TEU organiser Michael Gilchrist says forced redundancies have increased in frequency in the last year.

"These redundancies have lacked a coherent rationale and genuine consultation and have been demoralising and destructive to both staff and students in the programmes affected."

At meetings in August and September TEU members resolved to meet with senior management as soon as possible, to discuss the university’s strategic and investment plans.

They said normal staff turnover should provide ample opportunities for re-shaping academic programmes, without the need for forced redundancies. They also resolved to explore options such as ‘grey-listing’ any vacancies created as a result of forced redundancies.

Grey-listing is asking academics at other universities not to apply for any advertised jobs at Victoria University during the dispute.

TEU wrote to the vice-chancellor Pat Walsh, on 14 October, seeking to meet to discuss its concerns about forced redundancies. A meeting with a delegation from the university’s senior management team should occur early next week ahead of meetings with members scheduled later in the week to discuss their response.

Because there are no alternatives on offer in 2012, this now means that students wanting a second chance at higher education in the Wellington region will have no options available to them, said VUWSA president Seamus Brady.

“Victoria (along with other universities that have cut pre-degree courses) risks creating a negative image amongst New Zealand’s most marginalised groups. These groups should have the right to ‘get amongst the best’ and should not be deterred because of educational inequalities they have experienced that may have been beyond their control.”

VUWSA believes the closure of the CUP programme will significantly deter many students from higher education.

Mr Brady said the closure of the CUP programme clearly signals to prospective students that unless their secondary schooling experience has prepared them for university, or they have a degree already, higher education will simply be out of reach for them.

“This has the potential of creating an ‘elitist’ conception of university. It also has the potential of denying the many attributes that ‘mature’ students bring to the campus in particular. In many senses it narrows the education path of people to a predefined, rather archaic way of looking at education.”

The letter informs staff that the employer will be initiating a Performance Improvement Plan with them.

“This is a targeted attack on the individual recipient, aimed at putting direct pressure on them with regard to their future employment,” said TEU organiser Michael Gilchrist.

One version of the letter implies that the staff concerned have “no or minimal” research activity and states that there is a “financial and reputational risk to the university in knowingly retaining such a staff member”. The letter claims that PBRF funding is based on the ranking of institutions. “…A shift of one place [in the university's PBRF ranking] could gain or lose about $3 million and the retention of one research inactive staff member could result in the loss of one place”, the letter says.

“This claim is every bit as absurd and inaccurate as it sounds,” said Mr Gilchrist. “Ranking is irrelevant. The impact of one R rated staff member on funding for a tertiary institution will in fact be very small – nominally a few thousand dollars but less likely than that when other variables are taken into account.”

TEU has reminded managers that they can only initiate a Performance Management Plan when a staff member has ‘demonstrably and persistently failed to meet an objective’ in their Performance, Development and Career Planning Process (PDCP) document. “This simply reflects basic rules of fair process in employment. Staff have a right to know where the goalposts are located, especially as they strive to produce quality research under the pressure of the impending PBRF assessment.”

Melbourne, 7 October 2011

New Zealand is in the middle of Rugby World Cup fever. In every city and town I visit, there are signs welcoming visiting teams and supporters; events to ensure they enjoy their time in New Zealand; and, of course plenty of All Blacks flags, shirts, and posters. Go the Blacks. Front pages have been adorned with stories about the injuries suffered by our rugby elite and what this means for us as a nation.

While the rugby has been fun to watch and the general ‘party’ that has been generated by the Rugby World Cup has been great to be part of, there is a problem with rugby fever – it is pushing from sight the extremely serious political issues facing the country and the difficulties in public education.

When glancing at the news, you would hardly know that New Zealand is eight weeks from a general election and a major referendum on our electoral system

In the New Zealand tertiary education sector we are struggling to find spaces in which we can raise our concerns about the government’s on-going pressure on the tertiary sector and what this means for staff, students, and the communities they come from.  And there are serious pressures facing the sector which come from the very direction being required of our institutions by the government.

The New Zealand government’s Tertiary Education Strategy contains within it a drive for ‘increased productivity’ and ‘increased accountability’ for public expenditure. The market-model approach underpinning the strategy has created a range of disputes in universities and polytechnics that threaten the very essence of public tertiary education – the very essence of universities and vocational training.  In fact, I would argue that the current government’s approach to higher education and vocational training has pushed the tertiary education sector to capacity and it is now starting to crumble around us.

