The Australian National University is stepping back from humanities research — should funding go to the regions instead? - ABC Religion & Ethics

Australia Broadcast Center

3 days ago

The proposals by the Australian National University (ANU) to disestablish some of its most globally respected research centres in the humanities, arts and social sciences have led some to wonder whether the university remains worthy of its reputation as a 'truly national university' or of continuing to receive the National Institutes Grant.
There is no doubt that government policies — particularly the Job Ready Graduate Scheme — are causing extensive direct and long-term damage to the ANU and every other university in the country, as well as to the nation's future leaders. These considerations have led Australian students to pursue graduate study overseas and disincentivised international students from applying to Australian universities.
However, the main sticking point regarding the immediate cuts to the ANU is the approximately $200 million National Institutes Grant that the federal government gives the ANU annually to support its national mission. No cuts to the National Institutes Grant have been reported. It continues to be a privileged source of funding to insulate key research functions from the fluctuations of student enrolments and popularity to ensure sovereign intellectual infrastructure for the nation.
It makes little sense that the areas put forward for disestablishment by the College of Arts and Social Sciences are those that have historically been associated with this special grant. From the Research School of Social Sciences through to the Humanities Research Centre, they have routinely been put forward as key evidence in support of the College's annual claim for its relatively small slice of the National Institutes Grant — until this year, that is.
The College's proposal to cut areas that deliver on a reliable source of income in a precarious funding environment is inexplicable and directly imperils its capacity to deliver on these functions of sovereign importance, as asserted in Senator David Pocock's senate motion.
Betting on a better future?
It is appropriate to invoke the language of leagues tables given the high levels of interest and investment paid by universities to international rankings. The language of 'relegation', moreover, signals the point that rather than just being an own goal, the ANU's cuts will result in losses to the national community, including those who live outside the 'Canberra bubble'. The whole league and its future stars are at risk.
The language in such headlines also draws attention to the stubborn stereotype in which 'regional' is synonymous with second-rate. This provides an opportunity to reconsider the very real contributions that regional universities make to the national interest and raise new questions about what we expect of cultural leadership in 2025.
Rather than being a prescription for change, what we would like to offer here is a thought exercise. As one of us has described elsewhere, the National Institutes Grant was endowed to the ANU in 1946 and reflected the ambitions created by a homogenous leadership group. But how might its conditions of award differ if it was created today? Would it be equally bound to the idea that Australia should have one national university or might it prefer a more distributed and inclusive model of cultural leadership to serve the nation?
From margins to engines
We write from opposite ends of the country. One of us (Kylie Message) leads the ANU Humanities Research Centre (HRC), which is facing closure after more than fifty years of service to the nation. The other (Victoria Kuttainen) directs the newly established Roderick Centre for Australian Literature and Creative Writing at James Cook University, based in the tropics of northern Australia. From these locations — one long considered the centre, the other long regarded as the margin — we witness the same pattern: the steady erosion of cultural infrastructure in a university sector still organised around prestige economies and outdated hierarchies.
We also recognise the argument put forward by the Australian Academy of Humanities to protest the ANU's plan for the humanities and social sciences:
Now is not the time to reduce our national humanities capabilities. Global unrest, the impact of AI on society, wealth inequality, climate change, distrust in democratic institutions — all call for independent and informed Australian thinking. The humanities help us to understand ourselves and our neighbours, and the changes our times require.
We argue that meaningful innovation for the long-term survival of the sector won't come from within the fortressed walls of Group of Eight universities. It will come from new alignments — between regional need and national responsibility; between the civic mission of universities and the communities they serve. In other words, the kind of work the HRC has led with distinction and that regional centres now urgently need, now more than ever.
Systemic cuts lead to cultural collapse
Current threats to the arts and humanities at the ANU are by no means isolated. The sector has been described as under 'sustained political attack', with more than a dozen universities faced with restructuring — including Macquarie University, University of Tasmania, Western Sydney University, University of Canberra and the University of Wollongong. A symptom of these cuts are job losses: more than 1,000 are being cut or have already gone from Australian universities.
Nowhere is the crisis more visible than in regional Australia. James Cook University, Charles Sturt University, Southern Cross University and the University of Tasmania were already grappling with disappearing funding, bloated workloads and crumbling staff morale long before the nation's treasured metropolitan institutions sent up the distress signal.
While city-based institutions might cushion the blow with larger cohorts, international student pipelines, stronger branding or — in the case of the ANU — using the National Institutes Grant, regional universities have been absorbing the shock for years. Their situation has worsened more recently by metropolitan universities seeking to meet equity targets by recruiting students out of communities through full scholarships that local universities cannot match. This approach may afford benefits to individuals, but stands to further hollow-out regional universities and communities through brain drain, and erode the link between generic university fields and more localised content and research that regional universities carry out as part of their civic mission.
