As I reported in September of last year, every entering student at New Zealand’s Auckland University was required to take an “indigeneity” course—and that includes prospective science majors. As I noted:
. . . . at the University of Auckland—New Zealand’s most prestigious university—every student has to take a mandatory course related to indigenous knowledge, a course ostensibly related to their their field of study. In reality, these courses are exercises in propaganda, created to indoctrinate students into sacralizing indigenous “ways of knowing”. As an example, I gave this course (see screenshot below), which is required for all science majors. Click to access the course description, which I went through a while back (see the link above).
. . . . If you read the course description, you’ll see that it’s largely designed to inculcate students into the (1840) Treaty of Waitangi (in Māori: “Te Tiriti o Waitangi”) as a way of showing that Māori ways of knowing, or Mātauranga Māori (MM), should be considered coequal to modern science. This, in turn, is part of a push to insinuate indigenous ways of knowing into New Zealand science, as well as giving Māori increased power over what science is done and how it is done. (For my criticisms of this approach, see the many pieces I’ve written about it.) The general view of the indigenous people of New Zealand is that Māori have the sole power to use and control how indigenous knowledge is used. That’s in contrast to modern science, in which no ethnic group has any control about what projects are done or funded.
I gave some excerpts from the syllabus, which was designed to show students how sacred the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi was, widely interpreted to deem all endeavors in New Zealand coequal between the “Crown” (Europeans) and the indigenous Māori. This included science, so you could regard the course below, required for all science majors, as a way to propagandize them into thinking that indigenous “ways of knowing” were coequal to modern science. But there was a similar required course for every major.
Unfortunately, this did not go down well: many of the students considered it a waste of time. As one university member told me:
What we have been told is that the majority of students considered the courses below an acceptable standard, but it varied faculty by faculty. Remember that each faculty had its own WTR course. I know that in Engineering students overwhelmingly criticised their WTR course, but, ironically, this will continue as compulsory in 2026 as graduate competencies that are claimed to be covered by WTR are required for degree accreditation. I suspect however that the courses will be modified. We won’t know if WTR will be optional for the Faculty of Science in 2026, but most are assuming it will be, i.e. it won’t be compulsory next year.
For some reason, engineering and medicine students will still be required to take such a course, but, as a New Zealand Herald article (archived here) notes, the rest of these courses will be optional. Perhaps Māori students may take them, but the course offered was not a science course but a propaganda course, and why waste your time on such stuff when you can be learning science? (If you want to learn indigenous culture, anthropology or sociology courses are the proper venue.)
Dawn Freshwater, the Auckland Vice-Chancellor (i.e., “The Boss”) has been mentioned here before. She dissimulated several years ago, promising that there would be a full and fair debate on the relative merits and usefulness of modern science versus indigenous “ways of knowing”. But after four years, the debate still never took place. Freshwater clearly never had any intention of allowing it. And when I swallowed hard and emailed her about this, asking where the debate was, I got no answer. Fortunately for Auckland Uni, Freshwater has announced she’s leaving.
In the article below she backs off the program, recommending that the courses be optional instead of required. A faculty vote overwhelmingly supported this.
Click to read. (“Waipapa Taumata Rau” is Māori for “The University of Auckland,” recently given that indigenous name (as my colleague said, “This was one of the problems with the whole thing: naming the course after the University indicated that the content reflected the views of the university.”)
Anyway, I’ll give a few excerpts:
Excerpts (go to the archived link to read full article):
The University of Auckland’s controversial Treaty of Waitangi and te ao Māori courses are unlikely to remain compulsory after negative feedback from staff and students, and criticism from politicians.
The university senate has recommended that Waipapa Taumata Rau (WTR) courses become an optional choice, rather than a core requirement.
The courses were made compulsory for all first-year students this year. The backdown comes after just one completed semester.
In March, Act leader David Seymour called on the university to scrap the compulsory courses, describing them as “a perversion of academic freedom” and “a form of indoctrination”.
“The university has been reviewing the feedback about the Waipapa Taumata Rau courses,” Auckland University Vice-Chancellor Dawn Freshwater posted online on September 12.
Freshwater, as always, tried to put a good face on it, but the feedback was dire: students, even in engineering, considered the courses a waste of time.
“While students have found the courses valuable, they have also indicated where improvements could be made and told us they would like greater flexibility in how WTR fits within their programme of study,” she wrote.
English translation: “The reviews were lousy—so lousy that we have to make the courses optional so that students can take courses in their major lacking ideological propagandizing,”
“As we do with all courses, we aim to use staff and student feedback to strengthen how they are delivered.
“To that end, and in response to that feedback, a proposal will be discussed at Senate on 15 September recommending that WTR become an optional choice within General Education for most programmes, rather than a core requirement.
