An overhaul of grant schemes has highlighted the years of compromise that have transformed the Australian Research Council (ARC) into a de facto funder of academic jobs.

Sharath Sriram, president of Science and Technology Australia, said the ongoing review of competitive grants was an opportunity for the ARC to rethink how its fellowships are used to underwrite salaries.

He said rather than covering professors¡¯ full wages, the fellowships should only be used to ¡°buy out¡± their teaching time ¨C ostensibly 40 per cent of their workloads. ¡°If [they are] on a continuing position already, they shouldn¡¯t be given a full fellowship,¡± Sriram said.

¡°Bluntly, why are we saving the universities the other 60 per cent? We [could] fund two-and-a-half times the number of fellowships.¡±

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Sriram said the Australian Laureate Fellowships, which pay the salaries of top-flight researchers for up to five years, were treated as a ¡°badge of honour¡± by recipients. ¡°Could the funding be used in a better way? As a cost-benefit analysis for the taxpayer, it¡¯s a tough justification.¡±

But higher education researcher Gwilym Croucher said universities were not necessarily ¡°double-dipping¡± on ARC funds, because Laureate grant recipients generally freed up resources to support their colleagues¡¯ research.

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¡°The business-as-usual work continues in different ways,¡± said Croucher, deputy director of the University of Melbourne¡¯s Centre for the Study of Higher Education. ¡°Universities are devoting a huge amount of staff time to these projects.

¡°It can be a challenge for some institutions if people win projects that require a large time commitment ¨C particularly for smaller institutions that don¡¯t have the scale or resource base.¡±

Monash University higher education analyst Andrew Norton said that in an ideal world, universities would pay academics¡¯ salaries and ARC funds would cover the ¡°marginal costs¡± of research projects. But years of waning support for research had moved Australia a long way from that ideal.

Norton said ¡°implied research funding¡± had been stripped from teaching grants through the Job-ready Graduates changes of 2021, while growth in the Research Support Programme ¨C which helps cover overhead expenses ¨C had not kept pace with grant income.

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Meanwhile, universities¡¯ major source of discretionary income to cover the shortfall ¨C international students¡¯ fees ¨C was in decline. And the government¡¯s efforts to reduce fixed-term university employment conflicted with its ¡°transactional approach¡± to higher education funding, which encouraged fixed-term contracts.

¡°The 2020s have undermined the institutional foundations of ongoing academic research employment,¡± Norton said. ¡°If the government does not have a model for funding [it], then the ARC paying it starts to make sense.¡±

Peter Bentley, policy adviser to the Innovative Research Universities, said the ARC review proposals seemed like ¡°pushback¡± against universities that had become too reliant on research grants to cover their salaries. The review¡¯s proposal for two-year ¡°embedded¡± fellowships implied a university responsibility to employ researchers whose fellowships had expired.

¡°It¡¯s like we¡¯re trying to piece back together the teaching-research nexus,¡± Bentley said. ¡°Lower-ranked academic positions over the past couple of decades have often been research-only or teaching-only. Teaching-and-research roles provide job security, but there are far fewer of them in early-career positions.¡±

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The Universities Accord said the research workforce should be considered a shared responsibility of research funders and universities, among other parties, and recommended the development of a research workforce development strategy.

Croucher said research funding had become so intermingled with other higher education resourcing arrangements that any attempts to tinker with the system inevitably had impacts elsewhere.

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¡°There¡¯s an assumption that universities will be able to support staffing costs for these projects. It might be right in concept, but it doesn¡¯t always work in practice.¡±

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com