The Academy supports, in principle, giving universities room to build genuine depth in areas of comparative advantage.
Our support is conditional, however, on research specialisation enabling targeted research investment without sacrificing the breadth of scholarship, disciplinary capability and educational provision of Australian universities, or weakening Australia’s national knowledge system.
The Academy makes the following recommendations:
- Develop a national framework for demonstrating depth, scale and sustainability at both the national and institutional level.
- Establish a process for maintaining nationally significant research where there is ‘market failure’.
- That the revised Threshold Standards distinguish explicitly between:
- Research specialisation, where significant research capability and investment may be targeted; and
- University-wide scholarship and educational capability, which should continue to extend across the institution’s teaching and qualification profile.
Specialisation could hollow out national capability
The Academy’s central concern is that voluntary, market-driven specialisation will tend to concentrate research capability in fields with the strongest immediate funding or student demand. These are not always the fields Australia needs most.
Disciplines could be put at risk if research support is withdrawn, including disciplines which are:
- strategically important but small in enrolment
- essential to national security and sovereign capability
- tied to cultural heritage and identity, or,
- vulnerable to a sudden loss of specialist expertise.
Australia’s own experience of declining language capability and diminished regional expertise demonstrates how difficult lost capability can be to rebuild.
The Academy suggests that the Government establish an explicit mechanism for national capability stewardship.
ATEC’s stewardship role and the use of individual institutional compacts may provide part of this mechanism, but they should not be assumed to provide a complete solution. A national capability framework should identify disciplines and capabilities of strategic significance, monitor their distribution and health across the sector, and provide mechanisms for maintaining or rebuilding capability where market incentives alone are insufficient.
Overall, specialisation should be welcomed where it strengthens research excellence and institutional distinctiveness, but not where it comes at the expense of the breadth and resilience of Australia’s national knowledge system.
This is particularly important for the humanities, arts and social sciences, whose contribution to Australia’s cultural life, democratic institutions, international engagement and capacity to govern technological change is not captured by narrow metrics such as infrastructure spend or research income alone.
