MEASURING EXCELLENCE IN RESEARCH AND RESEARCH TRAINING
Canberra, 22 June 2004

Open forum discussion

Phil McFadden (Chair) – If I could do just a bit of a wrap-up.

One thing I heard throughout each group's report was the cry for diversity, the need to maintain diversity, the need not to have a one size fits all response – the need to move away from simple metric measures as a one size fits all, the need to take into account the different needs of each of the groups. One thing nobody has mentioned is that what we are actually seeking there is moving away from a very simplistic method that is currently being used, which measures quantity, to a much more complex system in order to be able to measure quality.

That has resource implications somewhere along the line, but I guess the thing is that we want this done properly, and if you are going to do it properly you are going to have to accept the consequences of doing it properly.

In the training I heard the need for courage at one’s centre to be able to look at their students and see whether in fact they are giving you quality. I remember I once made the mistake of trying to bring a PhD student to a halt at two years, and I still bear the scars, but I think you were dead right that it would be much better for the student had they gone on to doing something that suited them better. We need the courage.

We need to avoid the pressure of an artificial shortening in time for a piece of work that in fact deserves five years to train the student and develop the student into a really self-thinking creature. If it is going to take five years, then sometimes that is worth it and we shouldn’t have these artificial impositions that bring it to a halt in some shorter period of time.

We need to encourage and engender mobility between different universities. We need to engender different ways of measuring for the different communities.

So there was a lot of meat in that. In essence, every part of it spoke about the need for being responsive to the requirements of that particular area. One particularly strong statement that I heard from John Beaton, and that I think has got a lot of validity to it, is that need for faith in the peer review. If you don’t have faith in the peer review, where are you going to go to get advice about quality? I think one of the things that we need to do is to make certain that we can engender, in the funding bodies, faith in the peer system, faith in the expert advice. That is going to be central to our ability to convince people.

One thing that we were a bit short on, in terms of what was discussed – and it is of course because it is the very difficult thing – is that although we spoke a lot about the generalities of ‘We should avoid biasing against early-career researchers,’ but the question is how. What method are we going to be able to use to actually judge that this person is excellent and help them, and not bias it against those people? So to some extent we need to think a little bit more deeply, I think, about the ‘how’. A lot of what was expressed was, of course, very valuable. But it is not valuable unless we can start articulating some of the measures that we can use to actually start achieving that.

Questions/discussion

Miriam Goodwin – One thing I also note that we haven’t really thoug