Does this apply to the university sector? Universities have a very high degree of institutional autonomy, which is a critical safeguard that protects academic freedom and research integrity. In return for this freedom, universities bear duties. Our ability to innovate and meet the needs of our society depends on nurturing the resources of the university sector wisely and well.

So it’s pretty important that those in charge of universities do their jobs well, and unless we assume they are both infallible and paragons of virtue, there needs to be accountability somewhere in the system. 

Holding universities accountable: the Commission and the councils

Who holds the universities to account? The current law provides for two main avenues of accountability: one via the universities’ annual reporting and funding agreements with the Tertiary Education Commission and the other via the council that each university is required to have. The law endows university councils with a lot of authority. Councils formally make or approve university decisions and internal policies (or delegate responsibility for them) on pretty much everything the university does as a corporate entity. Of course, the actual day to day running of a university is delegated to the Vice Chancellor, who is effectively the CEO. Councils have the critical responsibility of appointing the Vice Chancellor and holding that person to account for his or her management of the university.

This means it is a big deal who gets to be on the council and how they get to be there. What does the law say? Actually, not that much. The law says councils must have between 8 and 12 members, with 3 or 4 of these appointed by the minister. A few types of people are disqualified (undischarged bankrupts, for example) and a few types of people must be included: a student representative, two staff representatives (one academic, one non-academic) and at least one council member must be Māori. And there’s general language about needing to ensure representativeness, appropriate skills and experience, and ability to perform their duties as members.

Beyond that, the law basically leaves university councils to decide for themselves how they will operate. Section 279 of the Act says: ‘An institution’s council may make statutes relating to the appointment of members..’ Even the minister responsible for the universities needs to consult with the council before deciding on the 3 or 4 individuals he or she gets to appoint: Section 278(7) says that ‘Before making an appointment under this section, the Minister must seek, and consider, nominations from the relevant council.’

Council roles to be filled at the University of Auckland

So councils get to write their own statutes setting out how they appoint members. What do these statutes say? I’ll take the University of Auckland’s one as an example. Others may be different, but the University of Auckland is our country’s largest. It is also in the process of appointing four council members. And, because the current Vice Chancellor resigned only a few months after being reappointed by the current council, the council is tasked with the weighty responsibility of choosing a new Vice Chancellor over the coming months.

The council revised its procedures for appointing its own members three times in the last three years. Its 2023 statute sets out desirable qualities in council members and notes they can be appointed for a maximum of four years and a maximum of three times – so one could serve for up to 12 years. The statute says the Vice Chancellor is always a member of the council, by virtue of being Vice Chancellor. The statute also sets out the procedures for the election of staff and student representative members. There’s another document – made by the council – that gives a bit more detail on how exactly members get appointed or reappointed. This shows that the central role is played by something called the VCRERC – the Vice-Chancellor’s Review and Executive Remuneration Committee. This committee gets to specify what skills and experience members should have, before a call for expressions of interest in joining the council is made. The VCRERC also gets to view these expressions of interest and draw up a shortlist, to present to council, along with its recommendation. 

The powerholders answerable to.. themselves

Who is on the VCRERC? It is a committee of the council itself and comprises just four people: the Chancellor, who chairs the council, the pro-chancellor (effectively the deputy) and chairs of the council committees for finance and audit.

A look at its responsibilities shows that the VCRERC really is the centre of power on the council. As well as reviewing and recommending appointments or reappointments of council members, it also has the responsibility of ‘Reviewing and managing the performance, composition and succession of Council.’

What all this boils down to is that the council, the body charged with holding the university’s paramount manager, the Vice Chancellor, to account: a) includes the Vice Chancellor; b) determines for itself how it will operate; c) appoints and reappoints itself (with the exception of the 3 elected members and the minister’s appointees – but it gets to nominate ministerial appointees; d) reviews its own performance.

Managing conflicts of interest

All pretty cosy. There’s a cute provision for managing conflicts of interest in the appointment of council members: ‘If any member of VCRERC is a candidate for appointment as a Council member, that VCRERC member will not be present or participate in any part of the appointments process for the relevant position including the receipt and consideration of expressions of interest.’ So (for example), when considering the expressions of interest in positions that are currently vacant or up for reappointment, should the current Chancellor wish to be reappointed as the alumni member, she will excuse herself as a member of the VCRERC, which she has led since 2021, while the rest of the committee considers any competing expressions of interest received for the alumni role she currently fills on council. No problem at all.

Another quirk of the council appointments process is that the council’s appointments statute stipulates that the university’s Pro Vice-Chancellor (Māori), a member of the university’s executive team, ‘is to be invited to attend meetings of the VCRERC to assist the VCRERC… when the appointment of a Māori member is being considered.’ So the council member with particular responsibility for monitoring the university’s performance with respect to Māori interests – performance which is led by the Pro Vice-Chancellor (Māori) – is appointed on the advice of that same Pro Vice-Chancellor. Taken together, we may not have a chumocracy, but we surely have a system vulnerable to chumocracy and all the risks associated with it. Of course, everyone may be doing their job honourably and competently. Nothing I have written here suggests otherwise. But it’s a system that bears some similarities to what historian Peter Hennessy calls the ‘good chaps’ theory of British government. That’s a system that depends on everyone being a self-restrained good chap – which is to say, a system that is vulnerable to decay and capture.

