Humanities and social science research topics being tweaked rhetorically to seem airy-fairy, impractical and/or ‘woke’ is nothing new. Joanne Wilkes explains how political intervention in funding for academic research played out across the ditch.

As a retired academic from an arts faculty – I taught English literature at Auckland University from 1987 to 2021 – I’ve taken much interest in the recent furore over the Marsden Fund. This was for many years the main contestable source of research funding available to academics in humanities and social sciences. Earlier this month, the minister for science, innovation and technology, Judith Collins, suddenly cancelled future access to the fund for these subject areas. 

I very much agree with criticism of this move as short-sighted and unfair, and as betraying too a lack of awareness of how interrelated various disciplines can be. What the development most brought to mind, however, was a furore of a few years ago involving Australia’s closest equivalent to the Marsden Fund, the Australian Research Council (ARC). Previous Australian governments of a similar conservative stripe to that of Collins have a history of political intervention in awards for academic research. And when they go gunning for certain topics, they’re almost always targeting the humanities and social sciences. 

As an expert in the field of British 19th-century literature, I was sometimes invited to assess applications to the ARC. Refereeing of this kind is a rigorous process, often time-consuming, and also unpaid. You know too when undertaking it that projects you consider worthy of funding will often not receive any money, because the success rate is less than 20%. The experience for referees and applicants with the Marsden Fund is similar. 

In the 2017 ARC round, the applicants for 11 projects were told that their work would not be funded, but that it was in the top 10% of unfunded projects. Yet this claim fudged the truth: the Labor opposition garnered from a parliamentary investigation rather like New Zealand’s scrutiny week, but held a year after the awards, that the 11 projects had all been recommended for funding by the ARC, but had been rejected by the minister for education and training, Simon Birmingham. 

When unexpectedly outed, Minister Birmingham – tweeting like a good, down-to-earth Aussie as “Birmo” – pointed to one project, “Post orientalist arts of the Straits of Gibraltar”, as exemplifying the kind of research that wouldn’t impress “most Australian taxpayers”. I take it that when politicians invoke “taxpayers”, they’re trying to create outrage while knowing that their argument is weak. Not surprisingly, the investigator for this maligned project weighed in, and he (and others) pointed out that the Straits of Gibraltar was for centuries a meeting point for western and Islamic cultures, and that this circumstance had influenced the region’s art in ways that were worth exploring. 

I had not been a referee in this particular round, but I did take a special interest in it, since one of the topics the minister had embargoed was that of someone I’d successfully recommended for another project a few years earlier. But the funding cancellation which eventually most resonated with me was one in the “early career” category. The young man in question, who was intending to research “Soviet cinema in Hollywood before the blacklist, 1917-1950”, found out belatedly that the reason for the failure had been the minister’s veto, and not the quality of his research. By this time, he had gone overseas, unable to pursue an academic career in Australia. 

By contrast, government ministers in both Australia and New Zealand do not see fit to embargo research in scientific and medical areas in the same way. Not that I believe they should – but humanities and social science research topics can be tweaked rhetorically to seem airy-fairy, impractical and / or “woke”. There is some difference between New Zealand and Australia here. Supporters of Collins’s funding embargo have pointed to topics with a Māori dimension as especially suspect; in Australia, researching the social ramifications of climate change might get you into trouble with politicians. But in both countries, the terminology in which scientific and medical research proposals are necessarily couched is generally beyond the comprehension of the lay person, including most politicians. Hence if there was anything in those projects that wasn’t to a politician’s taste, or that could be publicly attacked as unworthy of “taxpayer” funding, the politician would likely be unable to recognise it! In Australia, this fact possibly explains why the grants from the other major research funding body, the National Health and Medical Research Council, have not been subject to ministerial veto. 

The relationship between the political world and academic research was indeed highlighted succinctly by two researchers on a project considering climate change that was rejected by Simon Birmingham back in 2017: “Depending on the issue at hand, evidence-based research is invoked by political actors and citizens to support a particular position and declared hopelessly arcane and out-of-touch by those who hold a different position.”

As a humanities researcher, I find it difficult to defend the worth of my work in a hostile political climate. Of course, it is important not to consider oneself inherently in possession of some special wisdom that non-experts have no hope of understanding. But it’s important too to hold on to the conviction that many of the insights offered by literature, or art, or history, can be disseminated by scholars in ways that are valued by others. Moreover, it is true that the kind of “blue-skies” research that both the Marsden Fund and Australia’s ARC have funded can have more concrete social and economic benefits as well: it’s just that these benefits can’t be predicted confidently in advance. 

The situation in Australia has changed somewhat since 2017-18. Subsequent ministers from Liberal-National coalitions have embargoed some humanities and social science projects, but were at least forced to be more upfront about it. In the Labor government that has been in power since 2022, ministers have not, to my knowledge, embargoed any ARC-approved projects. In fact a bill passed in March this year establishes an independent ARC Board that will be responsible for the approval of research grants within the National Competitive Grants Programme, instead of the minister. The minister will still have the power to direct the board not to approve a grant on grounds of national security, but will be required to notify parliament of these decisions.

And as for me – at the end of 2018, I formally withdrew from the ARC panel of reviewers. Three years later I turned 65, and formally retired from my academic position. But lo and behold! I’ve since discovered that I can make a bit of money from talking about the literature I’ve researched. So, Ms Collins, doesn’t that money of mine feed into the, er, economy?

Joanne Wilkes is an emeritus professor of English at the University of Auckland. She has never received a grant from the Marsden Fund.