Humanities lose out on research funding

The humanities are at the end of the research funding queue – perhaps they need their own. By Jeremy Gilling. Late last year the Minister for Industry, Science and Research, Kim Carr, told the National Press Club that the humanities “make a terrible mistake when they claim support on the basis of their commercial value … It is their intrinsic value we should treasure them for.” How well does this noble sentiment translate into research funding support? Not very well at all, conclude UWA’s Tim Pitman and Judith Berman. Pitman and Berman present the results of their study of the experiences of humanities researchers in securing competitive national research funding in the November issue of the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management. Whatever the metric employed, it is clear that the humanities fall well short of parity with the other three academies: science, social sciences, and technological sciences and engineering. This impacts not just on the strength of research in the humanities. The authors argue that because a university’s prestige and viability are increasingly a function of its success in attracting research income. To some extent it can even be viewed as “a proxy for research quality” – so the individuals and discipline areas are increasingly likely to be resourced by the university according to the same criterion. Pitman and Berman analysed all 6310 applications for funding under the ARC linkage projects scheme between 2002 and 2007, and the 2065 projects whose applications were successful. They chose the Linkage projects because these, unlike the Discovery projects, require researchers to seek matching funding from one or more partner organisations. The scheme also has no a priori bias towards any discipline group, and claims to be indifferent between economic, social and cultural benefits. They found that humanities projects accounted for just 6.7 per cent of funded applications and 6.4 per cent of funds awarded. By contrast, science projects accounted for nearly 40 per cent of funds; social sciences, and technological sciences and engineering, 27 per cent each. To compound the inequity, the humanities share shrank substantially over the six-year period under view. Humanities fared slightly less worse on a funding per successful application basis – a little better than social sciences, but substantially behind the science-based disciplines. This, the authors say, is because the humanities are much more dependent on local government and not-for-profit organisations, both of which are typically cash-strapped and hence much more likely to offer mainly in-kind support. The ARC requires 20 per cent of support to be in cash, which imposes a low ceiling on the matching support that a humanities applicant can commit to. For this reason, the humanities are driven to seek multiple partners, resulting in higher levels of administrative complexity, much longer application lead times and plenty of frustration. Pitman told Campus Review that although the period they researched predates the current government and minister, he was sceptical that much would change in the short term. “Our research suggests that the humanities could be well advised to turn the process on its head. Instead of selecting the funding scheme and tailoring their research to the scheme, they should perhaps start from the basis of their research and look for funding sources that provide a natural fit.” Pitman and Berman also argue that the humanities tend to miss opportunities to articulate the potential benefits of their research in the favoured economic and social lexicon. For example, a proposal to explore the Turkish side of the Gallipoli campaign focuses on the cultural benefits it would deliver, whereas it would have been tactically wiser to stress its potential political, trade and migration spin-offs. Ultimately, Pitman said, the government should consider severing the humanities from the Linkage scheme and provide a separate humanities-only scheme. “It could be less generous than the Linkage scheme, but it would be tailored to the humanities, and perhaps also the social sciences,” he said. “The main difference would be removal of the requirement for a cash contribution from the partner bodies. The cash would come exclusively from the government.”