Photo by Roberto Carlos Román Don on Unsplash

The post Chumocracy in the universities? appeared first on Open Inquiry.

The Minister of Education, Erica Stanford is determined to introduce a knowledge rich curriculum for all New Zealand students. What does this mean? First, it is a standardised curriculum which ensures that students across the country receive the same high-quality knowledge. That knowledge consists of academic subjects with content selected for its value and justified for its veracity. Furthermore, the content must be designed so that it is coherently organised and built progressively from the most basic to the more complex.

Second, it is about planning for teaching. It is here that teachers take the designed national curriculum and turn it into effective teaching plans suitable for their school and their students. The latest ideas from cognitive science about secondary mental abilities, time perception, memory load, and feedback are needed at this stage. They help connect the content to students’ thinking processes.

Third, both good curriculum design and planning for teaching set the foundation for the actual teaching. Many teachers know their subjects well and use teaching methods that best connect students to rich content. They will welcome a knowledge-rich curriculum because it is what they have taught for years. We know and respect those teachers. The real benefits will be for those teachers and students who have been disadvantaged by eighteen years of a localised curriculum.

This ambitious knowledge-rich curriculum will link Erica Stanford to Peter Fraser. His commitment in the 1940s to prescribed subject content laid the foundation for the first-rate education system enjoyed by the post-war generation. Stanford’s knowledge rich curriculum will be as momentous and as far-reaching as Fraser’s. However, its success is not yet assured. The professional class which benefited most from that post-war subject-based curriculum has worked tirelessly to dismantle the source of its privilege in a strange alliance of decolonisation and socialism.

This ambitious knowledge-rich curriculum will link Erica Stanford to Peter Fraser. His commitment in the 1940s to prescribed subject content laid the foundation for the first-rate education system enjoyed by the post-war generation. Stanford’s knowledge rich curriculum will be as momentous and as far-reaching as Fraser’s. 

We can thank the recent secondary school incident for revealing what this alliance looks like in practice – a junior English class, a video playing, a teacher instructing how to analyse the video’s tone and mood. In the video, How colonisers went from learning to reo Māori to trying to exterminate it, students hear the authoritative voice of sociolinguist, Dr Vini Olsen-Reeder declaiming, Once the pakeha government was established here, from there the desire grew to exterminate the Māori people.

The video’s content is either wrong or seriously distorted. Such propaganda will be difficult to teach in a knowledge-rich subject that requires the selection of content to be justified. That’s the sticking point – who justifies the content? What criteria are used?

In the coming months, the public will be consulted on the draft English curriculum. This is right and proper – it is not a curriculum for teachers alone, but for the nation.  It is here, in the national discussion about the subject of English that I predict a simmering conflict will surface. Some, like me, regard school English as the study of language and literature in the English language. For others, English is the tool of the capitalist coloniser, intent on locking the colonised into a permanent state of subjugation. Their demands are for the decolonisation, then indigenisation, of the entire education system.

It is unsurprising that English is at the centre of the gathering storm, although History and Science are not far behind. English has a very particular role – that of creating society’s cultural repertoire. When we study English at school we are taught, or should be taught, the content and conventions of our nation’s most widely spoken language. New Zealand’s democratic institutions, social practices and universalist values were developed in English. It is the language of the 19th century colonial era and of 20th century nation building. According to one secondary school principal, the most effective way to decolonise the nation is by removing English, that dangerous language of the Eurocentric coloniser from the school curriculum.

New Zealand’s democratic institutions, social practices and universalist values were developed in English.

If we agree that the subject is the study of English language and literature, then the content selected must be justified. A straightforward process, one might think. But no, at the very source of the creation and justification of academic knowledge is the wellspring of the conflict. It is in the nation’s universities that decolonisation and indigenisation are being promoted. School subjects which are drawn from university disciplines and accountable to their rules and methods, will be hostages to the unaccountable ideologies of our decolonising universities.

English as a school subject draws in the main from the disciplines of literary criticism (including Shakespearean studies), linguistics, sociolinguistics, and history. Decolonising those disciplines removes all means of accountability – those methods of empirical evidence, logical argument and ongoing criticism which ensure that disciplinary knowledge is always on trial and always subject to rejection, revision, or provisional confirmation. These methods are what gives the disciplines, and by extension those who practise them, authority and status.

Although Dr Olsen-Reeder does not identify himself in the video as a university lecturer, his title and sociolinguist label convey authority. Teachers and high school students are likely to take him at his word. If anything, thanks are indeed due to the secondary school incident mentioned above for providing us with a glimpse of a decolonised education system. It should alert us to the difficulties faced by those tasked with introducing a knowledge rich curriculum.

If you contribute to the consultation of the draft English curriculum, I ask that you justify what you want taught. The content must have value not only for its literary beauty, its grammatical precision, its vocabulary richness, but it must challenge students. When teachers introduce young people to abstract content beyond their immediate experience, the students develop the secondary cognitive abilities necessary for the complexities of modern life. 

A decolonised curriculum does not provide quality content. Instead it locks young people into emotional responses. But emoting is not thinking. Abstract thinking develops only when students are confronted by complex content. A knowledge-rich English curriculum offers both that content and the development of the mental skills needed for the modern world.

