Impact factors

With the disappearance of most public money for teaching in the humanities, there is no reason to maintain the Chinese wall between funding for research and teaching. Accordingly, "impact" should be redefined for the sector to include the impact of our research on students.

Students are the most obvious beneficiaries of our research, both in what we write and in how we model our engagement with thinking through our own projects. It is ludicrous to exclude an annual, easily measured, direct impact on half the British school-leaving population and focus solely on pathways to impact on a vaguely discerned, far-off, fissiparous community of "others".

Ceri Sullivan, School of English, Bangor University