Publicly funded but privately run - who really runs the university? TEU and AUSA bring speakers together to discuss two issues:
Speakers include: David Cunliffe / Jacinda Ardern / Cris Shaw / Vernon Tava / John Minto / Nigel Haworth / Jane Kelsey / Campbell Jones
They all spoke about the issues facing the University of Auckland, including the lack of funding, the increasing student fees, and the erosion of academic freedom.
David Cunliffe and Jacinda Ardern spoke about the importance of making tertiary education accessible to all, regardless of income. They argued that the government's policies are causing students to be priced out of education and that this is a barrier to social mobility.
Cris Shaw spoke about the impact of student debt on graduates and the need for a more sustainable funding model. He argued that the current system is driving students to leave New Zealand and that this is a loss for the country.
Vernon Tava spoke about the importance of civic education and the need for students to learn about democracy and how society works. He argued that the current education system is failing to prepare students for participation in democracy.
John Minto spoke about the need for free public education and the importance of protecting academic freedom. He argued that the university is being run like a business and that this is having a negative impact on students and staff.
Nigel Haworth spoke about the need for a more collaborative approach to managing the university, rather than a corporate-driven approach. He argued that the current system is leading to conflict and that a more collaborative approach would be more effective.
Jane Kelsey spoke about the importance of preserving the legacy of universities as public zones that serve the national good. She argued that the current system is destroying this legacy and that this needs to be reversed.
Campbell Jones spoke about the annual negotiations between the university and the Teaching Union (TU). He argued that the university is not willing to negotiate on pay and that this is causing tension between the two parties. He also spoke about the need for a living wage and the importance of investing in higher education.
Overall, the speeches highlighted the need for a more sustainable funding model, the importance of protecting academic freedom, and the need for a more collaborative approach to managing the university. They also emphasized the importance of making tertiary education accessible to all and the need for civic education.
Here is the transcript in Markdown format with improved capitalization, punctuation, and formatting:
Thank you, and welcome!
I'm joined today by the fantastic Auckland Central MP, Jacinda Ardern. Great to see you all here!
Two views of the world
When it comes to tertiary education and universities, there are two views of the world. One is that you are commodities, the other is that you are people. One is that this is an expense, the other is that it's an investment. One is that you get only what you can afford, and the other is that you get what you deserve because access to education should be a right, not a privilege.
The Labour Party's stance
The Labour Party believes that tertiary education should be accessible, and it should be accessible right through to post-graduate without having your bursary and your allowances and your loan eligibility cut. We don't agree with the government cutting student and staff representation on university councils. You've got to ask, "Why are they doing this? What is wrong with having the voice of the customer, the students, around the table making the decisions?" It's crazy, it's ideological, it's a leftover from the 1990s, and we will change it here at Auckland University.
Fees and funding
They've pushed your fees to the maximum every year, and government funding hasn't kept up without blowing the budget that we haven't yet written and we need to get elected first.
A better chance at a better education
I just want to say to you that we believe tertiary education is an investment. We want to fund it better, and we want to make sure you get a better chance at a better education because education should be based on ability to learn, not ability to pay.
Voluntary student union membership
This is a university where you've had voluntary student union membership, and that's been controversial up and down the country. We want to go back to the idea that students can decide for themselves whether they have it as compulsory or not. We want to repeal National's law in that area.
Thanks and a call to action
I just say thanks very much. It's great to see you as students being active and fighting for your future. And we invite you to join with us to fight for a better future for all New Zealanders next year, because we've got an election, and we've got to win for all of you and all of them out there. Kia ora! Thank you very much!
Thank you
Thank you, David. I'm going to be really brief because I get the privilege of coming up to this campus and seeing your faces time and time again. You know, as we always say, universities are the public's conscience. You are our voice. You're the ones that try and keep the government honest.
Battling against retrograde steps
You know, you're not just battling things like the government's decision on the GCSB bill. You're not just battling against every retrograde step that they've made in this country. You're now just battling to survive. And how can we ensure that we keep the voice of our conscience in New Zealand alive when you guys are doing all you can just to continue to put food on the table and to be able to afford to live in Auckland?
