Research and the national interest

About Professor Andrew Cheetham

By Professor Andrew Cheetham, Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research and Information Management)

22 March 2006: Research has been in the news in the past week or so and not for particularly good reasons.   In the Weekend Australian (4 March 06) Paddy McGuiness was taking pot-shots at humanities and social science research saying (to paraphrase) that most of it is rubbish and the money is dished out by like-thinking assessors so there will not be any change in the foreseeable future.  

Many of you will be aware that McGuiness chaired a committee that vetted all the ARC Discovery grants recommended for funding after the ARC peer review process last year. This was done at the request of the then Minister (Nelson).  

The terms of reference of the committee are not known but words like "national interest" have been used to describe it.   That committee recommended that 27 grants should not be funded.   In the end, the Minister refused to fund seven grants.   We don't know which, but they were all social science or humanities projects.

Kath and Kim

Then in the Canberra Times on Monday (6 March 06) there was a small article pointing out that a researcher at La Trobe University had won a $300,000 grant to study the effect of comedy on our national identity and saying that the grant was more than the actors would be paid to produce a 'Kath and Kim' series and that it would be better spent on more comedy or medical research for children etc.

But science didn't escape either.   In The Australian on Monday (6 March 06) was a letter from a former reviewer of grant applications concurring with McGuiness and adding that a good deal of science funding seemed to be going to buy four wheel drive vehicles, helicopter rides and hotel rooms for environmentalists and ecologists to get to their field sites out in the bush.  

This was followed by an article in the Australian Higher Education (8 March 06) telling us that the ARC is going to audit several universities to check that they are actually spending the taxpayers' hard-earned on what the grant was awarded for.

In the end, this all boils down to the fact that, not only the government but also the public want to know what we (the researchers) are doing; which is no bad thing, and If they think they know better, then they will tell us; which of course is a lot easier in the humanities and social sciences, mainly because everyone believes that in those disciplines, their life-experience gives them a degree of authority that they don't have in other more technical fields.

Benefit to society

While it has to be accepted that it is "a good thing" that people are interested in the research that we do, I believe the take-home message from the above is that we must make every effort, and then some, to explain our research, both what we want to do, why and what the benefit to society will be, whenever we have an opportunity.   We also have a responsibility to instil this skill into our research students to aid them in their future careers.

But finally, what of the research that is fundamentally curiosity driven, that is fascinating and enlightening but has no immediately discernable benefit to society other than fascination and enlightenment?   Will it wither and die?   That would be a great loss to our culture and our civilisation and must surely be the subject of a debate that we will have to have.

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Last Updated on August 1, 2005