Abstract
Under the belief in the mechanism of marketisation, many government institutions adopt managerialism by using competition for the pursuit of excellence. Britain is one of the forerunners after the ruling of M. Thatcher in 1979. Since the inception of Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) in 1986, it has changed the status of university greatly, from relative autonomy to be under the control of government. The article begins with the motivation of the adoption of RAE which is from managerialism. Individual teacher' s research outputs are evaluated and their total represents the quality of the department. Research fund are distributed also according the outcome of RAE. The differences between RAE and Research Excellence Framework (REF) are also compared. The conclusions of the study are: 1. The review does not includes all types of knowledge in the discipline of education. 2. RAE has caused inappropriate classification of university staffs. 3. University teaching has been neglected, and there is no evaluation for students' learning outcomes. 4. Means becomes end, the spending and operation of RAE is gigantic. 5. Managerialism takes the lead, the ideal of autonomy for university has gone. Although REF2014 has some revisions and added the dimension of 'impact' , it is to be seen whether REF will be more successful than RAE.