Unitec pleads for funding fairness

By SIMON COLLINS

Unitec has made a last-minute plea to rethink a new research funding system which is likely to take away most of its research budget.

The Mt Albert-based institute, which changed its name from Carrington Polytechnic in 1994, will lose money when the performance-based research fund for tertiary institutes comes into force next year.

Its graduate school director, Dr Jacqueline Rowarth, told a conference of the Australasian Research Management Society in Auckland yesterday that many Unitec academics saw the new system as punitive.

"There are people who will not make the cut, but have invested a huge amount of time and effort in getting themselves research-active," she said.

"They may see this as a major disincentive to continuing, because it will be very difficult for them to get research funding."

For the first time, the fund will produce an official ranking of New Zealand universities based on the quality of their research, similar to countries such as the United States where the top institutions get the pick of the top students.

Auckland and Otago Universities are tipped to top the rankings, partly because they have the only two medical schools, which attract big external research funding.

Vice-Chancellors' Committee policy adviser Michael Peters said other established universities might also do well. Canterbury would rank highly because it had the highest proportion of postgraduate students.

But Unitec and the Auckland University of Technology (AUT) are expected to do badly because they have only recently started offering degrees and requiring that people teaching on degree courses do research.

Dr Rowarth said Unitec stood to lose much of the $1.8 million that it gets for research under the present formula, which is based simply on its student numbers in degree courses.

She proposed allocating only around a quarter of the research fund on the basis of research quality, and keeping a system based on student numbers for the rest so that places like Unitec would be able to maintain a "research culture".

"We've got 50,000 students at AUT and Unitec.

"Can we actually afford to have those students taught in places that do not have a research culture?" she asked.

But a Massey University professor who served on the working party that planned the new fund, Dr Warwick Slinn, said the whole idea was to give more money to the institutions that did the best research.

"Any qualitative system is by definition elitist," he said. "Therefore by definition, the larger amount of money will go to the successful researchers."

Mr Peters said that even in 2007, when it was fully phased in, the research fund would make up only 10 per cent of the university block grants. The other 90 per cent, from the Ministry of Education and from student fees, would cover the cost of teaching.