The Value of Arts Humanities & Social Science Research

It has been a busy time of the academic year with conferrings –graced by former graduates as speakers extolling the virtues of a liberal arts and social sciences education- and the launch of a research showcase month in the College, which highlights the research activities ongoing in the College and launches a research website and a brochure full of activities: workshops, conferences, summer schools and seminars.

There has never been a more important time to mark the significance of research within the College, as in the national context we await the Forfas prioritisation report which may have implications for the amount of research funding made available for AHSS. Given that as noted in a recent opinion piece in the Irish Times (July 2^nd 2011), by Professor John Kelly that over the period 2005-2009 some €1.35 billion of public money was spent on research in our universities, with : “85 per cent allocated to the disciplines in sciences, 8 per cent to engineering and 7 per cent to other, mostly arts, disciplines”, it is notable that a total of 93 per cent of public research monies thus went to so-called STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), with the remaining 7 per cent distributed amongst AHSS (arts, humanities and social sciences) disciplines.

Consideration of the national research spend is inevitable at a time of fiscal restraint, but it needs to take cognisance of the fact that research monies to date, both from the state and from private industry sources, are more readily available to the sciences than to arts, humanities and social sciences. That is not to deny the costliness or underestimate the value of scientific endeavour, but rather to emphasise the often obscured reality that arts, humanities and social sciences, while benefiting from neither a large pot of available public monies in the national arena, nor from funds from certain industries (e.g. pharmaceutical), have performed very well in international competitions such as those for research funding in Europe. Additionally in Ireland, these disciplines have attracted, and graduated, large numbers of undergraduate and postgraduate students, especially PhDs. They are pivotal to our national strategy for economic recovery in terms of the cultural and historical economy, and international recruitment into education. That this has been achieved with proportionally little investment, and where the return is considerable, in terms of both employment (of postdoctoral fellows and researchers) and leveraging of European funding, has to be taken into account in any debate on research strategy.

The current Forfás exercise on research prioritisation brings government policy on research into sharp focus. There is an apprehension —perhaps unspoken— that research investment will be seen as a mechanism to simply input monies into certain industries. This could happen if all or proportionally most of government funding for research goes into certain identified areas. Furthermore, an economic model of research which equates the latter with commercialisation and employment and which only values applied research is mistaken and dangerous. In this respect the academic communities of sciences, arts, humanities and social sciences would agree that such an approach at the very least will ensure that once blue skies research is no longer being carried out, there will be little to be applied. There must be space for blue skies research in all disciplines, and the autonomy of scholars individually and /or collectively to pursue ideas must be fostered since such autonomy is key to innovation, imagination and progress. The view that any government prioritisation exercise is, or can be, the whole story when it comes to research or research funding, must be rejected, and any dialogue whereby innovation is limited to applied and commercialised research criticised. Indeed, one might also challenge the wisdom of the government deciding to prioritise what will probably be the same areas as every other country in the world,  and choosing to do so using the very limited methodology of simply building on past research success .  After all, where the next ‘big idea’ will come from is not yet known, but it is  unlikely to emerge from those already well-trodden fields. It is more likely that the next ‘big idea’ idea will emerge from the cracks between disciplines.

Ironically, in an era when much lip service is paid to the cross disciplinary and interdisciplinary initiatives, attention to the methodology whereby such scholars talk to and work with each other is fairly scant. Countries which provide structures to support this work and which make provisions to encourage emerging or early-career scholars  to work in these areas will have an inbuilt advantage in future research and discovery. Hunt, in its rejection of hyper-specialisation at an early stage of higher education and a valuing of deep disciplinary foundations, contains a similar message which also must be echoed in research policy and in the later stages of education. As the HEA/IRCHSS report Playing to our strengths (at p17)  notes: “…the expectation that SET research is best suited to ‘create jobs’ is to misunderstand what drives creativity in the first place and understates the importance of AHSS as well as the underlying importance of generic skills in promoting innovation and productivity. ,,,[W]hile the AHSS provide skills for specific occupations and sectors which contribute directly to economic sustainability, they also enhance quality of life and help to make Ireland an attractive place to live, work and do business.”

There is also an additional societal dividend in terms of the ensuring a sustainable society and democracy which merits attention. The focus of academic inquiry and the methodology of our arts humanities and social science scholars has much to offer, not simply in terms of input to public discourse and debate, but in terms of methodology and approach. Despite the occasional lip-service paid to the world of knowledge by politicians in the context of the knowledge economy and society, the recent economic crisis and the focus on utility and transformation of ideas into commercial ideas may often make short shrift of the value of a more traditional approach to knowledge. The latter is one that prefers an ability to critically appraise information and subject the certainties of the moment to analysis in a long-term framework to the dictates of a particular vision of the ‘smart economy’. The ability to articulate and give expression to a dissenting view is exactly what we need as politicians, policy makers and citizens.  Indeed, the failure to do precisely that and to challenge the prevailing consensus may well have been the harbinger of our current difficulties. To forestall any reoccurrence, we therefore need to look to those skills of reflection and analysis and have the courage to dissent and foster an education system which hones them. That means fostering the arts humanities and social sciences in our universities and institutes of higher learning by embedding them more generally in the curriculum across the disciplines (precisely as envisaged in Hunt and Playing to our strengths). In this way we can ensure that the skills in those areas are represented in decision making and policy in all areas and at all levels in our society.

We need to extend a welcome in the College to those students who are now entering the first year of our courses, where the disciplines explore how we might challenge perspective by looking at things differently –and at different things. We need to ensure those disciplines remain central to our educational mission, and enrich the educational opportunities offered to all our graduates by ensuring that the influence of the liberal arts in education are not confined to students registering for such courses.

 There is an important opportunity here in research policy and education to carry the ‘richness’ of the some of the traditions Ireland claims as its own on the world stage, and mark their general and global significance by making them central to our educational and research mission. Showcasing our research is a first step in that process.