Big Brother's Control of Science. (March 20, 2006)

    With the imposition of a badly thought out  research quality framework (RQF) moving like viscus volcanic magma inexorably closer, there have been uttered a few knowledgeable voices in dissent.

The Australian Nobel Laureate, Peter Doherty, who has spent decades undertaking biomedical research in the United States on June 27, 2005 spoke out forcefully in an interview for the ABC's Four Corners that research funding should be done on the basis of the quality of the principal investigator and should be given in such a way to cover indirect costs.

...you don’t really need a research assessment exercise in this country. All you have to do is to look at where the research grant money goes. Now the Americans haven’t had a research assessment exercise, and the reason they haven’t had that is they simply pay indirect costs on the grants. So if for instance, I’m at the University of Melbourne and I get a million dollar grant over five years or something of that sort, the university will get a 40 per cent overhead on that. That is they will get an additional 400,000 to support the types of activities that universities do in research. I will have no control over it. They can spend that in the office of the deputy vice chancellor for research and so forth. Now, there was a proposal to try to introduce that into the Australian system, particularly in the Australia research council system, and I don’t think the universities liked it very much, but I think actually that it is the right mechanism. And then it’s simply a competitive system that finds its own level.

Jan Thomas, Executive Officer of the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute, in an interview with The Australian's Brendan O'Keefe spoke of her disquiet telling him, "[The universities] are starting to second-guess what the RQF will be like and saying, 'If maths is not a strength, well, we won't bother too much about filling positions. We'll build up somewhere where we think we might get a few more bikkies out of the RQF."'

Ms Thomas went on to say, "Nobody knows how the RQF is going to operate. Some universities are being very short-sighted about that because they're all dependent on having good statistical advice to do most of their research successfully."

Today Don Aitkin, Foundation Professor of Politics at Macquarie University from 1971 to 1979, Professor of Political Science at ANU from 1980 to 1988, and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Canberra, 1991-2002 has voiced his view in an opinion piece for the Australian Financial Review which opens with "Surely Australia could have done better than to adopt the bones of a British exercise that cannot be demonstrated to have done much good for Britain. Indeed, which other country has adopted it, or anything like it?" And then concludes his assessment:

Australian research doesn't need this massive exercise in distraction [the RQF], which won't make us better at research: it actually was healthy enough without pills. If governments want more and better research they can always provide more funds for it. If they don't, they would be better off leaving the system alone. It is decently self-regulating.

While we may argue with Professor Aitkin about the current health of Australian research, we can only hope that the costly still-born albatross the Government is bent on hanging around the neck of Australian research will wither away quietly and unnoticed -- perhaps through an extended period of trialling.