Academy of Social Sciences in Australia
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President's Report
Professor Stuart Macintyre
Reviews
Winter is a season of reviews. We have two major inquiries, one into higher education chaired by Denise Bradley, the other into innovation chaired by Terence Cutler, and both have now released discussion papers. So too has the Australian Research Council, which is now responsible for the evaluation of research performance.
These mark the first stage of the new Federal Government's undertaking to lead an education revolution, making good its predecessor's underinvestment in universities and tackling the deficiencies in the national research effort. There was limited funding for such a revival in the recent federal budget, but the outcome of the present reviews is likely to make the case for a major increase in support. It will also set new directions for teaching and research in higher education, with major implications for the social sciences.
The Academy thus has a vital interest in the outcome of these reviews. Social scientists are heavily involved in them and many have made submissions, individually or through disciplinary associations, as has the Academy.
Review of Higher Education
The Bradley review commissioned by Julia Gillard as Minister for Education, Employment, Workplace Relations and Social Inclusion is the first major review of arrangements for Australia's universities for a decade. The discussion paper it released in June provides a comprehensive account of a system under strain. It is large, with a million students enrolled in 39 universities, but demographic projections suggest that future growth is likely to depend on increasing the participation rate - the restricted enrolment of students from low-income and Indigenous families is marked. The growth in enrolments has outstripped staffing - student/staff ratios grew from 12.9 in 1990 to 20.3 in 2005 - and as Graeme Hugo has shown, replacement of an ageing workforce will be a major challenge. Public funding in real terms has fallen, so that Australian universities rely heavily on student fees, especially from international students, with a heavy strain on their facilities.
The picture of research arrangements is equally stark. Higher education expenditure of $4.3 billion on research and development sounds healthy, but two-thirds of this is made up of expenditure from general university funds and the contribution from business (just 6 per cent) is remarkably low. The proportion of expenditure directed to basic research is declining, and the paper notes that universities still have to subsidise the cost of research undertaken with national competitive grants. Simon Marginson's work on the challenge to Australia's international research reputation as other countries invest heavily is acknowledged. Clearly the national research effort relies heavily on the capacity of academics to combine teaching and research (for comment on many of these issues, see Dialogue 1/2008).
The paper characterises Australian higher education as an industry made up of 'enterprises in a market, albeit enterprises that still have a strong sense of their public benefit role'. This is a generous judgement. The picture that emerges from the discussion paper is of a retreat from public education burdened by intrusive regulation, and short-term expedients to deal with just some of the more troubling consequences.
The paper asks many questions and gives little indication of the decisions it is likely to reach. It is guided by the review's terms of reference, which are notable for their economic perspective. The Bradley committee is charged with assessing whether the current system is 'contributing to the innovation and productivity gains required for long term economic development and growth', and 'ensuring that there is a broadbased tertiary education system producing professionals for both national and local labour market needs'. This narrow remit is softened slightly by an additional reference to 'supporting and widening access to higher education, including participation by students from a wide range of backgrounds'.
Not surprisingly, the Bradley committee works with the concept of higher education as a creator of 'human capital' for a 'competitive, knowledge-based global economy'. It sees universities as the 'intellectual base for new knowledge intensive industries', though it goes on to add that 'higher education in a modern democracy does more than this' through enhancing social inclusion, promoting international engagement and 'engendering the love of learning for its own sake and the passion for intellectual discovery'.
The brevity of these allusions contrasts with their prominence in the earlier reviews of Keith Murray and Leslie Martin, or even in the 1988 statements by John Dawkins - though the consequences of that blueprint indicate that affirmation is not in itself a safeguard. Much will depend upon the means whereby the ends are to be secured. Still, I welcome the reminder that universities have a larger purpose Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA).
In June the Australian Research Council released a consultation paper for how it proposes to conduct an evaluation of Australian research performance. This is to replace the earlier Research Quality Framework, in preparation for which universities and academics expended such time and effort. The decision of Senator Kim Carr as the new Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research to adopt a simpler exercise and entrust it to the ARC was well received.
The Minister also affirmed the integrity of the ARC, reassuring researchers who had been deeply disturbed by the pervious government's surreptitious interference in its decisions and removal of its board. Most fellows will be aware that he has created an advisory committee to strengthen the ARC, and along with my colleague Ian Donaldson, I am a member; this recognition of the importance of the humanities and social sciences extends to a number of other committee appointments. I would have preferred that a statutory board be re-established to restore the arm's length relationship between government and the principal research body, but we do appreciate the improvement in its status.
At fairly short notice the ARC has designed a system of research evaluation designed to make use of its existing expertise and avoid the costly duplication of effort involved in the earlier RQF. It proposes to use eight discipline clusters, one of which will be Social, Behavioural and Economic Sciences (though a number of our disciplines, including history, law, linguistics and philosophy, will be in the Humanities and Creative Arts Cluster). The unit of evaluation will be disciplines, as identified by the Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification. The evaluation will use three indicators: research activity and intensity (staff numbers, Higher Degree enrolments and completions, and research income); quality (based on publications analysis and income); and applied research and translation (where measures are likely to be specific to the cluster). At least initially, the outcome will not determine the allocation of block grants for research to universities.