The faculty vote was very lopsided: make the courses optional. Some student comments.
Comments online included: “From what I’m seeing, you either pay for this course or some other. You can debate whether another elective or transdisciplinary would be more useful than WTR.”
Another said: “This class is literally primary school-level content. I love the idea of a compulsory class on Te Tiriti, but obviously they failed at it. This class has been the biggest waste of my time, I learnt more in my Year 4 class.”
Some students said the course costs – between $900 and $1200 – were high and the courses had little relevance to their studies when compared to other general education courses.
The majority of comments were negative but not racist.
LOL. “Negative but not racist.” That’s an escellent take on the “equal time” proposal. And those are the comments that Freshwater said “found the courses valuable.” The woman doesn’t know how to give a straight answer.
Act’s tertiary education spokeswoman, Dr Parmjeet Parmar, said in March that international students were being forced to pay thousands of dollars for a course with little relevance to their future careers.
To sum up, the University’s efforts to shove the sacralization of indigenous people (and the treaty of Waitani) down the throats of students failed; the students want to learn stuff relevant to their interests, and are pretty clearly sick of the pervasive indigenization of New Zealand. I find that good in the sense that while citizens of
Is this a harbinger of things to come? Perhaps in New Zealand, but certainly not in Canada, where the sacralization of the indigenous people is only getting started. Expect to see the “two-eyed seeing” trope everywhere.
Finally, I bid Dr. Freshwater goodbye and good riddance. Her tenure served only to damage education at New Zealand’s most prestigious university.
Professor Jerry Coyne is an American biologist known for his work on speciation and his commentary on intelligent design, a prolific scientist and author. This article was first published HERE
11 comments:
Hi professor! And over at neighbouring AUT, you have a fellow academic launching into a column. On why she sees DEI not as a luxury, but a basic necessity.
Here’s my take on that:
Gail Pacheco, in a column published on The Post’s website today, argued that if we want meritocracy to succeed, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) are essential. Pacheco, the Equal Employment Opportunities Commissioner and a Professor of Economics at Auckland University of Technology, said she wants to help “build a New Zealand” where everyone can contribute and be recognised, no matter their background. She also directs the New Zealand Work Research Institute at AUT, giving her both policy influence and an academic platform that shapes how future economists and business leaders think about fairness, bias, and opportunity.
She described invisible barriers in the labour market — biased assumptions, structural disadvantages — and warned that the Government’s plan to remove DEI provisions from the Public Service Act would “seriously weaken diversity efforts” and risk a return to “traditional networks” and unconscious bias. Diversity, she said, strengthens merit and boosts productivity.
It sounds tidy — fairness fortified by compassion. But behind the phrasing lies an inversion: merit must now be managed, corrected, and supervised to ensure it behaves properly.
Pacheco presents herself as the calm empiricist — the economist armed with data, not dogma. Yet her argument is moral, not economic. She assumes the labour market is riddled with “invisible barriers” that only policy can dismantle. The evidence for these unseen obstacles is, of course, their invisibility. In this way, the DEI worldview is self-confirming: absence of proof is proof itself.
Meritocracy, as most understand it, means judging individuals on ability, effort, and performance — not ancestry, gender, or identity category. Pacheco’s version reverses that order. She argues merit cannot function unless adjusted for inequity. In practice, demographic representation becomes the benchmark, and any deviation is treated as evidence of bias.
She cites McKinsey studies showing diverse firms perform better — a favourite of consultants selling “diversity strategies.” These reports confuse correlation with causation: successful global firms tend to be diverse because they are already successful and global. To attribute their profitability to HR policies is like crediting the weather for the harvest.
Closer to home, Pacheco points to “20 years of New Zealand data” linking diversity to productivity. No variables, no definitions, no methodology — just the reassuring hum of statistics. Advocacy in a lab coat.
What she does not discuss is DEI’s own performance: whether mandated diversity in our public sector has improved competence, accountability, or public confidence. Nor does she mention the distortions that follow when promotions satisfy optics rather than outcomes. Those matters are invisible too.
Her philosophy is one of managed fairness. Fairness is no longer an emergent social virtue; it is a measurable policy outcome. Bias is presumed omnipresent, requiring continuous correction through bureaucratic vigilance — conveniently, the system she represents. Fairness as an administrative process, not a moral instinct.
The Government’s proposed rollback of DEI language from the Public Service Act is, in her view, a grave threat to justice itself. Without explicit provisions for diversity and pay equity, she warns, hiring may “default to traditional networks.” By which she means: decisions might again be made on merit, experience, and judgment — unfiltered by identity calibration.