The government's impact on your voice
What are we doing to your voice when you get into that kind of situation? That's why I'm glad today that you guys are united. It's staff and students that you're coming together and saying that despite all that you're going through out there currently, you're united to try and make sure that this campus, your place, remains democratic. Despite the government doing everything it can to take the control of your university out of your hands and give it to people who have less interest in your education than you do.
Keep fighting, stay angry
Keep fighting, stay angry through every day until the election. Because we need you to change this government and give New Zealand back to New Zealanders. Thank you, Martin.
Chris Shaw, Lecturer in Anthropology and Academic Representative
Thank you, David. My name is Chris Shaw, and I'm a lecturer in the Anthropology department. I'm also the TEU Academic Rep for the Auckland branch. I'm here today to give my support to the AUSA and to all the students and their parents who are fed up with witnessing year-on-year increases in fees to compensate for government underinvestment and underfunding of our sector.
Déjà Vu
I had a real sense of déjà vu this morning, coming in to protest at a very similar event to the one we had in October 2011. On each of those occasions, students reacted by protesting, sometimes by occupying the council chambers. Each time, the students were ignored. Little seems to have changed, except for the burden of student debt is now even larger - $13 billion, and the average student is saddled with debt of between $15,000 and $21,000.
Student Debt
I spoke with one of our students who's just finished his honours degree. He told me that his debt was now $40,000. He said the figure was so big that it was almost meaningless - just a string of numbers. He wondered how many years, or decades, it would take him to pay that sum back. It made me think, what a terrible way to start your professional life, saddled with debt.
Government's Impact on Students
This government is doing a disservice to our economy, to our students, and to our country. How is debt supposed to benefit New Zealand? All it does is give a strong incentive for our qualified graduates to go overseas to find jobs. New Zealand universities seem to become factories to produce cheap, qualified labor to furnish the Australian market. How does that make sense?
Debt and Economic Instability
You'd think that the government would have learned from the global financial crisis of 2008, which was caused by the accumulated small debt of thousands of people. Thanks to their mortgages, their subprime mortgages, it led to the meltdown of the entire banking system. Yet, for some reason, our political leaders don't see the link between debt and economic instability. They think that debt is actually good, that it binds students to the country, teaches them the value of their degree, and makes them more calculating and market-savvy.
Education for Citizenship
Our society needs much more than just scientists, engineers, and technicians, valuable though they are. We also need people who are educated in ways that enable them to challenge policymakers like the ones we have at the moment. We need to think of higher education as education for citizenship, not in this model. This model, according to our government, sees debt as the first act of true citizenship. Debt does not bind students to this country; it drives them overseas, and they often don't come back.
Neo-Liberal Strategies
Our government is hell-bent on returning New Zealand to the failed liberal, neoliberal strategies we saw in the 1990s. They didn't work then, and they're not going to work now. This is also what we see happening to higher education. The government has abandoned the idea of higher education as a public good and has recast education as a private, personal investment in your own individual career. They're trying to reinvent universities as commercial enterprises whose main purpose is to service industry and commerce.
A Properly Funded System
What we need is a properly funded, publicly owned, publicly governed, and publicly funded system of higher education. If we want our graduates to stay in New Zealand and contribute to our economy and society, let's stop saddling them with stupid debt and driving them offshore. To those who make the argument that we can't afford it, I say, yes, we can. It's just that we choose to spend it on the wrong priorities. We spend $225 million to keep Solid Energy in business, $85 million to Warner Brothers, $30 million to Rio Tinto, and $300 million to Auckland University to embark on the most ambitious building scheme we've ever seen. All of these 1.7 billion raised in the privatization of Mighty River Power. Let's not forget that this government also borrowed $2 million in 2010 to fund its tax-cutting program.
Get Our Priorities Straight
My message is simple: we need to get our priorities straight and start investing properly in higher education and eradicate student debt. Thank you.
The University is Precious
The university is precious, it is a taunga, it is where we come to develop our critical faculties, to play with ideas, to experiment, and to learn. Any hope we have of moving our society into an equitable, fair, and sustainable society begins at the university.
