Centrist: Bureaucrats up, teachers down - what’s really wrong with NZ’s universities?

When it comes to tertiary education, are we becoming an “intellectual desert and a dumbed-down, impoverished economy?” asks academic Grant Duncan.

Short answer: “NZ is already there.”

Duncan says successive governments have gutted tertiary policy while feeding an expanding layer of non-teaching staff.

John Raine: Education, Research, and Lifting Productivity – a Heads-Up for Shane Reti

A New Minister

The New Zealand Herald 20^th January report on the Coalition Cabinet reshuffle focuses on Dr Shane Reti’s loss of the Health portfolio, and that he would become the new Universities Minister, while also picking up Statistics and Science, Innovation and Technology.  He will now have to follow through on the Government’s planned changes to the Education and Training Act 2020 [1] to strengthen academic freedom in the universities and, it would seem, on how science and technology research will be funded in the future – both relevant to the urgent need to increase New Zealand’s productivity.

These will be challenging tasks, given how the education and research sector has been significantly captured by identity politics and pockets of decolonisation/indigenisation activism. These have also led to censorship of academic publications and self-censorship by academics. This politicisation has aggravated operational inefficiencies in the sector. 

David Lillis: Is Tertiary Education for Learning or for Indoctrination?

“Any edifice that rests on the shifting sands of contemporary academic fashion is bound sooner or later to fall. The university of the future will, paradoxically, need to offer its students an education with deeper historical roots.” (Ferguson and Howland, 2024). 

Compulsory Courses at the University of Auckland

The University of Auckland is set to deliver courses entitled ‘Waipapa Taumata Rau’ (University of Auckland, 2024). All undergraduate programmes there must include a Waipapa Taumata Rau core course that students must complete within their first year of study.

Karl du Fresne: A blank canvas for stokers of the culture wars

Ever heard of Professor Mohan Dutta? No, neither had I until a few days ago, when his name popped up on my computer screen. He occupies the Dean’s Chair in Communication at Massey University’s School of Communication, Journalism and Marketing, and what follows is his academic profile:

Derek Mackie: World leaders in Au'te reo'motive Engineering!

Our polytechs are desperately trying to recruit AND retain students in the midst of a huge financial and restructuring crisis, presided over by our very own Labour government, whose zeal for centralisation comes second-only to turning New Zealand into an ethno-nationalist apartheid state.

 Described as a “national disgrace” by a former polytech chief executive, and a “shambles” by a national newspaper, Labour has once again over-promised and completely failed to deliver in the tertiary education sector, along with everything else it touches. 

 On top of all this, the woke brigade, who infect institutions like this, excel at wasting time and resources on Maoritising everything they can get away with, usually to accommodate a lone student who has grown up being told that entitlement is a badge of honour and should be exploited at every opportunity. 

 The following conversation could well take place in the very near future, if we don’t weed out our current generation of “progressive”, virtue-signalling administrators and public servants. 

This can only happen from the top down by electing a government that takes a stand against this ridiculous ethnic and gender minority hero-worship. And in particular, the idolisation and mystical elevation of all things Maori.