David Lillis: New Zealand’s Universities - Bullying and Other Issues

Bullying at Our Universities

Over the last few years we have exposed bullying in many workplaces across New Zealand, especially in our public service (see Lillis, 2021 - 2024). Unfortunately, we hear reports of continuing bullying at our universities, sometimes linked with re-direction of mission statements and strategic plans and the indigenization of the universities. Those who speak out against such measures are at risk of loss of career advancement or even their employment.   

Recently, the Tertiary Education Union surveyed its members about the prevalence of bullying at Auckland University of Technology. The survey found widespread bullying and a culture of not resolving issues. It revealed that a pervasive culture of bullying persists at the Auckland University of Technology despite a formal review of bullying a few years ago. Apparently, this problem manifests itself in both overt and subtle forms. Some 84% of participants stated that they had personally experienced or witnessed bullying there. It was clear from the survey that immediate and effective measures are necessary to combat bullying and restore trust within the institution. We are told that bullying behaviour there often originates from senior management and trickles down, creating a hostile environment that undermines employee morale and well-being.

According to the survey, at Auckland University of Technology internal procedures for handling bullying complaints are widely regarded as ineffective and biased. Members report that these procedures often favour the bullies, leading to further victimization of those who come forward. The process is seen as slow, opaque and ultimately unproductive. The organizational culture is described as toxic, characterized by high control and low trust. The survey indicates a pervasive atmosphere of fear, especially in the presence of certain managers. A letter from the TEU to the Vice Chancellor, Damon Salesa, describes the hierarchical structure as discouraging dissent, making it difficult for employees to speak out against mistreatment.

The same letter states that line managers must support employees who are experiencing bullying and must facilitate mediation when necessary. Managers who avoid addressing bullying should be held accountable, as their inaction contributes to the problem. To address the issues effectively, the institution must undergo a cultural shift, fostering an environment of respect and open dialogue, requiring significant changes at all levels of the organization, beginning with senior management.

Surely, good must come from exposing bullying in any organization, but what if the top people are the biggest bullies? Or those same middle managers? I believe this problem to be all too real, especially in Government agencies that have to do with secondary education. In some of these places I have observed horrendous bullying from middle managers who were themselves poorly qualified (if qualified at all). I encountered highly-remunerated research managers who had never done any research in their lives and had no interest either, and statistics managers who held no tertiary qualifications whatsoever and who could barely find the average of three numbers. Clearly, their abuse of staff, administered in public view and evidently designed to force staff out of work, was sponsored by more senior executives and both supported and covered-up by Human Resources and other managers.

Bullying and Indigenization

At present our universities are re-directing their mission statements, constitutions and other governing documents to give expression to the Treaty of Waitangi as a core mission. I do not intend to get into a debate on the merits of the Treaty of Waitangi in 2024 and beyond, but the Treaty has very little bearing on tertiary teaching and research, and becoming Treaty-led forces the university to depart from political neutrality.

For example, Victoria University adopted its Te Tiriti o Waitangi Statute in February 2019 (VUW, 2024), as a replacement of an earlier statute on the Treaty of Waitangi. We are told that the Te Tiriti Statute includes eight principles that are drawn from Te Tiriti o Waitangi, New Zealand case law, Waitangi Tribunal reports, Crown policy documents, Victoria University’s governance documents and mātauranga Māori.  

Among the eight principles of the Statute is the principle of rangatiratanga, which purportedly recognises Māori autonomy and self-determination. We are told that in the context of the university, rangatiratanga relates to ensuring senior Māori leadership roles and entities, creating and maintaining spaces and events where tikanga Māori prevails, and engaging with and acknowledging Māori rights over te reo and mātauranga Māori. 

The principle of whai wāhi (participation) ensures that Māori are fully involved in all parts of New Zealand society. In the context of Victoria University, it requires the university to ensure Māori representation within key decision-making bodies and the involvement of Māori across all parts of the university. We have no problem with any of this, but what about the 25% of New Zealand’s total population who are non-Maori/non-European?

Unfortunately, Te Ao Maori is being forced onto the institution as a dominant culture, and this development runs counter to the idea of the university as a secular, apolitical body. Why not self-determination for Pacific People or other cultural and ethnic groups? We have a growing Islamic population. Do we forget about our Asian people because they do well here in New Zealand? They comprise 28% of the Auckland population and 47% of university students at the main university (University of Auckland, 2024). 

