Understanding the Research Game by Prof Victor Minichiello
As a follow up to my seminar on ARC Linkage grants, I want to make a few comments about how to improve our research productivity via external grants. I feel privileged to be working on the Australian Research Council’s College of Experts. I use the word privileged because it provides me with the opportunity to learn about the practices and thinking of other researchers and how universities support their researchers. I also felt privileged to be invited to chair a review panel at the University of Sydney and to see how other organisations structure and support research. I think being a scholar is about seeing the world from other perspectives. Being a ‘participant observer’ in such external forums allows you to compare and contrast what is happening in your organisation with the external world, so you can use this information critically for both self and organisational assessment and improvement.
What I have observed so far on the ARC is that they are focused on supporting excellence. The ARC peer review system is all about ensuring that the very best proposals get up. Not surprisingly, a large percentage of the grants are written by professors and associate professors, and included in their grants are fellows (usually senior lecturers and lecturers) that they are mentoring. But there are no free rides on such proposals. The grant applicants put in a lot of time, effort and scholarship in creating their projects, writing up their proposals, convincing their peers of the merit of their study, and then doing the research and publishing their results at the highest level.
The outcomes of their research are not only publications. They also have a wider impact on society. For example, by linking up with major partners and influencing the thinking and work practices of organisations, changing the course of current policy, or influencing the thinking within a discipline.
The projects that get funded are written by people who have excellent and innovative ideas (as a reader and reviewer you can spot this within seconds of reading the grant), are excellent and productive researchers (when you meet them in person you can see their enthusiasm and commitment to research), and have the evidence to convince others that they are strong scholars with a national and international reputation. There is no doubt that they are putting in long and hard hours into research.
This brings me to the second point. Often these researchers work in environments where research is highly valued and supported. Their organisation provides them with a workload that recognises their research and scholarship. They receive support in writing grant applications, preparing budgets, and facilitating partnerships, and have managers who celebrate their achievements.
An observation from the review I am involved with at the University of Sydney. In the faculty I am working with, there is recognition that professors and associate professors (congruent with the duty statements of such academic appointments) have a greater capacity and responsibility to undertake research and demonstrate academic leadership. This is reflected in their workload formula through teaching hours. For example, the minimum and maximum teaching hour responsibility of professors is 2 to 4 hours a week, while the minimum and maximum teaching hour responsibility for an associate lecturer is 10 to 15 hours a week. But the level of accountability for Professors to be research active at the highest level is well documented. Of course, over the life course of a person’s career, we should see people moving from high teaching and curriculum leadership to high research and scholarship leadership. In this continuum, a person can identify a point in their career where teaching was particularly prominent and a point in their career where research was particularly prominent.
It is my view that if UNE wants to be more successful we will need to recognise three points.
First, we need to recognise that our senior academic colleagues have a position statement that reflects their capacity and responsibility to be leading academic scholars in their field, and we need to create space for them to do this important work. Likewise, demonstrating leadership involves mentoring the upcoming generation of scholars both within their organisation as well as in their field.
Second, high quality research and scholarship must be connected to promoting knowledge in their field and improving society. With this responsibility comes the necessity to locate ourselves within the larger context of the discipline, the profession, other researchers (both within our institution and, perhaps more importantly, outside our institution), and the broader community.
Third, individuals cannot undertake this important work and responsibilty without the appropriate support and investment in infrastructure from their university. It is this last point that I think UNE needs to consider very seriously.
I welcome your feedback on this topic, which you can provide by leaving a comment here.
August 3rd, 2009 at 11:22 am
It appears from your statements about career development is that research is valued more highly than learning and teaching, and that one cannot be promoted without demonstrating a research profile quite distinct from one’s teaching practice. Those of us who specialise in learning and teaching feel somewhat insulted by this attitude, as we see the challenges involved in being an excellent teacher.
Is there room in this model for academics to develop a research profile based on teaching and learning in their discipline? If so, is this research profile recognised as being as relevant and important as a research profile based strictly in the discipline itself?
Cathryn
August 3rd, 2009 at 1:18 pm
From my own experience it is difficult to have the flexibility of time to take advantage of opportunities as they arise without having some support underpinning my work. In a previous position I was able to appoint a fulltime Research Fellow, paid from an accumulation of unexpended research monies. She took on the detail of project management (and thus made sure that she bullied me when deadlines were looming, but also took on all the details like getting RA contracts sorted, organising their time sheets etc) and co-ordinated the writing of grants so that whilst I did the main work she did the detail. Without that support I find myself spending time on details that detract from my ability to do other research work. I’m sure it is not either cost or time efficient to have a professor standing in front of a photocopier, or figuring out an RAs timesheet, or making travel bookings but I have no choice. And whilst I can in theory build up that accumulation of funds again to do that (asuming they will not be taken from me at the end of each financial year) until I do I am limited in what work I can take on to actually begin building those funds. Having said that, Deb is invaluable in supporting the actual grant applications, but as they start to come in I am going to drown in detail and not be able to continue to apply for more.
August 4th, 2009 at 11:19 am
I have considerable reservations about the model described in the email. Whatever its merits for particular disciplines, it would be invidious to apply it to a law school. I have been associated, in one way or another, with law schools in five jurisdictions and I have no doubt that the best law schools - both in terms of outputs and harmony - are the ones that allow all staff members the opportunity to engage in research. Victor’s email talks of the progression from one stage (the teaching phase) to another (the research phase) during a career but it is not clear how this is to be achieved if level A staff are to be burdened with high teaching loads whilst they remain at level A. This seems to me to reify the existing status quo within a school and encourages staff members to leave to seek to advance. I do not think this is a good long term strategy.
I also note that Victor’s email relates primarily to ARC grants. Whilst we must accept that we live in an age where grants are seen by some to be the be-all and end-all of research, it remains the case that for many disciplines the prospects of obtaining grant income remains relatively remote. In my view, we need to think more broadly about how we might use ‘research reputation’ than for merely the instrumental purpose of obtaining grants. Again, we need to recognise that there may be significant disciplinary differences and that a uniform approach is unlikley to be apt for everyone. Within law, the vast majority of legal scholarship does not attract grant funding and high quality research can be carried out by junior researchers as well as more senior academic. Of course, there is a mentoring role for senior staff but all staff should be encouraged, and given the opportunity, to undertake research and workloads should be allocated with this priority in mind. In this way staff can be held accountable for the time that has been allocated for research. It is crucial here that research be understood in a disciplinary sense. I remember that Victor once sent an email describing the responsibilities of a professor at a faculty he was involved in reviewing. I sent that email to colleagues in law schools in five jurisidictions and they all agreed that they knew of not one professor, living or dead, for even on year, that had met that standard.
The long and short of it is that we research because we think it is integral part of a university to engage in research. In some disciplines the kinds of structures that Victor describes may be appropriate because grant income is essential for high-quality research to be carried out. In that setting, perhaps they will work. For law schools, I think we need to adopt a broader view of the value of research; law schools gain their academic credibilty through the quality of their research, and this is output, and not input, based. Where that research is empirical, the nexus between inputs and outputs may be real. Where it is not, we should focus on the quality of the outputs, and all staff, at whatever level, should be given the opportunity to contribute to that output.
Thanks for this interesting thread Victor.