Anonymous #28

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Anonymous #28

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Q10. Having regard to the Review’s Terms of Reference, the ARC Act itself, the function, structure and operation of the ARC, and the current and potential role of the ARC in fostering excellent Australian research of global significance, do you have any other comments or suggestions?

I am an American-trained, critical social scientist and spent most of my career at the University of Michigan. I was recruited to a capacity-building professorship in Australia and accepted out of interest in better understanding alternative academic cultures. Work like mine (communication/cultural studies) is not funded by grant agencies in the US (though supported by competitive grants within top institutions), so I was curious about the opportunity to access schemes. I have been on two awarded Discovery Projects in the four years I’ve been in Australia. I have appreciated the generosity of these awards but find them an inefficient use of funds and academic labour relative to the institutional funding/course release access that supported my research in the US.

Generally, my experience of the ARC is that every aspect of its practice has been designed for the norms of the sciences. This drives me to reconfigure projects in ways suboptimal for their inquiry and goals. I also have the sense that aligning my work with the metrics prioritized in the Australian system risks diminishing my reputation and regard internationally and within the norms of my field. A considerable amount of my reputation derives from authoring books that are widely taught globally (including in translation). This is not an easily measured or reported metric. Publishing Q1 journal articles is not difficult, of course we all do it, but Q1 journal articles are secondary intellectual works relative to the advancement of major ideas in field that is accomplished in books. With rare exception, the truly top tier scholars in my field are known for their books.

My main concern with the current system is that the one-size-fits-all-fields schemes disserve research diversity across fields. Many HASS researchers do not need multi-year fellowships and million-dollar grant schemes. Nor does our work benefit from postdoc support and teams of HDR students. But we do need reliable course release and smaller sums to support fieldwork, archive visits, materials, conference travel, and research assistants. The amount of labour of the application process for existing schemes makes it inefficient to use them for smaller scale projects, and multi-year fellowships that remove scholars from the classroom for such long periods are poorly aligned to the 21st century university. HASS researchers should be able to compete for schemes with scale when they have appropriately suited projects, but another set of more modest schemes with a few teaching releases over a period of years that can be accessed by more scholars would provide better fit-for-purpose support. The application should be similarly downsized and budgets focused on general spending – pots of funds for fieldwork, travel, assistants – rather than requiring itemizing to the dollar years before funds will be spent. I review annually for a one-year residential fellowship at Harvard. The application consists of a three-page project narrative, CV, and three reference letters.

The large scale of grants has also misshaped my field in Australia. In a small field in a relatively small country, it is the case that the diversity of inquiry that is an important hallmark in HASS fields has been eroded by the need to chase schemes tied to ‘national priorities’ or perceived concerns of the moment as the most likely way to win funding and prove in the national interest. The ARC has funded sizable projects in automated decision-making and social media disinformation in recent years, and the effect has been to lead a great number of Australian scholars to specialize exclusively in these areas. This will have implications for decades. I have been unable to fill PhD scholarships aligned to my Discovery projects, and my institution has failed ongoing T&R position searches because so much funding is concentrated in a few projects that encourage overspecialization of a small talent pool.

Ill-suited metrics for contemporary conditions. I understand that the ‘number of PhD’s trained’ is also important as a metric of university funding, but quantity of PhD production incentivizes over-skilling relative to job possibilities, especially in HASS fields. It is immoral to train students for jobs that do not exist or to prioritize credentials that are not valued in the marketplace (a PhD does not make students more hireable outside academia in my field). In determining my capability for a grant with aligned HDRs or postdocs, it is not important whether I have trained five or fifty, rather the question is whether I have provided high quality supervision relative to opportunity.

The scale of reform needed also requires reassessment of metrics that govern how funding is awarded to universities. Creating fit-for-HASS schemes will do little good if universities pressure staff to chase the highest dollar award or regard more suitable HASS awards as lesser accomplishments, which is likely to happen given the degree to which KPIs come to govern rather than ‘indicate’. HASS fields are much healthier in the US, which likely ties to the ability of universities to devise internal priorities separate from funding metrics. The different funding structure has allowed US university leaders to counter ill-conceived public/political sentiment and regarded it a necessity to maintain robust HASS research and thinking. The conditions facing HASS in Australia are not ‘natural’ or ‘how things are’ but the consequence of funding structures and management approaches, many of which can be tied to how funding is allocated to universities and the priorities built into the schemes available through the ARC.

Submission received

09 December 2022

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