Professor Elizabeth Rata is an international curriculum expert. She is a co-author of Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking: The Knowledge Turn. Springer.  

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-74661-1.

Cover photograph of Peter Fraser by S P Andrew Ltd: Portrait negatives, reference 1/4-020106-F, Alexander Turnbull Library Collection. Available at https://natlib.govt.nz/records/23146991. Used with permission of the National Library of New Zealand.

The post A Knowledge Rich Curriculum for New Zealand appeared first on Open Inquiry.

As Johnston and Kierstead have described, in New Zealand our ratio of non-academic to academic staff of 1.5 to 1 is much higher than in Australia, the UK, or the USA (where it is about 0.8 to 1). If research-only staff are treated as academic staff this ratio still only improves to 1.4 to 1. Numerous “managers” and support staff have appeared in areas such as Human Resources, Health and Safety, Student Learning Support and Pastoral Care, Outreach, Māori and Pasifika directorates, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI).

This growing administrative cost has to some extent been offset by the growth in international student business. By 2019, over 117,000 enrolled students delivered the country a total economic benefit of around $5Bn. University international 2019 student fee revenue was about $600m, or around 15% of universities’ total revenue.  International students pay up to five times the domestic student fee rate. Covid-19 dramatically reduced the number of international students studying within New Zealand, though partly replaced by students enrolled for on-line studies. Mid-2020, universities faced a year-end financial shortfall from lost international enrolments of about $200m, and this was expected to rise to $400m in 2021. The financial hangover for the universities has been major, damaging, and aggravated by financial commitments to ongoing new building projects.

Looking now at what and how we teach, it is usual for the universities to periodically rationalise their course offerings with the aim of greater administrative efficiency and to contain costs, particularly where courses may have low enrolment numbers. I note at the outset that what is important is not necessarily the low enrolments in a particular course, but the total of the taught Equivalent Full-Time Student (EFTS) count for each academic staff member. Many courses are important but will have low enrolments because they are specialised, or they are pitched at postgraduate level. A staff member’s personally attributable EFTS, added up over their undergraduate and postgraduate teaching plus supervision commitments, tells us how much they earn for the university. Most academics who teach large enrolment courses teach small enrolment courses too. This reality should be part of the analysis in current curriculum transformation projects. If a narrow view is taken simply of the enrolment numbers per course, the richness and diversity of course offerings will be damaged.

A critical and controversial factor in the current course rationalisation exercises is the increasing pressure to include courses that reflect relativist postmodern views (“other ways of knowing”) and Te Ao Māori (specifically matauranga Māori), even within science programmes. This situation raises questions that must be answered.

The University of Auckland has stated, “The rationale is to reduce workload to allow time to develop relational pedagogies, to address timetabling constraints, and to reduce costs….”.  One can infer that “relational pedagogies”, mean relativist views that come through in traditional knowledge courses, for example, where we are seeing courses offered in science programmes that do not strictly stand the test of being taught science, but instead may deliver a mix of observational knowledge, cultural lore, myth, mysticism and animism or vitalism. Most of us support the inclusion of such content in history, sociology or anthropology courses, but not in the Science-Technology-Engineering-Mathematics (STEM) area. This situation comes into closer focus if such courses are intended to replace pre-existing science courses, as appears to be the case.

As one colleague at the University of Auckland said, “It’s quite extraordinary that we are launching a course called “Epistemological justice: indigenising STEM” while at the same time we’re being forced to cut science courses.”  

There is a clear logical fallacy in any university course that seeks to indigenise STEM:

• As regards STEM subjects, when European colonists arrived in the late 18^th and into the 19^th century, Māori scientific/technical knowledge was approximately at the stage of other developing societies at or pre-3,000 BC, acknowledging that the spiritual/vitalist/animist parts of matauranga Māori would have been differentiated form those of other societies by the names for, and qualities ascribed to, flora, fauna and inanimate objects, and also to gods such as Ranginui/sky father.  This was a society without the wheel, and without mathematics, physics, chemistry or biology, but which had extensive phenomenological understandings of food sources, that fire cooks and can cause burns, that clean water is necessary for life, that some plants have medicinal properties, weather patterns, and navigation by the sun and stars, etc. Such knowledge is of very considerable interest from a historical point of view, clearly desirable to preserve for cultural reasons, but of current relevance to STEM courses only if it complements modern science in a functional way, as unpalatable as that is to those who would include it.
• STEM rests heavily on knowledge discovered during the liberal enlightenment from the 17^th century up to today, and modern science (not “Western” science, as many non-Western societies Asia, the Middle and the far East contributed, for example) went through similar earlier processes of knowledge development through observation of nature and phenomenological discovery, as did matauranga Māori.  It then developed through new discovery to the present day.
• Unless it adds science content to a STEM degree programme, to insert matauranga Māori or other indigenous knowledge back into modern STEM education means excluding something else that had been deemed important in any one course, with older knowledge and belief that has long been superseded in the same way in which Mechanical Engineering students no longer study the steam engine – as I confess we did when I was a student!  STEM course content is continually updated to reflect the latest scientific discoveries, computational techniques, and the advent of AI, for example.  When I was a student, we were learning about how transistors worked, as they were then a recent development. By contrast, we spent little time on obsolescent radio valve technology. Why should we be obliging students to study something in the sciences that should be sitting in a course outside modern science (e.g. history, history of science, anthropology). Abbot et al., in “In Defense of Merit in Science” compare liberal epistemology, under which the scientific method falls, versus critical social justice theory, where indigenous and traditional knowledge find a more comfortable home. To “indigenise” STEM can only mean to re-introduce older knowledge and belief into courses where it is no longer relevant. This in my view can only be for ideological or political purposes, as otherwise it defies logic.

