In brief
- Auckland University places its international ranking at risk with a compulsory Treaty / mātauranga Māori course.
- All students have to enrol in the course — and pass it to go on to second-year studies.
- The compulsory course is part of a “decolonisation” agenda that aims to destroy the “Euro-centric” university system.
- Academics who might want to object will note how harshly the professors who signed the Listener letter were treated.
Sometimes it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the University of Auckland is suicidal. Last year it slipped out of the world’s top 150 universities rankings and this year began a compulsory course on the Treaty and Indigenous “knowledge systems” for all first-year students in every faculty.
So no matter whether you’re studying engineering, accounting, science or arts, you will have to enrol in one of the Waipapa Taumata Rau (WTR) papers, even if you have no interest in the topic and can’t see how being instructed in te Ao Māori is relevant to the subjects you want to specialise in.
And you will have to pay for the privilege of being railroaded onto the course — with international students paying up to $5730 for the paper. Perhaps most alarmingly, students have to pass to be entitled to move on to second-year studies.
How anyone imagines that will make the university more attractive to either domestic or international students is baffling. But that is evidently not its purpose. The compulsory course plays a key part in indigenising — or decolonising — the university.
The decolonisation programme — which, according to one definition, aims to “dismantle the colonial, Euro-centric structures and knowledge systems that have historically dominated universities in order to privilege Māori ways of knowing, being and doing” — has been underway for several years. This has been done with the blessing and encouragement of the university’s management, including the current Vice-Chancellor, Dawn Freshwater.
Eru Kapa-Kingi — a vice-president of Te Pāti Māori who develops and teaches courses for Law School — said in an Auckland University newsletter this month: “We need to start realising that universities were one of the primary tools of colonisation in Aotearoa, replacing Māori philosophy, Māori ways of thinking, speaking and acting. That places an obligation on academics today to really contribute to the deeper, longer-term decolonisation project.”
The possibility that the university’s reputation might suffer irreparable damage as a result is undoubtedly not seen as a negative outcome by its advocates. As one Auckland University teacher put it: “The activist academics don’t care. They want to destroy the universities and replace them with what would in effect be seminaries [for Māori nationalist aspirations]. So it’s win-win for them.”
Last September, Elizabeth Rata, a professor in the Education Faculty, told The Platform’s Michael Laws that she thought the effect of the decolonisation programme would be to ultimately “turn the university into a faith-based institution, like a wananga, or a seminary, or a madras. It will mean a university is no longer a university in the sense we understand… a place for the discovery of new knowledge, for the testing, for the refutation of the knowledge that we currently have.”
Decolonisation essentially means elevating a Māori worldview and ensuring it has at least equal status with that of the Pakeha “oppressors”. And although the three successful parties in the coalition government campaigned in 2023 on ending co-governance — which is based on an interpretation of the Treaty as an equal “partnership” — the university is ploughing on.
This month, David Seymour said he was frustrated the university hadn’t “quite got the memo that the people changed the government”.
“I’ve had so many constituents in [my] Epsom electorate who are students who say this [compulsory course] is not only not of interest to us but more importantly it’s a perversion of academic freedom.”
The name of the course is significant in regard to academic freedom. “Waipapa Taumata Rau” is the name Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei gifted to Auckland University in 2021, and is now part of its official title. So students will be studying a mandatory course that has the university’s explicit imprimatur. Inevitably, most will see it as representing an official view, which may make them unconfident about challenging the validity of the material presented to them.
The details of what is taught differ between faculties but they all promote the idea that knowledge is associated with a particular place — including “our university, our city and our country, and why it matters for knowledge taught in your faculty”.
“Situated knowledge” is opposed to the idea there are universal, objective truths that are independent of the context in which they are formed. An example is mātauranga Māori — or traditional Māori lore, which mixes spiritual and empirical elements. It is “situated knowledge” that differs from iwi to iwi and hapū to hapū.
It is not easy to find material from the current course given it has only been offered since the beginning of this semester. However, a discussion paper among the teaching resources students were given in the non-compulsory pilot science course last year included the following paragraphs:
“Mātauranga Māori and other Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing have been (and continue to be) seen through the lens of Western/Eurocentric scholarship as subordinate to academic and especially scientific knowledge systems.
“This tends to come hand-in-hand with failing to recognise mātauranga and other Indigenous knowledge systems as long-standing, robust, ongoing, and dynamic, as opposed to being static things of the past… Starting with such recognition provides a basis for discussions of complementarity and compatibility, rather than contests of epistemic validity.”
It is worth noting the last sentence, which slyly positions mātauranga Māori as complementary to and compatible with science, and suggests the exercise is not a contest of epistemic validity. What is science, you might wonder, if it isn’t a “contest of epistemic validity”?
