The decision by the University of Auckland to axe 21 positions in its Faculty of Education, at a time when the country is facing a teacher shortage, highlights an ongoing problem with the management of our universities.
The rationale offered for this decision is familiar. We are told student enrolments in this programme have dropped and that the money is needed for programmes that are growing.
The (tacit) assumption here is that it is the task of a university to respond to student demand, to offer programmes students want to take and to cut those students are no longer interested in.
No university administrator would, of course, put the matter quite so baldly. For when it is stated so baldly, this assumption seems clearly false.
The task of a university is to offer a broad education to some of our most talented young people, one that will provide them not only with marketable skills, but with the knowledge they need to be good citizens. Above all, a university's task is to help students to learn how to learn.
And students learn how to learn when they discover subjects they love and teachers who inspire them. Then, and only then, do they experience the joy of learning and are motivated to put in the work required to master a subject in depth.
In a rational world, universities would undertake this task - what we might call their ''core business'' - by offering a wide range of subjects. These would span the sciences and humanities, as well as more vocationally oriented subjects such as medicine, education, law, and commerce.
In each of these fields, universities would decide which subject areas are central to the field and distribute their income to ensure these can be adequately taught. And governments would ensure they had the income needed to do this.
Sadly, this is no longer how universities operate. The assumption that they exist to respond to student demand (in the same way as businesses respond to customer demand) has corrupted the way in which universities operate.
It has turned universities into a series of competing education shops, each trying to sell as much of its own product as possible. The worth of an academic discipline - the ''product'' - is judged by the number of students who enrol.
The word ''corrupted'' is not too strong. Businesses do not just respond to customer demand; they try to drum it up through advertising. In the same way, universities spend increasing amounts of their income on marketing, to ensure that as many students as possible enrol.
Why is this a corruption? It is because some students have talents that should lead them to a more directly vocational qualification. Our polytechs, which prepare people for the trades of which the country is in desperate need, are in many cases in financial difficulty.
One reason for this is that they are forced to compete with universities, who pay no heed to what may best suit the individual, wanting only to increase their student numbers.
The same attitude encourages a corruption within universities themselves. One of the tasks we undertake as academics is to advise students about what they should study. We do this at least partly because students are not ''informed customers''. They don't know what a subject involves until they have at least begun to study it. So how does this advisory role work?
Given the prevailing managerial culture, staff know their jobs are on the line if their departments or programmes fail to attract enough students. So when they are advising students, they have a clear conflict of interests.
What if they see that a student would benefit from studying another subject? What should they do? Should they tell the student the truth, at the risk of losing their own jobs? Or should they ''bend'' the truth a little, to keep up enrolments in their own programme? The colleagues I know act with great integrity in this respect. But it is easy to see how this situation could corrupt the relationship between teacher and student.
Let me add a personal note. I teach at the University of Otago, and much of what I am writing is drawn from my experience there. But my criticism is not directed at the University of Otago in particular.
Nor is it particularly directed at the University of Auckland, whose axing of education staff has provoked it. It is directed at a culture that has become practically universal, not only in New Zealand institutions, but across much of the English-speaking world. I am writing about it publicly because it has serious consequences not only for universities, but for other educational institutions and for society as a whole.
-Greg Dawes is a professor of philosophy at the University of Otago.
