industry & research
campusreview.com.au
An empire of scraps
The way university
research is measured
and rewarded
needs to change.
By Craig Taylor and
Julian Meyrick
H
elen Razer has called these times
an Age of False Enlightenment,
in which our leaders regularly
make claims to know what they do not
know. We might dub it the Era of Half Right
Answers too, given that so many official
pronouncements have a quality of truthiness,
a playing for plausibility and traction rather
than accuracy and deeper insight.
Current higher education policy
exemplifies this trend. The Australian
Productivity Commission recently reported
on the “tensions between universities’
research and teaching functions”.
“Many university staff are more interested
in, and rewarded for, conducting research,
due to established cultures and the
importance of international research
rankings,” it said. “Teaching therefore
plays second fiddle to research, with
consequences for student satisfaction,
teaching quality, and graduate outcomes.”
The Productivity Commission’s half-
right solution is to link university funding
to graduate employment – the sort of
brutish, un-nuanced neo-liberalism for
which it is renowned. Such measures are at
once reductive and ineffective. Reductive
because, though unfashionable to say
18
so, education is about more than training
students for employment; ineffective
because it is unclear what jobs will be
available to them anyway, and thus what
universities should train them for.
Higher education institutions must
increasingly prepare students for portfolio
careers in a complex AI world. This involves
a great deal more than the short-term
application of their skills in the zero-hours
contract, gig economy.
If universities are hyper-focused on
research, the Productivity Commission
has missed the root of the problem. It has
failed to see that the issue for students
and researchers alike is the way in which
universities pursue their research agenda. It
has confused the obsession with research
and the obsession with research metrics.
The first point to observe is that the
problem has been a long time in the
making. In 2015, the Grattan Institute
provided clear evidence that teaching
revenues support university research to
the tune of around 20 per cent. Shortly
afterwards, Universities Australia’s Keep
It Clever campaign confirmed it. While
this raises questions about how students
benefit from the research agenda, what is
more concerning is the way that agenda is
measured and rewarded.
University research is funded mainly by
the Commonwealth government, through
yearly research block grants. The grant is
calculated on the percentage of competitive
research funding a particular university has
secured in the previous year, plus its number
of research higher degree completions.
The second point to make is that research
income – grant money towards specific
projects – is an input into research, not an
output. This seems stunningly obvious. Yet
universities defend the situation saying that,
despite its lack of logic, this is the system they
are in and they cannot afford to ignore it.
The question then becomes: How should
institutions dedicated to extending human
knowledge through excellent research
respond to a skewed policy framework?
The typical reaction is to pass the
requirement to earn research income
onto individual academics. This creates
a distraction for those working in the
humanities or pure sciences who do not
need much by way of external project
funding, and so do not need to pursue it.
Forty per cent of their time and salary is
earmarked for research, and these are the
resources they really need.
While it is bad enough to measure
research in terms of an input, such muddling
also undercuts the drive for excellence,