Rob Sheehan

Name (Individual/Organisation)

Rob Sheehan

Responses

Q1. How could the purpose in the ARC Act be revised to reflect the current and future role of the ARC?

For example, should the ARC Act be amended to specify in legislation:
(a) the scope of research funding supported by the ARC
(b) the balance of Discovery and Linkage research programs
(c) the role of the ARC in actively shaping the research landscape in Australia
(d) any other functions?

If so, what scope, functions and role?

If not, please suggest alternative ways to clarify and define these functions.

I am going to insert my full submission under this one question. I did not find it helpful to split my observations across 10 questions. If my response here doesn't suit your purposes, that's okay. I understand I'm breaking the consultation rules. However, I don't have time to continue revising what follows. (I have to say that this particular online mode of submission is extraordinarily clunky.)

It’s a relief to know the ARC Act is under review. Given ministerial interventions in grant funding allocations over recent years, things need to be done differently if we are to protect and advance research integrity.

My submission focuses on four matters:
1. Social, cultural, and economic outcomes of research must be weighted equally.
2. Researchers in all disciplines must be able to seek ARC funding support without fear or favour
3. Research career trajectories must make respectful room for caring responsibilities that require commitments over the timeframe of research projects, and often require absences from research activity.
4. Provide researchers with access to editing support when writing research grant applications and their progressive reporting of research outcomes.

I am conscious that the boundaries of the research system, like the boundaries of government and universities among others, are not readily delineated. University-based research (and by necessary implication, research funding from government sources) is a societal enterprise, not an isolated institutional or sectoral enterprise. I lack time or resources to gather evidence that allows me to assess where the research system’s boundaries are. I’m relieved to leave this surveying task to the Review Panel. I would note that each of the specific matters I address below can only be advanced with due speed through direct, continuous engagement between the ARC and other institutions, organisations, statutory bodies, and government. I would further note that time is long gone when due speed can be other than a fast clip for any of the matters I put forward for the Panel’s consideration.

1. Social, cultural, and economic research objectives must be weighted equally

Feedback related to questions 1 and 5.

I recognise the ARC is bound to allocate grants in a manner that aligns with priorities formally imposed by government, like the current Science and Research Priorities. It is dispiriting to see how economic outcomes of research funded through the ARC have become the main game in recent years. The humanities, arts and social sciences are discounted disciplines – not delivering ‘value for taxpayers’ money nor contributing to the national interest’ (to quote the reported view of acting minister Robert who elected to discard peer reviewed grant applications the ARC had recommended for funding). I accept research in sciences, engineering, and medicine, among others, is more expensive to conduct: the asset suite required doesn’t come cheap. On that basis I would accept a differentiated allocation among categories of disciplines that accounted for those variations in kit required to start the bushwalk.

What I am unwilling to accept is a differentiated allocation that effectively undervalues the humanities, arts and social sciences. A June 2018 Australian Academy of the Humanities submission to the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education, Employment and Training’s Inquiry into Australia’s Research Funding, states that the humanities, arts and social sciences receives just 16 per cent of Australia’s research income (see page 16). As that same submission reports, the ARC is the major source of government-funded research for these disciplines.

I’d like the ARC to present evidence of distribution of dollars across broad fields of research in a way that demonstrates how grant funding amounts are equitably (or inequitably) distributed across Fields of Research. I believe a simple presentation of these data per scheme each year, accessible to the general public, would contribute to extending the social licence of government-funded research.

2. Researchers in all disciplines must be able to seek ARC funding support without fear or favour

Feedback related to questions 1, 2, 4 and 5.

Researchers in all disciplines must be able to seek ARC funding support without fear or favour. Obviously fear and favour were called into play when two former Commonwealth government ministers for education (one an acting minister as noted earlier) in 2017, 2018 and 2021 had rejected 17 grants over those years. By my count, 16 of those grants were from the humanities, arts and social science disciplines. That’s after the grant applications were subjected to the same funding rules as grant applications in other fields of research, none of which were rejected. In 2005 the Commonwealth minister for education also rejected recommended grants: the number is contested and could be three or 20, though one is one too many.

One sure way to scuttle trust in Australia’s research funding system, including ARC funding, is to allow ministers to reject a grant simply because they don’t like the project. To be frank, there were two projects among those rejected by the Commonwealth ministers which I didn’t like much: ‘Cultural Production of Religion by Science Fiction and Fantasy novels’ and ‘Post orientalist arts in the Strait of Gibraltar.’ But I support funding of both because they got through a testing application assessment obstacle course in good order.

It must be legislated requirement that if a Minister reject an ARC recommendation to provide funding to a grant application, then this would require a public statement issued at the time of the rejection which states the specific reasoning behind each and any rejection, followed by an explanation to Parliament.

I trust that the Panel’s recommendations include one to reinstitute the ARC board. A primary responsibility of the Board would be to ensure high standard peer review practice is adhered to. The Board model proposed in the Consultation Paper is sensible in my view.

I believe an ARC Board should receive a report each year on the trend in the community for the social licence of government-funded research. Key insights gathered from such a report, along with the ARC’s active responses to factors influencing the trend, should be recorded in the Board’s annual report.

