The
Council of Rectors of Portuguese Universities (CRUP) has completely demolished
the assessment that the European Science Foundation (ESF) and the Fundação para
a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) are doing of all research units in the country.
On the 24th of October the 15 rectors of CRUP released their consensus position
which was the outcome of their meeting of October 14. This was sent to the
Minister of Education and Science, Nuno Crato. Up to now the Minister has not
given any known answer to the open letter, which has created a serious political embarrassment for the government.
This
is the full content of the letter:
To his Excellency the Minister of Education
and Science:
In our meeting of 14th October,
CRUP analysed the current assessment process of Research Units, under the light
of the responses given at the end of the hearing of the interested parties, and
decided to inform you of the consensual conclusions stemming from that
analysis.
To begin with, we want to make it quite
clear that we are totally in favour of evaluation processes. They are essential
to increase the quality of the system as a whole and, therefore, make it more
able to respond to the expectations of society, helping Portugal's development.
However, for an assessment system to be able
to promote excellence it must be, itself, at least excellent, if not
exceptional. This is not the case.
We were aware, and we pointed it out from the very beginning, that
an evaluation with a first stage without direct contact was potentially very fragile,
but we gave the benefit of the doubt to the view repeatedly made by the
people responsible for the evaluation
that the system would be robust. We
therefore expected that it would be capable of detecting its mistakes
and of correcting them. The recent announcement of the results of the hearing
of the interested parties revealed that this was not the case. Despite the many errors of judgement which were
pointed out, many of them entirely factual, several panels have excused
themselves in various ways to not derive
from them the necessary consequences, keeping inexplicable evaluation scores.
The non-presential evaluation of research units is, in our view, an absolute
flop.
This evaluation process does not have the
necessary quality. It is a lost opportunity for a national policy promoting
advanced knowledge and is resulting in a serious loss of confidence in the
assessment system, with the almost total disregard for the feedback from
universities.
We state that we will refuse any attempt to
use the results of this process for any other effect other than the direct
evaluation of the research units, e.g. its use as one of the criteria for evaluating research projects,
grants or any other funding applications.
We also refuse to accept the announced
death of almost 50% of the Portuguese
scientific system. This result, which was to be expected from the terms of the
contract between the Portuguese State and the European Science Foundation
(ESF), stating the transition to the second stage of only about 50% of the
units, shows a bias which we can not accept. Excellence is a relative measure
that arises only from a larger universe. If this universe does not exist,
excellence will also be quickly extinguished for lack of a recruiting pool.
Evaluation processes should be separated
from funding processes. After
the assessment, in case of lack of funding
for all units with good marks, everyone would understand that it would not be
possible to fund all, but at least the assessment would have been fair.
We would also like to express our
uneasiness at the fact that, contrary to what had been agreed with the
government, in the person of the
Secretary of State for Science, we did not participate in the evaluation of the
results of the hearing of the interested parties before the definition of the
terms of access to the restructuring fund, which henceforth becomes another
tool we do not trust. The access to this fund should not be based on the assessment whose errors it
seeks to correct, or be decided by the party responsible for such errors.
By the same token, the participation of the
ESF should not take place in the analysis of the claims (article 23 of the
Regulation and Evaluation and Funding of Research Units) that various
universities will present regarding the most serious situations.
We finish by reaffirming our availability
to work so that it will be possible to have a global evaluation process with
quality in the near future, in collaboration and with the agreement of the
universities. This process is, after all, another demonstration that the
artificial separation between higher education and science is harmful to the
development of the country.
With best regards,
António Rendas
Presidents of CRUP (current)
António Cunha
President-elect of CRUP
1 comentário:
Where is the Swift-Worms duo now? They got all worked up when someone wrote in Nature that ESF's evaluation is flawed, but remain quiet when the board of University Presidents of a whole country states that the very same evaluation gives a bad reputation to evaluations. It is bizarre, to say the least.
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