However, in the end the Treaty of Waitangi does not form any part of New Zealand domestic law, apart from situations where its principles are referred to in Acts of Parliament. But what exactly are those principles and to what extent do they apply to non-Māori/non-Europeans? Currently, we have 177,210 university students in New Zealand, including 147,915 New Zealanders, of whom 13% are Māori and 9% are Pacific (Universities NZ, 2024). How does the new Statute of Victoria University accommodate the 87% of university students who are non-Māori?

Misconduct Cases

It seems that many serious misconduct cases are in progress against academic staff at our universities but that do not pertain to strictly academic matters. At Massey University at least half-a-dozen staff are on the receiving end of misconduct cases for speaking out against university policies, and some outspoken critics have been forced into early retirement.

We hear of constant harassment, which follows as an aftermath this managerial power game. If what we hear is true, then this abuse must be exposed and stopped immediately. I am privy to much detail on bullying of university academic staff across several universities but, unfortunately, I am not at liberty to present this material publicly – as yet.

Recently, a meeting was held at one university, at which a paper was presented that proposed to limit international travel because of the concomitant carbon footprint. We understand the rationale here. However, this paper cited other papers that asserted no strong correlation between academic performance and attendance at international conferences. This assertion is patently untrue. For example, see Sousa et al. (2017). 

Here we recall the Kalven Report – a statement of the roles and responsibilities of the University of Chicago in relation to political and social action, published in 1967. Though pertaining to one university of more than half-a-century ago, it has lessons for us in the present. There should be no surprise that the Kalven Report confirms the primary roles and responsibilities of the university as teaching and research. But Kalven says something else - that the university should not promulgate or declare views or perspectives on the social or political activity of the day. This is not so much because doing so stands to antagonize parties outside the university but because, almost always, dissenting views are marginalized if only one perspective is to be presented as the university’s view, thus implying possible censorship and a loss of academic freedom for those who dissent.

What the university needs is to embrace diversity of views if it is to flourish. And so, the university becomes the provider and enabler of what Kalven refers to as:

an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry

And, in this extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry, the unit of analysis, the unit of contest and challenge is the individual member of staff and the individual student. But do we have an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry within our universities today?

What about Free Speech? What are the chances of established limits on freedom of speech being applied symmetrically on campus? If a white male engages in racist rhetoric then he should be called out, provided that his rhetoric clearly contravenes accepted definitions. Will the same standards and duty of care be applied to minorities, females, people of colour and LGBTQ people?    

The Symposium on the Future of Our Universities

On 15 May 2024 a Symposium on the future of our universities was held in Wellington. Many staff spoke out on issues relating to financial management, indigenization, freedom of speech and bullying of academic staff. Other issues raised that day included the very high ratio of non-academic staff to academic staff in New Zealand, curtailing of freedom of speech on campus, low funding to universities relative to that of other nations, and reconfiguration of definitions of research and excellence in research.

The first two Symposium panel discussions involved the State of Play of our Universities and the Purpose of our Universities. We heard about duplication of effort and delivery of programmes and a possible need for rationalization. Outside the Symposium we have heard of questionable decision-making in relation to expenditures on infrastructure and buildings while, at the same time, shedding of significant numbers of academic staff. In New Zealand, we have a very high ratio of non-academic staff to academic staff (1.5 : 1) and a Government contribution that has declined in real terms by 40% from that of thirty years ago because of long term failure to match inflation.

We also heard of a decline in average rankings of our universities in international ranking tables over the last fifteen years, such as those of Quacquarelli Symonds and Times Higher Education (Lillis, 2024).   

Two further panel discussions involved Academic Freedom and Research and Research Funding. In addition, we heard an interview with Distinguished Professor Peter Schwerdtfeger. In these discussions and interview, many issues were raised in relation to suppression of academic freedom and inadequate funding for research and innovation across the entire innovation sector - not only within universities. In particular, Professor Schwerdtfeger expressed great concern about the conflation of traditional knowledges with modern global science throughout Te Tiriti-led tertiary organizations. Many of us agree.

My own view is that over the last 30 years or more we have fiddled on the margins within our innovation system, massaging strategic plans and funding policies, changing the numbers of output classes, introducing new funds and re-working mandates for research and policy agencies. We suspect that such fiddling makes little difference to social, economic and environmental outcomes at the national level and that the most important thing is to have well-resourced research, where excellence is non-negotiable (thus obviating most of traditional knowledges) and where sectors have the absorptive capacity to adopt and apply research and innovation. And here, our universities are critical.

