the ramifications of changes to the Marsden Fund

I’m going to borrow a line from Dame Anne Salmond, who says it better than I ever could.

The Government’s decision to cut humanities and social science research from its major funding stream is both bad policy and scientifically illiterate.

That’s from this excellent opinion piece by Dame Anne on newsroom, & I urge you to go there and read it in its entirety, but I’ve included a couple of quotes from her below.

A government should govern for its people, & to do that well it needs to have data on how its policies and actions will affect those very same people. The hard sciences that Aotearoa NZ’s current government seems to think are the only ones worth funding won’t provide that data, but researchers in areas like law, welfare, immigration etc can.

But – which subjects are the ones that will now not be eligible for contestable funding from the Marsden Fund?

To give you some idea of [the cuts’] impacts, in the Marsden Fund the social sciences include public health, nursing, education, psychology, urban design and environmental stucies, Māori studies and indigenous studies, human geography, social anthropology, public policy, political science and architecture.

The humanities include English, literature, languages, linguistics, religion, philosophy, classics, cultural studies, media studies, art history, film, history, and law.

Are we then committed to a future of governments making non-evidence-based decisions on issues that affect us all?

It’s wider than that, though.

Without access to ‘blue skies’ research funding, New Zealand universities will struggle to attract and retain world class scholars and international students in all of these disciplines, and transdisciplinary studies in many other areas, putting their international reputations and rankings at risk.

In fact, Te Pōkai Tara Universities New Zealand is clearly very unhappy, reiterating the extremely important point that the Humanities and Social sciences are the disciplines that underpin our society and research in these areas is crucial for understanding society transformation.

They are also those disciplines with a relatively high proportion of Māori and Pacific Island researchers. The ramifications of this decision are extensive, and damaging.

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