Aperhaps more significant illustration of the unintended consequences of social action than devolved budgets was the government's introduction of the ‘research assessment exercise’, the infamous RAE (as it used to be called). The attitude to research when I first began teaching was relaxed. One of our external examiners at Kent once described to us how, at a set time every year, the senior English professor at his own university would stalk down the departmental corridor, knocking on every door. If members of his staff talked of the new courses in which they had been involved, he would tell them they ought to think about publishing more; if they described what they had just written, he would warn them against neglecting their pedagogic responsibilities. One of the reasons we found this comic was because there was so little pressure on us to write. People would publish, it was assumed, when they felt they had something to say and, for some of us, ‘research’ was in any case hardly the most felicitous term to describe what came before saying that something. But in its grants to universities the government allocated certain set sums for research and it was decided it should try to discover whether it was getting its money's worth. Finding out how much each department had published, and devising an inevitably inadequate method for judging its quality, meant that there was a handy criterion available for comparing one university with another; but the most obvious, unintended effect of the new system was the down-grading of teaching, especially when the grants any university received began to be affected by its showing in the RAE. Then it was that teaching came to be regarded as something most people were able to manage competently anyway, and the only method of distinguishing between individuals, or departments, became the number of articles and books published. The difference this made was profound. At Kent, the contact hours each staff member had with students had crept up to twelve (a derisorily low number for a school teacher, but considered quite high in the university world). After the RAE had been in operation for some time, it was decided that, by increasing class sizes, twelve hours could be reduced to six so that staff members would have more time for their own work.