My foregoing remarks are not intended to diminish or disrespect traditional knowledge. However, curricula in STEM degree programmes are constantly under pressure to introduce new content and drop material that can be let go.  Even this is problematic, and past considerations have been given to increasing the Bachelor of Engineering (Hons) from four to five years to avoid dropping essential content.  In our modern world we cannot afford to impose traditional knowledge content in science programmes for purely ideological reasons (or to determine academic staff career progression based on their acceptance or adoption of this ideological position).  Apart from the potential diminishment of the overall scientific content of the degree, doing so will inevitably reduce the standing of these degree programmes internationally.

Photo by Ram Kishor on Unsplash

The post Ideological Illogic – Facts Not Feels, Please appeared first on Open Inquiry.

Cover Photo by Khashayar Kouchpeydeh on Unsplash

The post University of Auckland faculty restructures appeared first on Open Inquiry.

Any edifice that rests on the shifting sands of contemporary academic fashion is bound sooner or later to fall. The university of the future will, paradoxically, need to offer its students an education with deeper historical roots

Ferguson and Howland

Compulsory Courses at the University of Auckland

The University of Auckland is set to deliver courses entitled ‘Waipapa Taumata Rau’. All students must complete a Waipapa Taumata Rau core course in their first year of study. 

The university website informs us that ‘Waipapa Taumata Rau’ is the Māori name gifted to the University of Auckland and that the relevant courses are called by this name to symbolize students’ aspirations as they seek to be a part of the University and to succeed in their studies. 

 “Designed to transition you into University life, your Waipapa Taumata Rau course provides knowledge vital to your studies and essential skills (like critical and ethical thinking, effective communication, and the ability to work well with others).

Each faculty course teaches you why place matters, introducing you to knowledge associated with the University, the wider city, this country, and its people and history, including Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

You’ll learn about different knowledge systems that underpin your area of study to provide a foundation for your future learning. Your Waipapa Taumata Rau core course will play a key role in shaping your first year of study with us.

Completion is required to progress into your second year of study where you will have opportunities to build on what you have learned.”

Some of the material does seem very relevant, especially critical and ethical thinking, effective communication and the ability to work well with others. Also positive is the discussion of knowledge associated with the University, the wider city, this country and its people and history, provided that a balanced picture of New Zealand’s history is encouraged.

However, we ask why all students must take such a course in order to progress into second year at a time when STEM courses are being cut. Why is Te Tiriti an enforced part of these courses but apparently not the New Zealand Constitution Act of 1852? Will the Constitution Act of 1986 be discussed, or other recent legislation?  

Knowledge Systems?

What exactly are the ‘knowledge systems’ that underpin students’ areas of study and that will provide a foundation for their future learning? How will these knowledge systems support electrical, civil and mechanical engineering, theoretical and experimental physics, pure mathematics, theoretical and applied statistics, organic and inorganic chemistry, evolutionary biology and cancer research? How will they assist in combatting malnutrition and infant and child mortality, clean energy technologies, efficient transportation and many other fields of endeavour?

Will students of forestry science at New Zealand universities be introduced to traditional medicine for restoration of kauri forests? One account of such medicine asserts  the “need to tune into the vibrations of the forest” and recommends burial of mauri stones within the affected areas, along with appropriate rituals? Will students be taught that sperm whale oil embodies healing properties for kauri? Will they be encouraged to “send out a call to the world, asking communities to hold special ceremony on behalf of kauri” and “invite the world to Aotearoa to join us in prayer and ceremony in the initiation of our future Rongoā interventions.”? In that account we are told:

“Through listening and traditional meditation in the forest, will assist those to align to the cellular frequency of the forest and to become more enlightened in the work of looking after the forest.”  

Will students of agriculture learn that farmers should manage their farms on the basis of the phases of the moon, when in reality the lunar cycle has no effect whatsoever on plant growth or physiology?

If the thinking behind such traditional knowledge is taken as an allegory for loving and caring for the natural world and its living environments, then something wonderful has indeed been gifted to us. But if such beliefs are accorded the status of literal truth then we have the makings of a very serious problem in tertiary education.

In New Zealand, what about the approximately 25% of tertiary students who are non-Māori/non-European? Will their knowledge systems be presented too? Will the international students who are forced to take these courses consider their fees to be money well spent?

Today in various countries we hear demands for decolonization of mathematics. For example, Rowena Ball claims that mathematics has been gate-kept by the West, defined to exclude entire cultures and that almost all mathematics that students have ever come across is European-based. Among others, she wants to enrich the discipline through the inclusion of cross-cultural mathematics. However, Sergiu Klainerman responds as follows:

“If mathematics was in fact a cultural artifact, like music, literature or the arts, it would be impossible to explain its extraordinary effectiveness in the physical sciences, weather prediction, engineering or artificial intelligence.“

We agree with Professor Klainerman. Further, we believe that both science and mathematics transcend all political, cultural, ethnic and religious frontiers.

