A retired Cardiff University professor who says he was denied emeritus status for criticising management has accused the institution of seeking to profit from his work while disowning him. His case has raised fresh concerns about whether the next round of the UK’s official research assessment exercise will allow universities to claim credit – and millions in public funding – for the work of scholars they no longer employ.
Professor James Whitley, an archaeologist who spent 35 years at Cardiff, accepted voluntary redundancy earlier this year after the Russell Group institution closed its School of Ancient History as part of wider plans to cut around 400 academic jobs and address a £31.2 million deficit.
While retiring full professors are typically granted emeritus status in recognition of their service, Whitley said the honour was withheld without explanation. He believes the decision was prompted by his opposition to the restructuring, which he expressed in a letter to the university’s governing council.
Although Whitley has been removed from Cardiff’s list of honorary staff and has lost access to email, library systems and online journals, many of his publications – including several published since 2021 – remain listed on ORCA, the university’s open-access research repository. He believes they may still be under consideration for inclusion in Cardiff’s next return to the Research Excellence Framework (REF).
The REF is the UK-wide system for assessing research quality in higher education. The next exercise, REF 2029, will review outputs published between 2021 and 2028 and is used to allocate around £2 billion a year in public research funding.
In a letter to REF administrators, Whitley is now seeking clarification as to whether his work can be included in this way. “Is it ethical,” he wrote, “for an institution to submit publications on behalf of a unit of assessment, when one member of that unit (whose publications are being submitted) has been ‘cancelled’ in this way?”
A Cardiff University spokesperson said no decisions had yet been made about the institution’s REF 2029 submission, adding: “ORCA includes all research outputs to help make our work more widely available. Academics are free to submit their work themselves.”
Whitley is not the first to raise concerns about REF 2029. Open letters from performing arts and English subject associations have warned that rule changes could allow universities to retain control over research by academics they no longer employ – particularly disadvantaging those on short-term contracts or those working on long-form outputs like monographs who may lack time to produce new material at a subsequent institution. The effect could be career-determining, they argue, particularly in disciplines where research outputs are scarce and REF eligibility influences hiring or promotion. Scholars whose most valuable work is ‘locked’ at a previous institution may struggle to remain on research contracts, increasing pressure to accept teaching-only roles.
But as Whitley’s case suggests, the system’s shifting approach to intellectual labour may also affect senior academics who exit the sector voluntarily, and find their work still claimed by institutions with which they no longer have a relationship.
Unlike previous exercises in 2014 and 2021, REF 2029 does not require universities to submit named academics. Instead, they will report an aggregate number of outputs based on the average size of their eligible research workforce, calculated over two full academic years – 2025–26 and 2026–27 – rather than a snapshot on a single census date. In terms of specific outputs, however, universities may submit an academic’s work irrespective of whether that person is employed during the census period.
For many, the most contentious feature of this system is that institutions are allowed to retain this right long after employment ends: for up to two years in most cases, or up to five years in the case of long-form outputs such as monographs, to reflect longer production and publication timelines. This applies even if that person is not listed as honorary staff, granted emeritus status, or still working in higher education – and their consent is not required. The only pre-condition is that the output must stem from research supported during their qualifying contract.
This is possible because REF 2029 shifts the locus of intellectual ownership to the institution, introducing what administrators call “decoupling” – the removal of any fixed link between a named researcher and the output they produced. Unlike REF 2021 – where, if a researcher moved between institutions, the same single-authored output could be submitted by both, thereby allowing the output to follow its author – REF 2029 assigns each such output to a single institution: the one with which the researcher had a “substantive link” at the time the work was carried out or published – i.e., a contract of at least 0.2 FTE for a continuous period of 12 months or more, with a formal expectation of research.
The rules formally distinguish between voluntary and involuntary departures: in cases of compulsory redundancy or dismissal, universities are barred from submitting outputs published after the end of employment (though outputs published before that point remain eligible, since the substantive link still existed during production and publication). But in a financially squeezed, marketised and increasingly managerial sector where redundancy is often pre-empted through ‘voluntary’ severance schemes, that procedural distinction may obscure the structural reality of how and why many academics leave.
So in Whitley’s case, because he accepted voluntary redundancy in 2025, Cardiff University would retain the right to submit any of his outputs published up to 2027 – or to 2030 in the case of a monograph – so long as the work was undertaken while he held a qualifying contract. In other words, the former professor’s suspicion that Cardiff could continue to benefit from his research even after severing institutional ties is, on the face of it, well-founded, and likely to be permissible under REF 2029 rules.
This article forms part of the Committee for Academic Freedom’s ongoing monitoring of developments in UK higher education. To receive monthly updates and analysis on cases affecting academic freedom, subscribe to our newsletter here.