Message from Academy Chair

This is my valedictory newsletter as my three-year term as Chair of the Academy concludes on 30 June. I am very happy to report that Distinguished Professor Geoff Chase (University of Canterbury) has been elected incoming Chair. I wish him the very best for the next three years.

In his final message to the Academy in June 2020, my predecessor Professor Richard Blaikie (University of Otago) noted that ‘the structure and membership’ of the Council and the Academy Executive Committee had ‘changed substantially’ in the preceding three years. He noted that the change had required ‘debate and engagement from the Fellowship’ and thanked those who had taken part in that evolution.

In the ensuing three years the Academy and Royal Society Te Apārangi have ridden the waves of a covid-challenged world in its highs and lows. The highs include the huge value contributed by scientists and researchers across many fields within Aotearoa New Zealand in providing the sound basis for an evidence-led response to the crisis. New Zealand has had remarkable success in this respect and its research community can feel rightly proud of their part in it (COVID-19 in Aotearoa New Zealand, Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand; Skegg, David. 2021)    

In the longer term, and speaking as a historian, New Zealand’s extraordinarily successful response will grow in significance as distance from the immediacies of the covid-19 pandemic are increasingly recognised. Internationally, New Zealand was one of the top 5 countries in containing mortality (and even reducing it beneath average mortality rates) (Balmford, Ben, et al. 2020; Islam, Nazrul, et al. 2021; Nepomuceno, Marília R., et al. 2022; Msemburi, William, et al. 2023).

Highlights of my term include the annual New Fellows’ Day where an outstanding group of new Fellows are inducted into the Academy and provide compact and enthralling glimpses into their stellar research. In 2021 New Fellows included a large number of Māori scholars whose work spanned the disciplines, and whose whānau and colleagues filled the whare at Turnbull Street in ways that very amply fulfilled Wharehuia Milroy’s name for the Society: Te Apārangi: a gathering of experts. The annual Honours events changed shape under covid with regional celebrations replacing the expensive one-venue, dinner format. Working with the excellent AEC members has been a real pleasure and I would like to thank them all, past and present, for their expertise and time devoted to Society business. It has also been very satisfying to work with all those who serve on the subject domain panels and the national Fellowship Selection Panel. I am constantly impressed by the care taken and thoroughness of these deliberations.

Covid and its attendant disruptions have also brought an escalation and polarisation in public speech (not all of it can be described as ‘debate’) and in sentiment. A low point was reached with the occupation of Parliament grounds and surrounds over January-March 2022, though online vitriol escalated after that event concluded. Polarisation was manifest in the highly charged response to the July 2021 ‘Listener letter’, including, among others, the Society and its Academy, and to the Society’s public response. This was a difficult phase in my tenure. Not everyone agreed with the public statement we issued; though many people did. A section of the research community in Aotearoa New Zealand deeply disagreed with the ideas expressed in ‘the Listener letter’ and found its content damaging. 

A number of Fellows were subsequently more forceful in objecting to the Society’s complaints process that became a matter of public comment from October 2021 following complaints received by the Society in relation to the Listener letter, alongside calls from some quarters to expel Fellows from the Academy. The complaints procedure of the Society, which is required by our statute and is a common feature in organisations of our kind, is not well understood. Nor was it widely understood that the complaints lodged were made by individuals who had the right to do so, rather than the Society as a body, and that the Society had an obligation to follow the complaints procedure, including maintaining confidentiality. The complaints procedure is being revised to improve the initial investigation process and clarify the process overall.

A good deal of turbulence stirred the waters of the Academy during late 2021 and early 2022. The special meeting of Fellows convened on 13 April 2022 on the Wellington waterfront provided a useful opportunity for meeting and talking together. The discussion on that day demonstrated the value of face-to-face exchange and respectful dialogue, over confrontational or legalistic duelling. Such discussion continues in the future strategic vision exercise initiated by the Chief Executive and President in the latter half of 2022.

Working together in a multi-disciplinary Academy such as we have in the Society has its great advantages and not inconsiderable challenges (and we began as an organisation of wide intellectual investigation rather than of discretely specified scientific disciplines) (Martin, John. 2017). In Aotearoa New Zealand we have a unique opportunity to bring varieties of excellent research together. We should treasure the world we have and that we can share with each other, across our laboratories, field work, libraries, seminar spaces, marae, clinical rooms, and in the lands, forests and seas that sustain us and which provide endless questions to explore. Most of all, to share our knowledge amongst the people who spark our questions and who seek out what we find.

I write as our university sector faces dire challenges in funding. The financial crisis has resulted in the announcement of job cuts at the University of Otago and Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington, with others intimated to follow. Reduction on the scale in prospect: several hundred academic and supporting professional jobs, will seriously diminish the capacity of the universities to fulfil their research and teaching functions. Action is being mobilised, the outcome is anticipated with deep concern.

I would like to offer special thanks to Professor Angus Hikairo Macfarlane, whose term is also concluding on 30 June. Professor Macfarlane has given huge service to the Academy and the Society in supporting Māori knowledge and development and leading the AEC and Society in its path to a closer connection with Te Ao Māori. On Sunday 28 May, Kahu Hotere, Director Māori, presented a gift on behalf of the Society.

As one of a still small number of women office holders in the Society (I think I am the first woman to occupy the role as Chair of the Academy) there remains a sense of being a stranger in an unfamiliar place. I would like to thank those who have been welcoming to me in that space and urge the Academy to continue its work of making this a community where the wider research population might see themselves.

Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou

Charlotte Macdonald
Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington
7 June 2023