A Core Curriculum?

Today, readings at many universities in the Western world cover “progressive preoccupations” that include anti-colonialism, sex and gender, antiracism and climate. Surely, there is great merit in dialogue and action on such issues but it is critical that students’ readings are diverse rather than comprising only the perspectives of the contemporary left.

Ferguson and Howland tell us that if students are to become active and reflective individuals, they must learn to regard the past not merely as the crime scene of bygone ages, but as the record of human possibilities – an always unfinished tapestry of both admirable and shameful lives and both noble and base deeds. They must develop an ear for the English language and the language of ancestral wisdom, as well as the various languages of intellectual inquiry, including mathematics. They need a good grasp of modern statistical methods and they must also allow themselves to be inwardly-formed and cultivated by the classics.

They suggest that a sound foundation would also require an introduction to the modes of cognition, including intellectual and moral intuition and scientific demonstration. Aristotle, informal logic and Karl Popper would introduce students to the “preeminently learnable and knowable things.”

Will Students Vote with their Feet?

The perceptions of international students that New Zealand is indigenizing its degrees could lead to a significant loss of international enrolments and reduced credibility of our universities. The motive of preparing students to be effective learners is laudable, but is it strictly necessary to demand of them to assimilate these systems in order to progress in their other studies?

If the academic and political initiatives relating to these courses were truly about preparing students for university studies, then perhaps they should take the form of preparatory courses, possibly available online, before students begin their degrees. In the United States, for example, many universities provide future students access to “Cornerstone” courses in order to prepare them for assessment on writing, reasoning, research and literacy.  

Any mandatory belief-based curriculum amounts to indoctrination and should have no place in our universities. In a competition amongst the universities for fee-paying students and Government funding, will universities that insist on such courses see their enrolments fall, as students go to wherever they are not forced to pay for indoctrination?

Dr David Lillis trained in physics and mathematics at Victoria University and Curtin University in Perth, working as a teacher, researcher, statistician and lecturer for most of his career. He has published many articles and scientific papers, as well as a book on graphing and statistics. 

An earlier version of this article was first published at Breaking Views

Cover image by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

The post Is Tertiary Education for Learning or for Indoctrination? appeared first on Open Inquiry.

These may be necessary, if painful, adjustments. Universities need to stay relevant and efficient. But what exactly is being prioritised in these restructuring and rationalisation moves? Academic merit, research excellence and ability to teach the content that students will need? Or is it part of an effort to fundamentally rewire the university to serve different agendas? Could this even be a way to silence staff who have spoken out in support of science, academic freedom and free expression? The procedures and criteria set out in recent staffing reviews raise questions.

Look at the Faculty of Education and Social Work document at the bottom of this post. For some reason they don’t seem keen for the world to see it. We’re interested in the criteria for deciding whether an individual academic is safe – getting a green light on their traffic light system. For example, getting a “green” rating on research requires an output far beyond what is usual for even high performing social scientists (20 scholarly articles in two and a half years). What this means is that research performance effectively drops out of the criteria – almost no staff will be “green” on research. So other criteria will come into play. Such as “Contribution to the faculty’s expertise in Mātauranga Māori “. Take a look at appendices E and G.

Professor Elizabeth Rata, who has spoken and written publicly in defence of science, was among many staff in the old Faculty of Education and Social Work who recently received notice that their positions were “in scope” in a staffing review. We reproduce the letter sent by the Free Speech Union to the Dean of her faculty in response:

30 July 2024

Prof. Mark Barrow

Dean of the Faculty of Education and Social Work

m.barrow@auckland.ac.nz

Academic Staffing Review – Prof. Elizabeth Rata

Good morning, 

1. The Free Speech Union is a registered trade union with a mission to fight for, protect, and expand New Zealanders’ rights to freedom of speech, conscience, and intellectual inquiry. We believe that freedom of speech is not only a legal principle, but a social good that allows for people in modern liberal democracies to peacefully, freely advocate for the causes they care about without risking unjust retribution.
2. The Free Speech Union represents Prof. Elizabeth Rata, a sociologist of education and a professor in the School of Critical Studies within the Faculty of Education and Social Work (“the faculty”) at the University of Auckland (“UoA”).
3. It has been brought to our attention that the faculty is currently undergoing a restructure, more specifically, an ‘Academic Staffing Review’ (“the review”). Following the faculty’s release of the outcomes of Phase One of the review, Prof. Rata was informed that her position is ‘in-scope’ and may be disestablished. 
4. Of concern to us is how data relating to ‘strategic contributions’ will be used by the Selection Committee to recommend whether positions be disestablished or not. One of these ‘strategic contributions’ is contribution to the faculty’s expertise in mātauranga Māori. As you will be aware, there is significant public debate as to whether mātauranga Māori constitutes science – a debate sparked by a letter signed by seven UoA professors (including Prof. Rata) to the New Zealand Listener in July 2021.
5. Under section 267(4) of the Education and Training Act, UoA staff have the right to academic freedom which includes freedom “within the law, to question and test received wisdom, to put forward new ideas, and to state controversial or unpopular opinions stipulates academic freedom in relation to a university.” In performing its functions, the UoA must give effect to this by preserving and enhancing academic freedom and autonomy. Underpinning this is the requirement for institutional neutrality.
6. The role of mātauranga Māori in our education institutions is a controversial political issue. Considering an employee’s contribution in this area as part of a restructure process discriminates against employees who do not share the UoA’s institutional view of the role and status of mātauranga Māori in education. Setting aside the fact universities should remain apolitical and neutral, the UoA is in clear breach of its obligations under the Education and Training Act as it is requiring its staff to adopt a specific view on mātauranga Māori. 
7. Further, the Selection Committee’s consideration of ‘strategic contributions’, specifically, contribution to the faculty’s expertise in mātauranga Māori, may be in breach of the Employment Relations Act, namely:
   1. Section 4 (Good Faith)
   1. Section 104 (Discrimination)
8. To be clear, this letter is not notice of a Personal Grievance. Rather, we wish to bring to your attention our concerns with the unlawful nature of the ‘strategic contributions’ and invite your comment on whether the consideration of contribution to expertise in mātauranga Māori will be withdrawn in light of the above.
9. We look forward to hearing from you.

