David Farrar: The very unhappy AUT law faculty

I have been leaked a copy of the latest staff survey from AUT Law Faculty and it is very clear that it is a very unhappy place. Here are some of their results:

• Would recommend AUT as a great place to work 45%

• AUT is in a position to succeed 42%

• Have confidence in senior leaders at AUT 35%

• AUT has a thriving research culture 35%

• Am comfortable reporting inappropriate behaviour 30%

• Workloads are divided fairly 25%

• Innovation is recognised and rewarded 20%

• At AUT we are good at learning from our mistakes 20%

• The right people are recognised and rewarded 20%

• If someone is not delivering in their role we do something about it 5%

You never get 100% staff satisfaction but to have such a low level of satisfaction should ring warning bells.

As if that isn’t bad enough, a whopping 35% of law faculty staff who responded said they had experienced bullying or harassment at work in the last six months. Also 20% said they had been discriminate against.

This is a quote from an e-mail from one of the law faculty professors discussing the results. He seems to blame it all on the central AUT administration, a view not shared by his colleagues.

Now readers will recall that the Dean of Law is Khylee Quince and she attracted a lot of publicity when she called a senior KC a racist dinosaur who should go off and die in the corner.

Readers will be interested in how AUT dealt with this. Did they tell the Dean that this is unacceptable behaviour for a first year law student let alone the Dean of Law?

This is from the Pro VC in charge of the law faculty. So their focus was to make the Dean feel safe and supported for her outrageous behaviour, and not on how her comments may have made staff and students feel.

This is unintentionally hilarious. The Law School Dean blasts someone she disagrees with as a racist old dinosaur who should die in the corner, and the Dean’s boss says our values are to be kind and supportive!!!



This is from a powerpoint presenting the findings of the survey. So is AUT doing anything about this?

Click to view

As you can see the results for the Law Faculty are much much lower than AUT as a whole. So this would suggest the major issue is not the central administration, but the faculty management itself. I am told by sources that everyone knows what the major problem is, but people are too scared to say so.

Click to view

So only 1 out of 20 law staff thought something is done when someone is not delivering in their role. I wonder who they might have in mind when they answered that question!

David Farrar runs Curia Market Research, a specialist opinion polling and research agency, and the popular Kiwiblog where this article was sourced. He previously worked in the Parliament for eight years, serving two National Party Prime Ministers and three Opposition Leaders.