UNSW faculty's staffing top-heavy

THE University of NSW's science faculty is "top-heavy with senior people" in some high-performing research areas, an international panel of experts has found.

The panel said that if the university wanted to assemble and maintain a "high-profile, internationally recognised" faculty, it needed a more "academically robust" recruitment and appointment process.

But the panel, commissioned by vice-chancellor Fred Hilmer, was impressed by the faculty's "high overall quality" of scientific research and made 12 recommendations to enhance it.

The science review was chaired by University of Cambridge professor of theoretical geophysics Herbert Huppert and included academic illuminati from prestigious universities in Europe, Britain and the US, as part of Professor Hilmer's determination to ensure UNSW is a world-class research leader.

The panel was selected after discussions with senior staff including faculty dean Mike Archer, who is due to step down from the position early next month.

Professor Hilmer said the reorganisation of the faculty was going to be a five to 10-year process. The executive summary and recommendations of the science review were released to the HES, but other sections, dealing with each of the faculty's schools and centres, tagged commercial-in-confidence, were not.

Professor Hilmer told the HES that of the university's three big faculties in the science area -- engineering, medicine and science -- the last was the one that needed a strong focus.

"There are lots of choices we needed to make on where to concentrate relatively scarce resources," he said.

The panel recommended strategic expansion of the understaffed schools of chemistry, mathematics, physics and psychology, which it regarded as "critical to the university in the future, and in each of them the university could gain a significant competitive advantage".

Professor Hilmer said that given present resources, adopting some of the recommendations meant the faculty would have "to do less of something else or get better at finding funds".

The panel said the faculty should be aiming to recruit more promising scientists at the start of their careers, to ensure a strong line of succession to the top jobs within the schools and centres.

It recommended that the faculty abandon the practice of using search firms to recruit staff and instead use committees of scientists, which would include as a matter of course heads of schools.

It should also recruit more research-only staff. At present it has the lowest number in the Group of Eight -- 172 compared with 303 at the University of Sydney, for example -- which "puts it at a disadvantage in terms of research output and those measures of performance that are a function of head count".

The report was critical of the Australian method of tertiary funding, which made life harder for the faculty, noting "the difficulties in Australia for direct and appropriate levels of funding for research caused by the imposition by the federal government of a connection between funding and numbers of enrolled undergraduate students".

"The panel believes that service teaching should not drive budgets at the expense of research, and the support of research strengths should not have to depend on teaching loads."

The review said the university and the faculty needed to cultivate a more entrepreneurial culture, and the university should strengthen its efforts to register patents and trademarks and to commercialise technology "as it is underperforming relative to other members of the Go8 in this area".

The panel was also briefed about Project Optimum, set up by the university and Deloitte to monitor and measure research performance at UNSW.

The panel was "highly sceptical of this approach to evaluating and achieving academic and research excellence". It noted strong concerns from several schools about the accuracy and usefulness of the Project Optimum formula.

Professor Hilmer said the formula was still being worked on and accepted that it might need to give greater weight to human judgment in relation to scientific research, rather than relying too heavily on metrics.

"I think the general idea of measurement is not loved; on the other hand, it comes with the turf that if you are responsible for a big institution with a $1.2 billion budget you have to have some objective measures, saying this is a good use of resources and this is not," he said.

17/07/2009