95bFM Academics concerned about cuts to humanities and social science research in Marsden Fund
8 January, 2025
Interview by Sasha Mengazetdinov and Oto Sequiera, adapted by Yesenia Pineda
Image: Science, Innovation and Technology Minister, Judith Collins (2024) - Wikimedia Commons
On the 4th of December 2024, Science, Innovation and Technology Minister, Judith Collins, announced funding cuts to the Marsden Fund.
The fund; established in 1994 by the then National government, will cut funding to humanities and social science research, focusing more on areas in mathematics and science.
These cuts have faced major backlash from academics concerned about the shrinkage of the already small percentage of allocated funds towards humanities, to an even smaller number.
National President of the Tertiary Education Union, Dr Julie Douglas, told 95bFM’s The Wire that it is critically important we understand how society works and how the human condition works, with these grants being able to guide this form of research.
“You can not develop machinery and technology without understanding the context within which it's used. So if [society] does not understand people, and we do not understand social sciences and the humanities and what they bring to understanding that context, I think we will have a very hollow society, which will be problematic in the long term.”
The changes and cuts will also disproportionately affect Māori researchers, with the cutting of the existing 13% of funded research to a now proposed 5.5% — a 7.5% percentage change, which Douglas believes devalues indigenous expertise.
“One of the most disturbing aspects of this announcement is that it feels like this is a continuing attack on the standing and status of Māori knowledge and Māori culture in our society.”
“[And[ it is not just Māori; there are also a number of projects in this year’s list which are looking at different indigenous cultures, problems, and research areas.”
Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Auckland and Co-Director of the MacDiarmid Institute; an organisation supporting projects within institutions across Aotearoa, Nicola Gaston, told The Wire that this is a massive loss for people working in the humanities and social sciences because the [Marsden Fund] is the one type of funding New Zealand has for these initiatives.
“It funds research excellence, and that means it funds people to work in our universities who teach in the subjects that they research in, and you can not change that without changing the definition of what a university is, so we need to keep people researching actively in these spaces.”
“If the Marsden Fund is not there for our colleagues in the humanities and social sciences, our universities are going to have to cross-subsidise research in those spaces so there are big flow-on effects for the whole system.”
Gaston criticises Collins’ notion that mathematics and science-based research have done more for the economy than the humanities and social sciences.
“Commercialising your work, creating a startup company and building that up, and selling things offshore is absolutely not the only way to make an economic impact.”
“... even worse than that, it is not the only kind of impact that we want to see coming out of our universities and out of research in New Zealand; we want the environmental [and] social [studies] as well; that is just as economically important.”
Overall, Gaston believes the Marsden Funding needs amendments to adequately support academics, regardless of the area of research.
“[Aotearoa] should be putting more money into the things that work well and absolutely not trying to come up with new ways of spending money or [creating] new schemes.”
“A single grant is never enough, and therefore one of the biggest inefficiencies is simply that there is not enough money in the system, and we lose a lot on account of that.”
