I’ve explained several times that two members of the Royal Society of New Zealand (RSNZ), philosopher Robert Nola and biochemist Garth Cooper (distinguished members of their trade), resigned from the RSNZ after a recent investigation cleared them of being miscreants after criticizing the government’s initiative to teach Mātauranga Māori (MM), or Māori “ways of knowing”, as coequal to science in science classes. They were accused, among other things, of causing “harm” to people by expressing this view.
Cooper and Nola, along with five other University of Auckland professors (one now deceased) had given this opinion in a short letter to The Listener, a popular Kiwi website. While the University of Auckland also attacked all seven signers—a blatant violation of their right of academic freedom—the University has now quietly shelved its criticisms, but their promise to have a public University debate about the merit of teaching MM as science seems to have disappeared as well.
At any rate, Nola issued a statement explaining why he resigned despite being exculpated, and I posted that here. (It was largely a free-speech issue, but there were several reasons.)
Now Garth Cooper has issued his own statement about why he resigned. I’ve put the bulk of it below the fold, but give a brief excerpt here. (Note that Cooper is part Māori and has spent much of his career educating and helping the Māori.)
Cooper:
The events that in the end led me to resign followed on from my signing of the letter “In defence of science” (NZ Listener, 31 July 2021) along with six of my colleagues. Our combined expertise includes biology, biochemistry, psychology, education, philosophy of science, and medicine, and all of us are expert science educators and communicators.
I signed the letter to make clear, in a public forum, my opposition and deep concern about processes now underway in New Zealand that are evidently undermining literacy, numeracy, and science literacy, particularly amongst Māori children.
I have Maori heritage. For most children, a good education is often their best hope of improving their trajectory in life and I was raised in that belief. I did not experience anti-Māori bias. Real bias stems from the view that Māori can’t do things or participate fully in society because they’re Māori. Unfortunately, the partial substitution of mātauranga Maori for international-format science education, perhaps unintendedly, is implying that limitation.
. . . An NCEA (NZ’s public examination system) working group referred to science as a “Western European invention”. We strongly objected to that particular characterization since science is universal. One recent extreme of some astonishing views being introduced, for example, claims that “to insist Māori children learn to read is an act of colonisation” [see here].
. . .The inherent bias against students in suggesting that rather than a sound grounding in mathematics, biology, chemistry and physics, there is to be parity with non-scientific systems such as mātauranga Māori, will be massively counterproductive for all students, but especially biased against Māori.
Māori are good students when they are afforded the proper opportunity to learn, and I have specific knowledge and experience of this based on my past formal roles in Māori education. Their right to unbiased access to optimal education, if they wish, should be protected vigorously.
This whole mess has made everyone look bad save the “Satanic Seven” who signed the initial Listener letter. Those seven have been vindicated. But The University of Auckland has embarrassed itself by apparently worshiping MM and by criticizing a perfectly reasonable letter (read it; it’s short). The RSNZ simply looks foolish and inept for investigating the signers of the letter and especially for its initial statement (now quietly removed) given below:
And the government of New Zealand, once a bellwether of true liberalism and progressivism, now looks weak and woke, giving precedence to the valorization of its indigenous population over scientific truth.
Where this will end is in the watering down of science education in New Zealand and the departure of its best students to study elsewhere. (It has not escaped my notice that there are parallels with what’s going on with the politicization of science in the U.S.). MM is surely something that Kiwis should be educated about, but it should never be taught as if it were equivalent to modern science. Educational and governmental officials in New Zealand, besotted with worship of all things indigenous, can’t seem to make that distinction.
Click “continue reading” to see Cooper’s full statement.
Why did I resign from the Royal Society of New Zealand?
Garth J S Cooper DPhil (Oxon) DSc (Oxon) FRCPA FMedSci
My reasons relate to its loss of understanding of its raison d’être; suppression of free speech; failure to properly support science and science education; untoward political focus of management and governance processes; and prolonged defamation of myself and Professors Michael Corballis (now sadly deceased) and Robert Nola, by certain of its authorities.
My concerns do not apply to the Fellowship but to other aspects of the RS, and I acknowledge all those Fellows who share the central belief that “Science is Science”. I am grateful for my time of service with the RS Academy, for my many rewarding associations with members of the Fellowship, and for their substantive support throughout this process. Moreover, the Initial Investigatory Panel (IIP) established by RS to examine the complaints against me and Professor Nola, eventually recommended not to continue the investigation.
The events that in the end led me to resign followed on from my signing of the letter “In defence of science” (NZ Listener, 31 July 2021) along with six of my colleagues. Our combined expertise includes biology, biochemistry, psychology, education, philosophy of science, and medicine, and all of us are expert science educators and communicators.
