I remember how it was -- JR
Thursday, March 10, 2022
Australian universities criticise minister’s research veto powers
Vetoing apparenty silly and trivial research grants has always been politically available to avoid public criticisms about a waste of taxpayers' money
University leaders have warned of a chilling effect on research caused by the federal education minister’s ability to veto funding grants, saying their institutions were at risk of losing world-class academics to overseas competitors.
In a decision that has been widely criticised by academics, acting Education Minister Stuart Robert vetoed Australian Research Council (ARC) funding to six humanities projects for 2022 on Christmas Eve – the third time in four years the power has been used by the Coalition.
Appearing at a Senate inquiry on Wednesday, university chiefs and academic leaders were in lockstep in raising concerns about the lack of transparency over the ministerial intervention and the singling out of individual grants for rejection without detailed explanation. But they were divided over a Greens proposal to abolish the veto, with the Senate’s education committee examining the merits of a bill by senator Mehreen Faruqi that would amend ARC legislation to achieve this.
Supporting the bill, ANU vice-chancellor Brian Schmidt said the minister’s veto power was a “serious problem” that was compromising universities’ ability to attract and retain world-class academics, saying the issue had been raised with him by top researchers from overseas competitor institutions.
“People around the globe who I talk to, trying to recruit [them] to come to Australia, have noticed what’s going on. [They] have expressed their concerns to the point of saying ‘I am not going to come to Australia until you sort this out’,” Professor Schmidt told the inquiry. “It is literally affecting my ability to attract talent to Australia”.
Professor James McCluskey, University of Melbourne deputy vice-chancellor research, said the veto power was a “significant departure from world’s best practice”, noting that research councils in the US and UK were autonomous and not subject to ministerial intervention.
Western Sydney University had two grants vetoed in the 2022 funding round, with deputy vice-chancellor Deborah Sweeney telling the inquiry the intervention had had “a chilling, devastating and demoralising effect” on those researchers.
The ANU, University of Melbourne, Western Sydney University and the University of Tasmania support removing the veto power – a position that has been also been endorsed by Universities Australia and Group of Eight lobby groups.
But some universities – including the Australian Catholic University and Queensland University of Technology – have departed from this view arguing that the ministerial veto should be rarely used, but not be scrapped entirely. Instead, they support legislative changes that would improve transparency over the decision-making process, such as requiring the minister to provide an explanation to the Parliament detailing why projects were rejected.
Dr John Byron, from QUT, said completely removing the veto power was not “politically realistic or necessarily democratically desirable”, telling the inquiry that the principles of responsible government meant the minister must retain oversight of funding decisions.
Monash University deputy vice-chancellor Rebekah Brown said the lack of transparency in the veto process was diminishing credibility in the ARC’s peer-review process, and gave evidence about how a project vetoed in 2018 had significantly affected the university’s broader program of humanities research.
“The project was eventually funded two years later, but missed a significant opportunity in those intervening two years to make a global impact [and] to collect really important data during that two-year period,” she said.
Under the ARC process, an independent college of experts reviews the grant applications, worth between $30,000 and $500,000 a year, and makes recommendations for approval.
The six rejected projects included one about student climate protests and democracy, and one about religion in science fiction and fantasy novels. Two were about modern China, and two were about English literature.
Mr Robert has claimed that the six projects, which were all recommended for approval by the ARC, did not demonstrate value for taxpayers’ money or contribute to the national interest. He approved 98.8 per cent of projects recommended.
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Even With ‘Defund the Police’ Discredited, Some Schools May Still Shun the Police
Des Moines this week suffered its first fatal school shooting – reigniting a controversy in the city after the district removed police officers from its schools last year.
Police say a group of teenagers in vehicles outside Des Moines' East High School fired multiple rounds onto school property on Monday, killing a 15-year-old boy and critically wounding two female students who were bystanders. Six teenagers, some of them current Des Moines students, have been charged with first-degree murder.
