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ОСНОВНЫЕ ТЕНДЕНЦИИ В МУЗЫКОЗНАНИИ СОВРЕМЕННОЙ ВЕЛИКОБРИТАНИИ: НАУКОМЕТРИЯ—PRO ET CONTRA
In this interview with Grigoriy Konson, Professor Marina-Frolova Walker, Cam-bridge University, reflects on current issues in scholarship and higher education. One of them is the system of reporting on the activities of institutions and individual scholars (the Research Excellence Framework, or REF), which works largely through peer-review. In the UK, universities participate in a kind of competition for the state funding of their research; this happens roughly once in seven years. Every faculty or department (“unit of assessment”) submits their best research outputs for peer-review by a panel of assessors. The three main criteria are originality, significance and rigour. This system of assessment has had a substantial effect on the activities of the scholars: their productivity has risen, but certain priorities have emerged (for example, it is more “risky” to work on a single monograph for a long period, than to produce a series of peer-reviewed articles for prestigious journals). The mechanism of “double-weighting,” which can be applied to a monograph, alleviates this potential problem.
In contrast to the practice in Russia, PhD defence is not a public occasion. The thesis is read by two examiners (one internal to the department/university and one external), both write their reports individually (they could be relatively short) and then discuss them with each other in advance of the viva voce examination of the PhD candidate. There could be a range of outcomes: straightforward pass without corrections; pass with minor corrections (to be completed within 3 months); pass with major corrections (6 months); “revise and resubmit” (12 months), which requires a second defence; and fail (the latter is almost never used in practice).
The interview also focuses on the issues of morality and trust in UK scholarship and emerging trends in musicological research, offering an insight into the future of musicology as a discipline.
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