Funding research.(Letter to the editor)

SIR: The repeated narrative of academic decline in Quadrant deserves comment, especially when it finds its way into the national press. The opening sentence of the article on page 4 of the Weekend Australian for March 4-5, entitled "'Rubbish' Uni Arts Projects Get Funds" is a gloss of the March Quadrant editorial. It is presented as fact: "The Humanities have become so corrupted by nonsense and propaganda they should be thrown out of the contest for public funding." This sort of thing appeals to a cultural position resulting largely from ignorance. It is also parochial: in other countries Humanities research is funded more effectively than here, and such funding is accompanied by a lack of anxiety.

In itself, the editorial contains a grain of sense. The problems with the way the ARC assesses grant applications are well articulated. In describing the faults of the system, you could even have gone further, and explained why grant applications which receive outstanding reports from international practitioners in the field still do not rate in the ARC competition. Genuine academic debate is absent from the process: an applicant's reply to specialist readers is not directed to those scholars themselves, but to the non-experts who actually make the decisions, who then somehow "judge" one's risposto against the words of the expert. A quota system is operative among disciplines, but, when asked at a university briefing how this quota system was determined, the ARC representative was unable to respond.

The main faults in Humanities applications are in fact largely caused by the system, particularly the National Research Priorities, which make people think that their project in (as it might be) Linguistics has to look like a project in Border Protection. This falsifies many projects, and is a cause of anxiety, since the process is not transparent enough to tell us what proportion of funded projects can fall outside the designated Research Priorities. Lack of transparency and Draconian decision-making seem to operate at all levels; at no stage are the decision-makers obliged to take the advice of the experts, and this is clearly demonstrated in Draconian decisions from the top.

Your suggestion of splitting the ARC into two bodies makes some sense. One body would then deal with funding in the Sciences, one with Humanities, perhaps on the model of the Arts and Humanities Research Board in the UK. However, at the end of the editorial you back away from this proposal, saying, "Probably there would be little loss to society and to genuine intellectual enquiry if the funding of the non-sciences through the ARC (or any similar body [my emphasis]) were simply abolished." Do you suggest that Humanities research should not therefore take place? Conducting research without some ...