And here’s the Faculty document:

Cover Photo by Khashayar Kouchpeydeh on Unsplash

The post Under pressure at the University of Auckland appeared first on Open Inquiry.

Kendall Clements is the corresponding author of the letter.

The post Teaching science ‘alongside’ indigenous knowledge? appeared first on Open Inquiry.

To any neutral observer, though, the event will have made clear quite how far our universities have strayed from being the politically disinterested, open institutions we pay them to be, and how urgently government intervention is now needed to make them fit for purpose again.

The first sign of that was the set-up. Smith had originally invited two speakers willing to defend free speech as traditionally conceived: Jonathan Ayling of the Free Speech Union, and my New Zealand Initiative colleague Michael Johnston. 

When a few students said they were ‘freaking out’ over these ‘right-wing voices,’ though, Smith re-organized the event with Ayling, Johnston, and eight other speakers, none of whom would describe themselves as right-of-centre. He also moved the event from VUW’s central, open ‘Hub’ to a closed lecture theatre, apparently in response to VUWSA President Marcail Parkinson’s concerns that students wouldn’t have been able to ‘avoid that area…if they didn’t feel comfortable being around the debate.’

Most of the speakers at the event also seemed worried about the harm speech could cause. Anjum Rahman of the Inclusive Aotearoa Collective stressed that students should feel ‘uncomfortable’ during discussions at universities, but not ‘unsafe,’ which she left tantalizingly undefined. Khylee Quince, the Dean of AUT’s law school, felt sure that some on campus ‘pose a threat to’ the ‘safety and well-being’ of others, though she, too, declined to precisely define these terms. 

Queensland University of Technology’s John Byron also seemed unsure about speech, which, he said, could ‘shut down other people’s speech,’ something that was exemplified at Victoria only a couple months ago, when top US diplomat Bonnie Jenkins was shouted down by protestors. 

Byron, though, didn’t mention that incident, and didn’t seem to be confining his remarks to the kind of heckling that literally prevents someone from being heard, and that has long been recognized as falling outside the protection of the First Amendment in the United States. What he had in mind was ‘intimidation’ and ‘humiliation’– two more terms that seemed to cry out for further definition.

Speakers for the most part failed to engage with the evidence that New Zealand universities have a problem with free speech. Several speakers dismissed the Free Speech Union’s 2023 survey of academics for its methodological weaknesses, but failed to mention other surveys without those weaknesses that came to similar conclusions, such as the 2022 FSU survey of academics, the 2022 Heterodox New Zealand survey of undergraduates, and the University of Auckland’s internal survey, all of which showed that substantial numbers of people were fearful of voicing their views. 

Anjum Rahman seemed particularly keen to explore important philosophical questions such as whether incitement to violence could be considered free speech, but didn’t bring up more concrete cases such as Massey’s deplatforming of Don Brash in 2019 or AUT’s deplatforming of Daphna Whitmore in 2022. 

Some speakers did, however, think that academic freedom faced some threats at our universities. University of Auckland Professor Emerita Jane Kelsey said that in her forty-year experience of the university, ‘those who’ve been shut down have not been those [on the right] – it’s been because the donors could potentially be upset, or “We can’t have the Uyghur woman speaking because the Chinese are going to be upset.”’

In the report on academic freedom that I am currently preparing for the New Zealand Initiative, we have found a number of lines of evidence which suggest that over-powerful managers, the idea of universities as businesses, and the Chinese Communist Party do indeed pose a threat to academic freedom in this country. A considerable body of evidence, though, also points to a threat from the left within universities, and this was something that only Victoria University of Wellington’s Nicole Moreham even acknowledged, though she also took clear to qualify this ‘pressure from the left’ on free speech as ‘well-meaning’ and only ‘slightly overzealous.’

Most of the speakers were also keen to dismiss the idea that new legislation was needed to protect academic freedom, either in the form of a requirement that universities have academic freedom policies (mentioned in the coalition agreement), or of a New Zealand equivalent of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill that has just received royal assent in the UK, which would allow students or academics whose free speech rights have been violated to seek redress through the courts.

