Tertiary Update Vol 15 No 4 Brett Alcock says his previous job at a privately owned tertiary institution was a string of short-term contracts. “Many teachers, including myself when I was there, have their contracts rolled over. But the fact that they are not on permanent contracts creates a pervasive [...]

Radio NZ reports Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce has asked Canterbury’s three main tertiary providers to examine all possible options, including mergers, as they look towards the next 20 years. Mr Joyce told RNZ the earthquakes mean Canterbury University, Lincoln University and the Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology have to take [...]

Academic unions are the best hope to reverse the spread of heavy-handed corporate style micro management, defend academic freedom, reinvigorate academic citizenship, and address the spread and poor working conditions of contingent teaching staff. That is a premise of a widely circulated article by TEU’s University of Auckland branch co-president [...]

Global educational benchmarking agency Quacquarelli Symonds, known as QS Stars, has evaluated Massey University’s performance and given it an overall rating of four stars out of five. While there is no mention of how much Massey paid QS for its ranking, Ireland’s University College Cork (UCC) last year said it [...]

Why academic unions matter By Paul Michel Taillon   The vandals are at the gate, according to David Robinson, Senior Advisor at Education International (a trade union federation representing thirty million education employees around the world) and former Associate Executive Director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers. So who [...]

The Tertiary Education Commission (TEC) could use ‘Compacts’ with individual tertiary education institutions in conjunction with performance linked funding to drive the government’s economic growth strategy. In its publicly released, but highly censored, briefing to the incoming minister TEC notes that overseas jurisdictions such as Australia and some US states [...]

Tertiary Update Vol 15 No 1 At least nine New Zealanders have joined a global boycott of Elsevier, the world’s largest scientific journal publisher. The protest has rapidly gained momentum since it began as an irate blog post at the end of January. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education [...]

TEU believes new academic timetables at the University of Canterbury are much better than first drafts, after it met with two assistant vice-chancellors earlier this week. Last week the Christchurch Press reported that academic staff were up in arms over changes to the way timetables are set, “forcing lecturers to [...]

Educators are critical of a plan by the University of Auckland and Teach First NZ to fast track 20 graduates into classrooms after just six weeks of teacher-specific training. The minister of education Hekia Parata is backing the scheme, but it is yet to receive sign-off from the Teachers Council [...]

Destiny Church ‘University’ could be just the beginning if the government’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPPA) trade negotiations conclude without proper public scrutiny. “Destiny’s outlandish ‘university’ makes a mockery of the public education responsibilities of New Zealand’s real universities, polytechnics and wānanga,” said TEU President Dr Sandra Grey. “Our public universities all [...]