The meaning of science
In his semi-autobiographical book Adventures of a Psychologist, award-winning researcher and author Michael Corballis suggests universities “should be dangerous places”, intellectually speaking, anyway.
“They are where ideas are, or should be, debated,” writes the University of Auckland emeritus professor, who has spent much of his career researching experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience.
“They are where religion clashes with atheism, business with philosophy, universalism with nationalism.”
University campuses are also where the broadening culture wars are raging, often testing the definition of academic freedom in the process. Corballis and a handful of his colleagues, most of them well advanced in their careers or retired from teaching altogether, have just emerged from their own brief but intense skirmish.
In a letter published in the July 31 Listener, the group, which includes respected diabetes researcher Professor Garth Cooper; outspoken sociologist professor Elizabeth Rata; and psychology professor Douglas Elliffe, who was acting Dean of Science at the University of Auckland, wrote of their concern at proposed changes to the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA), the national qualification for secondary-school students.
The Ministry of Education is seeking “to ensure parity” between mātauranga Māori, which literally means Māori knowledge or wisdom, and other bodies of knowledge taught as part of NCEA, “particularly Western/Pākehā epistemologies”.
The academics took issue with science being characterised as “Western” in nature as well as a plan to include, as part of course work, discussion on how science “has been used to support the dominance of Eurocentric views (among which [is] its use as a rationale for colonisation of Māori and the suppression of Māori knowledge)”.
Public submissions on the changes close on August 13 and new subjects will be piloted next year, with the revised curriculum expected to be introduced in 2024-25.
DEFENDING SCIENCE
The letter was a forceful if carefully worded “defence of science” that 10 years ago would have barely caused a ripple.