In its response to the consultation paper the Academy expressed its appreciation of the improvements made to the earlier RQF, not just in simplifying the process but also in improving the design and nomenclature - the earlier idea of distinguishing quality and impact was not only impractical but likely to baffle non-Australians for whom impact is a measure of quality. We are concerned about the uncertainty of funding implications, and preference for disciplines over schools and departments - some important areas of research, such as gender studies, have no ANZSRC recognition. The greatest area of contention is the heavy reliance on ranking of journals and citations for publication analysis. The ranking of journals was undertaken by the Department prior to the involvement of the ARC. It began with disciplinary associations, groups of deans and others preparing rankings of journals in their fields. The four academies were then asked to collate the information, and on the grounds that it was better for us to assist the practitioners we did. Our Academy was guided by the advice provided to us by the practitioners but changes were made after we submitted that advice, and a number of disciplines felt justifiably concerned by the changes.
For understandable reasons, the rankings are generous to Australian journals. Much of the best research in the social sciences works with Australian problems and Australian data, and it is best suited to a national journal. But anyone who looks at the rankings will find so many leading international journals ranked so low as to threaten national solipsism. It is hard to see how reliance on these rankings will secure one of the objects of the exercise, to make informed comparisons of the quality of Australian research. For that matter, it is hard to see how analysis within disciplinary indicators is going to provide a basis for comparison between them. Similar problems bedevil the reliance on citations. As currently configured, the principal databases provide a poor capture of Australian social science citations in a number of disciplines. Beyond this, there are inherent problems in relying on journals and journal citations for many of the social sciences, where books and book chapters are primary forms of publication. An Indicators Development Group is to consider appropriate measures for specific disciplines, but our submission suggested 'there is no immediate substitute for an expert panel that assesses "scholarly reputation” for books and book chapters'. Accordingly, we argued that 'a viable method has to include actually reading some books and book chapters that are proposed as influential within a discipline'.
National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) Running alongside the development of the research evaluation, Senator Carr commissioned a new Roadmap for Australian Research Infrastructure. The previous Roadmap was developed after the Howard government provided funding of $542 million over seven years from 2004 for a strategy for major research infrastructure that was heavily weighted to science and technology. An Exposure Draft for the new Roadmap was released in July and one of its features is the inclusion of a new 'capability' for Transforming Arts, Humanities and Social Science Research. We welcome this recognition of what it describes as 'the important and pervasive influences' of the HASS disciplines.
A Working Group chaired by Graeme Turner helped prepare the statement of the priorities for these disciplines, and a fellow of the Academy, Graeme Hugo, was a member of the Group. They have suggested the need for a substantial enhancement of digital resources, including improvement of access, analysis and linkage of social science data bases. Moreover, they emphasise the contribution of HASS research to the other NCRIS capabilities in population and biological health, terrestial ecosystems, marine environment and biosecurity.
The Academy welcomes these proposals. Some of us might think that the non-virtual components of our research infrastructure might be in need of attention, notably the large collections in museums, archives and libraries.
The reiteration of HASS involvement in the other capabilities takes us back to the efforts of the two Academies to broaden the national research priorities when they were promulgated in 2002. That endeavour brought some rewording of the ambit of the priority areas, but left the social sciences in a subordinate role to scientific and technological priorities. The inclusion of HASS as a capability in its own right provides a far more auspicious basis for the linkages that NCRIS seeks.
Innovation Review
Alongside these reviews is one of particular importance. It is concerned with Australia's innovation system, and is charged with identifying the principles that should guide the participation of the public sector in innovation. This will involve developing innovation priorities to complement the existing research priorities, improving the system of support, removing obstacles to innovation and considering how its government might be improved. The Expert Group conducting the review is chaired by Terry Cutler, and includes three fellows of the Academy: Glyn Davis, Steve Dowrick and John Foster.
All this makes the meeting of the National Academies Forum on 26 August particularly important. It was timed to follow the release of a Green Paper for the Innovation Review, and involved Senator Carr, Terence Cutler and representatives of all four academies. I am writing this President's Report ahead of the Forum, but am confident that it will be a major symposium carrying forward the discussion on which government policy will be based.
The same holds for our Annual Symposium, which is being convened by Janet Chan and Leon Mann to pursue the central idea guiding government policy, that of innovation. It's a heavily freighted term, innovation, and drives research policy in the OECD, its member countries and their universities. At its heart lies a conviction that the production and application of knowledge is the key to success in the knowledge economy, and universities are a crucial component of research and development. But while there is a clear correlation between investment in research and economic growth, economists are still debating the nature of the relationship. There is a common tendency for governments to concentrate on mechanisms of technology transfer, and to overlook the highly contextual complexities of successful innovation - complexities that social scientists are trained to analyse. There is a related tendency to think of the university as part of an innovation system that needs to be made more responsive to its requirements, and to overlook the distinctive qualities that make the university so effective in intellectual creativity.
For all these reasons I look forward to the Symposium, and to the outcome of the current wave of reviews.
Stuart Macintyre
2008
Last modified: 2 November 2009.