I signed the letter to make clear, in a public forum, my opposition and deep concern about processes now underway in New Zealand that are evidently undermining literacy, numeracy, and science literacy, particularly amongst Māori children.
I have Maori heritage. For most children, a good education is often their best hope of improving their trajectory in life and I was raised in that belief. I did not experience anti-Māori bias. Real bias stems from the view that Māori can’t do things or participate fully in society because they’re Māori. Unfortunately, the partial substitution of mātauranga Maori for international-format science education, perhaps unintendedly, is implying that limitation.
Much of my career has been focussed on kaupapa (Māori agenda) research and teaching aimed at improving Māori health care delivery and Māori science education, on marae and in hospital and medical school/university settings. That focus has been literal – personally designing, writing, teaching, and executing novel and successful programmes in both Māori health and education. As part of my commitment to these objectives, I served on the national Health Research Council, including 6-years’ service on Te Komiti Māori with further years advising on Māori health development.
While treating many Māori in diabetes clinics, I turned my focus to kaupapa diabetes research, since this disease is a leading cause of disability and death amongst Māori. Inter alia, this work entailed visiting marae throughout the country to inform and seek endorsement of iwi.
With much dismay, I have been witnessing a recent profound undermining of the meaning of science in New Zealand, now underway with the introduction of mātauranga Māori education as having parity with sciences including mathematics, chemistry, biology, and physics. Mātauranga Māori should be taught, as we stated in our letter, but not as part of the national science curriculum.
An NCEA (NZ’s public examination system) working group referred to science as a “Western European invention”. We strongly objected to that particular characterization since science is universal. One recent extreme of some astonishing views being introduced, for example, claims that “to insist Māori children learn to read is an act of colonisation” (https://nzareblog.wordpress.com/2022/03/22/maori-literacy/).
Our letter also spoke against the NCEA report’s divisive suggestion that the colonising damage purportedly caused by science be taught nationally in schools as part of the NCEA curriculum. The particular view that underlies this problem originates, at least in part, with the concept that the New Zealand education system is a colonising force that needs to be ‘decolonised’ – these radical and divisive views promoted by some, are fundamentally antithetical to educational achievement and opportunity, more especially for Māori.
I have remained largely silent throughout the prolonged, conflicted, and defamatory RS management behaviours against us arising from our widely endorsed letter ‘In defence of science’. As a past member of the RS Academy, I had hoped that its overseers would in time come to understand that the role of RS has always been to protect good science and its servants, the scientists – that their role was not to support the redefinition of science itself.
Nor are those who currently guide and manage the RS absolved from their responsibility for condemning my, and my colleagues’ rights – and indeed obligations – to speak from our considerable individual and collective knowledge of accepted scientific processes, knowledge, and understanding. They should understand the fundamental requirement that all New Zealanders have the right to have an acceptable education based on sound principles of literacy, numeracy, and science literacy.
The quality of science education must be a central concern of RS. A key function of RS under section 6 of the Royal Society of New Zealand Act 1997 is “the advancement of science and technology education” (note that this does not include the advancement of humanities education).
The inherent bias against students in suggesting that rather than a sound grounding in mathematics, biology, chemistry and physics, there is to be parity with non-scientific systems such as mātauranga Māori, will be massively counterproductive for all students, but especially biased against Māori.
Māori are good students when they are afforded the proper opportunity to learn, and I have specific knowledge and experience of this based on my past formal roles in Maori education. Their right to unbiased access to optimal education, if they wish, should be protected vigorously.
An excellent statement by Professor Cooper. RSNZ should be ashamed at losing such an exemplary practitioner, not least of furthering scientific research and teaching of benefit to Māori.
Please do read the link Prof. Cooper cites in his statement. The author is an advocate for overcoming the trope of “Maori deficits” including the canard that literacy = colonialism. The idea that literacy is not a Maori “thing”, she writes, is belied by the avidity with which Maori took to learning at mission schools established for them by the British arrivals.
I posit the education = colonialism claim is a new invention to meet the needs of grievance agitators. To succeed, insurrections need an abundant supply of idle, poorly educated young men with limited prospects in the wage economy and no attractiveness to women who want good fathers for their children. Then when a demagogue comes along with money, trouble starts even in the absence of some great Cause. It’s like Billy Crystal’s joke: “Women need a reason to have sex. Men just need a place.”
Prof. Cooper has devoted his life to helping these young men find reasons.
