Common sense. Gasp. Well done. Be handy to turn all of our management intensive universities into places that actually put more $ into teaching and research. I'll help build the B Ark.

I couldn’t agree more. And I speak with a background of 15 years in managing R&D in a statutory body. However, the barriers to the transformation Paul Collits proposes are large. Primarily they are the need for a “block grant” distributive mechanism within each University that keeps researchers on side; and the need to ensure that administrative savings help to retain or raise the level of research funding that Universities can distribute.

The current system of breaking down total ARC funding into minute bites each of which is separately assessed (without, by the way, any apparent complementary mechanism of project-by-project outcome evaluation and accountability) is clumsy and extraordinarily inefficient. But it does have advocates because it panders both to the control freaks in government and to the anarchists within Universities – and I imagine there are many of both species.

Paul asserts that the transformation to block grants “will allow researchers to simply get on and research the things they and their colleagues think are important”. Hear, hear, but how will that work? To my mind the only way is to spread funding accountability along some kind of institutional hierarchy. After all, from the Vice Chancellor down senior academics ought to know, or know how to decide, what is “important” or not and allocate funding accordingly. I can just hear the screams; there is some comfort in receiving edicts, unpleasant as they may be, from distant faceless bureaucrats rather than the local “bosses”.

So there will need to be massive attitudinal changes to authority and “managerialism” within academia. The persuasive levers will be in the benefits that Paul lists, primarily the freeing up of real research time and funding

The author is of course a subscriber to the group-think mind promoted by Quadrant.
But what is the purpose of the modern "university" and does it really allow for free open-ended investigation of the human condition?
http://www.firmstand.org/articles/separation_of_church_and_state.html

Because our mostly uninspected presumptions about what we are as human beings always places limits on our understanding of what is "out there".
http://www.aboutadidam.org/lesser_alternatives/scientific_materialism/reductionism.html

Paul your article comes across as seriously sour grapes. If you want to get a research grant, try, you know, actually publishing something first. It's not that hard!

ISI Web of Knowledge only locates three publications with you as an author, the first two of them attracting an anaemic total of five citations over sixteen years. Your H index is 1. You say you returned to academia six years ago, yet you appear to have produced only a single indexed publication since that time.

Publications, citations and H-index all matter. Publications are the proof, if you like, that we are actually doing any research. Citations, Journal impact factors and other metrics are clear, widely accepted indicators of the level of excitement with which our research is actually received.

When the ARC say you need a track record they are not talking about previous grants nearly so much as your record of publishing research, particularly research that others actually care about. They're mostly only interested in the last five years so if you get cracking now you can turn your track record around even now. Research is fun, right, or you wouldn't be where you are?

Very good article, & so true.

Ducky, most of us have a pretty fair knowledge of the "human condition", we live it, & don't need some clown wasting tax payer dollars on writing some crap about it. Nor do we need some conman writing fantasies about the effect of some trace gas, & claiming it to be research.

What we need is to know how to build better bridges. I wonder if there are still people in our universities who would know how to build one?

CJean. Is ad-hominim attack the best you can manage? Surely the author has worked for big oil, vested interest, tobacco?
As Hasbeen comments, "very good article, & so true.
The need for ANY funding submission, over the past years, to have 'climate change' and/or 'sustainability' in the outcome has been mandatory. It has gone beyond a joke to become a prostitution of integrity.

Prompete, I have no idea why you are bringing climate change into it - the article was about the merits or otherwise of competitive funding of research vs just giving the universities more money and seeing what they do with it.

But seeing as you care, 597 of the 3425 ARC Discovery Project applications last year claimed to address in some way the National Research Priority Area "An Environmentally Sustainable Australia," of which 120 (or 20.1%) were actually funded. Conversely, 1370 applications fell under "Frontier Technologies for Building and Transforming Australian Industries" of which 315 (22.99%) were funded. See URL below. Alternatively you can read the abstracts of all 732 successful grants for last year and see them for yourself instead of making such clearly uninformed claims.

http://www.arc.gov.au/ncgp/dp/DP13_selrpt.htm#11
http://www.arc.gov.au/pdf/DP13/DP13_Listing_by_all_State_Organisation.pdf

Back on topic, if there is a single thing that could be done to make Australian universities leaner and more competitive in both research and teaching it would be to abolish the concept of tenure (otherwise known as cushy academic job for life) altogether. I'm all for it, but Dr Collits sitting in a plum Associate Professorial position ($119k+ p.a.) might well not agree.

CJean. Point taken. Frustration remains with 'non-ARC' finding submissions however. Off topic regarding this article.

Hmmm. Well according the Taleb (Black Swan, Penguin) most of our useful 'research' outcomes have been the result of serendipity.

If we knew what the research would uncover, then we wouldn't need to do it!

If we do know what we expect, then it's termed 'development'.

Government boards, committees etc. are a repository for rent seekers who are usually only authorised to say "no".

We need to get rid of the maze of parasitic committees to massively cut our costs and free Australians up to be creative doers, rather than tremulous worriers.