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What price knowledge?

The first students at Wellington’s Victoria University College in 1899 could study history, French, Latin and advanced English. Students today may soon not get that choice, writes Dolores Janiewski.

Dolores Janiewski is an associate professor of history at Victoria University of Wellington-Te Herenga Waka, where she teaches courses on the Cold War; media and the modern US; the US and global power; and crime, justice and human rights in the US.

Concerned about universities making ‘‘deep cuts’’ in humanities and the arts, Martha Nussbaum warned that nations and policymakers ‘‘thirsty for profit’’ were ‘‘heedlessly discarding skills that are needed to keep democracies alive’’ in 2010.

A decade before current worries about AI, she predicted that ‘‘nations all over the world will soon be producing generations of useful machines, rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticise tradition, and understand the significance of another person’s sufferings and achievements’’.

What Nussbaum observed in the immediate aftermath of the global financial crisis is happening here in the wake of a pandemic, inflation and disruption in international travel. New Zealand universities are now experiencing the ‘‘silent crisis’’ which philosopher, feminist and humanist Nussbaum described as ‘‘damaging to the future of democratic selfgovernment’’.

At Victoria University of Wellington-Te Herenga Waka leaders are considering cuts to 59 academic areas, including Asian studies, art history, classics, drama, history, languages, literature and religious studies. A still more stringent process is occurring at Otago and others are under way at Massey and AUT, and have already happened at Canterbury and Auckland.

Humanities and arts are often the most vulnerable targets.

As an American historian, I contrast this response to a very different response from an American president and his administration confronting the Great Depression and a global war. Franklin Roosevelt not only sought to revitalise a depressed economy but provided work for artists, historians, actors, and writers as crucial to revival of American hopes, culture and democracy to combat ‘‘fear itself’’.

A few days after Germany had invaded the Soviet Union in late June 1941, he dedicated a library to make his papers available to future historians in what he described as ‘‘an act of faith’’.

Roosevelt believed that neither military nor economic might could sustain nations whose citizens failed to know their past and developed the wisdom necessary for ‘‘creating their own future’’ through public institutions such as libraries, archives and universities promoting the study of humanities and arts.

Like Nussbaum, we should be concerned about the elimination of courses that cultivate the ‘‘ability to have concern for the lives of others’’, inculcate an ‘‘understanding of a wide range of human stories’’, enhance the ‘‘ability to think about the good of the nation as a whole, not just that of one’s own local group’’ and ‘‘see one’s own nation, in turn, as a part of a complicated world order’’.

The first group of students who enrolled in Victoria University College in 1899 could study history, French, Latin and advanced English. It would be ironic if, during Vic’s 125th year, cost-cutting denies current and future students the same opportunity.

Where will our future diplomats learn to speak other languages? How will they learn about the cultures and histories of people beyond our shores whose decisions, values, and interests are entangled with our own?

Do our young citizens need to learn to read, write, and think deeply or can we depend on AI, Google, and Facebook to do those tasks for us? Do we want to outsource their brains?

Similar worrying developments are also present in the National Library/Te Puna Ma¯ tauranga o Aotearoa and Archives New Zealand/Te Rua Mahara o te Ka¯ wanatanga.

Deplorable decisions such as the disposal of overseas publications and the reduction of reading-room hours have not saved these knowledge-based taonga from budget cuts in 2023.

Their parent organisation, the Department of Internal Affairs, appears unable to understand the importance of knowledge generated beyond our borders or the need for access to historical records.

Its pledge to preserve the ‘‘nation’s memory’’ fails to consider that our memories are plural and transnational. Its goal of building ‘‘a safe, prosperous, and respected nation’’ lacks the daring essential to the fearless pursuit of knowledge, essential to the development of wisdom which can challenge conventional thinking.

If we do not want to witness the death of humanities and the arts and consequent damage to our culture and democracy, we must insist on the necessary funding for an education that teaches us how to be human in a complicated world.

Opinion

en-nz

2023-06-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-06-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://fairfaxmedia.pressreader.com/article/281775633540584

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