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.
“For every 10 full-time-equivalent academic staff (who actually teach and research) there are 14 other staff,” he writes.
“Work expands to fill the space available,” Duncan says, citing Parkinson’s Law. More administrators means more meetings, more paperwork, and more compliance, not more education. The universities, he says, have forgotten why they exist.
Successive governments have tinkered with merging polytechs, only to later reverse course. According to Duncan, this has not helped. “Restructuring after restructuring is achieving nothing, and the winners are the consultants,” he writes.
Teaching staff are kept on short-term contracts, pressured to do unpaid research, and often stuck teaching compulsory “generic” courses to students who do not want to be there. “Reluctant teachers teach reluctant students,” he says.
As for solutions, he hints at a radical fix.
“Surgically removing some of the techno-bureaucratic blockages and a clean-out at the top could help.”
Centrist Ltd.