Definitions of Research Excellence

We heard concerns about comparatively low levels of research funding within universities. During the 1990s and, up to recently, New Zealand funded research on the basis of two criteria – Excellence and Relevance. Relevance had to do with judgements of the potential for proposed research to deliver benefits and outcomes. Surely, we should not fund research on excellence alone because we have duty of care to engage in wise and prudent use of public money and attempt to extract good things for the people, the economy and the environment of New Zealand. Research can indeed deliver outcomes across many domains and sectors and over the long term and that is precisely why all nations invest in research and development. In addition, they invest in order to have involvement in international collaborative efforts to address global challenges that include malnutrition and food insecurity, pandemics, public health and child mortality, environment and climate.  

Thus, between 2014 and 2018 global investment in research and development increased by 19%, a faster rate of growth than the contemporaneous increase in global GDP because both governments and their private sectors saw advantage in increasing their investment year-on-year (Science Business, 2023).

Research excellence was not discussed extensively during the Symposium, but should have been. It is not a difficult construct and is got at largely through the judgements of peers. It may look a little different in the private sector as opposed to the public sector, and different again in environment and climate, public health or investigations into the behavior of atomic nuclei. Nevertheless, certain common elements are present in most definitions, including rigour, originality and impact. Rigour may include the notion of well-designed, well-performed, well-reported research that is recognized through peer review. Impact may include the direct and indirect influence of research or its effect on an individual, a community or the wider society, including benefits to our economic, social, human and natural capital.

We may define excellence at the level of the individual researcher and at the level of the institution. An excellent researcher is an expert in a research field who has earned a high level of international recognition, demonstrated by outstanding publications. Conversely, a Centre of Excellence within an institution includes a significant cohort of excellent researchers who contribute to creative environments in delivering research of high quality.

Today we hear concerns about our country backing away from excellence as a condition of funding for research. Are we really re-configuring our notions and definitions of research excellence? If so - why? To include other ways of knowing? If so, then what is the scientific basis of these others ways of knowing?

If we re-define research and research excellence to accommodate diverse world views, then potentially we could end up funding almost anything that looks even remotely like research, and the endgame will be a destination in which our national effort in research, science and technology is diminished - and possibly significantly so. A related and serious concern is that the MBIE assessment guidelines for Endeavour Fund research grants indicate that a research proposal, whether, for example, in nuclear physics, artificial intelligence, or the biodiversity of wetlands, should not expect a “very strong” grading without the involvement of a Māori lead or co-lead researcher. This situation represents a counterproductive politicization of the funding system.

Unfortunately, we really are diluting excellence, and so we must raise the temperature on this debate. Would you take funding from an institution that performs international-class research on the human immune system and novel treatments for cancer, and give that money to research into folk medicine and traditional remedies?

Unfortunately, some of the material coming out of our research institutes reads more like political activism than scholarship, especially in health and education. Research is supposed to be objective in its intent and in its praxis, but too often we see motivated reasoning in order to justify some particular ideology. It is a particularly dangerous state of affairs when this stuff is incorporated within policy.

Traditional Knowledge and Science

At present our universities are in the process of indigenizing and becoming Treaty-led, and mātauranga Māori is assuming ever greater importance within tertiary education. At the Symposium we observed considerable confusion and disquiet over these developments. My own view is that we should consider the positive attributes of all traditional knowledges of the world with open minds and we should value and preserve all forms of traditional knowledge, including mātauranga Māori. But, some of us struggle with:

...for nearly 18 years I’ve been here exploring mātauranga and what Māori science is. I say exploring, because I think we are creating it, where we’re pulling it out from our ancestors, we’re unpacking those taonga tuku iho [heritage components], but we are in a sense creating the discourse and the discipline in the field right now. Mercier and Jackson (2017)

Does this mean that in New Zealand we are developing an epistemology of mātauranga Māori as work in progress, or are we uncovering a rich vein of scientific truth of which the rest of the world should be made aware? Like most or all traditional knowledges, mātauranga Māori has social, cultural and historic importance and some knowledge that has a scientific basis. However, we must remember that hundreds of traditional knowledges remain in the world of today. So - should not the science of the ancient peoples of Papua New Guinea, the Northern Territories and Sub-Saharan Africa be accorded mana orite with mātauranga Māori?  

