Enlisting academics to?pursue the United Nations¡¯ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is an?¡°abdication of?responsibility¡± by?politicians, Times Higher Education¡¯s World Academic Summit has heard.

University of Melbourne vice-chancellor Duncan Maskell said politicians had ¡°invented¡± the SDGs and then ¡°chucked the ball over the fence¡± to?universities. ¡°To?assume that researchers¡­should just suddenly come up with all the answers is?very naive,¡± he told the summit at the University of Sydney.

¡°Many of the problems with solving the SDGs [are because] the politicians don¡¯t want to do the obvious things they should be doing to solve them.¡±

Professor Maskell said he had spent considerable time advising politicians about food safety in his native UK. ¡°They were always asking for the expert scientific panel to provide evidence that supported policy,¡± he said.

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¡°I found that to be an extremely dangerous Machiavellian phrase, because some of them actually meant, ¡®This is our policy?¨C you go and find the evidence to support?it.¡¯ That¡¯s anti-science.¡±

But Griffith University vice-chancellor Carolyn Evans said it was wrong to characterise the SDGs as purely a political construct. Professor Evans said academics had contributed to the formation of the goals, as had people from other non-government sectors.

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¡°The SDGs resonate with a lot of academics,¡± she told the summit. ¡°Universities¡­can act as an honest broker between different parties who may not be able to come together otherwise.¡±

Professor Evans said universities¡¯ capacity to mobilise different disciplines was a unique strength. She said every field could prove unexpectedly valuable, citing her 1990s research into religious freedom.

¡°Everybody that cared for me said, ¡®Don¡¯t work on religion! There¡¯s no future in that; it¡¯s over!¡¯ Sadly, for all the worst reasons, by the end of 2000 everybody was saying: ¡®Who knows anything about religion?¡¯

¡°Those of us who¡­get to decide what¡¯s going to matter in 10 or 20 years [need] a?little humility and [to] occasionally allow people to pursue their passion and interest. You never know when a deep knowledge of Peter the Great might come in handy.¡±

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Professor Maskell, whose research expertise is in infectious diseases, said academics had a natural inclination to mark out ever narrower disciplinary specialities. ¡°I¡¯ve had colleagues who thought that they were working in a multidisciplinary fashion because the cell line that they were working on was different from the cell line in the next-door lab.¡±

But tightly defined expertise did not necessarily suit real-world conditions, he said, citing his research into species-hopping bacteria in Myanmar. The project had initially involved fieldwork by social anthropologists, who discovered that the reality of Burmese agricultural practices differed markedly from official versions.

¡°Bringing together pretty hard-core molecular science with social anthropologists [was] powerful,¡± Professor Maskell told the summit. ¡°We were able to fine-tune our sampling structures to ask the right questions.¡±

But such work is ¡°really hard to get funded¡±, he added, largely because grant reviewers have monodisciplinary perspectives. ¡°Immediately you get some negative commentary, and with very low success rates in grants, that¡¯s enough to kill?it.¡±

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john.ross@timeshighereducation.com