scholarly and creative publication, research and art grant income,
and postgraduate research student supervision/completion. What was previously
largely a debate about the identity and value of the creative arts in universities has,
therefore, taken on new impetus, and writer- academics have, as others have in the
creative disciplines, begun to investigate their practice and analyse the ways in which
their art form can also constitute a research methodology and generate reportable
outputs.
There is a risk, in this move, that writer- academics might be captured by what is
called skhole, a term whose original meaning refers to a place of leisure: the leisure
involved in having time to learn and time for knowledge. of course writers (like
other artists) need a version of skhole, time to learn, make and reflect. But central