Let’s agree to agree: The situational academic quality of the UK REF as consensual public knowledge

The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is a UK policy tool for distributing government funding and an important indicator of the academic status of a UK university. The legitimacy of the policy comes from peers’ consensus on what academic quality is. We are interested in how the REF enables this funding distribution by determining the academic quality of a broad array of different forms of research through a single peer-review process. As they search for academic quality that is contingent to a specific epistemology and requires more time than the REF allows, how do academics agree to agree, and within constraints of a given timeframe? Interviews with REF panellists and their accounts of the process lead us to suggest that the consensus is enacted by setting up a situation: the mechanics of the REF with its practices of benchmarking, scoring, calibrating, and normalizing. This situation sets the boundaries of reviewing and, in doing so, propels peers to shift from assessment contingent on epistemic commitments to evaluation on a single scale. We argue that this shift renders academic quality distinct from scientific or epistemic quality.