The Tertiary Education Commission recently announced that it would attempt to end “the widespread game of research funding.”
Welcoming the move, Tertiary Education Union Dr Sandra Grey said that Universities have tried to change their research rankings compared to other universities by ‘hiding’ staff they consider will compare poorly in terms of research output.
“Universities have changed people’s employment agreements, restructured departments and people’s jobs and in some cases made academics redundant simply so that they can appear higher on a rankings ladder than other universities,” she said.
The commission has released an initial audit of the performance based research fund exercise carried out by KPMG. The audit showed a range of problems with the way institutions were engaging the exercise, confirming that gaming has been occurring in the research funding exercise.
TEC General Manager (Strategy, Planning and Information) David Nicholson told the Otago Daily Times that the Commission was taking the issues raised in the audit seriously and was concerned the way institutions managed their staff could affect their ranking on league tables.
“We are now consulting with the sector to determine if there is a more meaningful way to report the league tables,” he said.
Dr Grey said that competitive funding, by its nature, can create perverse incentives. In this case, the perverse outcome has been job insecurity for many academics, she said.
“TEU has consistently and publicly lobbied the Commission about this issue for a long time and we are glad to see that our concerns have been recognised.
“I hope that this review and consultation on performance based research funding will mean that good teachers and emerging researchers at universities can have more job security,” she said.
Source: Tertiary Education Union