A round-up of the actions of members of the New Zealand Tertiary Education Union from the last few months signal that this is a sector under immense strain. Members at CPIT (the polytechnic in Christchurch which is supposed to be at the forefront of training workers for the rebuild of the city after all the earthquakes) held a full week of strike action to defend core conditions; members at the University of Auckland are currently carrying out industrial action to defend their core conditions (withholding information for our research assessment exercise PBRF); we have seen lightning strikes at WelTec; stop work meetings at the University of Canterbury, NMIT, and WelTec; public rallies and demonstrations at five polytechnics (Whitireia, NorthTec, Unitec, BoPP, Wintec), at the University of Auckland, and at Victoria University of Wellington. The demonstrations have not just involved staff but students as well.

Interestingly in almost all cases there are two issues at the heart of the disputes our members are engaged in and both of these are based in the deep desire held by university and polytechnic staff to defend accessible quality public tertiary education. The two issues are the defence of core conditions which enable quality research and teaching in the tertiary sector; and the interconnected issue is an attempt to defend (or reclaim) professional autonomy.

First, to the on-going attack on core conditions for research and teaching which is being played out in the New Zealand tertiary sector. At both our universities and polytechnics this has been an issue in 2011 and will continue to be an issue into 2012. I will use two examples to illustrate this issue:

• The on-going industrial action at the University of Auckland
• And the on-going industrial action at CPIT

At the University of Auckland, our members are seeking to defend a range of core conditions which currently sit in their collective agreement – including clauses on research and study leave, promotions criteria, and disciplinary guidelines. The vice chancellor is demanding academics agree to move these core conditions that are crucial to academics doing their job out of their collective agreement and into policy over which they would have no control.

The unionised academic staff are wise enough to know that it is not worth trading off these conditions for a 4 percent pay rise, and earlier this year even offered to take a nil pay increase if their conditions were left in the collective agreement. Why? Because the core conditions being defended by academic staff are not privileges or perks, they relate directly to ensuring quality education and research at the university.”

Before moving on I would like to take this moment to thank Graham and NTEU for your support in this dispute.  As was noted yesterday during your deliberations universities and their vice-chancellors want to protect their public image, and having unions and academics from around the world criticising their actions helps our members to push their case.

Back to the Auckland academics from our union who are defending their core conditions. They know there is no such thing as a free lunch in the tertiary education sector.  And this has been made clear by the vice-chancellor of Auckland who stated in a letter to staff who took the pay rise (non-union staff): ‘I need to make it clear that the University can afford a salary increase such as this [4 percent offer] for academic staff only if we can achieve the administrative efficiencies and realise the productivity gains that will follow from the changes to the employment agreements’ (Proposed Salary Increase Offer for 2011, 25 November 2010).

Our members at the University of Auckland have argued that universities are required to operate on evidence-based research and reasoned argument. The vice-chancellor argues that changing the collective agreement will create efficiencies and increase productivity. But he has produced no information to show how savings equivalent to 4 percent of academic salaries would be achieved from changes to research and study leave, discipline procedures, academic criteria for promotions and external employment policy.

Similar demands for changes to core conditions to ensure ‘productivity’ gains are seen at polytechnic sites across New Zealand. Here our members find they are being asked to ‘sell’ their ‘discretionary’ leave back to their employer, to increase their teaching hours, and increase the hours they are required to be ‘at work’ (physically available for duties), in order to increase productivity and justify pay rises.

Last week while at CPIT in Christchurch a number of members pointed out what attacks on their hours of work actually mean. Currently they are required to be at the institution for 34 hours a week; but the employer wants to change their collective agreement and require them to be available for contact for 40 hours a week. Bear in mind that this is not the totality of their jobs. The maths is simple over the working year at the polytechnics, which is 43 weeks that would mean 258 hours more work – over six weeks extra ‘work’ every year, six weeks extra that our members would have to make themselves available on the CPIT campus every year.  What is being offered in return?  Nothing.

For staff who have worked beyond the call of duty this year to make sure students received quality teaching and learning while the city was being besieged by earthquakes the calls for them to work harder and to be more flexible about when and how they teach is galling.

The calls for ‘more productivity’ are unjustified and unnecessary. These demands for rising productivity ignore the fact that public education is not a ‘production line’ into which you can force more raw product and turnout more widgets.

Though even for the hard core econocrats who dislike notions of public good we could argue that the on-going drive for productivity ignores the gains already made in the sector, gains made at a cost I might add. 

