Research grant suspension ‘about probity, not politics’

Ministers have been accused of political interference after the Australian Research Council (ARC) suspended an A$870,000 (£430,000) grant to an activist academic who claimed to “bend” the rules.

Macquarie University confirmed that the ARC had directed it to “immediately cease all activity” funded by the grant, which had been awarded to sociologist Randa Abdel-Fattah, pending an investigation.

Education minister Jason Clare had asked the ARC to review the grant following a report in The Australian newspaper that Abdel-Fattah had boasted of bending research funding rules during a racism conference hosted by Queensland University of Technology (QUT).

In partial footage of her presentation, posted on the newspaper’s website, Abdel-Fattah said she tries to sidestep the rules of academia but does not mention the ARC. Her speech denounced colleagues for sitting on their hands while professing concern for the oppressed.

“The peak of an academic career…usually means somebody who’s…written lots of books about genocide but will not sign a statement against [it]. I want no part of that, so I look for ways to bend rules and refuse and subvert them. I challenge the formal circuits of knowledge production and what counts as knowledge,” Abdel-Fattah said.

Greens education spokeswoman Mehreen Faruqi said Clare had “caved” to pressure from “racist” media. “As a brown Muslim woman who was an academic in a previous life, I find it deeply, deeply disturbing for a white male education minister to lead the charge against…an Arab woman…for the crime of speaking at an anti-racist conference,” Faruqi told a Senate estimates committee.

“Would you say this is political interference? Does the minister know more about racism than a brown Muslim woman?”

ARC board chair Peter Shergold said the ARC had begun scrutinising the grant before it received Clare’s letter. “[We took] the decision to suspend until we could get a full account of what had happened and whether the grant was being used appropriately,” he told the committee.

“This is not an issue about freedom of speech. It’s about the acquittal of public funds. If a story appears in a newspaper where a grant recipient is alleged to have said…‘I look for ways to bend the rules,’ what sort of public servant would ignore that?”

An award-winning author, Abdel-Fattah is a polarising figure. She stands accused of disseminating the leaked details of hundreds of Jewish Australians and leading children in anti-Israeli chants at a pro-Palestine encampment at the University of Sydney. Shadow education minister Sarah Henderson has demanded that Clare cancel Abdel-Fattah’s ARC grant since last April.

In an open letter, 750 signatories – mostly academics – condemned Clare for seeking an investigation. “Palestinian academics…and other anti-racism scholars have been subjected to particularly damaging campaigns to end their careers and silence their criticisms of Israel’s violence,” it says. “The role of the education minister should be to defend the independence of the ARC, not to interfere with its operations on the basis of political campaigns.”

John Byron, a former executive director of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and longstanding campaigner against the politicisation of research grants, said the minister had not “infringed” by demanding an investigation of a “credible” allegation that grant money had been misspent.

“Would we prefer he ignored that allegation? ARC money is so scarce, [with] success rates below 20 per cent. It’s in the interests of all researchers for the government to make sure it’s spent properly,” he said.

Byron, a former Labor ministerial adviser and now principal policy adviser at QUT, said he had been overseas at the time of the conference and did not know whether the allegation against Abdel-Fattah was true or not.

Macquarie said it was investigating whether Abdel-Fattah had complied with the grant conditions, including whether she had stayed within the “approved project scope” and used grant money only for “eligible expenditure items”. It expected to report back to the ARC in the second half of the year.

Abdel-Fattah did not respond to requests for comment.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com