The University as a Critic and Conscience of Society
The university is, in the words of the Education Act, the critic and conscience of society. It is not a market commodity, it is not the source point for the job market, it is not where we come merely to acquire vocational skills.
Green Party's Vision for Higher Education
The Green Party honours that special place that the university has in society. We contend that higher education should be made accessible to all on the basis of capacity, so that nobody should be barred because they can't afford to go to university. Lifelong learning should be available to all New Zealanders.
Student Allowances and Fees
Recently, we've seen the government cut student allowances not only to postgraduate students. I was one of the fortunate last generation of students, in fact, my was the last year when I studied a Master of Law at this university, finishing at the end of 2010. Who was actually able to draw a postgraduate allowance while finishing that degree. And I have to say, it would have been very difficult, if not impossible, for me to be able to do it, or I would have had to have stretched my time out part-time, and I have little doubt that it would have definitely affected the ability to really explore the ideas in that degree and commit the time that it needed.
Education as a Public Good
Education should be seen not only as the acquisition of job skills, it is not purely a vocational institution. Education should not be included in free trade agreements, such as the General Agreement on Trade and Services or the TPPA. It is being advanced. We will work with other political parties to ensure that education isn't subject to triadial cycles and political fashions, and used as a football. It is far too important for that.
Eliminating Student Loans and Fees
The Green Party would eliminate student loans and fees, and go further to move towards a universal student living costs benefit. Universal. I've lost count of the number of times I've been told, usually by people who are old enough to have had their education 100% subsidised by the state, that this is fiscal irresponsibility, that this is lunacy. How can we ever pay for this? And I take great pleasure in pointing out that we do have a universal, unmeans-tested benefit in New Zealand that goes to everybody aged over 65. It's called New Zealand Super. You can be a multi-millionaire and you can still collect New Zealand Super, and many very very wealthy people do so.
A Personal Experience
I'd like to share with you something from my own personal experience. In fact, from my graduation in 2011, where as a member of the TEU, working as a tutor at the same time, I was a member of the tertiary education unions. Believe it was the Action Committee was the name of the group, and this was at the time when very very hard-fought negotiations were going on with the Vice Chancellor and the academic staff of the university. A distinctly unconsulted and difficult set of negotiations. What we decided to do, or one of the things we decided to do as an action, was at the graduation, where we made for the students' rosettes, you know, those little "Best in Show" badges that politicians wear at election time, little rosettes. I love mine, I have a great collection now, and I know you do too. Now we made a yellow one, and it said "Staff and Students Unite to Defend the University". Personally, I can't think of a more polite and moderate form of protest than wearing a badge with a pretty ribbon on it. But this was too much for the university to countenance. I was told before graduating with a Master of Laws degree with honours, winning the prize for my year, with a Master's thesis, I was told that despite all that, I was not able to cross the stage that night wearing that badge.
A Fascist Administration
Fortunately, I had a pocket full of these badges, because I was one of the lefty troublemakers handing them out, so I surrendered it the first time after being told that I wouldn't be allowed to leave the collection area where we're all shepherded together before we're sent up to our seats, pinned it on once inside the theatre, and saw one of the administrative staff in the clock tower who were given robes and sort of police powers for the day, and an earpiece come up and stand next to me, and I heard her say, "Oh, he's put the fence back on in the intermission". The music break. I went out to the having enjoyed some of the um, the beverages at the tent in advance, I had the need to um, visit the restroom in the music break, and there was nobody else out there when I came back to re-enter the theatre, there were four of these black-robed guards standing outside the door, telling me that I would not be allowed back in to graduate with a degree I have earned and paid for with interest, unless I took off that badge. I was physically restrained from walking back into the theatre. So I surrendered the badge, because I had a couple more in my pocket. I was finally reduced to having to pin it inside the trencher cap and hold it up and wave it as I walked across the stage. It was worse than high school, it really was.
