NERA: the Nonsense of Excellence in Research for Australia

I do a lot of reviewing for a wide range of journals whose ranking I usually do not know. To me the ranking does not matter as my review does not take that into account. Again when for my own research I am searching the literature, I do not restrict my search to ERA listed A* or A journals. I have this funny seemingly old fashioned idea that journal articles are first and foremost for the educational benefit of the reader. They are increasingly now, as with this ERA exercise, about satisfying one's peers of the perceived high quality of the journals in which I publish.

And then there is the time involved in all of this ERA process. How much research benefit is foregone by this nonsense?

I still cling perhaps despairingly to the idea that universities are about scholarship. Such scholarship is difficult to define let alone measure. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum writes of an 'unnoticed crisis … a crisis that is likely to be, in the long run, far more damaging [than the global economic crisis] to the future of democratic self-government: a world wide crisis in education.' She argues that: 'Thirsty for national profits, nations … are heedlessly discarding skills that are needed to keep democracies alive'. And she suggests that if this is allowed to continue, we 'will soon be producing generations of useful machines rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves'.

There is more to citizenship, to life and to scholarship than can be quantitatively measured. It is time for a new ERA!