Is it fair to impose any single form of traditional knowledge as scientific truth on each and every child, regardless of ethnic, religious or cultural affiliation, and within each and every school? Must we insist on shoehorning traditional knowledge across much or all of tertiary education? If so, perhaps Linda Smith provides the justification here:                                                     

Aspects of IK mātauranga are fundamentally incommensurate with other, established disciplines of knowledge and in particular with science, and are a much grander and more ‘mysterious’ set of ideas, values and ways of being than science. (Smith et al., 2016, pp. 131) 

Also - from Graham Smith:

There is a need to struggle to assert the equal validity of Māori knowledge and frameworks and conversely to critically engage ideologies which reify Western knowledge [science] as being superior, more scientific, and therefore more legitimate. (Smith, 1992, p. 7)

Do we take it that all traditional knowledges are much grander than science or does mātauranga Māori alone attain that status? Is mātauranga Māori the only form of traditional knowledge to achieve equality with science? Is there a need to struggle? As regards reification of "Western" knowledge, the International Science Council, as one example, talks of science as knowledge that is organized systematically and applied reliably. By what enormous factor would we have to multiply the accumulated knowledge of all traditional communities of the world to equal the accumulated knowledge of global science of the twenty-first century? 

How would one critically engage ideologies that reify Western knowledge as superior, more scientific, and therefore more legitimate? And how is knowledge to be applied reliably? Surely, through testing and challenge of ideas, findings, hypotheses or theory, perhaps through experimentation or through statistical evaluation - falsification, in other words - a quality that is almost completely absent within traditional knowledge. Where does all of this leave us and the next several generations of our schoolchildren and our university students in respect of equal validity of traditional knowledges and global science?

Recalling the Magna Charta of the European Universities

The Magna Charta of the European Universities was signed in 1988 for the ninth centenary of the founding of the oldest university in Europe (MCU, 2020). It was mentioned only briefly at the Symposium but deserves comment here.

It says that the university must give future generations of students a quality of education and training that will teach them to respect the great harmonies of their natural environment and to respect life itself.

It states that the universities must safeguard the freedoms of students. Perhaps to that notion we could add that the university should also safeguard the freedoms of staff.

It speaks of what we might call a nexus between teaching and research - the inseparability of teaching and research, perhaps so that students, particularly postgraduate students, have exposure to the very latest in knowledge, theory, insight, ideas, technology and research, as provided by tutors, mentors, supervisors, lecturers and professors.

The Future of our Universities

In due course a summary report on the Symposium, with recommendations, will be provided to Government and, of course, the university administrations, councils and executives. We hope that our universities will think clearly about the future and learn to accommodate diversity of views more than at present.

The university itself must remain neutral on all political matters while fostering broad enquiry and debate on all ideas and subjects within the institution. The Magna Charta of the European Universities says that in order to fulfil its vocation the university transcends geographic and political frontiers. This is far from a throw-away line. It is in fact very fundamental. Perhaps as a final note we should say that the reach of the university should transcend, not only geographic and political frontiers, but must also transcend social, cultural, religious and ethnic frontiers.

Here in New Zealand we have every reason to be proud of our universities but we hope that traction from the Symposium creates a future in which we will have cause to feel even prouder of our universities, confident that our universities match the best of the rest of the world.

References

Lillis, David (2021 - 2024): https://breakingviewsnz.blogspot.com/search?q=Lillis+bullying

Lillis, David (2024): Debating Education on TV   https://breakingviewsnz.blogspot.com/2024/03/david-lillis-debating-education-on-tv.html#more

MCU (2020):

https://www.magna-charta.org/magna-charta/en/magna-charta-universitatum/mcu-1988

 

Mercier, Ocean & Jackson, Anne-Marie: 2020, ‘Mātauranga and Science: Introduction’, New Zealand Science Review 75(4), 3-5.

 

Smith, G. H.: 1992, ‘Kura Kaupapa Maori Schooling: Implications for the Teaching of Science in New Zealand’, unpublished paper, Education Department, University of Auckland. Snively, G., & Corsiglia, J.: 2001, Rediscovering indigenous science: Implications for science education, Science Education, 85(1), 6–34.

 

Smith, L., Maxwell, Te K., Puke, H., Temara, P. (2016). ‘Indigenous Knowledge, Methodology and Mayhem: What is the Role of Methodology in Producing Indigenous Insights? A Discussion from Mātauranga Māori’. Knowledge Cultures 4(3): 131-56.

Science Business (2023). Number of scientists worldwide reaches 8.8M, as global research spending grows faster than the economy https://sciencebusiness.net/news/number-scientists-worldwide-reaches-88m-global-research-spending-grows-faster-economy

 

Sousa et al. (2017). Getting the Most Out of Academic Conference Attendance: Five Key Strategies 
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1609406917740441

 

University of Auckland (2024): University Demographic Data  https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/about-us/about-the-university/equity-at-the-university/university-demographic-data.html

 

Universities NZ (2024): https://www.universitiesnz.ac.nz/universities

VUW (2024): https://www.wgtn.ac.nz/maori-hub/rauemi/te-tiriti-o-waitangi