Lorraine Bridger passed away recently. Most people won’t know who she is but Lorraine was special to me. She got me started as research administrator. I’m going to miss her.

In 1990, Lorraine employed me to work at the Research Coordination Office at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. I had one year of experience working at the precursor to the Australian Research Council, backed up by a mediocre Arts degree. She gave me a chance.

It is hard to imagine how different things were back then. The entire central research office was six people, from the Dean of Research down to me. In my desk, I found the minutes of the first Research Committee meeting. They were written by the inimitable Hein Wagenfeld. He noted that the committee met off campus, as research was not an activity that was recognised by the Institute at that time. It was dated only two or three years before I arrived.

My main role was to compile the ‘canary’, a guide to new research funding opportunities that we printed on yellow paper to catch people’s eye (hence the nickname). I would check the newspaper every day for advertisements by funding agencies and compile them into one document. I would then print and send a copy to every department in the university, where it would be pinned up on noticeboards or circulated to each staff member in turn.

When researchers drafted their applications, they would send a copy to our office for review. Over time, Lorraine taught me how to provide feedback on an application. She would give me a draft application to read and annotate. We would then both go over our feedback before discussing it with the academic. In this way, I learnt what was useful feedback and what wasn’t. She included me in conversations with researchers about their drafts, so I could see what they responded to, and why. As I gained confidence, she trusted me to take care of researchers myself. She kept an eye on me, but gave me room to stumble my way towards competence.

At this time, the Australian government was changing higher education from an elite university system into a mass education system. Lorraine and I would attend interminable meetings between Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and Footscray Institute of Technology (now Victoria University), as a merger was being discussed. The research discussions seemed to boil down to ‘our research is better than your research’, and neither organisation had sufficient evidence to back up their claims. Imagine that, a university with not enough research metrics. In the end, the merger did not proceed.

Eventually, Lorraine and I would go our seperate ways, but we always stayed in touch. We were colleageus who were friends, and we were happy to support one another, both in our work and outside of work.

In 2011, Lorraine let me know that RMIT was advertising for three new positions that were designed specifically to give applicants feedback on their draft applications. I was thrilled when I got the job, as I would be working with Lorraine again. Tseen Khoo also gained one of those positions – as a result, you are reading this blog today.

Over the intervening twenty years, things had changed. The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology had become RMIT University. Rather than working across the whole university, Lorraine and I concentrated on the social science and humanities researchers, the artists, the designers, and the educators. We were a little team of two. We really liked our work and working together. I think that we did some good work, too.

A few years later, Lorraine retired. We kept in touch and, over time, we built up a pattern of weekly phone calls with another friend that kept us all sane. After years working in the Australian higher education system, Lorraine had a formidable network. She often knew that things were happening before I did. More importantly, she could often explain the broader context of things that were affecting my professional life.

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Recently, I watched a demo of a generative artificial intelligence tool that did a half-way decent job of providing feedback on a draft grant application. If you were willing to sacrifice the world to global warming, this tool would give you feedback on compliance, grammar and logic and even try to point out useful literature to cite. It would even have an ersatz conversation with you about your application.

One of the issues that I had with it was that, like most generative artificial intelligence, it was completely, 100% sycophantic. That’s not what you need when you are talking about your research. I learnt from Lorraine the value of talking with researchers about our feedback and about their research in general. If you had a conversation with Lorraine about your research, it was a hard conversation. She was encouraging without being lax. If she saw a flaw, she would call it out. She created a space where you really had to think about what you were doing and why you were doing it. She would probe for the details that weren’t there, or were flimsy. She knew where to push to make the research stronger. I learnt all that from her.

Her life wasn’t easy. She understood the value of collegiality and support because she needed support from her colleagues at times. She knew the value of a good glass of wine, a good book or film, and good friends to share those things with. She was fiercely independent and dealt with life in her own way.

Her passing has let me reflect on all that I have gained from her. She taught me what I needed to know, and set me on the road to where I am today. If universities deploy generative artificial intelligence to replace professional roles, the next generation of people like me won’t have any space to learn those lessons. They won’t have a Lorraine being patient with them, getting exasperated with them and pushing them to do better. Our research environment will be poorer for it.

I’ll miss you, Lorraine Bridger. Thanks for all that you did for me, and for the generation of researchers that you helped along the way.