Opinion
When I was a student, I went cycling across the west of Scotland. I have never been so wet.
But there were also sunny periods, and one day I met a local cyclist, and we rode together for a while. I learnt a lot about his country as we chatted. At one point we passed a deserted farmhouse (a croft), nestled splendidly in an emerald-green glen, but showing signs of abandonment and decay. It wouldn’t last much longer.
“This place is so beautiful” I said, “It’s stunning, picturesque, almost magical. Why doesn’t anyone live here?”
My Scottish companion answered, “Why don’t you f…ing live here?”
I thought about it.
Throughout history people from the countryside have made huge contributions. Homer lived on a small island, the Brontes on a wild moor, and Jane Austen in a sleepy village. Mendel lived in a monastery, Newton laid the foundations for physics while isolating away from Cambridge during a pandemic, and Einstein began transforming physics alone, while working as a patent attorney.
But perhaps these pioneers were harvesting low hanging fruit. Magnificent fruit of the highest quality, but they did not need ladders to get their hands on the prize.
As a molecular biologist I need ladders to harvest higher hanging fruit.
Physical infrastructure and core facilities, and cultural infrastructure, expert colleagues. Critical mass seems to underly many projects today and some degree of multi-disciplinary collaboration is often important, so university campuses and research precincts are important.
It is harder for someone like me to do competitive research while restoring a collapsing croft overlooking the Isle of Mull.
Accordingly, academics from many modern disciplines choose not to live in deserted crofts, but move instead to precincts in big cities, and some staff and students opt for Group of Eight (Go8) universities.
They do this because of the ladders – the material core facilities (microscopes, computers, genome sequencing, and proteomics etc) and the cultural infrastructure related to being immersed among colleagues from every discipline, addicted to research and connected across the globe.
Recently, I have heard it said that Go8 universities arrogantly horde too much funding and if only it were distributed more broadly, then everyone would benefit.
Of course, we all have biases based on our experiences, but I worry this is a dangerous idea for Australia. The answer is not to reduce funding for the Go8, surely it is to fund others more with needs-based funding.
No one has too much funding – the full cost of research (ladder maintenance) is not funded in Australia (except via international student fees – so, of course, in the absence of a government research strategy, Go8s want to enrol international students).
Happily, most Australian Go8 ladders are shared under the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS). Cutting and distributing pieces wouldn’t help because they are already too short by modern standards.
We need to think about sovereign capability and security. If we face a pandemic or a geopolitical threat, won’t we want even taller ladders to pluck out new vaccines or devise drone or cyber defence capabilities?
Even in the absence of threats, we’ll still want taller ladders to drive productivity, enable us to see further, and to nurture a future facing society of creative innovation that can finally diversity our economy.
How would cutting any ladders in half and sharing the pieces help?
When it comes to social welfare and hardship, sharing does help. As the Prime Minister said, ‘no one should be left behind’, but he next said, ‘and no one should be held back’. Would holding back the Group of Eight make Australia more prosperous. The reflex urge to flatten tall poppies helps no one.
Instead, we need a proper strategy to accelerate the path of research and discovery, translating more Australian inventions and technologies into transformative products, and embedding a culture of innovation. We know all this – WiFi, long wearing contact lenses, bionic ears, vanadium batteries, solar cells, Gardasil, stem cell growth factors etc.
We live in a sunny country. We can build our own future.
But it will depend on our choices. Will we be like Singapore and invest in research for the good of all, pushing forward where we can and enjoying the fruits of research to ensure that no one is left behind?
Or will we keep arguing that it is best to cap international enrolments, omit a research strategy, and cut up the ladders, and the microscopes, and the staff who maintain them, and distribute the lot so that perceived inequities and asymmetries in funding can be resolved, at a profound cost to everyone in our country?
Professor Merlin Crossley is Deputy Vice-Chancellor Academic Quality at UNSW, which is a Group of Eight University.