I happen to work in the same field as Dr Cooper ( medicine ), and in the same city, Auckland. Therefore, I knew before the Listener letter that he is of Maori ethnic heritage, even though he does not advertise this professionally. This is more than can be said of ‘New Zealander of the Year’ Susana Wiles and physicist without academic qualifications in the humanities Sean Hendy, who fomented the witch hunt against the Listener writer academics by launching a petition.
In addition, NZer of the Year Susana Wiles remarked on twitter that the authors had written ‘racist garbage’ to the Listener, which meant that Maori medic Dr Cooper was in her estimation a peddler of anti-Maori racism. This was even though Dr Cooper has mentored academically/advised hundreds of Maori university students, as well as Pacific and White. ( That is, Dr Cooper has also advised medical students who do not have Maori ethnic heritage. )
For non-NZ readers, the confusion arose because of a peculiar NZ convention that has become widespread only in the past quarter of a century. Those of Maori ancestry can have printed, after their names, their tribal affiliations, enclosed by brackets, eg Jill Smith ( X, Y, Z ). This marks Jill Smith as Maori, even if she has an ‘English’ name. I can’t recall seeing Dr Cooper’s name in a professional context with this tribal connection, so it is unsurprising most people believed wrongly that all 7 Listener authors were White. ( In reality, the proportion of 1/7 Listener authors being of some Maori heritage accords with the national population of 16% )
In NZ, anyone can identify as Maori so long as they can persuade at least one Maori tribal group they have some Maori genealogical connection. Therefore, one can be officially counted in NZ as Maori even if one has 1/256 ancestry. If readers Google NZ artist and UoA art teacher ‘Peter 3.125% Robinson’, they can find that Robinson has made a series of satirical paintings on his 3.125% Maori ethnicity, that lampoon how this 3.125% quanta of Maori background makes him eligible for certain vocational benefits and rewards. Robinson identities as White, according to those I know in the art world. However, if one Googles ‘Peter Robinson Auckland art gallery’, one can discover that Auckland Art Gallery lists him with the Maori naming convention.
Dr Cooper has helped many Maori medical students, and mostly they have been people who have come from more deprived socioeconomic strata.
The problem is that many ‘Maori’ who gain entry to restricted entry university courses are NOT socioeconomically deprived, but have ransacked their family tree for some Maori background so they can enter these courses through the reduced academic criteria that were originally instituted to aid those who came from academically and/or economically deprived family backgrounds.
For the University of Otago in 2019, it took White and Asian students a minimum GPA mark of 94% to enter medical school, whereas it took Maori or Pacific students a GPA of 74%. If theoretically someone like Peter ‘3.125%’ Maori Robinson, without a deprived family background, desired to enter med school, he could use the Maori pathway even if he had attended an ‘elite’ school.
In the last three years, I have met ‘Maori’ medical students who have entered through the Maori med school pathway, with these characteristics : 1. A boyfriend-girlfriend couple where both kids attended the same classes in the same middle-class school. Both applied to Auckland med school, where the one with slightly better grades failed, but the other entered med school through the ‘Maori pathway’. I have met all four parents a few times, and all the parents look White, and have nothing about their speech or cultural preferences that mark them as Maori.
2. At least three med students who have one parent as a medical doctor, and who attended schools that were in the upper 20% of socioeconomic privilege. 3. Ditto, one student with a parent as a lawyer. 4. A med student who entered through the Pacific pathway whose parents own a private business, and who attended a high achieving high school that is fee-paying. This student drives to med school in a new German-made car valued at 20K more than my own car at the time.
Ramesh.
I wonder if you would consider submitting an edited version of your comments above to the Listener in NZ. I have sent notes to Radio New Zealand (state funded) objecting to the practise of listing tribal affiliations after names of Maori folk they interview. No response of course. When assisting pupils with entry to medical schools in NZ I was told to advise them to check for Maori ancestry, since there were ‘Maori Scholarships’ available. That was back in the 90s.
Hi Don,
you are welcome to submit my comments anywhere.
Like Dr Cooper, I support some affirmative action for severely socioeconomically deprived kids to enter restricted entry uni courses, and I hope Dr Cooper agrees with me this should NOT be ONLY on basis of Maori or PI ethnicity. The overriding factor has to be socioeconomic deprivation, since reams of international data across almost all nations show the primary determinants of a child’s future achieved educational record depend on 1. The educational level of their mother , and 2. The academic ability of their class peers from primary to secondary school.
