Defunding the social sciences

A way to silence dissent

The death of the Marsden Fund for Social Sciences, Humanities and the Arts has a significant and chilling impact on research in Aotearoa New Zealand.

These grants were for “blue skies” research - work that doesn’t necessarily have an economic benefit, but which contributes new and interesting knowledge. There was an implicit understanding that new knowledge will increase possibilities and impacts in ways that we can’t always directly see ahead of time.

The Marsden Fund was a core funder of social science and humanities research; last month $14.7m was allocated to social science and humanities projects in the 2024 Marsden Fund round. This equates to approximately one-fifth (20%) of the total funds awarded.

That has all changed now; the once prestigious Marsden Fund has been turned into a fancified R&D fund for businesses to plunder and profit from. 50% of the grants must show a clear economic benefit, only ‘hard’ sciences need apply, and the expectation is that there will be new products and IP for selling to the highest bidder/generating wealth from.

The move has been widely slammed by academics, tertiary institutes, and researchers across the country.

Te Punaha Matatini notes

By narrowing research funding to a prescriptive economic lens, we risk undermining the complex ecosystem of knowledge production. Researchers are critical independent advisors who generate insights that transcend immediate fiscal calculations. Their work generates systemic value through innovative problem-solving, policy development, and societal understanding that often yields unpredictable yet profound economic and social benefits over the long term.

Marsden grants will no longer fund education, law, international relations, military and defense studies, public policy, political science, psychology, criminology, health communication, languages, linguistics, film, music, theatre, literature, sociology, anthropology, archaeology, how science is communicated to society, business strategy, economics, organisational change, translation, interpretation, writing, history, art, cultural studies, philosophy, gender studies, immigration studies, religion, geography, demography and so on.

This will have a chilling effect on universities, who rely on external grant funding and overheads to prop up key funding shortfalls.

Marsden grants not only pay for research time and university overheads, but they also contribute to PhD scholarships, post-doc research, early career research work, and the building of community relationships. Strangling funding for research makes it far more difficult for tertiary institutions to develop meaningful pathways in the above-mentioned areas.

In turn, this makes it increasingly difficult to challenge the neoliberal thinking (individual liberty, property rights, limited government, and free market solutions) promulgated by ACT and Atlas sponsored think tanks. Multiple Bills from the current National-led government are aimed at removing constraints so that wealthy groups can exploit our land and our people. It has often been the voices of social scientists, Indigenous scholars, and those in the humanities who have argued the best and loudest against these extractive approaches.

As Professor Tom Baker writes:

"In a place like New Zealand, reducing the ability of social scientists and humanities scholars to pursue projects and generate evidence independent of government agendas is arguably more concerning than it would be in other nations.

New Zealand has one of the most centralised systems of government in the wealthy world, one with comparatively little restraint on the executive. This alone should give us pause, but it’s made worse by an extremely thin ecosystem of think-tanks and other non-governmental policy institutions, which promote independent ideas and debate."

The challenge of course is that what works to build healthy, strong societies, that what works to address thorny social issues like youth offending, poverty, and homelessness are not the punitive or neoliberal solutions so warmly favoured by the far right and the very wealthy.

In addition, social scientists as a whole have a fairly well-developed sense of fairness, a strong commitment to ethical practice, and an annoying tendency to speak up and out when confronted with a government making poor decisions that are clearly not in the best interests of the populace.

In less than a year, this government has made it clear just how little it cares for our collective well-being.