A Call to Action
Now I was confronted by a black-robed earpiece-wearing guard outside, and told that, "Oh, look, that's totally unacceptable. What you've done, it's it's you're making a mockery of the dignity of the process, and you may be disciplined for this". And I said, "Well, quite frankly, I think you should be ashamed of yourselves, and to be honest, I think you've acted like a bunch of fascists". And she said to me, "Well, I happen to be one of those fascists", which I thought was a very frank admission, enough. I never heard from them again. I can only imagine what the senior manager might have said the next day when they were told that they wanted to discipline someone who just graduated for wearing a badge with a pretty ribbon on it.
A Final Message
I tell that story not only because it's quite bizarre, but because it is emblematic of the change that we are seeing, the cultural shift that we're beginning to see in a university, a corporate structure that cannot countenance, cannot deal with the most polite and moderate form of dissent from one of its graduates. You're not allowed to wear a badge at your own party if the corporate administration of the university does not agree with it. Is that a place for free thought and expression? Is that the critic and conscience of society? I suggest it's not so. I urge you, work with the TEU, take action. It's fantastic to see so many people here today. Remember when you vote, please vote in local body elections, for goodness sake, the turnout is low. But when you vote in the national elections next year, read the policies, the Green Party has all of its policies up on the website, unlike many political parties, all of the policies are available, they're progressive, they're interesting. Look at Labour's policies, look at New Zealand First's policies, shop around, inform yourself, exercise the critical faculties that you've come here to hone and to learn. Thank you very much.
Kyoto Koto
I'm here to greet everybody, and it's great to see this marvelous crowd here. Several years ago, I was elected as the Council of Trade Unions representative to sit on the Auckland University Council. But I was never able to take up that position because the university council refused to have me on the council. So what I'm saying to you is the university council is not a democratic organization, and over the years, it's become even less democratic.
Stephen Joyce's Decision
Stephen Joyce's decision today to say no, we're not going to have staff or student reps on the council, just underlines the fact that we should never underestimate the hatred which so many people in big business have for democracy. They hate it because it gets in the way of them making profits.
The Battle in Education
As you've heard from a couple of other speakers, the last 30 years there's been this big battle going on in education. On the one hand, you've got education as a basic human right, where everybody deserves the same high-quality education, no matter what your background is, no matter whether your family can afford to pay for it. And on the other side, you've got education as a commodity in the marketplace, where the quality of what you get will depend on your ability to pay.
Stuart McCutcheon and the University Council
Stuart McCutcheon and the university council are very much in that second view. They are here to promote the idea of education as a commodity, where the quality you get depends on your ability to pay. Shame on Stuart McCutcheon and shame on the whole university council.
The Consequences of Their Vision
As a result of that vision, that Auckland University Council has and the business elites that run this country have, we've seen increasing student fees well beyond the rate of inflation. We've had cuts to full-time academic positions and an increase in short-term contracts. We've had huge increases in salaries for the senior managers running this university, while the people who do the actual work, the cleaners, the security guards, the academic staff, have had cuts or their pay rate suppressed.
The University's Role as Critic and Conscience of Society
We've had the university's role as the critic and conscience of society seriously downgraded. And I reckon that everyone on that university council would despise that role of the university. They do not believe the university should be the critic and conscience of society.
The Same Thing Outside the University
The same thing outside the university, we've had governments pouring money into PTEs, who more often than not, specialize in these really expensive, low-quality courses, where students end up with a useless qualification, a massive student debt, and can't get a job anyway. We've had the so-called on-job training that occurs out in the private sector, where people are trained in a very narrow range of skills, their skills that are needed for that particular employer, so the skills they're learning are not transferable to other jobs, as they used to be in other training regimes, when we used to have a proper apprenticeship system, for example.
The Changing Nature of Education
Education is changing from producing critically conscious students who can take an active, informed part in our democracy to education to provide the basic needs for employers to run their businesses and make more profits off the rest of us. Shame on that vision of education.
Who Runs the University?
Who runs the university? Well, it's certainly not a democracy. And you have to say, it's the closest that we've got to a big business dictatorship. There is no control of students over their own money, and there is no say, whatever, by the academic staff, and how the institutions run.
