Seamus Perry on undergraduate interviews and the role of research

The holiday is receding. Good will to all men is gradually being refocused on fewer and fewer men. The festive bins have been collected by the council: the recycling has crashed into the back of the lorry with an embarrassingly protracted crash of bottles.

The annual struggle to dispose of the corpse of the Christmas tree is done. The cats are breathing a sigh of relief.

One sign of middle age is the bitter conviction that the metabolic challenge of Christmas has come, yet again, at precisely the wrong time, just when the system is already under attack from the soup of bronchial infection that marks this special time of the year in Oxford.

Oh, but it’s worse for the don. I don’t anticipate a great flood of sympathy here, but for the college tutor, emerging from the ordeal of undergraduate admissions, the season proves doubly demanding.

I am not sure why sitting on a comfy-ish chair interviewing (mostly) nice young people who are (mostly) keen to study English literature should prove quite so depleting. But so it is.

Maintaining an encouraging smile for a week is itself a strain, especially if your normal expression tends to the hatchet end of the spectrum.

Actually, this year, thanks to the wisdom of our rulers, dons faced a triple emotional challenge.

Every six or seven years one of the principal paymasters of the universities, a Government agency called the Higher Education Funding Council for England, announces how well we’ve all been doing in our research.

These days this is called the Research Excellence Framework, shortened to ‘REF’, one of those non-words whose derivatives show how beautifully the English language can absorb whatever is thrown at it.

My colleagues have put in countless hours compiling our research return, totting up our best ‘reffable’ publications (or rather, in refspeak, the ‘outputs’) that have emerged from the faculty, assessing their ‘impact’, and generally offering proof of our scholarly excellence.

The results were announced in dark December just before everyone slipped away, dark rings around their eyes, to brave the mince pies. What timing!

A lot of institutional pride hangs on the REF, of course, but there are also more material consequences too: the rankings that emerge will be fed into a big equation that decides how much money the different departments will earn for the next six or seven years.

Since the total amount of Government spending promises to be set at homeopathic levels of dilution, a good result might just mean a slightly larger share of very little, but that was too dispiriting a thought to entertain over the brandy butter.

As the Balliol poet put it, “say not the struggle naught availeth”.

Where you come in the league tables depends on how they’re devised.

The good news is that Oxford English came top in the ‘power’ rankings, which roughly means more top-notch research and scholarship happens here than anywhere else.

A thought to keep you warm — for a few minutes, at least, before you begin to think about the next REF in 2020.

Seamus Perry is chair of the Oxford University English Faculty