In the last three years staff: student ratios in New Zealand have risen from 1:17.9 in 2009 to 1:19.8 in 2011

All of this ‘increased productivity’ has come at a cost. In the terms of what our employers care about and the government, they have cost New Zealand institutions in terms of their reputations. While international rankings of universities are somewhat flawed, we recently noted that in the QS world rankings five of the six surveyed New Zealand universities fell down the international rankings ladder – probably due to the rising staff: student ratios among other things. And the Times Higher Education rankings released today show a similar downward slide for New Zealand institutions on the whole.

In terms of our members, the attacks on core conditions mean increased workloads, a rise in insecure work, a decline in overall morale on campuses (which has serious implications for a sector which runs on good will), and, rising bullying on campuses.

The attack on core conditions at heart is also an attack on professional autonomy at our institutions.  This is clearly what is seen with regard the demands by the University of Auckland’s vice-chancellor who is insisting that academic staff be subject to ‘managerial will’ in regard important conditions for research and research-led teaching.

Another example of these attacks on professional autonomy is being noted by members at Victoria University Wellington and at the University of Canterbury.

At Victoria University of Wellington, a range of academic programmes have been closed or reorganised with no academic input and no real consideration of the research and teaching needs of the institution and the New Zealand community.

A ground breaking case for us will be the decision by the university to make three lecturers in political science redundant, while not changing the teachings of the programme they work within.  The university is not giving financial arguments for the redundancies, which is how it has justified a range of programme closures and job cuts over the last year, in fact it has committed to putting more money into the programme.  What Victoria University management has said is that they want some changes in the direction of the political science programme and so needs to make the three lecturers redundant in order to hire three more senior staff who can reposition the programmes teaching (though they are being hired to teach some of the courses of the now sacked ‘lecturers’).

This is the first time that we have seen senior management dictating the exact teaching to be carried out within a programme. It seems at Victoria University of Wellington, control over degree programmes has moved from being the prerogative of the academic professionals of the institutions, to the realm of the managerial professional. We as professionals who are interested in teaching and learning cannot handover control of our academic courses to ‘managers’. It is crucial that staff, alongside students, have a say in the courses that we teach at an institution, for it is us who know what is happening currently in our academic disciplines around the globe.

And NZTEU will need to look at using New Zealand’s Education Act which includes academic freedom clauses. I would question whether Victoria University is meeting the demands of the law that a university be a place “primarily concerned with more advanced learning, the principal aim being to develop intellectual independence”.  It seems this institution is not respecting intellectual independence. Neither is it ensuring that they respect the legal obligation to ensure that they be “a repository of knowledge and expertise” that has a “role as critic and conscience of society”. This last role of universities as mandated in law in New Zealand includes the role that staff of universities have in being ‘critic and conscience’ on their own campuses!

I do want to mention one battle to defend ‘critic and conscience’ objectives of the Education Act which played out in a very vibrant and colourful way. As part of the ongoing industrial dispute at the University of Auckland staff and students wore yellow rosettes to the graduation.  Attempts were made to take these rosettes of a law student, Vernon Tava, before he graduated and this made headline news.  It was an embarrassment for the university to have the dispute and the actions to ban protest emblazoned across the front pages of local and national papers. Small acts can create extensive disruption.

But back to the issue of attacks on the voice of university staff and their professional autonomy.

Staff at another institution, University of Canterbury, also this week met and argued that their professional autonomy and their professional expertise is being swept aside as the institution undergoes massive change.

As you will all be aware, the city of Christchurch has suffered a series of serious earthquakes over the last 13 months. This has meant a reduction in the numbers of students at the tertiary institutions in the city – in particular with regard to first year students. And in a market model this can only mean one thing, the institution must ‘downsize’ to cope with the drop in revenue. This is an untenable position and we are continually arguing with the government and the SMT of the institutions that they are looking too short term with regard this crisis.  As was noted at a stop work meeting at the University of Canterbury on Monday – what is a short term civil defense emergency must not become a long term crisis for the university, its staff, its students, and the community.

What the staff at the university noted at a stopwork meeting on Monday on this issue was that

they have never been more consulted and less listened to

These attacks on core conditions and the professional voice in the tertiary education sector is being driven by the government’s market approach to education provision. Rising managerialism and an overarching distrust of the ‘public sector’ is creating a tense environment for our members. Once respected as autonomous professionals who would engage in collegial governance, both academic and general staff at universities and polytechnics around New Zealand have found themselves being told ‘they are lucky to have a job at all’ and ‘should feel privileged to teach’.