The corruption in NZ is that bourgeois ‘strategic Maori’ and bourgeois MINOs [ Maori In Name Only ] kids predate on the places available to the truly deprived. If Prof Sean Hendy or Tina ‘blame everything on colonialism’ Ngata are reading this, perhaps they can tell me how 1. kids with doctor or lawyer parents and who attend $$ high schools such as Kings, St Kentigerns, St Cuthbert’s, Baradene, Kristin etc , or 2. Kids with parents who own a multimillion private business [ as per my examples ] ‘suffer from appalling structural racism’ and deserve handicapping to enter law or med school.
The points here are not just fairness, but social consent. Why should the 16% of NZers like me who are Asians pay tax to allow middle class Maori-In-Name-Only to have their kids enter med school with an eyewatering 20% GPA handicap over Asian kids, many of whom come from poor backgrounds themselves? This corruption erodes social consent in terms of meritocratic public education.
Incidentally, this phenomenon is even worse in the arts. Last year, NZ Opera appointed two Maori and PI trustees. One was Carol Hirschfeld, who had to resign from Radio NZ for lying. In my 25 years of attending NZ opera, and 35 years of attending the NZSO, I’ve never seen her at a classical concert except one that had some pop content. The other new trustee was someone who a well-known NZ opera singer ( who was for years on the cast of a Euro opera house ) wrote to me remarking, ‘Ramesh, is she a Maori now? I’ve known her for 20 years and that’s news to me!’ )
Also, Dr Cooper may have known Prof Jonathan Mane-Wheoki. I met Mane-Wheoki 33 years ago, when he told me unequivocally he was of Tahitian ancestry, and was NOT a Maori. He was Dr Mane when I first met him, and was a specialist in Victorian architecture, with a PhD in that from the Courtauld, London. When I met him many years later, he was now Mane-Wheoki, specialist in Maori art, with an international career lecturing on Maori art, but not his PhD expertise on Victorian English architecture.
Hello.
I wish to state my agreement with Ramesh. The present situation is getting out of hand and is potentially damaging to New Zealand society.
Other groups in New Zealand are even more disadvantaged than Maori in certain respects. For example, Pacific people have significantly worse health across a range of indices than Maori and other smaller subgroups (including recent immigrants) do too.
We should assist all demographic groups that are disadvantaged in some way. The notion that one particular group is more deserving than others, for no other reason than ethnicity, is very dangerous if we take it seriously enough to base significant public policy and funding decision-making on it.
David Lillis
Listing an individuals Iwi (tribe) behind their name is a really weird phenomenon which seems to have taken off in recent years in NZ. I find the growing embrace of whakapapa (essentially ethnic identity or geneology- ie their Iwi) by the government, media and universities as a concept we should be extremely cautious about. Seeing in science department press releases is particularly jarring. Combined with the emphasis on Tangata whenua (translates as people of the land- ie Maori- in contrast to Tangata tiriti- people of the treaty; ie people not originally from here), there is a disturbing focus in the public sphere about the importance of where people come from (ie here, or somewhere else) and their who their ancestry is. It’s a form of Primordialism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primordialism), and something we should be very wary of.
I always enjoy your comments from Remuera, Auckland 🙂 Ramesh. I used to live there and am amazed at the changes in the last 25 years. Looking back one could almost see some of them coming, perhaps in the last 15 years even more so. Keep up your activism, Dr. R.
cheers,
D.A.
NYC
It is not unreasonable to ask who has had the more beneficial impact on Maori well-being and life chances: Professor Cooper or those who sought to hang him out to dry. It is sad that Cooper has felt obliged to quit the RSNZ but he leaves with his head held high.
Hmmm…I don’t see much parallel between this and, say, right-wing rejection of climate change. Which is the classic ‘politicization of science’ example.
However I do see significant parallels between Cooper’s message about Maoris taking science, and McWhorter’s message on Blacks taking standardized tests.
This makes me wonder if there is some underlying data showing Maori don’t do as well in science as non-Maori, which might be driving the same sort of “if there’s a performance disparity in X, do X differently or stop doing X altogether” response.
I don’t know, but the left’s valorization of MM “ways of knowing” in NZ seems analogous to the right’s “ways of knowing” to me. If MM truths are just as valid as scientific truths, why can’t the Biblical truths of the Christian right be equally valid? Science says that climate change is human caused. Fundamentalists say its God’s will and/or natural. If the U.S. adopted the same standards as NZ, these two views would be taught co-equally in our classrooms.
But I’ve never heard the right stress postmodernist ‘ways of knowing’. The rare religious right winger might occasionally use that rhetoric out of convenience, but they don’t actually believe it. With climate change both secular and religious righties tend to argue that the mainstream is just plain innaccurate in data interpretation and prediction, not that there is some other way of knowing. And the creationists who refer to the bible aren’t really interested in promoting postmodernist ‘other ways’ either, because their argument foundation is that there is just one way, the bible, and the outputs of science must be interpreted to align with that.
