KEY POINTS:
The ongoing problems in a faculty at Auckland University, which has featured in this paper's news, review and letters to the editor sections, can be viewed as symptomatic of wider issues in the university sector.
Staff and students talk of a "climate of fear" ruled over by university leaders clearly seeing themselves as "corporate managers" whose "ultimate justification is the economic bottom line". University managers regard themselves as operating in an environment of intense competition for resources, students and funding.
In justifying changes at Auckland University, the vice-chancellor's response was illuminating. He stated that a more structured approach to marketing was necessary.
"There tended to be a view that the faculties were brands in their own right. The University of Auckland is the brand and what I wanted was a consistency of style and a consistency of the brand."
This response, suffused with the language of corporate marketing and branding, has been shaped by Government policies towards the sector since the 1990s. In that period a competitive environment among the universities was created and corporate models roughly and often inappropriately applied.
Problems and costs that arose with this approach were recognised by the present Government and it has announced new structures which is says will encourage universities to co-operate in a complementary university system. However, one central tertiary education policy introduced by this Government arguably works against this and, indeed, reinforces competition.
That policy is the Performance-based Research Fund. This fund is used to justify restructuring, redundancies, pressure on staff, and impose that "consistency of style and brand".
Introduced as the first of twin measures to rank research output and teaching at our universities, it is notable that the second part has not been implemented, leaving the performance-based fund as the sole gauge by which two universities have staked their claims to be "the leading" university.
To make these claims is ethically dubious. And it rather obscures the fact that all our universities have particular strengths that contribute to our tertiary education sector as a whole.
The lack of a second measure of judgment covering the essential elements of teaching and learning also leads to an extremely unbalanced view of university quality. My university ranks lowest on the fund ranking, yet has considerable strengths acknowledged by the other universities in its teaching and applied learning.
As a piece of public policy the fund is problematic. Based on a similar but highly criticised policy in Britain, it appears to be blessed with a number of attributes normally identified with public policy failure.
A significant proportion of the funds for research are swallowed up by the bureaucracy established, within universities and the Tertiary Education Commission, to administer the scheme. Considerable time, effort and public money are also expended by individual academics to comply with the policy.
It has what public policy analysts identify as unintended consequences with, for example, greater ingenuity displayed in devising strategies to produce or manufacture outputs than is apparent in the actual worth of much of the research that is produced.
It also seeks to rank, compare and allocate funding to disparate research activities that can range from a dance performance to the number of microbes that could dance on the head of a pin.
There is no question that under the present fund, Sir Ernest Rutherford would have been far better off , and undoubtedly encouraged by university management, to dash off a couple of academic journal articles to meet the fund assessment period than wasting his time setting up experiments to discover the nuclear nature of atoms.
Recently the AUT was recognised and financially supported for its "distinctive" contribution to the university sector by a Government that has not always agreed with it attaining university status. However, the fund and the other new funding arrangements can be seen as working against this university making that contribution.
The new funding is a one-size-fits-all solution which forces AUT to reshape itself to fit the pattern of the other universities where large undergraduate lectures bring the cost savings and research time now demanded.
We will lose the smaller class applied skills teaching that gives us that distinctive character. Pressure to rate and comply with the fund also logically requires my school, for example, to only employ research-ranked staff at the expense of those who have traditionally brought the industry experience and applied skills to our mix.
Rather than a focus on critically-informed media practice, we would transmogrify into a media or cultural studies department.
In this regard, the demise of Auckland University's School of Creative and Performing Arts and redundancies at Elam provide an uncomfortable precedent.
If the Government truly desires a co-operative, complementary university sector with globally-rated outcomes, then it must significantly reform policies like the Performance-based Research Fund and design in far more flexibility to the funding mix.
The current policies, sadly, still encourage wasteful competition, a greater emphasis on brands and marketing than biology and mathematics. They encourage leprous managerialism and attendant problems of low staff morale, high levels of stress and the absence of collegiality among staff and between universities.
* Alan Cocker is an associate head of the School of Communication Studies at AUT. He is also an academic staff representative on the AUT council. The views expressed are his own.
