‘Competition is a great driver of improvement’: Or is it?

ABSTRACT

What follows is, in effect, a plea that university lecturers should question the value of competition as a route to success. Most of it consists of a paper I wrote for Drama colleagues at Exeter in July 2010. That paper was my response to an admonitory e-mail from the Dean of the College of Humanities after I had expressed my disagreement with Exeter University's positioning itself as a competitor with other universities. If that is how we view colleagues located elsewhere, I had written, ‘I hope we lose’. No, wrote the Dean, we must strive to win.

KEYWORDS:

• competition
• Research Assessment Exercise
• collaboration
• disempowerment
• teaching