The research grants that help very few Australians
It has long been thus, with the ARC’s funding committees assumed to know what matters most. Yet overall, the distribution of grants is not as eccentric as it can look. Plus, there are signs that real-world impact is going to be more important in deciding who gets how much.
While the ARC also allocates money to university-industry projects with markets and community benefits in mind, Discovery Grants, which fund academics to research in their own expertise is a big deal. There was a career-making handout last week, $370m for 520 projects.
Discovery Grants are great news for winners, delivering time and money to produce research they can turn into journal articles to make them famous in the small scholarly worlds they care about. Of course, grant announcements always generate questions whether they are the best use of public money for research. Natasha Bita reported some examples in the paper last week. But the academic establishment does not much value what the rest of us think – their opinion leaders used to get cross when politicians criticised funding until Education Minister Jason Clare appeared to get them off that hook.
The ARC has long funded projects that indulge researchers. The all-time defining example was in 2011 when it awarded $24m over seven years for the study of the history of emotions in Europe, 1100-1800. Apart from intrinsic interest, the case for the cash was the project was important because it would “illuminate the Western cultural foundations of emotions in modern Australia”.
It was the sort of funding that encouraged Coalition education ministers to veto grants, just not often but 30 or so times across 34,000 grants awarded over 20 years. No doubt Coalition ministers, notably Simon Birmingham and Stuart Robert, were playing to their base when they applied it to research that they decided would not help Australians.
But so are research community leaders who argue that academics alone should decide what the ARC spends your money on. That often includes research that is based on activism as well as academic knowledge.
In 2019, then minister Dan Tehan waved through a project the ARC jointly funded with the ACTU, “an innovative study that highlights the Hawke era to show the ACTU’s history as one of transition to governance”. “We aim to reveal the potential of the Australian labour movement to effect change,” was the pitch.
Every year, the ARC funds projects that are self-absorbed. Emily Gray (Monash U) and colleagues were awarded $689,000 last week to create “theoretical, cultural and practical knowledge about how experiences of intersectionality, gender, power and complexity shape universities.”
There is a point to this – universities long failed to address harassment of staff and students.
It is why Clare created a National Student Ombudsman and established a compulsory code on their responding to gender-based violence, but to suggest the research serves the national interest because “the gender problem that shapes universities shapes Australian society” overdoes their importance.
Some projects were funded last week that meet needs that very few Australians know needed to be met. Christopher Hay (Flinders U) warned “critical writing about theatre is under threat” and so his project team has $539,000 to create an archive of Australian and New Zealand theatre criticism to “re-centre under-represented narratives and identities.”
“Expected benefits include rich insights into (and case studies on) the figure of the theatre critic and evolution of the critic.”
This does not occur only in the humanities – they are generally used as examples because the project descriptions are written in (not always especially) plain English while some successful grant statements in mathematics and physics are incomprehensible to anybody without advanced science degrees.
Arumina Ray (Uni Melbourne) has $630,000 to “comprehensively study four-dimensional topological manifolds” (sorry, not a clue). Expected benefits include “enhancing Australia’s research reputation by producing excellent research in a field not historically represented in the country.”
Status for scientists is a common case for funding, including among astronomers, but overall scientists and engineers generally get that they need to explain what is in their work for the rest of us and they certainly always dominate grants. Maybe this is because there are so many of them on campus. Or maybe not.
How, or if, the ARC allocates funding by fields of research is a mystery – they politely did not answer this writer’s question. Yet for over 20-plus years, STEM researchers have collected the cash. As of last year, there had been 4600 in engineering and 4000 in biological sciences, compared with 473 for philosophers and 12 for “creative arts and writing”.
This drives the humanities lobby nuts. “The insistence on commercialisation works to commodify academic research in narrow and unproductive ways … There is also the danger that the commercialisation of knowledge which was generated by the use of public funds can lead to purely private rather than public benefits,” the Australian Academy of the Humanities complained last year. Which rather misses the way market economies work.
But it is not going to get any better for them. Clare has seen to that. He canonised himself among academics when he ended the ministerial veto (outside national security cases) on ARC-funded projects but he kept the also hated “national interest test” statement that researchers must include in ARC applications.
What supporters of scholarship for its own sake also miss is that while they are now generally exempt from ministerial judgment, the policy focus of funding is increasingly on benefits for people in the present.
Where this takes “basic research”, the class of work that started the University of Melbourne’s Richard Robson down a track with no specific outcome in mind but led to this year’s Nobel Prize for chemistry, is probably to even less funding. An imminent restructure of ARC funding scheme will encourage more science to make our lives better now.
The ARC supports a huge amount of work that does. Last week’s grant winners include teams led by Robert Breunig (ANU), who will analyse childcare administration data to discover how existing policy shapes availability and consumption of services and how parents go in the labour market. Jayantha Kodikara (Monash U) will work on the damage unsealed roads do and what can be done about it. Janet Roitman (RMIT) wants to work out how non-ban digital money is reshaping currency exchange so that regulators can keep up.
There are way more examples in the new awards of important work in the national interest – which you need to be an expert to know need doing.
Research refined to expand the economy and improve productivity are vast resources. The problem is people in government, let alone entrepreneurs or the community, won’t hear about them while academic orthodoxy is universities are clients and consumers of the research system.
International student visa approval rate falls despite quota lift
Everybody who reads The Australian is contributing to the cost of research that could only interest an academic, with the Australian Research Council funding projects, no questions asked about what happens when the work is done.