[lg policy] Australia:

[Harold Schiffman]

Let's translate the research funding rules

    by: Bernard Lane
    From: The Australian
    October 04, 2011 12:00AM




LANGUAGE academics will have to play the politics of research
evaluation if they want the true value of their work to be recognised,
according to language policy expert Joe Lo Bianco. "Retrospective and
far from perfect measures of research performance can lead to
government disinvestment in areas judged to constitute poor
performance,'' he said.

He was speaking at the first national meeting of the Languages and
Cultures Network for Australian Universities, staged last week at the
University of Melbourne.

Professor Lo Bianco, president of the Australian Academy of the
Humanities, told the meeting that the results of the Excellence in
Research for Australia evaluation exercise reflected a long history of
inadequate and erratic funding for languages.

"The overall conclusion from a sober reflection on ERA in the context
of a long history of funding differentials is that in general terms
performance is relative to opportunity, and opportunity is structured
by both external investment and esteem by the host institution,'' he
said.
He said the LCNAU, set up with a two year grant from the Australian
Learning and Teaching Council, had a role to play as a ``strategic
agent promoting a `tutor to professor' alliance on behalf of a
permanent place for languages in the Australian academy.

"I can count a large number of national leadership centres in
languages that have been created with fanfare and high hopes since the
1990s only to have imposed on them inappropriate market economy-based
accountabilities and then to fold in a few years. "Research has
documented a steady decline in the number of languages offered at
university level and declines in the enrolled candidature. "What we
need, essentially, is to normalise the place and standing of our
field.''

He said much of the work to be done by the LCNAU would be across
disciplines and institutions but there was another imperative. "A key
field of engagement which is urgently required relates to the politics
of research evaluation and how research is documented and reported,
and its connection to funding,'' he said.

"We need to engage with what people mean when they talk of
'innovation' and 'national development' and direct these notions to
include society, social groups, intellectual and cultural
development.''

In March, the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research,
Kim Carr commended the strong research performance of the humanities,
arts and social sciences, saying this sector "plays an important role
in our nation's development and helps to drive innovation across the
economy''.

Professor Lo Bianco agreed with Senator Carr on the sector's strong
performance but "from this point on, things start to get dodgy for
many language advocates, and certainly for me''.

He suspected a narrow view of development, one reduced to economic success.

"We could expand the Minister's claim that research should support
innovation by including the language of social innovation, and
extending usefulness from labour market indicators to individual
learners, groups of learners, to the social climate of acceptance of
minorities, of foreigners, of foreign ideas and, most abstractly, but
perhaps most importantly, [to the idea that] languages are 'useful' to
the acceptance and understanding of difference itself,'' he said.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/time-to-translate-the-politics-of-research-funding/story-e6frgcjx-1226154344296

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