What can’t be measured can’t be perverted

Chatting to Greggie the other night I learned that Australian universities are all heavily investing in medical and bio research, primarily by importing successful and relevant academic researchers in the area, and also poaching the same off each other.

The motivation is to halt their collective slide down the global university rankings as Asian countries invest in their universities

Since medical research has a higher ‘impact’ factor, a dollar investment in research in this area offers a better impact on the university rankings than a dollar invested in something useful and boring like water treatment technology.

The constraining factor of course is that there is still the same limited NH&MRC research budget available for this medical research and an increasing demand for it as the universities all heavy up in these research areas.

Our universities need their high rankings because it impacts the fees that they can charge off foreign students, which they rely upon to stay solvent.

This scenario begs a few questions:

1. How did we get into this situation? Its a very unholy downward spiral with no likelihood of unspiralling.

2. Having said that, it’s going to have to break for anything to change. And it will eventually. Everyone in the system seems to have Stockholm Syndrome and they don’t see the problem, or at the very least they have a fear of ‘calling’ the situation.

3. How much medical research can a Koala Bear? We in Australia hardly use any of our research results in the area as it is and we import most of the practical medical technologies that are widely used.

4. Why O’ why does medical research have such a high impact factor? Because a lot of people are doing it, which leads to more citations, and hence a higher impact factor. Ever seen such a circular justification? ‘Ship of Fools’ territory.

5. You have to think we would be better placed in our small economy skating away from the pack and specialising in something less mainstream than medical research where we at least have a chance of being first rate. This is sort of like being able to win the world cup in Rugby League whereas we have no chance in Soccer. Or playing a game such as AFL that nobody else has even heard of.

6. Our economy is mostly services and then resources and agriculture. Maybe our research efforts could focus here? What an odd thought.

7. I wonder if anyone seriously believes our universities have improved since they started focusing on the foreign student dollar?

8. If they are going to run our universities into the ground then at least turn them into for profit organisations and completely privatise them. They would have at least a fighting chance of being successful at this unholy pilgrimage. The first thing they would do is hire proper management.

Enough said.