A Pakeha-privilege carrot? No wonder NZ university grants have been cut

Researchers were given $360,000 to study the white-privilege narrative around the statue of a carrot in Ohakune.

The lavish expenditure of public money on exotic academic projects has long been unpopular among conservative critics in New Zealand, and even some serious scholars, too. Now the government here appears to have reached a similar conclusion.

Earlier this month, the country’s science minister, Judith Collins, reversed the grant-making trend of recent years, saying that researchers in the humanities and social sciences will no longer be eligible to have their projects considered by New Zealand’s largest source of contestable academic funding.

Not so for their counterparts in the physics, chemistry, maths, engineering and biomedical sciences — all areas that Collins says offer the possibility of “hi-tech, high-productivity, high-value” national economic benefit.

For the cash-strapped government, it’s important “we support new ideas which lead to developing new technologies and products, boosting economic growth, and enhancing New Zealand’s quality of life,” Collins said.

The Marsden Fund, which is named after the late physicist Sir Ernest Marsden, was established in 30 years ago to support researchers at the country’s eight universities, not least in better competing against their better endowed trans-Tasman counterparts. Today, the agency distributes around $77 million in new research grants each year.

During the pandemic Jacinda Ardern expended the remit of the Marsden Fund. Picture: Getty Images.

At the time of its founding, in 1994, New Zealand’s spending on R & D as a proportion of the overall GDP was only a fraction of comparable sized nations such as Denmark, Ireland, Israel and Singapore, and just half that of Australia. The establishment of Marsden seemed to be a step in a better direction.

The subsequent funding has always allowed for blue-sky projects that wouldn’t necessarily turn an immediate profit. But the overriding goal has been for the agency to find projects that might.

And why not? Supporting world-class research would not only see local scholars and their parent institutions better compete against their global counterparts but allow them to lure in star researchers from abroad.

During the pandemic, when the need to support all areas of scholarship seemed to trump any other consideration, the Labour-led government of Jacinda Ardern expanded the fund’s remit to include what was deemed to be the best in show in the humanities and social sciences.

How then has this more holistic approach fared? Well, there was the awkward matter of $360,000 given to one scholar to investigate the question of whether it’s “benevolently sexist” to believe that “men ought to protect and cherish women”?

There followed $842,000 shelled out for one university department to investigate the apparently vital question of why so few Asian people pop up in New Zealand television and films?

Elsewhere: a $300,000 investigation into how Kiwis use dating apps; nearly $1 million for research into the “reimagination of anti-racism theory in the health sector”: $870,000; and $842,000 to look at “ethnic” female politicians in New Zealand.

Not forgetting “complex shadows”, an investigation into “intersecting stories of place, identity, and erasure through large roadside sculptures” — a steal, perhaps, at just $360,000.

This isn’t to say only grants in the humanities have raised eyebrows.

Science minister Judith Collins, has reversed the grant-making trend of recent years. Picture: Getty Images.

In the Marsden Fund’s latest round, for example, $860,000 was given to scientists at the University of Waikato, in Hamilton, to effectively junket around the beaches of Hawaii, Ireland and Iceland in order to generate a supposedly better shared understanding of the “imperatives to decolonise ocean worlds”.

Still, the sciences usually offer at least the potential of some commercial return on investment whereas the benefits of the other kind is at best in the eye of the beholder.

Not every observer agrees. Grant Robertson, the former finance minister who first argued for the humanities and social sciences to be included in the Marsden Fund’s remit, said the latest move was “disastrous and a major step backward in supporting the foundational research that drives critical social change”.

Mr Robertson, who is now the vice chancellor of the University of Otago, does concede the cause hasn’t been helped by what he says have been “silly” funding decisions.

Possibly he may have been thinking of what appears to have been the tipping-point grant of $360,000, given for researchers to determine whether the statue of a carrot in the farming town of Ohakune constitutes a “critical gaze to the privileging of Pakeha-centred narratives”.

Indeed, most observers probably didn’t need a hefty research grant to understand why it was only a matter of time before a more conservative government called time on this sort of academic grift.

• David Cohen is a Wellington author and journalist.