The chancellor said 2008 would be the last RAE, but if universities could agree on ways of rating research by metric measures - such as grants won or citations by academics in the same field - even that round could be scrapped.
"We are all academics in the same cell so we found a way to work it out," he told my mother.
The comparison group comprised healthy volunteers recruited from the local community and university staff pool (academic and non-academic) in the same geographical area as the patients.
Admissions officers, he says, try to "suss out" in conversations whether applicants who have middling academic records or test scores but are accomplished in other ways "can add to the academic discourse in the same way a Columbia College student can".
Furthermore, there has been a 50% decline in the number of mid-career academic surgeons since 2000, and an overall decline of 20% in the total numbers of academic surgeons in the same period (Eckhouse and Sullivan, 2008).
"By mixing industry and academic science in the same research park, ideas and collaboration will flourish.
Disabled students are entitled to be judged on academic merit in the same way as others, and given extra support.
"We must get away from the idea that we can successfully deliver both vocational and academic courses in the same school," he decided.
The use of near-peers with academic tutors in the same classroom and utilising near-peer teaching for an extended period is unreported in osteopathy and limited in the broader literature.
Obama credited them with using their "star power to inspire young people". Several of the celebrities had earlier attended the first lady's "College Signing Day," a hoopla-filled festival to honor students for their high academic achievements in the same way that future pro athletes are feted.
It was a dozen years before the American geneticist D. F. Poulson published academic findings in the same field (Poulson, 1940).
