Micromanagement is Never Far Away

When Brendan Nelson, current leader of the conservative coalition opposition, was put in charge of the Department of Education, Science and Training he instituted a plethora of reviews and assessments which were designed to window dress then Prime Minister John Howard's determination to squeeze Australia's universities and bring them to heel.

Dr Nelson is now decrying the number of reviews and assessments that Labor's first 100 days in power have introduced, but what is not yet clear is whether the Labor Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, is calling for them to gain objectively gathered and evaluated information on which to base governmental policy or follow "Howard's way".

As regards the university sector, the Minister for Education, Julia Gillard has been all but dumb as regards implementation of Labor's promised Education Revolution while the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Kim Carr, after first telling the publicly funded research organisations to clear all but trivial public statements with his (and possibly the prime minister's) department, has done a quick turnabout by announcing plans to draw up charters of rights and responsibilities for publicly funded scientists and researchers (see FASTS forum Rights and Obligations of Scientists and Researchers).

Senator Carr has also announced that the Coalition's stillborn Research Quality Framework (RQF) has been put to rest to be replaced by the ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia) which is "to be developed by the Australian Research Council (ARC) in conjunction with the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (DIISR), [which] will assess research quality using a combination of metrics and expert review by committees comprising experienced, internationally-recognised experts."

While he appears to have listened to caveats regarding an overreliance on citation metrics, the approach is still one of replacing the proposed RQF, with its penchant for micromanagement in determining university block grants, with an ERA rather than significantly revising the focus of funding university research.

For over twenty years the UK government has wrestled with developing and redeveloping a Research Assessment Exercise which would properly apportion block funding to Britain's universities. Certainly over that period Britain's research prowess has improved, but there are no data which separate the increase in the resources provided to the research community from that of the RAE per se, and the tweaking and refashioning of the RAE's parameters over the years, to the point now of "digging up and trying to relay the pitch" brings into serious question the soundness of the approach.

Were universities to be provided with base funding i.e. resources to adequately maintain the plant, administrative staff, and teaching facilities, while principle investigators receive grants that adequately provide on costs as well as the direct costs for their research, resources would migrate to where the action is, not for example where vice-chancellors with vested interests say they ought to be.

But of course such an approach, assuming research grants were to be allocated through objective review by competent peers, moves governments to arm's length from the process and would significantly hamper its ability to micromanage.

The fact is if Australia's citizens, and their political leaders, really want a first class research community, it's well past time that the federal government stop trying to squeeze universities into preconceived, ill thought out parameters.

Will the current crop of governmental reviews bring that about? The next 500 days ought to give the answer.

Alex Reisner

The Funneled Web