Farida Iqbal
Thought voluntary student unionism was bad enough? Education minister Brendan Nelson has another nasty attack on education up his sleeve — RQF, or Research Quality Framework, which is designed to monitor the "quality" and "impact" of research from universities and other research bodies, with funding allocated accordingly.
The final form for the proposed RQF is yet to be decided. But the issues paper released by Nelson on March 29 makes the government's neoliberal agenda clear. "Assessing the quality and impact of research in Australia" proposes that research "impact" should be measured according to its benefit to "end users". In other words, research that benefits big business will most probably rate more highly than research that does not, and will consequently receive more funding.
A central concern with RQF is its likely limit on academic freedom. We can hazard a guess at what Nelson's idea of "quality research" might be. But it is unlikely to include research into the psychological state of refugees who finds the mandatory detention system wanting, research into suicide rates among queer youth, research into working conditions in the casualised labour force, or research into violence against women. Research explicitly critical of the government may be the hardest hit.
The experience of New Zealand and UK universities, with similar schemes, indicates that existing equity issues in academia will be exacerbated if an RQF is introduced.
Larger urban universities fare better than smaller rural ones. In New Zealand, work produced by male and white researchers has consistently scored higher on the "quality" scale than that produced by women and Maori researchers. This does not reflect the actual quality of research produced by marginalised universities or researchers who come from marginalised groups; it is a reflection on whose research sells better when funding is tied to the market.
Nelson has indicated there will be no buts about this: an RQF will be introduced, perhaps as early as 2007. But if student and trade unions' campaigns against voluntary student unionism and the new industrial relations laws force the government back, Nelson's claims of inevitability will be cast into doubt.
From Green Left Weekly, August 24, 2005.
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