Mana's Vision
Two things that Mana wants to bring to this debate, we brought it at the last election, we're bringing it to the election next year. We believe in free public education, from preschool through to adult and community education. And don't you dare let anybody tell you we can't do it, because my generation did it, and where that money's gone now. We've had last year, the 150 wealthiest New Zealanders got an increase in wealth of $3.5 billion dollars, it was unearned wealth, it was untaxed wealth, that's where our money's going, and we've got to get it back.
Civics Education
The last thing I want to say, because it's really pertinent to this debate, is that Mana is determined to bring civics education into our schools, because our kids, our kids need to learn about democracy, they need to learn how society runs, they need to learn how they can influence the outcome of elections and the outcome of policy, they can learn about a participatory democracy, rather than this misinformed consent that we're sold at the moment.
Keep Your Anger Alive
So what I'm saying to you all today, is as somebody earlier said, keep your anger alive, because we've got big changes to make. Kirakoto.
Here is the transcript in Markdown format with improved capitalization, punctuation, and formatting:
Sensible Management Approaches
Sensible management approaches would work with the staff and students of an organization that's underfunded like we are. They would talk to the AUSA, which would talk to the TEU, which would talk to the PSA, and find a way of working through underfunding and find a way of working jointly to increase that funding. Unfortunately, our management doesn't take that view. It takes a quite different one, a view based on corporate-driven managerialism permitted by the university reforms of the 1990s.
Corporate-Driven Managerialism
We now have, as I understand, the highest-paid civil servant in the land acting as our CEO, Vice-Chancellor. We have a council that acts more like the board of directors than the body with the guardianship of the university, and is likely to be more so if Mr. Joyce's reforms go through. We've also got KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) sprouting out of every orifice of this institution, as we model ourselves upon the corporate world that we so wish to emulate.
The Faculty Administration Review
This explains why my union, the TEU, has been in constant legal conflict with this university for the last decade. It doesn't have to be like this. We have examples like Otago in the past where bitter cooperation existed, but under the regime here, we end up in the Employment Court more often than you and I have hot dinners. It's not an acceptable way of going forward.
The Faculty Administration Review (FAR)
I want to talk about an example of that rampant managerialism that affects you as students, never mind making my life easier. That's what's called a "lovely sexy term" - the Faculty Administration Review, or FAR. For me, it's an example of that rampant management managerialism that has real impact on students and staff alike.
FAR as a Cost-Saving Restructuring
FAR was presented in honeyed words originally. It was presented as a wonderful thing, in fact. It was presented as something that the professional staff wanted. They thought they weren't being given the career prospects, the development opportunities that they wanted. They were being held back, so this benevolent university said, "We will do something. We'll restructure you so that your careers will be so much better." It is, in fact, of course not nothing of that order at all. It's a cost-saving restructuring, probably trying to save about $10 million on the professional staff budget. You divide $10 million by about $550,000, and you begin to get a sense of the job losses that may be implicit in this restructuring - maybe up to 200 faculty and ministerial staff being removed.
The Impact of FAR
Now, you may say, "Hey, maybe that will reduce our fees some." Some chance. What it will do is have a whole set of real impacts across staff and students that have to be clearly understood. These cuts matter not just because it's treating important staff badly. Because these cuts have a real impact on the services and the education we deliver.
A Call to Action
Um, great that you have stuck around. Um, one of the things about coming at the end of such a long list is that everyone has said everything I was going to say. So, I want to be a bit uplifting. Okay?
The Legacy of Universities
I want to talk about how we can win. Universities are centuries and centuries old. Wananga are centuries and centuries old. When I was a student in the 70s, along with some of the others here, universities were public zones that were about the national good. We had a sense of obligation not just to our generation and the next generation, but the generations of the centuries to come. They cannot be allowed in a period of 30 years to have destroyed that legacy, so that we not only have universities that are of the era of neoliberalism, but cannot transcend the era of neoliberalism. That is our challenge, and we need to work out how to do it.
