It Must be a Matter of Faith -- the Peer Reviewers Must Be Reviewed. (March 5, 2008)

In September 2002 the then Chairman of the Group of Eight, Professor John Hay, Vice-Chancellor of The University of Queensland, in his address to the National Press Club in Canberra told his audience that Australia's research-strong universities had to subsidise research from their core operating grants. That subsidy is estimated at approximately $385 million a year.
Speaking for the Group of Eight Professor Hay went on to say, "A major, arguably disastrous consequence of the present scheme is that the research component of a university's operating grant is not distributed according to research performance indicators but according to undergraduate student numbers. It is blind to the amount or quality of research being done and to the actual costs of building and maintaining major infrastructure, from high-tech labs to libraries."

Robert May, President of the Royal Society at the time, was more succinct in 2001 when he described the current Australian system as, "daft".

Professor Hay concluded, "We need to create an awareness in Australia ...that the links between research and a knowledge-based future economy are indisputable. A future worth imagining is capable of being created. But it cannot prosper if research success is to be punished." and referred to the method of funding as an "indefensible absurdity".

Six years down the track that "daft" and "indefensible absurdity" is still with us. And the system proposed by John Howard's conservative coalition in 2004, the Research Quality Framework, gave every indication of, if anything, being more daft and absurd.

And while Britain wrestles with trying to replace its twenty-year-old oft modified Research Assessment Exercise, last week The Guardian reported: "Research Councils UK (RCUK), representing all the discipline-specific councils, told the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce) that its proposals to replace the research assessment exercise with a statistics-based 'metrics' system were 'not acceptable to RCUK in their current form'".

As in Australia, in Britain the research councils and the Higher Education Funding Council for England form the "dual support system" used to fund research in the UK's universities. Research councils fund individual researchers, while Hefce gives out £1.4bn in "block grants" to universities, which then decide how to spend it.

In Australia a significant portion of block funding goes to subsidise grants won by individual researchers because of inadequate provision of on costs. The situation is ludicrous ("daft", "absurd")

No matter, we now have the chief executive of the Australian Research Council Margaret Sheil telling The Australian's Bernard Lane she is thinking in terms of bringing in interdisciplinary or international reviewers in small disciplines such as palaeontology so that the same handful of experts would not be in charge of ARC grant work as well as quality evaluation under the new Excellence in Research for Australia system (ERA).

So what is going to be "quality evaluated"?

Why the research for which the ARC awarded the grants but in some sort of conglomerate yet to be determined, the result of which will decide how much of block grant money is to go where, and much of which, if matters continue as present, will have to go to subsidise ARC and NHMRC grants.

As Anna Russell said when she summarised the plot of der Ring des Nibelungen, "I'm not make this up, you know".

We're also told: "Saving money and time, promoting simplicity and counter-balancing metrics with peer review are among the reasons offered by the Government for piggybacking the ERA on the ARC and the National Health and Medical Research Council."

Wouldn't a lot more time and money be saved by improving the resources for the peer review systems of the ARC and NHMRC per se and bringing on costs to and appropriate level?

So far Kevin Rudd gives the impression of being not only intelligent but also rational. Perhaps he would like to ask his Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research to explain just: "Why do we need two review systems to evaluate the same thing." Perhaps he might ask his cabinet or even university vice-chancellors the question.

A university is foremost a collection of scholars, it is not something apart from them. Some years ago a senior university administrator of one of the US' mid-western state research universities was overheard saying in all seriousness: "We could really run this place properly if it weren't for the faculty and students".

Go for it, Kevin.