POLICY & REFORM campusreview. com. au
Emeritus professor Graeme Turner and his team recently launched a landmark that for the first time maps Australia’ s humanities, arts and social sciences( HASS). Mapping the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences in Australia pulls together a range of data from disparate agencies and research institutions from 2002 – 12.
Amongst its key findings is that the HASS education sector is facing an ageing workforce and climbing student-to-staff ratios.
The report also highlights a number of positives coming from the sector, including a high research output and employment rates for graduates. The report states that despite receiving just 16 per cent of the nation’ s research income, HASS is responsible for 34 per cent of all research output in the university sector.
Turner sat down with Campus Review to discuss the sector’ s health and the threats overshadowing its long-term sustainability.
CR: What questions was this report seeking to answer? GT: Well, the point was to provide some information that would assist people and planning for the future. We’ ve had the example of the health and sciences report that Ian Chubb did in 2012, and that was interesting to me as a non-scientist because it mapped out the field and I could see where there were problems I hadn’ t been aware of. It seemed a good idea for us to do the same with the HASS community. So we wanted to look at what’ s being taught, what’ s disappearing, what isn’ t. What kind of levels of support are the HASS disciplines getting? What research was being done? I mean, it was pretty wide-ranging inquiries that we launched.
This is the first Australian HASS report of its kind – why has it taken so long? The data required is collected differently, under different categories and in different locations. So you have to work with these big, broad categories that the universities didn’ t design. They were designed by the Bureau of Statistics. So it’ s a clunky bunch of data to work with. To try and make it useful takes a lot of processing and a lot of thinking about how to do it. We discovered there were good reasons why it hadn’ t happened before. It took a lot of work. We had a budget that enabled us to do quite a lot of that work, and we could have done more if we’ d had more money. It did require a lot of hardcore massaging of numbers and looking for ways of presenting and so on.
Map HASS untold value
Emeritus professor Graeme Turner talks with Andrew Bracey about conveying the importance of the humanities, arts and social sciences, and what the sector can do to make a better case for itself at funding time.
Is this about being able to argue the case for better funding – whether from governments or universities and institutions themselves – for better support of teaching and research? I think so. I think the humanities and social sciences probably in particular have settled into a [ cycle of complaint ]. They’ re too easily dismissed as just special-pleaders or rent-seekers by government and by the universities. They’ re getting used to it. It’ s difficult to mount a case supported by empirical data – until now. Unless their case is supported by authoritative data, it just seems like it’ s anecdotal or special pleading or in other ways inconsiderable.
So the aim of this report was to say:“ Let’ s forget about doing it that way. Here’ s the data. You can look at it. Make decisions about what you want to use. At least, if you use stuff from this report, you’ ll know that it’ s got some authority.”
Did any of the data confound your expectations? I was surprised by how well the disciplines were doing. I, too, have experienced the difficulties that we all hear about and knew how
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