From the Vice Chancellor
The changing higher education landscape
Policy
churn is a consistent feature of the environment for higher education but
the pace of review and announcements from Canberra is hectic at present.
Every aspect of higher education – governance, teaching, research,
relationships with government, with international partners and with
communities, is being scrutinised and is open to possible change. As it is
very hard to predict how these separate policy initiatives will come
together to position any institution for the future, we have held a retreat
for the University’s leaders, initiated forums on each campus and are
maintaining a website to ensure staff have access to information about what
is happening and to UniSA’s position on each of these issues.
Of particular importance is the discussion underway about a new approach to evaluating the quality of research. Education Minister Brendan Nelson has established a group, chaired by Sir Gareth Roberts from the UK, to recommend a new framework for evaluation of the quality of research in Australia. The group is moving towards finalisation of a proposal for the Minster’s consideration and representatives from each University attended the final public event – a National Stakeholder’s Forum last month in Canberra.
There was a surprising level of agreement at the Forum about a preferred model and acceptance that it would be used to drive allocation of funds for support of research in Australia’s universities. However, the devil is always in the detail and there is no clarity yet about how the agreed broad approach might translate into a workable model for funding research. There will be pilots in a number of universities later this year and we can expect close attention nationally to what they demonstrate about the interrelationship of parameters within the model.
UniSA will need to be very vigilant as the new model is developed and trialled. While our research performance is improving and our research income is on a par with older universities like Latrobe, Macquarie, Deakin and Wollongong, we are still new to this game. The established universities have had decades to build research infrastructure, recruit staff and position themselves for any policy turbulence.
While we sit somewhere in the middle of Australian universities on a range of performance measures and can demonstrate substantial increases in research income, publications and research degree completions in the last decade, we are still developing research capacity across the entire academic profile.
UniSA is on a trajectory of change and has some nationally and internationally competitive areas of research excellence but much of our strength is in applied rather than blue sky research and meaningful measurement of the quality of such research does not lie in citation indices or international peer review. It lies with feedback on whether the research has proved useful to those wishing to solve problems in industry and in communities.
That is called “impact’’ and, while citizens and government can
articulate why it is important, the international academic community has
taken a very conservative view about “impact”. That conservatism was
apparent among some of our colleagues at the National Stakeholders Forum and
UniSA will need to be careful that, within any framework for quality that is
implemented, the impact of research is given equal status with its
“excellence” internationally.