For a sector already buckling under post-COVID budgetary pressures, it seemed like a welcome reprieve. However, with the dust well and truly settled, it has become clear that the absence of ERA has further weakened the status of the creative arts in the Australian university landscape.
Without ERA’s qualitative, peer-reviewed approach to measuring research quality, quantitative metrics now assume outsize importance. Citations, journal rankings, and research income determine resource allocation, strategic partnerships, and – increasingly – academic progression. Such indicators, while suitable for many traditional academic disciplines, overtly fail to capture the energy and value of creative practice as research.
The result is a tertiary creative arts sector increasingly marginalised, particularly at non-metropolitan universities, while traditional fields forge ahead.
External factors have played their part in this process such as the mainstreaming of ‘culture wars’ rhetoric and the impact of ATAR subject scaling on HASS secondary enrolments. The increasingly vocational emphasis of higher education policies over the past decade has also had an impact, devaluing the entrepreneurial and self-directed professions that are typical destinations for creative arts graduates. ERA, despite its flaws, offered a vital peer-review process that helped leadership teams unfamiliar with creative arts to better grasp its value and contributions. Its absence has further undermined the profile of the creative arts in the university ecosystem.
As the Australian Research Council considers what the future ERA will look like, we must acknowledge the vital importance of its peer review process, while also seizing the opportunity to fix its shortcomings. The resource demands of the ERA reporting process overtly favoured larger institutions that could afford teams to draft impressive research statements and assemble comprehensive packages. In smaller universities and departments, these tasks often fell to individual academics resulting in submissions prepared in isolation and aggregated by faculty staff often far removed from the discipline and with limited knowledge of its conventions.
The vagueness of key terms such as ‘world class’ was commonly taken to mean ‘international’, resulting in outputs being ranked according to venue prestige rather than methodological merit and rigour.
Consequently, the peer review process favoured metropolitan universities, particularly those in Sydney and Melbourne with greater access to influential ‘world class’ galleries and museums. These combined factors led to a noticeable drop in visual arts and craft participation across successive ERA rounds. (FOR-code 1905, 2010-2018).
To rescue creative arts research in Australian universities, we need urgent action:
1. Reinstate Peer Review: Develop a new, more equitable system of peer assessment that provides clear benchmarks and criteria for creative research quality, ensuring alignment between reviewers and creative outputs.
2. Remove the Low Volume Threshold: Eliminate the 50-output minimum of previous ERA rounds, which excludes many quality projects from review and further marginalises smaller institutions with fewer staff members.
3. Separate Funding for Assessment: Allocate dedicated administrative resources for the reporting and peer-review process, rather than drawing on already stretched Commonwealth student fees and academic workloads.
4. Implement Result Scaling: Acknowledge the qualitative nature of appraisal and use statistical scaling to ensure a fair comparison between peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed codes.
5. Recognise Regional and Smaller Institutions: Develop better criteria that value diverse contexts and resources, breaking the metropolitan monopoly on perceived excellence.
If Australian universities are to maintain their status as ‘universal’ institutions, it is essential that they embrace all major research domains.
We urgently need the re-establishment of a system for evaluating, supporting, and integrating creative research – now more than 20 years old as a research paradigm – within the broader academic context. A more equitable assessment model is crucial. Without it, creative arts departments of all sizes will struggle to measure and articulate their contributions effectively. The result will be a homogenised higher education landscape, deprived of the invention, critical thinking, and cultural enrichment that the creative arts bring.
As we consider the future of measuring creative arts research, let’s ensure that the relief of ERA 2023’s cancellation doesn’t become an elegy for creative arts in Australian universities. The sector’s survival depends on urgent action to recognise and value the unique contributions of creative practice research.
Charles Robb is Associate Professor in Visual Art at QUT, Meanjin/Brisbane and ACUADS Executive member. He has been a practicing artist for more than three decades and his work has been seen in numerous group and solo exhibitions at venues including MONA (Hobart), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney) and the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia (Melbourne). Robb’s studio-based research explores the relationship between the memorial object and incidental form through sculpture, digital, and photographic media.
Main Image: Charles Robb, Roadside Stoush 2020-21, digital render; courtesy of the artist.