Rodney Hide: Raine showed us the lecture room. Here's the staffroom.

John Raine has laid bare what our universities teach students. The University of Auckland's new gender equity plan shows the same machinery aimed at staff: hiring, promotion and annual reviews. No budget, no targets.

"I thought back then that we might quickly pass peak woke and that rationality would have taken hold again by now," writes Emeritus Professor John Raine in The indoctrination must stop but Labour would double down. "Not so fast, some warned - they were right!"

Matua Kahurangi: More race-based bullsh*t in our universities

ACT MP calls out University of Auckland’s Māori-only job programme

Once again, race-based policies are rearing their divisive head in New Zealand’s public institutions, this time at the University of Auckland. ACT MP Dr Parmjeet Parmar has called out the university over a job listing that appears to blatantly breach the Human Rights Act 1993 by explicitly requiring applicants to be of Māori descent.

Parmjeet Parmar: Uni’s compulsory Treaty courses damage learning experience

From next year, the University of Auckland will require all first-year students to complete a ‘Waipapa Taumata Rau’ course covering the Treaty of Waitangi and traditional Māori knowledge systems.

ACT has a number of concerns about this plan. Firstly, students’ time is precious.

We fund universities to prepare students for their careers, and that requires time spent specialising on subjects relevant to their chosen majors.

Michael Johnston: Maori knowledge and science? don’t mix chalk and cheese

In July last year a furore erupted when seven eminent professors from the University of Auckland published a letter in the New Zealand Listener. They wrote to criticise Ministry of Education plans to include mātauranga Māori (traditional Māori knowledge) in the science curriculum for schools.

The letter drew fire from many quarters. The Vice Chancellor of Auckland University, the Tertiary Education Union and the Royal Society Te Apārangi all piled on. The professors were accused of causing “hurt and dismay” and told that their letter was “offensive” and “racist”. They were denounced in an open letter signed by more than two thousand university staff.

Three of the professors were investigated by the Royal Society, a process that could have led to their expulsion. Eventually the investigation was called off after the Society was taken to task by international giants Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne. Sadly, one of the three, Michael Corballis, died before his name was cleared.

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.