For Nicole Moreham, this would undermine universities’ autonomy, though it is not clear how it would have any effect on academics’ freedom over their own research and teaching (other than to protect it against bullying administrators and colleagues). Several speakers seemed to see government intervention on this front as hypocritical, as if everyone calling for the change was a cartoon libertarian, and as if left-wing academics suddenly opposing government intervention couldn’t equally be accused of hypocrisy. After the event, Nic Smith told journalists that there was ‘an inherent irony’ in ‘legislating for free speech,’ but didn’t say whether he would be calling for the repeal of existing legislation for free speech such as the New Zealand Bill of Rights. 

My own experience as a lecturer at VUW over the past decade has long convinced me that the universities cannot be reformed without outside intervention. Those opposing the restoration of free speech and political neutrality within our universities are simply too numerous, too powerful, and too shameless. Nic Smith’s ‘free speech’ event has only confirmed me in this view. 

The post VUW free speech event shows why government intervention is now necessary appeared first on Open Inquiry.

The bigger issue is a basic problem of information asymmetry between the universities that “sell” research and education services and the students and taxpayers (represented by public commissioning agencies) that “buy” their services. They are not selling shampoo or even silicon chips. The 18 year-olds signing up for 3 to 5 years of debt and foregone earnings don’t know if they are being sold a lemon. If they peruse the public resources that supposedly help them choose a university, they are advised to consider the “vibes” of the place, along with amenities and support services. The internet bears traces of an earlier initiative to make information on degree costs and career outcomes available to students, but the promised ‘key indicators’ are so well-hidden I suspect they do not exist. There are no accessible, independent measures of how well  universities have taught their students. It is inherently hard to assess the value of university research. If it could be assessed on the basis of commercial outcomes, it would not need to be publicly funded. The case for public funding of both research and teaching is a strong one: there are enormous potential positive externalities to both. But only if the research and teaching are well done.

If the research and education are not well done, simply freeing the universities to compete and innovate will waste public and private resources. For a vision of such a future, we can see what has happened in the United Kingdom. There, attention tends to go to the small number of elite universities that enjoy high prestige. But freeing the system as a whole to compete and innovate on the basis of taxpayer-subsidized public lending to students has led to high fees, grade inflation, and a proliferation of mediocre degree programmes.

New Zealand universities are facing more than a cashflow crisis. In the words of one senior academic, ‘we no longer deliver on the most important part of what we promised.’ Why not?

Managerialism

The sector excels at regulations, policies, metrics and documentation requirements. Centralized, intrusive directives have created a compliance culture heavy on paperwork, processes, and performative quality assurance systems. This is likely one reason for the bureaucratic bloat that universities carry: New Zealand universities appear to lead the world in the ratio of non-academic to academic staff. Managerialism also diverts academic time. In some faculties, the number of academics with some sort of “dean-ship” or equivalent in their job title has increased nearly threefold in a decade. The compliance work affects all academics, making the creeping growth of managerialism an enormous barrier to quality and innovation at the coal face.

Moralism

Universities have become very preachy places. Moralistic goals adopted by university leaders are distorting almost every aspect of what we do. This moralism is often justified under the general banners of “equity”, “fairness” and “inclusion” which have been adopted across the English-speaking world. Here in New Zealand, we have a specific version driven by deference to the Treaty of Waitangi, which has become a trojan horse for politicization – as it must, in a country where very obviously there is no broad social or political consensus about the role of the Treaty. An agenda of  “indigenising” the university radically overturns the traditional mission of the university.

The moralism makes institutional neutrality – the idea that a university in its corporate form should not take sides on issues of current social and political contestation – impossible. Evident institutional non-neutrality erodes the credibility of teaching and research.

Moralism of the protective sort, that seeks to prevent “harm” and protect “wellbeing”, to promote “diversity” and “honour Te Tiriti”, also curtails academic freedom and freedom of expression. Not only does such moralism create an overall chilling effect on freedom of expression, it is given bite in official speech codes, research ethics requirements, promotion criteria and curriculum requirements. The university policies that put the decolonization agenda into the myriad managerial policy frameworks of the organization ‘invoke a particular, static, idea of the Treaty as if debate about it has been resolved’; they also place the individual academic in the peculiar position of being an agent of the Crown, unable to contest supposedly foundational Treaty principles as asserted by university management.

Disciplinary degradation

Academic disciplines are the guardians of knowledge. They are responsible for the gatekeeping that maintains standards and rigour. For a whole variety of reasons, including managerialism and moralism, the disciplines have become degraded as institutions for responsible, scientific gatekeeping. Moral agendas, rather than scientific merit, now overtly influence editorial policy at many major science journals, to the detriment of disciplinary rigour.

Epistemic relativism – the idea that there is no objective knowledge (even as something to pursue or work towards) and that science as a method of knowledge discovery is just one of many ‘knowledge systems’ or ‘ways of knowing’ – has moved from the fringes of the humanities and social sciences to take hold in much of the institutional apparatus of the university. Not all academic research is infected; much of the academy retains rigorous peer review processes.  But the creeping relativism makes it harder for those who want to defend disciplinary standards.

Institutional incoherence

It is impossible to see any strategic direction for the tertiary sector. The government’s tertiary education funding agency and watchdog, the TEC, has a “tertiary education strategy that talks about wellbeing, achievement, identity and other platitudes. It could be talking about the kindergarten sector. The other so-called guardian of our education system, the NZQA, is so agnostic about actual educational quality it will accredit colleges of wellbeing and homeopathy. The last government’s review of public sector science and research funding looked more concerned with embedding the Treaty of Waitangi across the entire science system than actually producing a more effective one. No wonder New Zealand suffers from long-term and severe educational mismatches: the percentage of the school leaving cohort going on to university has expanded hugely since the 1990s, but large areas of society suffer from critical skill shortages.

