The Professor I worked for in the early &#x27;90s told me that he&#x27;d been involved in some ranking exercise for one of the UK funding bodies where he was deeply unpopular as he wanted to work from objective measures and then come up with a ranking whereas the standard game was apparently to work out the rankings based on which departments everyone &quot;knew&quot; to be best and then designing the ranking scheme to get the &quot;right&quot; answer.<p>That kind of stuff, and the whole nonsense around the desperate scramble for publications really put me off of a career in academia.