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The other and more important cause of the change the conduct of scholarship in other disciplines within is that the federal government – partly because of the the humanities. undue influence of the sciences - began to use relative The situation today is very different. Faculties and success in attracting research income, and especially departments, including law schools, now apply considcompetitive ARC grants, as the predominant criterion erable pressure to their scholars to apply for research for the allocation of large portions of some annual govfunding, because university managements apply the ernment funding to universities. The actual fruits of same pressure to them. Universities set ‘targets’ for the research – publications – were given minimal weight, amounts of research funding that faculties and departand the funding supposedly needed to produce ments – and sometimes, individual academics – must publications was given inordinate weight. Research attempt to raise.The performance of scholars in attract‘inputs’ counted far more than its ‘outputs’ - which is ing research income is given enormous weight in deterlike assessing the quality of casseroles not by tasting mining appointments and applications for promotion. them, but by adding up the costs of their ingredients. This change seems to have had two causes. Both Consequently, comparahave to do with the colotive success in attracting nisation of the humanities Universities set ‘targets’ for the amounts external research funding by the methodologies for of research funding that faculties and also came to be heavily conducting and evaluatdepartments – and sometimes, individual used to rank universities in ing empirical research in academics – must attempt to raise. The terms of research performthe ‘laboratory disciplines’ performance of scholars in attracting ance. Since both funding such as science, engineerresearch income is given enormous and prestige are vital to ing and medicine, and also universities, they naturally some areas of the social sciweight in determining appointments and responded by adopting polences.There, it seems, most applications for promotion. icies to increase their sucresearch has been carried cess in attracting research out by teams of academincome. Their internal policies adopted the same sciics working with postdoctoral staff and PhD students, ence model for evaluating research and distributing often using expensive equipment. Large amounts of funding to faculties and departments, which were all money have been the life-blood of this research, to required to attract more research income. fund postdoctoral fellowships, doctoral scholarships, salaries for laboratory technicians, and the purchase of [R]esearch . . . is a means of defining value and equipment. Since most researchers had to compete for manufacturing symbols of excellence. It is a primary source of institutional prestige and income: that money, which was awarded to those with the best in its most prosaic form, research is the pre-emitrack records and most promising projects, success in nent ‘numbers game’ in the Enterprise University. attracting it came to be used as one measure of their Research management’s objective is to succeed achievements as researchers, and of their department’s in that numbers game (Marginson and Considine or faculty’s success in fostering first rate research. 2000: 133). One of the causes of the recent change is that many The universities’ initial responses to these govresearchers from these disciplines, when promoted to ernment funding formulae were often not rational. senior managerial positions within universities, did not Research in law schools, for example, was often consufficiently appreciate that their own familiar research demned as second rate simply because legal scholmethods were neither followed nor appropriate in ars applied for and attracted tiny amounts of funding some other disciplines. When only a small number compared with physicists and engineers. Universities of scholars have any need to apply for large amounts tended to compare apples with oranges. They later of external research funding, and most therefore do adopted a somewhat more sophisticated approach, not compete for it, it makes no sense whatsoever to using ‘benchmarking’ in which the performance of facuse funding as even a relevant – let alone a weighty ulties and departments is compared with that of their or mandatory - consideration in evaluating scholarly equivalents – their ‘comparators’ – in other Australwork in that discipline. In these fields, the quantity and ian universities. This was an improvement. But while – much more importantly – the quality of a scholar’s benchmarking compares each discipline with its compublications are the only relevant criteria.
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Research grant mania, Jeffrey Goldsworthy
vol. 50, no. 2, 2008