Humanities and social sciences could face significant threats as New Zealand transforms its research assessment exercise into a mainly metrics-driven review of outputs, the University of Otago’s vice-chancellor has warned.
Details of the country’s proposed new Tertiary Research Excellence Fund (TREF) were unveiled last month, with the guided by metrics instead of the peer review panels used by the current Performance-Based Research Fund (PBRF), an exercise similar to the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF).
Weighted citations and other yet-to-be developed “secondary metrics” will be used for the quality evaluation component (worth 55 per cent) of the exercise, which allocates some NZ$315 million (?138 million) of block grants per year. Research degree completions will account for a further 25 per cent and an “external research income” measure will make up 20 per cent of the 2027 exercise.
While broadly welcoming plans to reform the “overly complex” PBRF, Otago’s vice-chancellor Grant Robertson said he was concerned about how excellence in certain disciplines would be rewarded under a “really hard citations-based assessment exercise”.
“We are moving to a simplified PBRF based on citations but the question is around ‘secondary metrics’ and what those actually mean. How do you measure areas where citations often don’t convey the full story?” said Robertson, who was finance minister from 2017 to 2023 in Jacinda Ardern’s Labour government.
With New Zealand’s universities under financial stress amid real-terms cuts to research budgets and falling income from international students, changes to research assessment could exacerbate funding problems for at-risk humanities and social sciences departments, continued Robertson, whose institution typically receives the second highest amount in PRBF funding behind the University of Auckland.
“It would be a double whammy if we move to a really hard citations-based TREF,” said Robertson, who cautioned about viewing research impact in an overly narrow way.
“I’ve always been a big believer in the impact of university research – that’s partly why taxpayers are willing to pay for this research to happen. But I’m also interested in protecting research that is translational in different ways for society, such as humanities research or research that leads to public policy change,” he said, adding: “I support research impact but I worry some of the measures in place are too blunt.”
The measures under consideration are part of a package of reforms proposed by New Zealand’s former chief scientific advisor Peter Gluckman, who led an international advisory panel that informed wide-ranging changes for the UK’s own REF, due in 2029. His , published in June 2023, to “dramatically reduce the weighting given to research outputs and enhance that given to the ‘people, culture and environment’” led to radical changes, which now look likely to be reversed following a three-month pause to the REF announced last month.
Gluckman’s report for the UK’s REF also noted how the global “trend is away from standard bibliometrics with all their foibles” and assessment of quality “must, to a significant extent, be subjective and require some form of panel approach” – a stance his blueprint for New Zealand’s TREF appears to go against.
Gluckman’s latest research review has been accompanied by a larger set of recommendations for higher education funding more generally, although only some of these points have been accepted by New Zealand’s government.
While undergraduate fee income has continued to rise in recent years, Robertson said there are significant parallels with England’s funding model where universities insist below-inflation increases are not sufficient to maintain the current system.
“Certainly higher education funding in New Zealand is not sustainable – next year we will have less money than the previous year and the amount will be less in the following year,” he said, adding: “We have more students and higher expectations of what universities should provide – that is not sustainable without more money.” Robertson said further state support rather than tuition fee rises should be the way forward.
“Not enough money is going into the system and this funding is now declining – the solution is for government to properly value what universities do. Sir Peter Gluckman’s report gives them ways to do that. If we don’t do anything then something will give in the system – we can’t afford to be complacent about this,” he said.
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