Name Assessment Exercise: a proposal

[Some whimsy for British readers] In UK universities we have something called the Research Assessment Exercise, and teaching quality assessments too. These cause a tremendous amount of angst & breakdown for staff and cost huge amounts of money and time. I just had a brilliant idea that would cut all of these down to a minimum, which would be to replace them all with a Name Assessment Exercise, whereby a Department gets points for having staff members with the same name. For example we have 4 Peters, 3 Andrews, 2 Sheilas and 2 Pauls. I might score the Department some bonus points for having another colleague with the same initials as me. You would achieve a top score by having everyone in the department with the same name (cross-gender names like Chris or Phil, say, which would enable one also to maintain equal opps). This would mean that staff recruitment costs would be cut, as obviously someone with a name that was going to give the dept bonus points would become the lead candidate, and you wouldn't have to bother with references, presentations and so on.

It would personalise the department e.g. we might become known as Peter the information or (in deference to the Head of Department, in this case my colleague Professor Sheila Corrall) Sheila the library. Academic plans, another bane of one's life, would become so much simpler e.g. "Recruit more staff called Peter" (rather than a load of stuff about enhancing the student learning experience and engaging in cutting-edge research). There would have to be some regulation forbidding changing your name by deed poll immediately prior to the NAE, of course. If any reader from the Higher Education Funding Council for England wishes to give me large amounts of cash for researching the feasibility of this option, I will be happy to oblige....

Photo by Sheila Webber: Johann Strauss' grave, Vienna, Dec 2006. He would of course count as "John" in the NAE.