Creative capacity beyond the centre
There already exists a clear record demonstrating the extent to which the contraction in opportunities for research and training in the humanities, arts and social sciences has triggered a crisis in the pipeline of future arts workers in regional Australia. But the consequences that increased costs have on local education providers — combined with factors such as the brain drain of regional students to the cities — are poorly understood, even within our own sector.
In 2024, the question 'Are the Humanities in Crisis?' was asked at a national panel convened by one of our peak disciplinary associations. Panellists, none of whom represented a regional university, responded in the negative. It was the Humanities Research Centre that publicly challenged this view, pointing out what had been ignored: that the humanities are in crisis — and most sharply in the regions.
Aerial photo of James Cook University's Smithfield campus in Cairns, Queensland. (iTraveller / iStock / Getty Images)
The Humanities Research Centre's challenge took the form of a collaboration. Together with partners at the Roderick Centre at James Cook University — which has expertise in building interdisciplinary programs connecting literature, climate science mental health, Indigenous storytelling and regional development — we co-convened a national conference on Communities, Arts, Wellbeing in Cairns. The event worked with and through regional experts to determine how to support their work and its continued development.
This conference was not intended to be a gesture of outreach or a response to a misunderstanding; rather, it sought to put into practical effect the insistence of Amitav Ghosh that the humanities must itself transform to meet the urgency of the planetary crisis. Accordingly, we suggested that if the academy is to understand what transformation looks like, it needs to look to the regions — because it is here, at the margins of policy and power, that the future arrives first.
Such collaboration is rare but necessary, especially for places where climate disruption (floods, fire, coral bleaching), economic precarity (post-mining transitions) and social inequality are not future hypotheticals but daily conditions. We know that 70 per cent of the nation's export earnings come from the resources and agriculture of the north, but that the GDP returns flow south. Although policy is made in Canberra and capital cities, the profits are extracted from elsewhere.
The Humanities Research Centre is one of the few institutions that genuinely crosses this line in bridging region and centre to work beyond the bubble of institutional self-interest.
Reimagining national research infrastructure
Partnerships like the one between the Humanities Research Centre at the ANU and the Roderick Centre at James Cook University have been possible because of the contributions it makes in meeting the remit of the National Institutes Grant. For over fifty years, the HRC's work has executed this by supporting research of national importance beyond what is typically achievable through faculty-based or discipline-specific funding. It is also precisely the kind of work that cannot survive in an environment where universities are stripped for parts and academics are rendered disposable.
Which brings us back to our initial hypothetical: If ANU is no longer able or interested in fulfilling its national obligations by means of this small centre, then perhaps it is time for the federal government to reallocate — or re-imagine — that component of the National Institutes Grant . Indeed, if we set logistics and legislation aside, a legitimate case may exist to untether the grant from a single institution for the benefit of many others.
An alternative might be to construct a competitive scheme open to universities to apply for funding based on initiatives that meet contemporary national priorities — such as place-based collaboration, First Nations leadership, interdisciplinary resilience and deep community engagement, especially in and through the regions. Public value, not just historical prestige, would become the benchmark. Allocated in cycles, the grant could be assessed on how effectively the host institution enables others: coordinating, scaffolding and amplifying the national research capacity of less-resourced partners, not least with and in regional Australia and more remote areas worldwide.
This grant would be awarded to a host (or node) institution that would coordinate a national network of universities to support research training and development activities that individual universities cannot financially support. It would be based on the premise that an effective network can produce more than a simple sum of its parts.
Our hypothetical arose in response to nation-wide conversations with partners and stakeholders about the ANU's proposal to disestablish the Humanities Research Centre. We wondered if the College of Arts and Social Science's withdrawal of support for a centre that has made significant contributions to the university's justification of funding for over half-a-century indicates an endemic problem, which points to the need for systemic sectoral change.
Maybe it is time for all options to be laid out on the table, including the possibility that the future of Australian arts and humanities should not lie in the capital, but beyond — through a networked approach to supporting the regions and communities that are already doing this work, often with minimal support, against the odds. Maybe that's where we should be investing.
Kylie Message is Professor of Public Humanities and director of the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University. She is the author of books including Museums and Social Activism: Engaged Protest, Collecting Activism, Archiving Occupy Wall Street and Museums and Racism.
Victoria Kuttainen is Associate Professor of English and Writing and director of the Roderick Centre for Australian Literature and Creative Writing at James Cook University. She is member of LabNorth, a research initiative investigating the state of the arts in regional northern Australia. She edited the Australian Humanities Review's Special Forum on the Regional Humanities, and is the author of Unsettling Stories: Settler Postcolonialism and the Short Story Composite and co-author (Susann Liebich and Sarah Galletly) of The Transported Imagination: Australian Interwar Magazines and the Geographical Imaginaries of Colonial Modernity.