The University of Auckland’s TEU branch co-president, Cerian Wagstaff, says the vice-chancellor Stuart McCutcheon is wrong to accuse TEU of jeopardising funding for the university. Rather she says, in a letter to the Herald, that the vice-chancellor is creating a crisis at the university by refusing to negotiate with the union.

Ms Wagstaff, who is a general staff member, says academic staff are making their stand; “because they know Dr McCutcheon’s demands will decrease the quality of education at Auckland University and lead to the departure of many talented staff and students.”

Ms Wagstaff’s letter followed an earlier Herald story, which reported that union members were refusing to submit PBRF reports, which the university needs in order to get millions of dollars of funding each year.

In that story Dr McCutcheon threatened “if, through protesting, the union was to put revenue at risk then it would be putting jobs at risk and one would hope they would think carefully about that.”

The PBRF strike was the most strongly supported action by TEU members in the industrial action ballot. They hope the action will pressure the university to negotiate with them, while affecting students as little as possible. The University of Auckland not only receives a large sum of money from its PBRF funding, it also claims significant prestige based on its performance in the exercise.

TEU members have now stopped entering their publications into Research Plus, which records their research outputs for the PBRF exercise. They are not validating publications when they are automatically entered and are not complying with the PBRF collection of data or participating in mock rounds.