“Other ways of knowing” is almost exclusively a left wing postmodernist thing. To the extent that the right uses it, they pick it up for the occasional rhetorical swipe, and then they drop it just as quickly.
“Other ways of knowing” was a phrase often used by the Spiritual Liberals, particularly when invoking the mysticism of indigenous cultures (or what they imagined was the mysticism of indigenous cultures.) It’s genesis was probably in the 19th century but it really started gaining popularity in the 1970’s, particularly when referring to psychic practices or alternative medicine. Part mysticism, part folk wisdom, part intuition, part faith. Not so much postmodern, but a romantic longing for the premodern.
Eric.
Almost certainly there is data that shows Maori performing less well than non-Maori in the sciences. In fact, for five years I was the statistician who produced reports such as the following:
https://www.nzqa.govt.nz/assets/About-us/Publications/stats-reports/NCEA-Annual-Report-2020.pdf
Maori perform less well than Asians and Europeans across the New Zealand high-school-level qualifications and probably in the sciences too (though the sciences are not reported specifically in the report above). They certainly performed less well in the sciences when I was the statistician who did that work in New Zealand.
Why Maori and ethnic minorities (e.g. People of color in the US, Aboriginals in Australia) perform less well in education than others is a complex question but most probably the major factor is socio-economics, while ethnicity-based factors play a smaller part. While I was an education statistician I used to perform such analyses (e.g. multiple regressions) that showed socio-economic variables as significant predictors of educational performance while ethnicity-based variables were far less significant.
The problem, then, is how to address such disparities. Elevating indigenous knowledge to the status of the sciences is most certainly not the solution.
David Lillis
Sounds very parallel to the US situation. A couple hundred years of socioeconomic abuse of past generations does put a crimp in the current generations’ socioeconomic starting point.
That sounds like a virtue-focused reading of history.
Moving on to the present and the future, …despite the billions of dollars spent on the underclasses of the post-colonial world, (along with such non-monetary gifts as health care, affirmative action, and “restorative” sentencing) their socioeconomic starting point does not seem to have budged much and the upward trajectory seems shallow and erratic. Do you favour learned helplessness, entrenched systemic racism, or hostility to an educated culture as the best explanation for this failure?
If evangelical christians had managed to pull off this kind of heist in the UK or the USA there would be global outrage. Because NZ frames it as an act of decolonisation which is part of the religion of the ‘woke’ there is barely a murmur about this across the left leaning media.
The drive to teach Matauranga Maori as if it were Science is based on the notion that Science is
a word rather than a practice. It will be exactly as successful for educational purposes as Matauranga Maori would be for use in aeronautical engineering, if (as seems very likely) education of students takes place in the same real world that airplanes fly in. This is essentially Professor Cooper’s point.
The confusion of words with realities underlies pretty much all of wokeism—from “ethnomathematics” and similar contrivances to the insistence on substituting pronouns for Biology. The malady of reification used to come from religious ritual (trees that talk, the blood of Christ, etc. etc.), but in our time it comes from the academic discourse of post-modernism and grievance studies. Had academic administrators long ago treated these hoaxes the way they treat astrology or voodoo, they would not have diffused so widely into the Schools of Ed, and elsewhere as well. Focusing on reality, as is obviously necessary in the design of airplanes, wouldn’t be a bad idea in other realms—-but here we are, with administrative bodies from NZ to Boston reifying to beat the band
Slight quibble, but it’s based on the notion that Science is a body of facts. Thus when MM (or creationism, or whatever) comes to different conclusions, they want to say it’s because they used a different way of knowing. But you’re right, that they never seem to think about science being a practice. Both MMers and creationists don’t have an answer to a question like “okay, today we’re going to teach the students how to distill. How to set up the equipment, incorporate information about boiling points of the liquid, and report/record the results. What teaching-the-practice change should we make to incorporate MM/the bible?”
Another thought is that it’s really not based on either. Instead, it based on ‘reputation capture.’ The simple logic of: students take and respect science. We want students to take and respect our material too. So we will force science classes to include our material and then students will take ours just as much, and respect it just as much.
Yup, science envy. I think it was Feynman who compared pseudoscience to a cargo cult, mimicking certain forms to reap certain rewards.
That pale blue of the icebergs is almost identical to solid argon. I wonder why.
No idea why that happened. This was meant as a comment on Antarctica.