I initially thought of these problems as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, university-style. But on reflection, they haven’t come galloping up brandishing messages of doom. Instead, managerialism, moralism, disciplinary degradation and institutional incoherence are more like termites. They are largely invisible to outsiders and they silently eat away at the foundations of the university system.

There is still great value in our universities. I want to see the sector thrive and believe it has an essential role to play. But these termites function as de facto taxes on the research and education spend. And that’s the optimistic reading of the situation. The worst-case scenario is that they threaten to bring the whole house down.

This is an edited version of an address delivered by the author at a symposium on the Future of the Universities organized by the New Zealand Initiative, Wellington, 15 May 2024.

Photo by Roberto Carlos Román Don on Unsplash

The post The termites eating our universities appeared first on Open Inquiry.

“our Polynesian ancestors could not have crossed the largest expanse of open water

on the planet without developing a deep knowledge of astronomy, astrology, science,

maths and engineering.

They called it Mātauranga, an indigenous view of the world that includes all of those

subjects we have lumped under the acronym Stem (Science, technology, engineering

and maths) in our schools.

But we need to be telling these stories in our schools to inspire our young people that

this thing we call Stem is in their DNA.”

It is unclear whether Sir Ian meant this literally as a genetic predisposition towards science, metaphorically as a cultural predisposition, or something else entirely, but suggesting that science “is in the DNA” of Māori is problematic for several reasons.

First, complex skills such as ocean navigation were not something that all Māori inherently possessed, but rather skills that were practised and taught by specialists. People skilled in traditional methods of oceanic navigation today such as Jack Thatcher must be fairly bemused at the idea that Māori are born with skills that it took them decades to master, and that they take such care and effort to pass on to others.

Second, why is it necessary that in order to participate in science, students must believe it’s “in their DNA”? Doesn’t this view encourage Māori kids to believe that they’ll succeed in science because they’re Māori, rather than through their own efforts to learn and master it? Conversely, does Sir Ian think that there are races for whom science isn’t in their DNA? Does that mean that some races are inherently better at science than others? If not, what does it mean? 

Third, if Māori students are told that they’ll succeed in science because they’re Māori, but then they don’t experience success in science, could this bring their identity as Māori into question because they’re not succeeding in something that they’re apparently supposed to be good at? In situations where children do not experience success in something they think they’re expected to, they tend to blame themselves. The ‘science is in our DNA’ narrative, then, may well harm motivation and self-efficacy,  which can in turn affect educational outcomes, and lead to further disengagement. Thus, while Sir Ian’s intentions were well meaning, the weight of expectation may have unintended negative consequences.

Fourth, there are some interesting corollaries to Sir Ian’s view. If Māori are genetically predisposed to science because some of their ancestors developed ocean navigation and fortifications, does that mean that they’re not predisposed to skills in which their ancestors did not engage traditionally, such as literacy? In other words, should Māori not be expected to be good at literacy because their ancestors didn’t have a history of it? Such a view is clearly complete nonsense (Māori had very high literacy rates by mid-nineteenth century), but it’s consistent with what Sir Ian is saying here.

Science as a field of discovery is fundamentally accessible to all humans, if they have the interest and aptitude and are prepared to accept its basic principles. This is the message we should be conveying to our young people. All peoples adapted to their environment by developing the technology needed to survive, whether they lived in the Kalahari Desert, the Arctic, the Amazonian rainforest or on islands in the Pacific. We all use technology each day, but few of us understand the science behind how it works. We need to know that technology works, but not necessarily how or why it works. Artisans have been making wine and cheese for thousands of years without understanding the microbiological and biochemical processes involved, only that they reliably happened. Science is about explaining natural phenomena such as these. If indigenous technological solutions are seen as science then science just becomes what people collectively learned to do to survive in their particular environments. In this sense, equating oceanic navigation with science misrepresents modern international science, which is based on a set of universal principles, practices and norms, and especially the notion that all empirical claims must be provisional and open to test. Sir Ian seems to understand the last of these, but if so, why don’t we teach the best available solutions to problems, whether they are traditional or not?

It’s hard to see Sir Ian’s reference to DNA as anything other than a form of no doubt inadvertent racism. This view is consistent with the ideology of identitarianism, where the best way to characterise someone is based on their identity group, not their individual character, abilities and attributes. In his book “Woke racism”, the African-American linguist John McWhorter refers to this viewpoint as neo-racism.

To be fair to Sir Ian, he is putting his money where his mouth is in education by materially supporting Māori students to participate in science. It’s all very well saying that Māori kids engage with his material, but is there any evidence that they come away with a better understanding of STEM than when taught without emphasising race? We agree with teaching an understanding of mātauranga Māori in our schools, but teaching it as science, and especially suggesting that some races are somehow better at science than others, is problematic. The one thing we can all agree on and work toward is that Māori children should have the same opportunity to engage with and excel in science as anyone else.

The post A racial predisposition towards science? appeared first on Open Inquiry.