The deadly drive-by shooting now hovers over the decision by Des Moines officials, along with about 30 districts across the country, to exile cops from schools. These moves were part of the "defund the police" movement that erupted after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. It’s a movement now reeling in the face of violent crime surging nationwide, punctuated by President Biden’s State of the Union vow last week to “fund the police.”
But in schools, at least, a decision to bring back cops -- or “school resource officers,” as they are called -- isn’t a slam dunk in places where students of color had been arrested at higher rates than whites.
Des Moines (population: 214,000) provides a case in point. So far its district, half of whose students are black or Latino, has not followed schools from Maryland to California heeding pleas to restore the SROs. Instead, Iowa’s capital city is rolling out a new community-engagement safety plan to replace the cops.
And that infuriates parents alarmed by school mayhem long before Floyd’s death moved racial justice to the front burner -- parents like Lindsay LaGrange. The Des Moines mom reached her breaking point in November after a student in her son’s middle school was found with an airsoft pellet gun on campus. “My son turned in this boy to the front office, and then later this boy beats up my son after school,” she said. “Almost every day he said there’s another fight at school. The kids are not safe.”
Des Moines joined the wave of districts that hired SROs after the rash of school shootings in the 1990s, a decade capped by the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado. The killing of Sandy Hook elementary school children in Connecticut in 2012 spurred more districts to follow suit. As many as 25,000 law enforcement officers are working today in all types of schools, from rural to suburban to urban, said Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO).
In Des Moines, SRO was a coveted job. Cops went through a competitive hiring process, which vetted them for the patience and savvy to communicate with teenagers, said Sergeant Paul Parizek of the Des Moines Police Department. Not every officer was a good fit. Those tapped went through training at NASRO, a crash course in seeing the world through the eyes of a teenager.
Des Moines started its SRO program about two decades ago. The district would eventually hire 10 SROs and a supervisor – one cop for each high school and four that were shared by the middle schools. Seventy percent of SROs were white men and women. Black men made up 30%.
Parizek said the public has harbored misconceptions about the approach. SROs weren’t placed in schools to jack up kids with a dime bag. Although an average of 287 Des Moines students were arrested annually in the years before the pandemic, the goal was prevention: to build relationships with students to deter them from trouble and to hear chatter about what’s going down in the schools. Who’s going to fight? Who has a gun?
“The guns we recovered in 2019, we recovered them before they made it inside the school door,” Parizek said. “And this was because of the relationships that SROs had with students who provided them with information.”
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Australian medical school sets aside dozens of positions for country kids who could stay locally for good
Country kids who grew up dreaming of being doctors now have the chance to follow that path without moving to the city.
Deakin University's new rural training stream reserves highly competitive medical school places for country applicants who already hold a degree.
Once enrolled, the students are sent for hands-on training in small hospitals in towns in the west of Victoria including Ararat, Portland, Stawell, and Warrnambool.
Rural Community Clinical School director, associate professor Lara Fuller said the program was designed to address the issue of workforce shortages in the south-west and Grampians.
"The idea is to recruit students from the region, train in the region, and the idea is that they will stay in the region," she said. Dr Fuller said that there was "good evidence" to suggest that that was a likely outcome.
"Work we've done looking at our own graduate outcomes has shown that rural clinical experience, plus selecting students from a rural background, means that those students are more likely to work rurally when they graduate," she said.
Dr Fuller said the approach could help to resolve the brain drain from country towns.
"Historically, for medicine, medical school and post-graduate training has been located in cities," she said. "It can take a long time, we're talking 10 years-plus, to complete the full medical training.
"They put down roots and develop relationships and so on in the cities, so then it becomes a fait accompli almost. It's very difficult to go back."
The new model Deakin has adopted provides 30 training places available only to rural and regional students, and gives priority to applicants from Deakin's rural partner communities in South West Victoria and the Grampians region.
Deakin's Dean of Medicine, professor Gary Rogers, said it was the first step towards a bigger vision where country kids who dreamt of being doctors might never have to leave their home towns.
"Into the future, we believe it will be possible for learners to undertake all their training from high school to independent medical practice without having to live in a metropolitan area," Professor Rogers said.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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