Happy ending for three of the 11 rejected research grant applicants
Three of the 11 humanities research grant applications originally vetoed have been accepted for next year’s round.
Three of the 11 humanities research grant applications vetoed by then education minister Simon Birmingham have been accepted in the current 2019 Australian Research Council round, announced yesterday by Education Minister Dan Tehan.
Senator Birmingham vetoed the grants in 2017 and 2018, and his decisions were kept quiet until they were uncovered by senator Kim Carr in Senate estimates hearings last month.
In the resulting furore, scholars and university leaders across the country expressed their dismay that a politician had interfered with the rigorous and peer-reviewed Australian Research Council system of selecting worthy applicants, and had chosen only humanities research applications to reject.
The three grants that have now been accepted include a research project on “Masculinity and social change in Australia”, previously titled “A history of Australian men’s dress 1870-1970”, from an Australian Catholic University researcher; “Rioting and the literary archive”, from researchers at the University of NSW; and “Multiple Lives: Louis XIV prints, medals and materials in global exchange”, from an Australian National University researcher.
It is unclear whether the remaining eight applications were resubmitted. “I am advised by the ARC that three projects that had previously been rejected are now markedly different and these have been approved in this round,” Mr Tehan said.
Meanwhile, the longest wait for an Australian Research Council grants announcement has fuelled anger on Twitter. Usually announced in October or early November, the grants are linked to a range of projects, some to begin early next year.
President of the Science and Technology Australia group Emma Johnston said researchers who had applied for grants in February were awaiting news on the fate of projects intended to begin soon. These include 200 Discovery Early Career Researcher Award researchers who, she said, “don’t know if they have a job after Christmas”.
“To treat our discipline experts in this way is atrocious and unproductive,” Professor Johnston said. “It’s going to cause major delays in the beginnings of most projects.”
She added that Science and Technology Australia believed experts should judge the potential national benefit of projects and there should be no ministerial intervention in the process, and there was already a national-benefit element built into the ARC grant applications.
According to a spokesman, Mr Tehan did not veto any of the applications in the current round of university research projects.
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