HIGH FLYERS THINK TANK
National Research Priorities Strategic Forum
The Shine Dome, Canberra, 26-27 June 2002
Far from the maddening crowds: A Tasmanian perspective on research priorities
by Andrew Glenn
Andrew Glenn is Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research) at the University of Tasmania. He was formerly Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research) and held a Personal Chair in Microbiology and Biochemistry at Murdoch University. His research interests include the biology and biochemistry of root nodule bacteria. He has published over 100 refereed journal articles, supervised 18 research higher degree students, received continuous ARC funding since 1977 and raised total external research funding of $3.6 million. He is a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, Director of Intellinc Pty Ltd, Unitas Pty Ltd, and the Tasmanian Innovation Board and a member of the Tasmanian Science and Technology Council.
I am going to take a fairly university-centric view and to try to use Tasmania as, if you like, a case history of an area where we have actually been dealing with priorities and themes for the last six years, and to try to look at some of the outcomes of what we as an institution have been doing. In the Tasmanian context, we are the largest and the most diverse research organisation in the state.
This is probably obvious to most people but I am going to say it anyway. Universities that are away from the major metropolitan centres actually provide an important asset to their regions. Obviously, educational opportunities we take for granted. Infrastructure facilities are often the major infrastructure facilities for the cultural, indeed sometimes the social, life of the region. The universities are also significant generators of employment. Unfortunately, the University of Tasmania is the second largest employer in the state. Anything which affects the university would have very significant impacts on the capacity of the state to employ highly skilled people. And then of course there is the R&D capability.
The approach that the University of Tasmania has taken – and we now have a significant degree of alignment with state government policy – is to strategically utilise competitive or comparative advantage of location or the circumstances of Tasmania. I will give you an example, the Australian Antarctic Division's location in Kingston, just south of Hobart. CSIRO Marine Research has its headquarters there; there are more temperate-marine scientists in Hobart than anywhere else in the country. And so the Antarctic related research is an obvious thing to consider in relation to Tasmania. There are large areas of the state that are wilderness areas; some of them are World Heritage listed areas. Tasmania is a very good base for doing population studies, health studies of one kind or another, but looking at broader issues of population and the community. And lastly there are a lot of the traditional industries like agriculture, aquaculture, forestry and so on, and then more recently industries like IT and biotech.
In 1996 the university set four theme areas:
Antarctic and Southern Ocean; Environment and Wilderness; Population and Community; and State and National Development. These themes are multidisciplinary. For example, in Antarctic and Southern Ocean, we look at climate change and the biology of Antarctic organisms, but we are also looking at important policy and law initiatives. In relation to environment and wilderness, again we are not just talking about science but we are talking about environmental law, environmental policy, sociology, environmental philosophy, not forgetting the visual arts. The university has a very strong commitment to the visual and performing arts, and has a very strong research activity. In fact, we have got something like 40 full-time PhD students in the visual arts.
In order to make themes work, they need to be supported in a variety of ways. So we support them financially; we strategically give priority to the allocation of research higher degree and RTS places to the priority areas or to themes; we use strategic funds to start new initiatives in the themes; and we also make sure that we link the infrastructure with these themes.
The second part of what I want to say relates to the use of resources. If we are, in the national priority exercise, going to be in a budget neutral situation, then using money in a smarter way becomes really important. Tasmania is the smallest and also the least wealthy state in the Commonwealth. It is imperative for us to use the scarce resources in the most effective way. So the university and the state government signed a fairly extensive partnership agreement in 2000. That built on two very substantial partnerships it had already established. The university and the state government, in 1997, set up a joint institute within the University of Tasmania to deal with the agricultural research in the state, and then in 1998 another institute to deal with aquaculture and fisheries.
The success of those institutes in delivering for the state government agenda and also for the university meant that we now have set up a law reform institute where all the scholarship, all of the background work that will underpin law reform in the state will be done by the university, we are getting support for the Menzies Institute for Population Research, we are looking at an environment institute, we are about to set up a law enforcement institute – combining the resources of the university and the state government.
One of the drivers for the university is for us to try to establish a number of areas of critical mass where there is a significant infrastructure support. As an institution we know that unless we can do that, we are going to drop out of the research environment in Australia. This is a survival tactic for us, and indeed I would suggest it is a survival tactic for the future of this nation. These activities that I have talked about all relate very closely to the university's theme areas: to state development, to the population and community, to the environment or to the Antarctic activity.
