NZ universities must champion the value of critical thinking, reasoned argument and engaged citizenship, says Richard Shaw (photo/Wikimedia Commons).
by Professor Richard Shaw
A month in, and the damage caused by the presidency of Donald Trump is piling up. Three features of the new administration’s conduct stand out for those who work in New Zealand’s universities: its tenuous relationship with the truth, bludgeoning disregard of evidence and argument with which it disagrees; and antediluvian views on the nature and role of science.
These things register because the role of a university is to create and publicly disseminate knowledge of the human condition and the world in which we live. This requires openness to different points of view, acceptance that knowledge is best pursued in a systematic manner, and a willingness to be proven wrong. Trump embodies the repudiation of all of these, and threatens not to make America great again but to turn it into a very dark place indeed: an insular, neo-feudal world in which those in power make and remake the truth daily, and bully the weak and defenceless with impunity.
It is tempting, in the grand New Zealand tradition, to think that none of this matters to us, tucked away as we are in our small island nation on the margins of the world. But while we might take some comfort from John Mulgan’s novel Man Alone, it is Roger Donaldson’s film Sleeping Dogs that is the better guide to what might happen if we indulge in the fantasy that our geographical isolation will protect us from Bad Stuff. The moral of the film? That the fear and the violence arrive anyway and no amount of bush will protect you when it does.
There are already warning signs. Granted, Godzone is not Trump’s America but all is not well in our own tertiary institutions. Specifically, at the very point in time when our public universities should be trumpeting (pun intended) the values of critical thinking, reasoned argument and engaged citizenship, their capacity to do so is being undercut by the slow, steady strangulation of many of their social science and humanities departments.
Universities are places where you learn how to cope with people who are not like you, to judge the merits of competing claims to truth, and to intellectually and emotionally deal with different points of view. They are where you learn to behave like a civilized adult. This is especially important in the faculties of Arts, where the disciplines of the social sciences and humanities invite students to use their intelligence freely in making sense of and exercising good judgment in a complex and changing world.
Professor Richard Shaw.
BA critical to a vibrant, functioning democracy
In short, in the Arts we teach the antidote to Trumpism. Yet we are suffering: in some universities (although not my own) courses are being cut, programmes are being shut down and staff laid off. This is not the result of the sorts of malign developments occurring in the US. Rather, it stems from the carelessness of governments unwilling to acknowledge that the transferable skills taught in programmes like the Bachelor of Arts (BA) are critical to a 21st century workforce, and seemingly unaware of how important those same skills are to a vibrant, functional democracy.
Whatever the root cause of this disregard for the Arts, its effect will be the casual destruction of our universities’ capacity to contribute to a national community at ease with itself.
And this could not come at a worse time. In this country the evidence points to mounting distrust in government, loss of faith in the institutions of democracy, rising inequality, and growing numbers of people who are politically disengaged. (Where else have we recently seen this combustible brew?)
There are no alternative facts to these, and courtesy of Trump we now know where this state of affairs can eventually lead. So this is a time to publicly acknowledge and properly fund the social, political and economic contributions made right across the spectrum of work done in our universities, including the Arts. Because if we don’t, she won’t be right. She’ll be a bloody disaster.
Professor Richard Shaw is a politics lecturer at Massey University and Director (Bachelor of Arts) External Connections.