In brief
- High-achieving teens are heading overseas, particularly to Australia, because New Zealand universities are increasingly less attractive.
- Part of this lack of attraction can be attributed to low levels of government funding
that severely limit the quality of education our universities can offer. - This lack of funding is regrettable since universities are the major source of
innovations as well as export earnings. - But part of the lack of attraction comes from excessive managerialism and
politicization of our university.
NZ Universities are sidelining academic expertise and failing in their duty of care to
students
As I have argued elsewhere, a key part of the crisis facing New Zealand universities is government apathy and underfunding. We don’t take tertiary education seriously even though it is one of our biggest export earners and typically a key driver of productivity.
But at the same time universities are compounding this problem via greater corporatisation and a lack of trust between administrators on the one hand and academic staff and students on the other.
Faced with funding pressures universities have engaged in cutting front-line academic and professional staff while the number of managers of various types has steadily increased so that at most institutions non-academic staff vastly outnumber academic staff.
University Councils, which are supposed to exercise oversight, have limited academic representation. University of Auckland’s twelve-member Council has a single representative of academic staff on board. Most members are political appointees with little understanding of a university’s core mission.
Dissonance between academic freedom and managerialism
Two recent cases at the University of Auckland highlight this dissonance between university managers and academics. As the journalist Graham Adams has highlighted, recently a Professor of Education was instructed by the University’s Equity Office to update her course outline to indicate that sex is not binary but rather a continuum. Now, whether sex is dichotomous, or a continuum, may well be the subject of debate, but it is doubtful that the University’s Equity Office has the requisite expertise to arbitrate this or to instruct a senior academic on this.
A group of senior academics including leading biologists wrote a letter to the University pointing out the fallacy in the Equity Office’s position resulting in an apology to the concerned academic.
A second issue, again highlighted by Graham Adams, deals with the introduction of a set of compulsory courses for all first-year students at the University of Auckland, courses that have faced significant pushback from students taking them. A petition asking the University to cancel these courses has been circulating for a while and has been signed by more than one thousand five hundred current students.
According to information available on the University website one such course WTR 100 “…draws on place-based knowledge to demonstrate how diverse knowledge systems and Te Tiriti o Waitangi shape perspectives and apply in your discipline.”
Questions about recent changes to the curriculum
It has never been clear why it should be mandatory for all students regardless of their discipline to learn about the Treaty. Is this knowledge useful for those working in New Zealand? Possibly. But the vast majority of our students will be looking for jobs overseas. It is unclear how integrated these courses are or can be with other core subjects students are studying; whether they will complement other courses or merely serve as vehicles for delivering a particular worldview.
It is not surprising that these courses have attracted derision as sources of political indoctrination.
Recent initiatives at Auckland University opposed by a majority of academics
Less recognized is the fact that these courses are part of a broader curriculum transformation that was overwhelmingly voted down by the University’s Senate, which represents academic staff in what the New Zealand Herald referred to as an “unprecedented revolt.” To be sure not everyone was objecting to these specific courses, but there was strong opposition to various aspects of the transformation, including the hasty nature of their introduction and the potential disruption from these changes to students’ planned program of studies. The introduction of these compulsory courses requires either elimination or at least postponement of other required courses.
The fundamental problem here is that these initiatives are violating academic freedom. They are being implemented with little or no input from the academics who have the most skin in the game. This has resulted in low morale among staff and a loss in our sense of purpose. This has obvious negative implications for the quality of education we are offering and why we are less attractive to students.
However, having said this, in the second part of this article, I argue that at this point of time at least it still makes sense to study in New Zealand, at least as opposed to Australia since many of the problems afflicting New Zealand universities are universal and the returns on investment from an Australian education may not be higher.
Ananish Chaudhuri is Professor of Experimental Economics at the University of Auckland and author, most recently, of “Economics: A Global Introduction“.
