Humanities and social sciences research is no longer eligible for the Marsden Fund. It’s a tiny portion of our overall research funding, yet makes a massive impact – and without it, the pie starts to crumble, writes a former Marsden Fund chair.
The frustrating thing about crazy ideas is that most of them are crazy. Worse, they are often hatched in the mind of peculiar individuals who are obsessed with them, the sort of people you might avoid getting stuck with in a bar.
Funding a single crazy idea is folly because it will probably lead nowhere. But fund a hundred, and a handful will likely strike gold.
Choosing the hundred is hard of course, and some of the golden ideas might be lost and never shine, but if you work hard to identify the best researchers and nurture a community to focus on their best ideas, then you have a pretty good shot at finding some of them. And in the meantime, you’ve grown a community of researchers that are connected to leading research overseas, can bring that home to a small country in the Pacific, and train students to tackle the challenges that face us and seize new opportunities. That’s what the Marsden Fund has done for New Zealand.
A hat tip to Simon Upton for having the vision and tenacity to set up the fund, and for leaving it unfettered from priorities of the government of the day. The best ideas can come from any discipline and we simply can’t know which of them will serve us best in the future. Who knew that philosophers would be in sudden high demand in artificial intelligence companies?
As chair of the Marsden Fund, I had the privilege of seeing all the applications and listening to the discussion at the expert panel meetings. I read the comments of the world-class scholars who refereed the proposals. Some of the ideas made my head hurt and others made my eyes roll, few were simple to grasp. I saw the different ways of thinking and judging excellence across all disciplines, much of it initially alien to someone trained in chemistry. I saw the enormous value of different perspectives, the traction that could be gained by thinking about problems in different ways, the excitement of genuine innovation, and the sparks of opportunity at discipline boundaries, especially those at the interface of the science I had learned and the social sciences and humanities.
I also saw the rigour with which the near impossible choices were made to fund only those ideas that truly sparkled. And felt the disappointment of those sparkly ones that just missed out. Those funded were high-risk ideas that might just work, and when they did they reaped huge rewards. They created our seed corn for the research programmes that grew out of them, in and across all disciplines.
Each year, it was impossible to know which of the chosen ideas would fly the highest, but the process, inevitably imperfect, produced a suite of research that did us proud. We nurtured research and researchers that showcased the best of New Zealand, sometimes as part of international endeavours, sometimes working on subjects that could only be researched here at home.
As the prime minister’s chief science adviser, I met with many people around the world who spoke highly of New Zealand research and researchers. Often this hailed from place-based research that earned distinction globally. Many of these researchers had been nurtured by Marsden, which had enabled them to ask a question that could only be answered here. Others had been awarded funds to work on problems that could be researched anywhere, but had brought their unique lens. They hailed from all disciplines.
Not all research funds can be allocated this way and the Marsden Fund has never had more than a small slice of the research pie. Marsden funding for social sciences and humanities is a tiny portion of our overall research funding, and yet makes a massive impact. Without it, the pie starts to crumble. Most of our research dollars correctly go to important research that has to be done to address important issues of the day – our biosecurity, our health, our hazards landscape, etc. Or to grow critical mass in areas of huge opportunity – like space. But underpinning all these is a community of researchers across all disciplines with tendrils around the world to connect to the vast international research landscape. People who can identify opportunities in specialist areas that provide vital input to our wider research effort.
No one knows which ideas will be needed to face future challenges and seize opportunities. But a community of researchers across all disciplines pursuing their best ideas is our best insurance for making sure we have access to those ideas when we need them. A Marsden Fund that is hamstrung by government priorities will struggle to foster this community in a future that needs our best minds chasing their boldest ideas to benefit us all in the long term.