The best of times at Oxford ...

History: Oxford, 1992 rating: 4, 1996 rating: 5*

Research assessment panels delivered their verdicts on university and college departments throughout the UK this week. A bad grade can close a department, a good grade can secure jobs for years. As academics waited anxiously for the results, THES reporters asked how they prepared for the assessment and sampled the research.

FEW outcomes in the 1992 Research Assessment Exercise occasioned more comment than Oxford's unexpected 4 rating for history. It both prompted Earl Russell to resign from the history panel and sent a wave of Schadenfreude through other, less famous departments.

At one level Oxford is the largest history department in the world - it put in 102 names for the last exercise. At another it is hardly a department at all. Academics are located in their colleges rather than the faculty which consists of little more than a library and a secretariat.

Sir John Elliot, regius professor of history and head of faculty while the 1996 submission was being prepared, said: "There is no central list and the first job was to locate everyone who qualified, which meant writing to 37 or 38 colleges. There are more than 100 permanent university-funded post-holders, but the faculty has 256 members."

Considerably greater streetwisdom than in the past was shown in their decision to submit fewer people (97.3 full-time equivalents) for assessment, cutting off the long non-producing tail which cost them heavily in 1992.

The precise impact of last time's rating is hard to assess. Oxford does not fund humanities research by faculty. Most historians tend to blame financial stringencies in the past few years on the need to cross-subsidise expensive, loss-making science departments.

The extent of and reasons for staff movement are similarly hard to track - neither Sir John nor Laurence Brockliss, fellow and tutor in history at Magdalen College and Sir John's successor as faculty chair, could point to any RAE effect.

Where change was evident was at university level: "This time there has been a great deal of advice and assistance on how to prepare our submission that I gather was not offered for previous exercises," said Dr Brockliss. He added that the exercise may have assisted the faculty officers: "It has allowed us to gather some extremely useful information, which gives us a much better idea of the activity and research interests within the faculty."

Sir John, previously based at Princeton in the United States, remains deeply unimpressed and cites the horror which RAE induces in foreign historians: "Eastern Europeans in particular tell me that this is the sort of thing they have only just escaped from."