It is clear that what are presented as “knowledge systems” are really “belief systems”. Nick Matzke, a senior lecturer at the university’s School of Biological Sciences made that point to the Senate at the beginning of March regarding last year’s science pilot:
“The course includes the following as elements of Indigenous ‘knowledge systems’— ‘ancestral forces’, and ‘mauri’, which refers to the ‘life essence in all things’. The course also states, ‘Māori knowledge systems, like many others, understand the beginnings of the universe in terms of light and dark.’
“These statements raise obvious questions. What is the evidence for ancestral forces, or for a life essence in all things, including non-living things? Are these statements of belief, or knowledge? What is the difference between belief and knowledge, and between ‘belief systems’ and ‘knowledge systems’? Wouldn’t a variety of religious views, including creationism, be ‘knowledge systems’ under this framework?”
Matzke also raised the question of how students who challenge aspects of the course content will be treated. “Given that the university has, for several years, been pushing very hard on the importance and value of indigenous knowledge, and systematically avoiding any opportunity for normal academic critical discussion of it, it needs to be asked: If a student dares to question, in an assessment, inside or outside of class, whether or not some supernatural claim in an indigenous knowledge system is actually knowledge, or asks for the evidence that the claim is true, will they be penalised [with a lower grade]?”
Students have to pass the course to continue their studies, and poor marks may affect their opportunities for future study by lowering their first-year grade average.
A university spokesperson has confirmed the grade a student achieves will be included in their overall first-year grade average — “in all degrees”, except those “seeking selection into clinical programmes in their second year of study (Medicine, Pharmacy, Optometry and Medical Imaging). They must pass the WTR course, but the grade will not be used in the grade-point average calculation as part of that clinical selection.”
Why these four courses have been deemed worthy of a dispensation has not been explained but it seems to be a tacit acknowledgment that the university understands including WTR results in a student's grade-point average may present problems.
Students at Auckland University will be hoping that criticising any aspects of the compulsory WRT courses won’t see them marked down — or labelled as racists. But given the implementation of the courses has been driven by activists, both seem to be possible outcomes.
Certainly, some dissenting students at Massey University who enrolled in its compulsory courses based on decolonisation ideology were viewed as racist.
A Massey University document noted in 2022: “Some students complained about (left) bias, a lack of ‘balance’, and the way in which ‘all the woes of the world (are) blamed on British colonialism’. While overt racist statements are thankfully rare, racism was inherent in some students’ comments and course work and needed careful management, particularly in a classroom or online class forum.”
Auckland University, of course, is no stranger to treating critics of decolonisation as heretics to be silenced. That fact goes some way to explaining why so few academics have been willing to speak up publicly in opposition to the WRT programme.
Yet it is clear that some do not like the path the university is following. Emeritus Professor Jerry Coyne — a world-renowned evolutionary biologist from Chicago University who has written repeatedly on mātauranga Māori and science — has said he receives emails regularly outlining the concerns of disaffected Auckland University academics who ask not to be publicly identified.
This week, Coyne quoted on his blog “Why Evolution is True” an anonymous correspondent’s complaint about the WRT course: “This is not what we thought we were agreeing to when we supported affirmative action to increase the proportion of Māori academics, but it’s what we got. This guy [Eru Kapa-Kingi] is basically using his university position to further the political interests of Te Pāti Māori.”
Academics’ desire for anonymity should not be surprising given the uproar that followed the publication of a letter to the Listener titled “In Defence of Science” in mid-2021. The seven signatories, all professors at Auckland University, made what should have been an uncontentious statement: “Indigenous knowledge may indeed help advance scientific knowledge in some ways, but it is not science.”
The professors’ 300-word letter was written in response to plans to include mātauranga Māori in the school science curriculum and to give it equal standing with “Western/ Pakeha epistemologies” — which means subjects such as physics, biology and chemistry.
The professors were immediately engulfed in a firestorm of hostility — which included an open letter signed by more than 2000 academics and researchers weighing in against them as well as slurs from fellow academics who dismissed them as “shuffling zombies” and “racists”.
As a result, Auckland University academics who might have wanted to put their heads above the parapet in solidarity with the professors would have seen very quickly that heresy is extremely costly. The professors’ dismal experience functioned as a cautionary tale for anyone else in academia who might take their statutory role as “critic and conscience of society” with regard to the decolonisation project seriously.
It should come as little surprise, therefore, that activists within the university have met with very little resistance to their plan to impose a particular view of Te Tiriti and mātauranga Māori on thousands of students — even if it means New Zealand’s biggest and most prestigious tertiary institute is “committing academic suicide through identity politics”, as Coyne described it.
Graham Adams is a freelance editor, journalist and columnist. He lives on Auckland’s North Shore.
