This story is unbelievable--what's going on in New Zealand that would explain this craziness?
Two authors of a controversial letter on the scientific status of Māori knowledge may be expelled from a prestigious academic society, following several complaints.
News of the disciplinary process within Royal Society Te Apārangi has led some of the winners of its most significant award to threaten their own resignations over what they see as an impingement on academic freedoms.
A July letter in The Listener, signed by seven professors from the University of Auckland, raised concerns about an NCEA working group’s proposal to give mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) parity with other forms of Western knowledge.
The open letter said the working group's description of one potential course, as promoting “discussion and analysis of the ways in which science has been used to support the dominance of Eurocentric views (among which, its use as a rationale for colonisation of Māori and the suppression of Māori knowledge); and the notion that science is a Western European invention and itself evidence of European dominance over Māori and other indigenous peoples”, perpetuated “disturbing misunderstandings of science emerging at all levels of education and in science funding”.
“Science itself does not colonise. It has been used to aid colonisation, as have literature and art. However, science also provides immense good, as well as greatly enhanced understanding of the world.”
While indigenous knowledge was “critical for the preservation and perpetuation of culture and local practices, and plays key roles in management and policy ... in the discovery of empirical, universal truths, it falls far short of what we can define as science itself”....
The Royal Society also issued a statement rejecting the authors’ views, which said it “strongly upholds the value of mātauranga Māori and rejects the narrow and outmoded definition of science”.
Now, the society is carrying out an investigation into whether two of the letter’s co-authors – biological scientist Garth Cooper and philosophy professor Robert Nola – should be expelled from its membership as a result of the remarks....
Nola said the letter’s critics had mistakenly claimed that science was itself colonising, which could deter young New Zealanders from studying the subject.
“I don't think science is a coloniser at all: all people are colonisers, and we've done plenty of colonising, and we may have used our science to help do that. But science itself, I can't see how that is colonising – Newton's laws of motion, colonising of the brain or the mind or whatever, it's nonsense.”
If Nola or Cooper are expelled, then every other member of the Royal Society with any integrity should resign, and then reconstitute an actual academic honor society that permits scholars to disagree about central questions like what constitutes knowledge, an whether all forms of professed "knowledge" are on a par.
(Thanks to Adriane Rini for the pointer.)
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