3. Research career trajectories must make respectful room for caring responsibilities

Feedback related to questions 1 and 5.

I am aggravated about a sentence on page 5 of the Consultation Paper. I know it’s there with good intentions; it might have been said better. It reads:
• The defined purpose of the Act does not capture the extent of the role of the ARC in actively shaping the research landscape in Australia, such as by … refining its programs and practices to recognise the effect of disruption to research careers, particularly where these can result in gender or other biases and inequities.

My understanding is that the Consultation Paper is referring in this passage to, among other things, parental leave, various kinds of carer’s leave, and domestic violence leave, all of which are much more likely to be used by women. I don’t regard any of these as a disruption to a research career. The phrasing suggests a very narrow perspective on life courses and what matters in people’s lives. Each of these kinds of leave is a change to life circumstances. These kinds of leave are known unknowns: almost anyone might need to take them, as they might need to take extended sick leave, at some stage during their careers. Indeed, I would think a researcher would be encouraged to take these kinds of leave when necessary. These kinds of can’t be planned for explicitly and specifically, but they can be planned for.

Panel members will be more than familiar with an old tune where a researcher takes maternity leave and comes back to work at the university, only to find there is no room for her in the research projects she was working on when she started her leave. The tune continues: on return after leave her teaching load increases and her research load decreases, and it tends to get stuck there though she wants to continue with the workload balance she had before her leave. Let’s be frank about this: the disruption to her research career is imposed by her university, her department, her colleagues. Her unplanned absence could have been planned for: it’s normal stuff. Remember when you had to resign your public service job if you were a woman and you got married; well, this tune is sort of like that one, only you have to throw in the towel on part of your research career. Not everyone. Not all the time. Just too often.

I am very tired of the endless noisiness of universities about the policies and programs they have in place to shift the dial on women in academic roles, that they’re driven by evidence, that they lead the way in gender equity and respect for all genders. And of course they readily critique other sectors for their lack of same.

Around 55 per cent of undergraduate students are women. Take that as a starting point. Moving along, at associate professor and professor levels there are almost twice as many men filling these positions as women. That is a simple disgrace. What’s the defensible argument for the over-representation of males at academic levels D and E? That women are less intelligent than men? That they’re less competent researchers? The shift to gender equity is on a geologic scale, not a social outcome scale. The ARC has a direct and influential role in getting things moving faster.

Research career trajectories must make respectful room for caring responsibilities that may often require absences from research activity.

It would also serve the social licence of government-funded research activity if gender equity was accounted for and reported on.

A starting point for the ARC in this regard would be to tap the lived experience of researchers whose careers have been disrupted by their universities’ decision making. Their experience is the best source for formulating appropriate rules for ARC funding schemes.

4. Provide researchers with editing support

Feedback related to questions 1 and 5.

In my professional past I have edited north of 100 PhD theses, more than ten books (I suspect more, I just haven't counted them up) written by academics, and numerous journal articles, reports written by academics for industry clients, and research grant applications. I am now on a path to retirement so what I have to say here has no bearing on my future income.

Let me start with the oft-quoted words of Isaac Newton: ‘If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.’ Excuse my overreach if I say that Newton didn’t get that right. What he could only have meant is this: ‘If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants who wrote things down.’

Great research relies for impact on very good writing.

At present many researchers have limited or no access to editing support through their universities. There are some stellar exceptions to this in individual departments across universities. I am reflecting on the general case, not the uncommon exceptions.

When such support is provided it is often at the research grant application stage, and not thereafter when results are reported and progressively published. This is a real constraint on time to publication, on fairness and respect for many academic authors for whom English is not their first language (and whom Australian universities often recruit then leave to their own language devices), and on academic authors for whom writing is not within the many gifts they have which make them wonderful researchers.

Lack of access to editing support can also mean that readers – be they students, members of the general public, industry clients – are left disappointed with what’s on paper or screen. When the writing isn’t working well, it does little for the social licence of government-funded research, and little for industry connection with the academy. Poor writing also makes poor use of scarce government research funding.

In his engaging book, How to win a Nobel Prize (Melbourne University Press, 2005), Peter Doherty offers 18 specific tips on cornering that award. Number four in the list is ‘learn to write clearly and concisely’ (page 240). The reality is not everyone can write as well as Doherty. Writing is not part of every researcher’s toolkit. (Indeed Doherty reports on page 126 that his Laureate colleague, Rolf Zinkernagel, didn’t write much at all: ‘Rolf did the lab studies while my responsibility was the writing and mouse experiments.’)

I would encourage the ARC to encourage universities to involve editors (whether as university professional staff members or on a freelance basis) in research training, in grant writing, and in progressive reporting of research outcomes. I have not spoken to the Institute of Professional Editors (IPEd) about this submission, but I am certain it would be open to discussion about this matter.

Submission received

06 December 2022

Publishing statement

Yes, I would like my submission to be published and my name and/or the name of the organisation to be published alongside the submission. Your submission will need to meet government accessibility requirements.