Dr David Lillis: Bullying at New Zealand Universities?

More Bullying at Our Universities?

Elsewhere in Breaking Views I have written extensively on workplace bullying generally, especially in New Zealand’s public service (Lillis, 2024a), and bullying at our universities specifically (Lillis, 2024b and 2024c). It appears that bullying has been exposed many times in the New Zealand media, but the message does not seem to get home to employers - or are they choosing to turn a blind eye?

David Lillis: New Trajectories for our Universities?

Enforced Indigenization of Our Universities

The School of Clinical Sciences at Auckland University of Technology (AUT) is now on a path that we consider to be divisive and negligent towards the 25% of New Zealand citizens who are non-Māori/non-European - and indeed to Europeans (see AUT, 2024). The extent of its embracing of Critical Social Justice for one ethnic and cultural group only, at the possible expense of quality of medical education, should be deeply worrying for New Zealand. So it is time for the present Government to step in and terminate the current drive towards highly imbalanced health and education.

Grant Schofield: A falling out of love letter to the university (….we need to talk)

What does an academic actually do and do they have any useful function in society today? This is a question I’ve been asking about myself 30 years into my academic career.

It’s not a mid-life crisis, at least so far as I can tell. I haven’t bought a Harley Davidson. Yet.

New Zealand universities are facing serious budget shortfalls, dwindling domestic enrolments, and catastrophic international student declines. My employer, engaged in a cost-cutting restructure which I survived, only to find out they botched it so badly they had to re-employ everyone they sacked. We will start the process again mid-year. The University of Otago announced staff cuts will be in the several hundreds, Massey, Auckland, Victoria and Lincioln have already been and are in these processes. Only Canterbury has somehow shown growth. Overall the sector is in trouble in New Zealand. It’s the same in Australia.

For most of my career I was in love with the “university” and the role it had in society. I’m gutted now to have lost that love.

Bryce Edwards: Culture wars stifling critical debate on our campuses

“Cancel culture”, “callout culture” or “woke politics” – these trends are often accused of reducing political debate and diversity of thought in society. And it’s on university campuses where this is said to occur the most.

Yet until now, it hasn’t been clear if academic freedom is being eroded and whether academics are being stifled in their role as “critic and conscience” of society. We have had occasional controversies – such as the fallout at the University of Auckland and in the Royal Society over the academics who questioned the way that mātauranga Māori is being used in the education curriculum, but it’s been hard to know whether this type of controversy is indicative of wider problems.

There is now evidence that there is indeed a problem. The first New Zealand Annual Survey on Academic Freedom, published today, shows that a significant proportion of university academics feel very constrained in what they can discuss and disagree with. The survey, commissioned by the Free Speech Union and carried out by Curia Research, asked academics how free they felt in challenging consensus, debating issues such as gender or the Treaty of Waitangi, and so forth. Respondents were asked to rate their academic freedom on various topics on a 0-10 scale, in which 0 meant “unfree” and 10 meant “entirely free”. There were 1266 responses to the survey.

Elizabeth Rata: Science or ideology? The NZ university at the crossroads

No matter how intense or heated the discussion may be, NZ universities need to address the difference between ideology and science.

New Zealand’s universities are at a defining crossroads. Do we remain a universitas, a community of scholars developing knowledge according to the universal principles and methods of science or do we continue down the path of a racialised ideology?

The science-ideology battle is nothing new to universities. Dialectical materialism was the ruling ideology in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Christianity was the ideology in the pre-Darwinian centuries of English universities. In post-1980s’ New Zealand it is the racial ideology of two political categories of people defined by their ancestry.