It has been a long, dry spell for the humanities in New Zealand’s universities and the moment has come to give them parity with the sciences.

Even though disciplines in the humanities develop graduates whose contribution to solving the complex challenges facing Aotearoa is just as important as those of scientists, their position in tertiary education has not been protected.

Sadly, it has been an uphill battle for universities to preserve their departments of gender, history, languages, classics, philosophy and others. Under the current funding model, tertiary institutions receive less for these students than those studying science and technology.

At the same time, there are very few external research funding opportunities in New Zealand for scholars in these disciplines, who are also typically ignored by industry and the corporate sector.

The drive toward aligning tertiary education with industry and the labour market further compounds the inequities between the science and humanities.

Critics readily dismiss the humanities, calling them ‘easy’, ‘imprecise’, ‘limited’, ‘unworthy’ and ‘unproductive’; they deride their work as mere ‘story-telling’ or ‘talk fests’. But the humanities are just as relevant as science or technology.

Road safety relies as much on effective communication — choosing the right metaphors and graphic images of dangers and threats — and on understanding relationships between infrastructure users as it does on road construction and automobile engineers.

Public health initiatives to reduce obesity rely as much on identifying at-risk populations through historical, political and sociological analysis as they do on the insights of dieticians and the skills of surgeons. They also require a knowledge of the cultural and symbolic place of food, eating and exercise among diverse groups.

Developing New Zealand’s tourist industry relies as much on understanding our natural environment, heritage and culture as it does on macro-economics and national statistics. It also requires language expertise, translation skills and knowledge of the visitors we welcome to our shores.

Adding value to primary food products, and exporting them to markets abroad, relies as much on knowledge of foreign consumers as it does on nutrition and food science.

A productive and prosperous country requires people with clear and critical thinking: the ability to imagine, identify, reconstruct and theorise problems; all skills honed by the humanities. While science and humanities both provide the principles and foundation of reason, the humanities lean toward the broader contextualisation of our problems, questions and answers. Employers looking to grow their businesses, managers seeking to improve efficiencies, bosses wanting to build relationships with potential clients, all need people who can contextualise and conceptualise their social environments and who aspire to better, fairer and more just ways of doing things.

The current tertiary education strategy in New Zealand is biased toward the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) in the mistaken belief these disciplines ask the most profound questions. But the humanities are no less weighty. Through their critical investigations of art, languages, music, relationships and texts, scholars working in the humanities have discovered patterns and theories with inordinate practical implications in dealing with issues such as inequality, health and ill-health, cultural diversity, citizenship and political participation.

The sciences alone will not chart the course to the future. Scientific advances and technological changes are everywhere and proceeding apace. Understanding, and thriving in, the future demands that we perceive, understand and contextualise ourselves and our environments (built and natural) and that we communicate and collaborate through our diversity of interests and cultures. Herein lies the power of the humanities.

Paradoxically, many of the most powerful policy makers in New Zealand have studied the humanities or creative arts. Former Prime Minister Bill English has an honours degree in English literature, Michael Cullen trained in history, and the current Minister of Health, David Clark, has a PhD in religion — his research explored Christian existentialism.

In the interests of building Aotearoa New Zealand, the new Government should take the opportunity to rebalance — in word and deed — the relationship between the sciences and the humanities. It should take the lead and help facilitate the contributions that the humanities make to employment and to the richness of everyday life.

Read the original article on Newsroom.