Marsden Fund cuts: What we miss out on by failing to invest in the humanities and social sciences

Marsden Grants have supported projects ranging from the metabolism of T cells to environmentally sustainable Māori burials and the media consumed and shared by New Zealand girls.

Last week, the Minister of Science, Innovation and Technology announced key changes to the Marsden Fund. The fund will now focus squarely on “core scientific research” and will no longer support projects in the humanities and social science. Additionally, the fund will prioritise research that can demonstrate its potential economic benefit, with 50 percent of funding now going towards projects with potential to boost economic growth.

Many in the science and research communities were quick to point out the flaws in this approach. While there is a strong case for increasing investment in research and development – particularly in times of sluggish economic growth – stripping funding for the humanities and social sciences is unlikely to bring out the purported boost in economic growth and productivity. As the government’s former chief science advisor and former Marsden Fund chair Juliet Gerrard points out, “The best ideas can come from any discipline and we simply can’t know which of them will serve us best in the future.”

What is more likely, however, is the negative impact on New Zealand universities, which are already facing serious financial challenges. Humanities and social science departments have already borne the brunt of many of the resulting cuts.

As New Zealand universities grapple with funding shortfalls, falling enrolments and record numbers of Kiwis opting to move overseas, narrowing funding opportunities undermine efforts to retain and attract world class researchers and academics. New Zealand can’t rest on its reputation as being a nice place to live to attract and retain top international talent to teach at its universities. At the very least, it needs to signal that research in the humanities and social sciences is highly valued.

Despite growing acknowledgement in both the arts and the sciences of the importance of interdisciplinary research, the ‘hard sciences’ and the humanities remain frequently pitted against one another. But investment in our research does not have to be zero sum, and an investment in one should not come at the cost of the other. The solutions to the world’s most complex and pressing problems are rarely found within the confines of a single discipline.

The bigger issue, however, is that research priorities need to be wider than economic growth. Economic growth is, after all, merely a measure of economic activity and not of wellbeing or value-add. One of the key purposes of public funding is that it supports activities that are not necessarily economically or commercially beneficial and are unlikely to attract funding from other channels. By constricting the scope of research eligible for funding, not only do we further exacerbate lack of resources those working in the humanities and social sciences face, but we also risk becoming a country that has less understanding of itself, of others, and its place in the world. 

It also means potentially shutting ourselves out of important conversations happening beyond our borders. One of the previous primary aims of the fund was to enable New Zealand-based researchers to “support the advancement of knowledge in New Zealand, and contribute to the global knowledge base.” Such objectives recognise that New Zealand researchers have valuable contributions to make across academic fields and geographic divides. They also acknowledge that the purpose of research – and knowledge more generally – is far wider than economic benefit.

In the recent past, the Marsden Fund supported research into various key developments in many of the Asian countries New Zealanders consider vital to our future. These include the treatment of low caste Hindus during the Partition of India, Korea’s globalisation and national identity, New Zealand agribusiness investment in rural China, the impact of Buddhism on law in Asia, territorial disputes and civil society in North Asian democracies, and the development of computational procedures in Sanskrit mathematics. We can’t hope to understand these places, or have better and deeper relations with them, without studying their histories, cultures, and societies. The cuts come at precisely the time New Zealand should be fostering scholars with a deep understanding of these places, and who can make their complexities easily accessible to the public.

Similarly, security issues in the Indo-Pacific and implications for small states, the growing number of Filipinno and Indian New Zealanders, and connections between Māori and the indigenous peoples of Taiwan are vital areas of study when it comes to making sense of evolving regional dynamics, preparing for New Zealand’s future, and conceiving of our past. They are all also areas of study that will no longer be eligible for the significant funding the Marsden Fund offers. As a result, many of the research questions so important to us are unlikely to be taken up as the main area of study by researchers beyond our shores or with New Zealand’s particular interests in mind.

As a small island nation, the ability to conduct our own research enables us to make sense of ourselves, our region, and our place within it. Without it, we have little sense of how big the world is, how much we have to offer one another, and how much remains unknown.