This year, with staff cuts looming in some departments, more than the usual anguish accompanies the teaching and study of humanities at the University of Otago.
Overall student rolls have fallen in recent years in the humanities division, from 5910 equivalent full-time students (EFTS) in 2011 to 4750 EFTS last month.
There was also a smaller fall in commerce student numbers between 2011 and last year, from 3220 EFTS to 2928 EFTS, partly offset by modest growth this year.
When I studied humanities, which I had the tremendously good fortune to do at Otago University more than 40 years ago in the early 1970s, I was doing so at a time not completely free of its own troubles.
Those anxieties included, in my own case, establishing identity and purpose, and emerging into early adulthood.
As part of the wider campus background, other anxieties included forum speakers raising concerns over the war in Vietnam.
For one fairly brief but intense period, worries about university discipline regulations culminated in a huge protest during which the university registry building was occupied by students.
But study in that now seemingly remote, golden time was accompanied by fewer worries about who might be doing the teaching and learning in future.
The first year subjects I chose were English, French, philosophy and history.
That first memorable year of Otago study seems now to be soaked in perpetual sunshine, almost as if the past had been re-entered through some kind of golden tunnel.
When I look back at those times it is with a sense of almost overwhelming gratitude.
That gratitude was partly about the chance to encounter and drink in some amazing works of literature, of philosophy, and history, at least several of which I still clearly remember.
This gratitude was also about having been taught by some particularly memorable and knowledgeable people, among them Shakespeare scholar Prof Alan Horsman and Prof Margaret Dalziel in English; Prof Alan Musgrave, Gwen Taylor and Dr David Ward in philosophy; Prof Ray Stone, a keen chess player, in French; and Associate Prof Gordon Parsonson in history.
My study in French was in that heady time when French and German still had their own separate departments, as did Russian.
These people and their remarkable insights, and the works they studied and discussed opened up some shining doors in the sky for me, and provided encouragement to explore and learn more.
By studying the humanities, which included a relentlessly large amount of essay writing, I was not only acquiring a certain analytical rigour, I was undergoing a life-transforming encounter with some of the values and insights into life offered by literature.
Indirectly adding to the quality of the sunlight in my perhaps nostalgic visions of that happy first year of study was an impressive set text, Summer in the Gravel Pit, a collection of short stories by former Otago Burns Fellow Maurice Duggan.
I rediscovered that book, with its distinctive sunlit-yellow dust jacket, at home this week, and among the stories — many heavily marked in pencil by my younger self in that far time — was one titled Blues for Miss Laverty, about which I wrote an early university essay.
Miss Laverty is an isolated, and frustrated music teacher, first encountered drinking a "bitter and solitary" gin.
When subsequently asked what she wants, she replies "a little human warmth".
Stories from James Joyce’s Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and, above all, Albert Camus’ life-changing The Outsider, set in sun-drenched Algeria, were among many other works I encountered.
My four years of English honours study contributed, overall, many things to my continuing life, among them a deeper sense of compassion, vision and community.
Sometimes there’s a tendency, in thinking about all that is best at the University of Otago, to imagine that it coincides, perhaps roughly, with some of those areas of semi-monopoly excellence that cannot be matched readily or at all elsewhere in the country: such as in medicine, dentistry, and pharmacy.
The wonderful and continuing achievements of those disciplines are undeniable.
But excellence burns fiercely in many other subjects, including in those facing the prospect of staff cuts, such as English and linguistics, and history and art history.
Several Otago humanities departments, including English, history and anthropology and archaeology, have gained high international QS scholarly rankings, and some, like philosophy, have gained particularly high Performance-based Research Fund (PBRF) scores.
Otago history scholars have recently won several international awards, and there has been high success, including in English, in gaining many prestigious Marsden Fund research grants.
Pro-vice-chancellor of humanities Prof Tony Ballantyne acknowledges responding to the roll reduction is "unsettling" for staff but said he was optimistic about the division’s future.
Prof Ballantyne, an award-winning historian, said there was an international trend towards reduced enrolment in humanities.
But he highlighted the ability of humanities graduates to "take a whole range of skills out into society", and to diagnose and solve pressing issues "of real cultural importance".
For my own part, I believe that humanities, sciences and other disciplines can contribute to a deeper and more transformative vision of the New Zealand of the future.
New Zealand has never had greater need for the humanities, in many fields, including in trying to tackle poverty and inequality, and in trying to find our way to a fairer and more transparent form of population-based health board funding in Otago.