Good News Stories
Let me tell you some good news stories about some victories we had. We were in 1989 when I'd been teaching here for about 10 years, was the first time the Labour government, the Rogernomics government, launched the big assault on the universities. That was when they proposed introducing fees, and it's when they proposed the first round of attempts to privatize the universities. We won. Labour backed off the fees. We got not only them to back off what they were going to do to the governance of the universities, but we got put into the Education Act our role as critic and conscience of society and the obligation to protect the academic freedom of the staff and the students. That was a major victory.
More Victories
In the 1990s, when the National Party came in, and they said they wouldn't have student fees as a national theme, but they would allow the universities to set their own, the battles moved into our universities. Lockwood Smith, who was Minister of Tertiary Education at the time, had to crawl out the window to escape the students. We have battled, after battle, of staff and students and community united to try to defeat the fees, and the fact that they did not escalate beyond where they did was because of that action.
Another Victory
In the later 1990s, when I was National President of the University Union, we worked with the students, we worked with the councils of the universities, and with the Vice-Chancellors' Committees to defeat exactly the kind of governance proposals that Stephen Joyce is proposing now. In 1997 and 1998, the Green Papers and White Papers that said exactly the same thing should happen to the university's councils, we defeated them. We were united together, and they could not proceed.
Another Victory
In the 2000s, we again joined forces within all of our universities, not only dealing with the challenges of how we reconstructed student unions, but also how we reconstructed workable governance arrangements. From the time when I was a member of the University Council, when we had a collective decision-making process where the views of academics and students were respected, we have moved to a situation of a Board of Directors where they believe that it is better to have distance from us rather than understand us.
Here is the transcript in Markdown format with improved capitalization, punctuation, and formatting:
TU Academic Representative
I'm currently the academic representative for the TU, and I thought I might let you know where we're up to to fill you in and give you a sense of what it is that we're up against.
Negotiations with the Employer
We asked the employer that all teaching and research staff be treated as academics, but the employer rejected this claim on the basis that it would not give them as much leverage as they wish to have over academics. We invited the employer to offer us a pay increase or even to offer us no pay increase, but the employer told us that they will not negotiate on pay.
Living Wage
We asked the employer for a living wage that would pay everyone who works in this university enough so that they can feed and raise their children. The employer responded by telling us that this was a philosophical and political discussion and therefore outside the parameters of negotiation. We think that the living wage is a practical matter about how we feed our children, how we raise our families, not an abstract issue.
Cost of a Living Wage
Also, to pay all of our permanent professional staff a living wage would cost less than one percent of the new capital expenditure that this administration is spending on.
Breaking Down of Negotiations
We're at a point then, and we've consulted with members widely last week, that our annual negotiations are about to break down and we may well be led into industrial action.
Why We're in This Situation
How do we get in this kind of situation? The employer claims that there simply isn't enough money to fund quality higher education. The VC has described the fall in our rankings from 83rd to 94th in the world as alarming, but he explains that there's nothing he can do to stop the ship from sinking. He says that he is handcuffed and there is nothing that he can do.
The Reason for the Problem
The reason that we have a problem is that New Zealand has the lowest per capita per student funding in the OECD. It's hardly surprising then that the Vice Chancellor has a problem.
Possible Solutions
There are three possible solutions that can be done to deal with the funding shortfall. The first would be to increase student fees. This would of course increase inequality of access to higher education and would further instrumentalize the student relationship with educators. We should recognize that New Zealand already has the seventh highest fees in the OECD.
Second Option
The second option would be to increase external funding through research grants. This would further instrumentalize research and cause all manner of problems with impartiality.
Third Option
The third possibility is government funding. Turning to government fund government funding from this institution has been systematically stalled for the last quarter of a century. We're working, we're living with educating and dilapidated buildings. We have falling rankings, and our lecture halls are overflowing.
Investing in Higher Education
If New Zealand's going to have an educated population and prospects for a sustainable future, this can only come by making choices in which we begin to invest again in higher education as a country.
Supporting the Vice Chancellor
We propose as the TEU to support the Vice Chancellor. We want to work with the Vice Chancellor and do not want industrial conflict. However, if the Vice Chancellor is unwilling to take the handcuffs off, then we may well have to take them off him.