Luke Oldfield
June 24th, 2020
Today marks the submission deadline for full Marsden proposals.
We congratulate everyone who progressed to the final round in what is a grueling process of developing, refining and communicating cutting-edge research ideas. Marsden grants are among the most sought after prizes for research funding each year as hundreds of academic staff submit applications covering the full spectrum of disciplines, from arts to atoms.
This year the Marsden application process progressed while COVID-19 laid bare the precarious nature of employment in research spaces across universities in Aotearoa / New Zealand.
The Tertiary Education Action Group Aotearoa (TEAGA) believe that an important step in addressing this issue, is for the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Enterprise (MBIE) to increase its funding to the Royal Society in 2020 with the purpose of expanding the Marsden fund.
The Marsden fund is one of our most rigorously assessed schemes, with peer-reviewed studies having shown that there would be no loss of quality expected if twice the number of grants were funded — no other research funding scheme can say as much.
However,only around 10% of Expressions of Interest are ultimately funded in any one year, while only45% of(invited)full proposals are awarded funding.
These grants bring in much needed employment and professional development opportunities for postgraduate and early-career academics, through the funding of PhD scholarships, research assistant and post-doctoral positions.
This is at a time when universities are attempting to cut costs, through axing research support and teaching staff on precarious short-term contracts and increasing the workload of full-time staff.
The pandemic has also caused considerable disruption to existing Marsden recipients, and while some have had deadlines extended, the salary funding necessary to complete this work has not been extended. Many early-career academics are on fixed-term contracts which are tied directly to funding from Marsden grants. An expectation that early-career academics continue their work unpaid only jeopardizes their ability to complete these projects.
If we #doublethefund each of these issues could be addressed. We propose that government work alongside MBIE to ensure an increase in funding from $83 million to $166 million in 2020, allowing for the following:
Such measures would be a win for all stakeholders in tertiary education through bolstering a sector under extraordinary pressure. All the while, maintaining the high standard of recipients worthy of grant funding, and the volume of research outputs expected of our world-renowned universities.