Introduction

The assumption that academic research will organically find its way to those with the power to act on it is false. Some may conceive of academia as the creator of the country’s best knowledge, knowledge which automatically permeates – and is respected by – powerful decision-making networks. This is not the case.

Instead, real-world decisions involving millions of people and billions of dollars are routinely made with scant attention to academic research.

Most politicians will not read a single academic paper, or even an abstract, in any given year. Nor will their advisors, often party loyalists with law degrees. For Australian politicians, most academic research may as well not exist. It is invisible, as are the researchers who produce it.

This academic invisibility also permeates business and the media. Both sectors tend to underplay university research, engaging with it sporadically or dismissing it as irrelevant. Some academics assume they can rely on a ‘need pull’ for research (Thorpe et al. 2011) but that signal is often weak. Researchers who do not systematically, strategically engage with non-academic sectors may think they are maintaining critical distance and academic rigour. What they are really doing is allowing their research to be ignored. An interpretation of the scarcity principle appears to operate among a stubborn minority of academics; the fewer people who can understand their academic outputs, the better.

So some of the country’s most brilliant minds are holed up in universities, writing papers for each other, while powerful people make decisions without accessing that high-quality knowledge. We all suffer from the ensuing ill-informed, hidebound behaviour from policy-makers, business and media.

This paper is a personal provocation. I was a journalist for eight years and briefly a senior advisor to a member of the then-federal Coalition shadow cabinet, before starting as a research fellow at the University of Melbourne in 2014. This paper is based on my experiences. I can see first-hand the high quality, rigour and transformative potential of some academic research. I have also seen first-hand that it is largely ignored off-campus. This paper makes the case that many academics are invisible to decision- makers and the public – the ‘Invisible Academic’ of this paper’s title – and suggests what should be done about it.