Universities under microscope

UNIVERSITY research projects that attract taxpayer funding will be given a greater level of scrutiny to make sure they directly tackle some of the issues facing Australians.

The Turnbull Government will today move to ensure university research is having a real-life effect for the $3.5 billion that Australian taxpayers invest in research.

Current research projects that have attracted almost $500,000 in taxpayer funds at Melbourne universities include a study of how “male and female artisans and producers of manufactured goods in the 18th century played a largely forgotten role in transferring applied knowledge between European centres”.

More than $180,000 went towards a group of Melbourne University academics to analyse “shifts and changes in women’s language, discourse and identities by examining ethnographic data of a longitudinal research project into working-class women’s life trajectories in Kobe, Japan”.

An RMIT project was given $175,000 to study South African asbestos and gold miners’ political and legal struggles for social justice.

Federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham said taxpayers expected to see how their investment in research was paying dividends.

Under the new measures, universities will have to make clear how much income has been made by commercialising research and how much income is made for each researcher. Institutions will also be required to make detailed explanations — in plain English — of how their research has had an effect.

A Productivity Commission report last week found universities were too focused on publishing research, with the prospects of staff depending more on their publishing resume than teaching record.

The commission found in 2011 that 80 per cent of staff at universities wanted to “raise their publication profile” or to “find more time for research”.

It said university rankings were more driven towards the quality of staff research instead of teaching performance.

“Research is about discovery, but it also needs to be about directly tackling some of the issues Australia faces,” Senator Birmingham said.

“We want to keep universities focused on research that has wider benefits.”