The recent decision by the Minister of Science, Judith Collins, to remove funding for humanities and social science from Marsden Fund grants has certainly stirred up a hornet’s nest — particularly from those that see their potential funding disappearing.
It is important, in my view, to closely look at the basis of research, the roles of the universities, the funders and what qualifies as quality decisions on how to spend public money.
Universities, and the academic staff within them, have a number of roles.
Firstly, is teaching. Students are attracted to enrol in a university in order to be taught so that in the end they can be awarded recognition that they have met certain pre-ordained knowledge and standards in their chosen subjects. Put crudely, the role of the university in this role is to sell degrees or qualifications.
Some would argue that the role of the university in this aspect is not a lot different to the latter years of a good secondary school. Others may say that a difference is that students are taught how to learn.
Some students are certainly involved in basic research, while others, particularly in Health Sciences, have very high workloads and access to the papers is limited. The business of teaching clearly costs the student a great deal of money and contributes in a major way to the heady finances of these tertiary providers.
A second role of the university is that of community engagement. This is much harder to define and certainly harder to measure.
I’m not sure at all that most universities in New Zealand could readily show the outcomes or effects of what is supposed to be a main feature of their role, but it is a role that probably costs universities more than it provides income.
Research is a biggie. Promotions rely on academic staff writing academic papers for prospective publishing in journals and periodicals that most of us mere mortals have no access to — let alone understand.
But the more they are published and referred to, the better it becomes for the individual academic member and the institution itself.
Universities are directly funded by Performance Based Research Funding, the criteria of which is set by the Tertiary Education Commission. It is by no means the perfect answer to research funding, but it is what we have.
It is a very significant funding stream for universities.
External funding is what has caused the recent uproar — particularly that doled out by the Royal Society who administer the Marsden Fund. The original concept of this is to fund science-based research — the sort of research that has measurable outcomes, and research that will be of benefit to our society.
The criteria for funding from Marsden was changed by the last government to include social science and humanities — subjects that inherently cannot be measured accurately at all.
Under the new criteria, all of a sudden universities and academics from non-science areas saw a heap of money that they could gain access to vanishing out the door.
So up popped up such research project applications as "adopting a transformative epistemology, it attends to the ways in which ‘Big Things’ (these are large roadside sculptures) can be an apparatus of forgetting settler-colonial histories, to provoke a new way of thinking about hegemonic constructions of colonial objects and the way these obscure land dispossession. Weaving together feminist, participatory, and filmic geographies, this project seeks to re-centre alternative stories currently hidden in the Big Things’ shadows, culminating in a scholarly monograph and six short films — one from each field-site".
Just how is this ground-breaking? What overseas student desperate for a PhD is going to look at this research — if it is ever published at all — and think, ‘wow, I need to go to Victoria and learn about the trout sculpture in Gore’?
Nonetheless, $360,000 of public money was awarded to this.
Or how about $861,000 awarded for looking at imperial borders in ocean governance which set out its aims as "By foregrounding the role of ‘border imperialism’ in institutionalising marine exclusions, the research draws critical attention to the relationship between environmental decline, social inequality and the longue duree of imperialist ideologies in ocean governance. The project’s field sites are four island nation states: Aotearoa, Hawaii, Iceland and Ireland, each of which has a distinct marine culture as well as historically diverse fishing economies and livelihoods. Each too has a different history of colonialism alongside a rich legacy of anti-colonial resistances and other forms of social movements, broadly rooted in claims to the commons."
Frankly, this sounds more like a word salad to justify a series of overseas jaunts. How many Hawaiian, Irish and Icelandic scholars are, as we speak, knocking at the doors of the University of Waikato?
New Zealand has many pressing issues that would benefit immediately with funding. As an example, we have an energy crisis — every year we nearly run out of electrical energy.
Which sort of research would we as a society like to be funded? Research into safe nuclear fusion, other alternative energy sources, or "near-death experiences linked to the movement of celestial orbs linked to Maori astronomy"?
Research into heart disease, cancer or how "sexuality was traditionally expressed by happy eating and singing"?
I have no doubt at all that the wailing will continue as funds dry up for bizarre meanderings into further AI-induced word salads, but I’d suggest that if individuals genuinely want to study these obscure social science subjects, then they are more than welcome to support themselves while doing do.
To somehow believe that the rest of us owe them a living while they are pursuing these obscurities smacks of a certain academic arrogance.
— Russell Garbutt is currently researching a book.
