In the long term, the only way for our army of professors to rescue their universities and safeguard their contribution to our national wellbeing is to keep up the agitation, writes Harry Love.
Recently the ODT (12.10.23) revealed that 120 senior professors had signed a letter to the Otago University administration expressing concern about the general direction in which the university is moving, the handling of its finances and the demonstrable incompetence of its management.
This letter, I am informed, was a second attempt after one which had been effectively ignored.
The university’s public response to this was for a spokesperson to assert that management often talked to staff, but that such conversations were private.
Then ... silence. Another win for the comms division. A close-run thing, though, because it’s possible that them out there, the general public and prospective students, might run off with the notion that whispers of problems which have escaped into the public realm could indicate something more than a financial hangover from Covid to be swiftly and definitively dealt with by the clever people in the clock tower.
More particularly, the university’s reputation, a thing long established before the age of managerial power and professorial discontent, might suffer and thus stem the flood of revenue-rescuing overseas students.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing in this whole situation is the fact that 120 professors could agree on a text. To anyone vaguely acquainted with academe this is a seismic event. What is concerning is that not one administrative building block appears to have moved and any aftershocks have been effectively smothered.
This unnatural state of affairs could partly be remedied by the authors of the letter sharing it with us all through the good offices of this august organ. The university, it should be remembered, does not belong to its management, but is an economic, social and cultural asset in which we all, especially in Dunedin, have a legitimate interest. And in this case a difference between staff and management is no mere employment issue to be hidden under those protocols.
However, the sound of silence from those with power extends far beyond our local mandarins. We all know that throughout the nation universities have spent more than they have earned and, like businesses anywhere, must cut costs and downsize. We all know that staff and courses are lost. And we know that the word "lost" here connotes the same sense of permanency as in the phrase "lost at sea".
The silence I refer to is not the self-interested non-communication of administrative communicators, but of government. Until very recently, we had a minister of education whose one response to all the agonies of universities was to say that they were operational matters and she couldn’t intervene.
Soon, though, we will have a new minister. For the past six years we have had a regime which made at least minimal efforts to mitigate the market excesses of its predecessors. But now?
It is the case that our new Prime Minister has said he will retain the current policy of free fees for first-year tertiary students. That’s encouraging, though his principal coalition partner is horrified by the very idea. On the other hand Mr Luxon’s response to university deficits was, get out and hustle, find new markets, be as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as me and all will be well. Exactly what it is we might have to sell these full-fee payers is a good question and we are back to the dark days of Joyce (Stephen, that is, not James).
So nothing really changes and we retain the market-based, customers-on-seats funding system, a thing baked into the psyche of the new regime.
We have been told repeatedly that we must have a dream. Well, I almost had the makings of one until Christopher Hipkins forbade the very idea of adjusting our tax regime to something broad-based and progressive. It (the dream) is still there in snatches, that irritating half-memory you have when awake.
If this seems a non-sequitur, it’s not. In the long term, the only way for our army of professors to rescue their universities and safeguard their contribution to our national wellbeing is to keep up the agitation, both locally within their institutions and more broadly (that means politics), to embed in the public mind the necessity for tertiary funding regimes that are rational and fit for purpose.
— Harry Love is honorary fellow in classics at the University of Otago.