Time for radical action to save our universities

Colin Anderson, from Upper Hutt, has had a lifelong interest in and association with universities, as a student, staff representative and council member.

OPINION: Our universities are in bad shape. Not yet in crisis, perhaps, but not very far from it.

The recent decision by Te Herenga Waka/Victoria University of Wellington to axe more than 250 jobs, paralleled by recent or imminent cuts in other institutions, underlines a malaise that has been afflicting our centres of higher education for the last 15-20 years.

Falling student numbers, rising costs, andclaimed insufficient financial support from government have led university councils to take stringent action to limit their losses.

READ MORE: * University of Waikato proposing staff cuts to IT, maths departments * Up to 260 jobs may go at Victoria University to address massive deficit * 'We have a target on our backs': University of Otago staff protest over hundreds of possible job cuts

But inevitably this has meant severe downsizing or even elimination of various subject areas, with an associated loss of academic and support staff. It is predominantly smaller disciplines in the humanities and social sciences which are bearing the brunt of these measures.

How has our national educational system arrived at this parlous state? The cause can be traced back to the misguided education reforms of the late 1980s. Universities, which had up until then been regarded as centres of higher learning and research, were suddenly thrust into becoming "businesses", competing with each other in what came to be called the "education industry".

So they began to act like businesses, seeking to maximise their assets and trimming away areas deemed less profitable.

The 90s saw universities take over regional teachers’ colleges, not so as to improve the quality of teacher training, but to lay hands on the capital assets and recruit more students, while obliging the staffs of those colleges to shift the focus away from teacher education to gaining higher degrees and conducting research.

Then university tentacles engulfed some polytechnics, progressively stripping them of their technical and trade training functions and installing new degree programmes in them to draw in their former students.

This collective megalomania became even more blatant by the early 2000s when most universities set up campuses on the territories of their rivals, with all the attendant major capital costs of building or acquiring properties to house them. And not without major inter-university tensions.

Massey University established an engineering school in its recently acquired Wellington campus, only to be gazumped a year or two later when Victoria did the same. Within a short time Massey pulling out its school in the face of that competition, having to write off its investment.

In the meantime, university PR sections vastly increased in order to pump out relentless publicity in the media, in billboards in each others’ cities, even on the backs of buses, to try to lure the now more elusive students to their places of study. Not to mention various rebranding exercises of dubious worth and considerable cost.

But the strain of this competition started to tell and various "restructuring" exercises have taken place on every campus over the last 15 years.

Such expressions were euphemisms for course cuts and redundancies, which are especially problematic for specialised academic staff for whom there is little alternate employment available to match their skills.

Once staffing in specific disciplines is reduced below around a bare minimum of four lecturing staff, it is not possible to maintain a full and credible programme to degree level, and much less to honours level and above. The result is a death spiral, as fewer and fewer students are drawn to these disciplines because of a lack of such range and opportunity.

Now we are faced with a double whammy. On the one hand, we are seeing a drop in domestic student numbers due to a combination of high course fees and living costs, the weakening of the attraction of campus life due in part to the isolation imposed by Covid, and by the greater opportunity of secure and well-paid future employment through trade training. And on the other hand we see the considerable drop-off in international enrolments which many universities had come to rely on to boost their coffers.

So, what is to be done? It is obvious to me that the competitive model is broken. It is wasteful of resources, and it has failed to enhance the standings of our universities, both for the New Zealand community and internationally.

What is needed is a radically new paradigm, to coalesce all our existing state universities into one body, while retaining a measure of individual autonomy. To re-establish the University of New Zealand, in effect. To do something akin to the unification of the polytechs.

This would allow a more coherent provision of the range of courses and disciplines that the nation needs, but in a way that avoids wasteful duplication.

A potential governing structure would be a single council, along the lines of the University of California, headed by a president, whose function would be to liaise with the Ministry of Tertiary Education and with individual vice-chancellors to determine where best to mount courses, and how many schools of law or medicine, say, the country should have.

Each individual university would retain its identity within this system, just as UCLA and Berkeley do in California, but would be facilitated to specialise in particular discipline areas.

This would particularly enable smaller disciplines such as English literature, foreign languages, classics, philosophy, religious studies, media studies, politics, ecology, and the fine arts and music to be retained in at least one university as viable programmes with bodies of highly qualified staff to maintain top quality teaching and research.

The alternative is to stand by helplessly and watch many of these disciplines wither and die. Do we want to be a country where foreign languages are barely taught, where history and literature are deemed of little importance, where no one has any but a meagre awareness of the Greek and Roman Classics which lie at the heart of the European part of our national heritage?