TEU members in New Zealand are clearly saying back – they are proud to teach and will defend quality public tertiary education with every means they have at their disposal. After all, as was said at Education International world congress this year “our conditions of teaching are our students’ conditions of learning”. We need the public and the government to acknowledge that quality teaching and learning in the tertiary sector is not something that is just ‘nice to have’, the cherry on top of the sundae that is compulsory education, it is crucial to the social, political, and economic wellbeing of New Zealand.

The submissions and petitions from staff and students that followed were reviewed by a select committee, that decided to ignore the 1000+ signatures and various submissions seeking accountability from management in these decisions.

So students have launched a petition that aims to “critically reflect on the arbitrary use of power by management and demand more accountability, particularly for students, in the future.”

The petitioners state their goals are simple:

•  We want meaningful consultation through PUBLIC student forums that are well-advertised at least 2 weeks in advance, via Blackboard, student emails and posters. These forums must engage with your typical “go to class, go home” student.
• When there is a “significant shift”* in university process or change in program, the student reps of the affected faculty must be consulted as a representative student body. These students must inform their classes in full and channel the feedback to management.
• We define “significant shift” as having been met with substantive concern from students and/or staff.
• More student representation on Academic Board.

You can find out more, and sign the petition here.

Meanwhile TVNZ reports that police arrested two protesters in Auckland last night after about 60 people staged a protest at the University of Auckland library. The protesters said the action was over funding cuts to education, with several participants barricading themselves in on the library’s ground floor. Auckland student protesters had initially been holding a teach-in in the library, discussing how to reassert student power.

The two protests were part of a ‘Nationwide Day of Student Action’ involving students from Victoria University of Wellington, the University of Auckland and Massey University Wellington. The Auckland and Victoria groups were both calling for their respective vice-chancellors to be sacked for attacks their own university communities – Victoria protesters citing recent proposals to cut or close of programmes such as gender studies, the Crime and Justice Centre and political science, and Auckland protesters citing rising fees and the on-going dispute between university management and academic staff over their professional academic working conditions.

Salient photographer Rachel Brandon has photos of the Victoria protest online.

The universities themselves are both supporting the respective breakfasts at Lincoln and Victoria, with the vice-chancellor at Lincoln funding the entire breakfast, and the vice chancellor at Victoria funding half of the breakfast.

A central issue for women commemorating Suffrage Day this year is the upcoming referendum on MMP.

“Suffrage wasn’t something that happened just once, a hundred years ago,” said TEU women’s vice president Alexandra Sims. “It’s an on-going process to ensure women have fair representation and participation in all aspects of politics. MMP has given more women a voice in Parliament – that’s why it’s a suffrage issue this year.”

When MMP was introduced the number of women in Parliament rose immediately from 21 percent to 29 percent and has subsequently remained over 30 percent ever since.

“Across the world women are better represented in parliaments with proportional voting systems. If we want to protect and grow our political voice women need to vote to retain MMP at this year’s referendum,” said Associate Professor Alex Sims.

“Submissions from overseas as well as from throughout New Zealand from high profile individuals and organizations testified to the invaluable role this centre has played in legislation and policy making in New Zealand over the last ten years.”

“There was no financial justification for closing the centre. The decision seems to reflect a lack of understanding of how business relationships work for a centre of this kind.”

“In a particularly cynical move, the decision panel says that it recognised the regard in which the centre is held and would like ‘to continue the reputational benefit to the university of the CJRC brand’.”

“This leaves a particularly sour taste”, Mr Gilchrist said. “The reputation of the centre, as with so many other parts of the university, rests on the reputation of its staff, built up over time. For Victoria University, that process is now at an end,” Mr Gilchrist concluded.

“We can’t tell exactly who will be attending the meeting other than students and staff at this stage,” says Tertiary Education Union organiser, Michael Gilchrist, “but we see the current changes as a watershed issue for the future direction of the university.”

“There is no question of a lack of funds or student demand in the programme. On the contrary, an additional investment is being made. But younger staff attempting to raise a family and build an academic career, are losing their jobs.”

“We are particularly concerned that the university’s Academic and Faculty Boards, representing students and staff, have not been consulted and that recent resignations in the programme have not been used to avoid making staff redundant.”

“Likewise, students see the alarming implications for the courses they are taught, the relationships they have with lecturers and their plans for progression within disciplines if possible changes in management thinking can have this kind of effect.”