One thing that it is really interesting to see over the years has been the coming together of people from different disciplines. So, we have just appointed a Professorial Chair in Rural Sociology, in the Institute of Agriculture. That person is now linking with the sociologists in the Faculty of Arts and people in the Faculty of Education, and being a real catalyst for bringing people together in cooperative research. We have also set up an agricultural law unit within the Institute of Agricultural Research.
The same is true in tourism. Typically our research in the past has largely focused on the environment or on the economics of tourism. What we are now finding is people coming together from a range of disciplines – sociology, English literature, history, Aboriginal studies – and are beginning to address significant issues of cultural heritage. We are finding that because of this partnership the state government, through Tourism Tasmania, is actually now beginning to provide resources to support this kind of research.
One of the things the university did was to set up a number of institutes. I guess we really need to be able to look at if that idea that people were talking about, back in 1996, has had any impact on the university and its capacity to establish areas of critical mass. Can you get the resources, can you get the staff, can you get the students who are working in particular areas of research? I just want to give you some examples, and while research students numbers and money do not necessarily mean a great deal about quality, I think they nevertheless are saying something about, if you like, the capacity, the potential that you have got to really be making significant contributions.
I am going to go through the five institutes in the university. All of these have external incomes of between $3 million and $5.5 million, and they have by and large very substantial research/higher degree student load. What this does is to give us the capacity of getting large numbers of people working cooperatively, having the infrastructure, getting the library facilities, to be able to support people in an appropriate way.
As a measure of how this might be tracking – and it is early days yet, we are going into our sixth year of this as a guide for the university and the state – the university senior executive and senior bureaucrats meet on a quarterly basis and identify critical issues for the state and critical issues for the university in terms of the state's R&D needs. These are finding expression through the Tasmanian Science and Technology Council.
We come to the strategy in terms of income. That is the way in which the university's income has grown over the last five years. This is a way, it seems to us, of being able to establish some very significant activities. To give you some idea, something like 75 per cent of all the university's research income, 75 per cent of all the research students and 70 per cent of all the publications are now coming out of those theme areas. And the connections between various people are growing, and growing very significantly.
In terms of the approach that we and the state are now taking to themes, firstly they need to be highly strategic. They need to address a need for the state or a competitive or comparative advantage that you can derive from doing the work in a particular location. The university uses most of the research funding, obviously, to employ people. Employment is a huge driver for the state government. It involves researchers across different disciplines. We are at what I would call phase 2 in terms of the involvement of people from different disciplines. Although we are engaging people in the different disciplines, I think we are still very much in the silo mentality; we are really not moving, at this stage, to large numbers of teams that are truly multidisciplinary, where a group of people from different disciplines are working on the same problem.
I think there is a need to focus resources, to focus spending on infrastructure and appointments. One of the most strategic drivers universities have is their appointment of staff. Staff appointments are big investments, and so we need to think about the time that we are going to embrace particular priority areas. These cannot be turned on and off rapidly. And we also need to look at how we can link research/higher degree students with priority areas – I would say the driver for me is: how can you provide the best working environment for researchers, how can you provide the best experience and the best training for research/higher degree students? – and then to look at partnerships with state government, and indeed with a whole range of other people, but in our case the state government is a particularly important partner, and then to review the performance and to make such changes as are required. We are going through a process of reviewing themes within the state now and we probably will make some changes, but they will be changes at the margins rather than fundamentally changing the approach.
Just four implications that I think are very obvious to derive from what I have said so far, in terms of the national priority exercise. The thematic approach must be strategic. Secondly, there must be a limited number of themes, and I think we should be aiming to cross the boundaries of the disciplines if we are truly going to get the answers to the great questions that we are going to pose. And, lastly, we must achieve the benefits of genuine partnerships. We are going to have to learn to live with the tension that we will both compete and also partner and collaborate. I think many of us as institutions and research organisations still have lessons to learn about partnerships and collaboration. Collaboration is not about 'I win, you lose'. I think that is still a kind of mindset that some of us sometimes have about collaboration. Collaboration has got to be about both partners winning and gaining from the relationship.
I have gone very quickly through the Tasmanian experience. We have tried the approach of themes. So far, for us as an institution, we believe that this has been a successful approach to beginning to focus some areas of research and for us to become a significant player. I would suggest in some of those areas we now have a base that we can use to become a significant international player in some of those areas, and to use the same approach to be driving new areas.