Her final flourish is demographic fatalism: by 2043, most of the working-age population will be Māori, Pacific, or Asian. Framed as a “test” of fairness, though it might equally be read as a simple fact of population change. Under the DEI lens, demography is destiny; representation must always match proportion, and difference is evidence of discrimination.
If merit needs rescuing, it’s not meritocracy anymore.
Yeah right, no pressure !
Why are the engineering and medicine students still required to pay , study, and pass a mandatory course in Maori fairytales that was fabricated last year, or on the spot if caught out with an awkward question ?
Are these types of students more likely to be resilient to indoctrination?
Probably.
Now get rid of all that Maori nonsense posted around Auckland Uni.
Then let the staff speak their minds rather than kowtowing to their academic masters.
Perhaps, give them permission not to wear their dangling greenstone pendants ?
Are engineering and medicine students about to be obliged to take Ardern's course on "entering positions of leadership, making decisions during times of crisis, and navigating difficult conversations" as she is promulgating at Harvard ?
Or studying her papers on kindness and empathy ?
I can see her adoring academics at AKL Uni fawning over that idea.
Sorry, students, I shouldn't even joke about it - being simple minded folk, the academic staff might take me seriously.
After 2026 all the changes will be reversed with a vengeance
Would Gail Pacheco be happy that her children are denied a job ,an education, an opportunity, a career, or relegated back down the medical list because they were white and from a privileged family ?
Of course not - and neither are we who find ourselves in that situation, simply because she thinks we should stand back to allow browner people to have greater advantages based on the date that there canoes arrived here, or their private sexual preferences.
Who gave her that right to indoctrinate students ?
Pacheco’s essay about moral management — a vision of society in which equality must be supervised forever. The irony is that in seeking to perfect fairness, she removes trust in people’s capacity to act fairly. The pursuit of equity becomes a permanent institution, and meritocracy a conditional privilege.
Who gave her the right to indoctrinate students?
The state did. New Zealand’s universities long ago stopped being places of open inquiry and became publicly funded echo chambers for moral policy. The titles — Professor, Commissioner, Director — confer not only academic status but moral authority. That authority is then used to advance an ideology of managed equality that feeds back into government policy, media messaging, and the bureaucracy itself. It is a closed loop of virtue.
American philosopher Thomas Sowell called this “the vision of the anointed” — a moral aristocracy that sees disagreement as ignorance and opposition as proof of bias. It’s the same logic that allows an economics professor to declare that meritocracy requires ideological supervision — and to do so from the comfort of tenure, salary, and state protection — and in complete safety from the consequences.
Academia grants the licence; the Human Rights Commission grants the platform. Together they form a cabal of fairness — deciding who must step aside, who must be “included,” and who deserves to be corrected. It’s not that anyone gave them the right. They simply assumed it, and the political class, fearful of being called unjust, consented.
Sowell warned that once moral expertise replaces empirical accountability, society shifts from testing ideas to enforcing them. The “experts” no longer persuade; they direct. And because their motives are presumed pure, their power grows unchecked.
New Zealand’s academic and bureaucratic caste has mastered this dynamic. Under the banner of “diversity” and “equity,” they recast social hierarchies as moral necessity — all while their own positions remain untouchable. They speak of inclusion, yet operate from exclusive circles insulated by status, funding, and ideology.
The result is a kind of administrative aristocracy: professors who preach redistribution from taxpayer-funded platforms, and commissioners who write policy designed to validate their own careers. Their “equity” always requires more management, more oversight, more control — and always from people like themselves.
So, who gave her the right?
We did — we let academia become a moral industry instead of a marketplace of ideas.
Unknown 718, you'd better have a look at a pic of her. There is an obvious reason why she would never have to worry about her children being turned down because they are White.
Well, Pacheco one of the many "Professors" whose published work is almost entirely multiple authored and largely repetitive. In NZ so many academics do a little research then recycle that research over and over.... So, no clue which author writes what or what is novel about any of these articles or presentations....
Established academia does not realise it yet, but they are now very much in the twilight of their existence. Competent youngsters will desert them on masse. New agencies will rise to serve this newly discriminating market. All power to their elbow. Existing unis will soon look very much like Tintern Abbey.
But where will those 'competent youngsters' go, Anon 1246?
In the US they can go to private universities that run along pre-PC lines but NZ law is rather restrictive with regard to the use of the label 'university'.
Or they'll just go overseas (those who can afford it) and we lose them probably for ever.
They’ll go overseas to study or into trade training. NZ unis have lost the plot. They’re an embarrassment. I thought Dawn Freshwater was leaving. She’s sure taking her time about it. Her departure is an opportunity for Akl Uni to reset - what’s the betting they don’t take it…
Post a Comment