Dividing up the research money.

THERE IS GENERAL agreement about the importance of research in Australian universities, although the usually assumed overriding importance of commercialisation of research results is only a part of the story--research training, overseas contacts and collaborations, the effect on teaching and the availability of expertise are also vital. Research, particularly in the Sciences, Medicine and Engineering is expensive, and university researchers draw funds from numerous sources, including industrial collaborations, charitable foundations, internal university funds and two major federal government programs--the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and the Australian Research Council (ARC)--which have counterparts in all developed countries.

The existence and the basics of operation of these programs, whose annual budgets run into hundreds of millions of dollars, are not controversial, but the size of the pies, their distribution and the processes certainly are. While much of the criticism stems from the understandable frustrations of unsuccessful applicants for grants, and the system is continually evolving, it is time to consider examining certain inherent problems.

I shall confine myself to the ARC, not only because it is the largest and most complex program, but because I have had personal experience with its operation, having served on the Chemistry Panel for five years (two years as chairman), on the Materials Science Priority Panel for three years, and as the chairman of the Interdisciplinary Panel for one year. I have also been both a successful and an unsuccessful applicant for numerous grants between 1964 (when the agency was the ARCs precursor, the ARGC) and my retirement from active research in 1998, and I am still connected with the University of Sydney as an emeritus professor and an honorary research associate. In sum, I know the ARC from inside and out and believe that a number of policy initiatives not involving changes in overall funding could improve the operation and the acceptability of the ARC grant system.

Humanities and Social Sciences funding should be split from the rest. Practically everyone I have met who has been involved with the ARC advocates this, although it is usually expressed as a gut feeling rather than as a reasoned argument. There are, in fact, three independent reasons for the split stemming from cultural differences between the Humanities and the Sciences, a problem at least as old as C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures", which are simply a fact of life.

First and most important is the fact that research grants are far more central to Sciences than to the Humanities, and the inevitable prevalence of the Sciences within the ARC imposes an unwanted distorting influence on the Humanities by making, say, historians behave like pretend-physicists: it imposes an inappropriate science culture on the Humanities. To put it crudely, professors of classics usually don't like chasing grants and usually can do without them, while professors of chemistry cannot work without a great deal of money and must chase grants whether they like it or not.

Second, there are important operational differences. In my day, the last and critical operation of the expert panels was the "budget week" in which the money made available to the panel was allocated to the hundreds of grants which had been deemed successful earlier in the process. While the operational principle was simplicity itself (as much good research as possible for the buck we had at our disposal) the "budget week" was a complex juggling operation replete with such details as whether a particular project required a post-doctoral associate or could do with a research assistant. It also involved Machiavellian offers to vice-chancellors: "We will fund an X-ray diffractometer for your university if you provide 50 per cent of the funds"--the idea being that we could thus fund two major pieces of equipment instead of just one.

In spite of the complexity, my panel laboured for fourteen hours per ...