Opinion: Why slashing funds for arts courses is a bad idea

There is certainly a case to be made for rapidly increasing our national competencies in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (Stem) in higher education.

As a country, we cannot hope to make any material progress if every time we have a complicated engineering problem we have to bring in outsiders. Our universities need more stem researchers. And our primary and secondary schools need more stem teachers.

Lastly, increasing our investments in the teaching of Stem subjects and associated research must be accompanied with deliberate policies that will ensure that all Kenyans, regardless of gender, have access to the best teachers and facilities.

I therefore welcome Dr Fred Matiang’i’s instinct to align the financial incentives faced by our universities with this overall goal. Our universities should be places of general knowledge; as well as places where we train the next generation to get things done.

That said, I have serious disagreement with his assertion that the increase in Stem funding should come at the expense of the social sciences and humanities in our universities. Matiang’i’s pronouncement in this regard betrays a warped understanding of what university education should be about.

By downgrading the importance of the social sciences and humanities, he is acting in a manner no different than colonial administrators who thought that Kenyans only needed to be taught handiwork. Matiang’i should realise that a brilliant engineer with no sense of purpose or moral compass is not better than a mere handyman. We might as well have Chinese engineers then.

Why do I say this? For the simple reason that we cannot figure out how to fix our problems unless we have a clear understanding of where we are coming from, where we are going, and who we are as a society. A Kenyan engineer who is not properly rooted in the Kenyan social milieu will not be in a position to provide solutions to Kenyan problems.

Before we can transform our society, we must understand who we are and what we are about. If Matiang’i were to have his way, our Stem graduates would be no different than robots and foreign technical experts.

As a country, we do not need that. Part of the reason why we have such shallow and rudderless leaders is because we have never really invested in understanding our history and crafting a Kenyan story. If Matiang’i’s directive is to invest in the hardware that will transform Kenya, he must also understand that we need the software to run this hardware. And the software comes not from scientific knowledge. It comes from the social sciences and humanities.

After more than 50 years of independence, I am constantly baffled by the insouciance of our leaders when it comes to the basic elements of nation-building. It is almost as if they seem to think that we will naturally become patriotic Kenyans.

This is false. Unless we consciously dig for and document our shared histories; unless we then use this information to craft a national narrative about who we are and where we are going; and unless we take research coming out of the social sciences and humanities seriously, we will remain to be a poor country racked by internal divisions and whose elites act and think like foreigners in their own land.

Do you ever wonder why we are such an insecure society full of rudderless individuals? Do you ever wonder why we lack any collective moral core? Do you ever wonder why the vast majority of our fellow citizens imagine everything Kenyan to be base, and every foreign fantastic? Do you ever wonder why our leaders readily sell us and our futures for nothing to foreigners?

The simple answer is because they do not know who they are; or why they are in the positions they hold. And cutting funding for the social sciences and humanities would only make this problem worse. Full disclosure, I am a political economist who believes strongly in the usefulness of the social sciences and humanities.