The invisible politics of the Research Council

Last week, the Research Council of Norway announced its funding from the Latin-America Programme. They have been reading 71 applications all together, three research projects out of 51 applications were funded, one personal post-doc fellowship and six seminars and workshops. The three biggest universities (in Oslo, Bergen and Trondheim) and three prominent research institutes (in Bergen and Oslo) passed through the needle eye. Now, running the risk of being perceived as a grumbling, hurt and jealous second-rate academic, I find it worthwhile to take some time to reflect a bit what this might suggest.

First of all, I am sure that the Research Council did not have any easy task picking out the few that were regarded as the projects with the best potentials, minutely checking that the applications were answering all the criterias published in the call, evaluating the academic level, and so forth. Still, one must wonder- why is the result of such objective assessment that out of ten projects, all are to be found in Oslo, Bergen and Trondheim, and all are covered by six institutions?

I might be too blunt and may fall into the trap of conspiracy-theorizing here, but could there, by any chance, be that there are some extra-criterias involved here, not necessarily published in the call? The only official answer to this is of course “no”, and anything else is difficult to prove. On the other hand, if Oslo and institutions based in Oslo were the only ones to receive funding, simply because they had the best projects, I think it would not have been passed by in silence by the academic community. So, of course- independent of the quality of the projects, one can not give everything to Oslo. My first point therefore, is that geography matters.

Then we have the relationship between the public universities and the independent research centers. We need the specialized research institutions and their very survival is depending on some good-will from the authorities. Or let us put it the other way around here as well: if the only institutions to receive funding were the public universities, simply because they had the best projects, some harsh criticism would be in place.

So, to summarize: geography mattes, institutional structure matters, and these are essential criterias when RCN shall do their evaluation- of course in addition to quality of the project which is a fundament. But how do we respond to this?

We could protest loudly and point to the incompetence of the RCN, hidden agendas and so on (quite tempting I would say). Not unlike soccer-players protesting to the decisions of the referee. However, I have never seen a referee in a soccer game change his mind because of the protests, rather he expects the players to adapt to his style. With ten years of administrative experience in higher education and research, I am inclined to suggest that we try to discover and adapt to these invisible but decisive criterias of the RCN.

In this special case we might try to be more pin-pointed as research communities. Could it be that we should try to focus on joint projects with a regional basis? Of course this will challenge the long established culture of everybody’s war on everybody within the academic society, but could it be that we can get some better science out of it after all? There are not that many researchers focusing on Brazil, so maybe we could get together and identify some areas of common interest and develop projects together? Over time we could even establish regional areas with different core competence about Norwegian-Brazilian relationships- let us say technology and process industry in Mid-Norway, indigenous issues in Northern Norway, sub-sea in the west and social sciences and development in the east (I know- these are not clear cut areas of research, but it is an illustration to my point).

By adapting to the invisible politics of RCN, we could also see more research activities of high quality be done. Because I am sure that out of the 61 applications that did not receive funding, at least some of them should be pretty good as project per se had it not been for their geographical location.

And yes, you are right- we at Østfold University College applied but did not get anything.