PBRF Symposium

After a dash from my Employment Law exam to the airport, I arrived in Wellington to present a paper on behalf of the AUS at a symposium on the Performance Based Research Fund (PBRF) organised by the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC). After one full round and a partial round, there is a reconsideration underway of the way the PBRF is calculated. I was a member of the last panel of the day and raised a number of general and specific concerns about the PBRF.

Some of these had come directly from individual members, such as academic staff who have been told in the course of restructuring that since the funding and prestige their employer has secured by way of their PBRF scores is now in the bank until 2012, their research performance would not be a factor in terms of whether they kept their jobs or not.

Other ideas came from discussions at the latest meeting of the AUS’s Professional and Education Policy Committee (PEPC) that considered alternatives to the current PBRF system. Such alternatives included using a sample of (rather than all) academics or seeking to find a close enough proxy from other available data.

A number of alternatives were also explored at the TEC Symposium by Professor Jonathon Boston who was on the same panel as me. Further dialogue is being sought with Jonathon on some of these possibilities. I am hoping we can meet in advance of the PEPC meeting on August 24 and also to hold meetings around the campuses on this issue.

Quality a Casualty of the Corporate Model

On the weekend of Winter solstice (in a study break just before my employment law exam) I accepted an invitation from the New Zealand Union of Students Associations (NZUSA) to address their national conference. I represented the AUS on a panel that also included Lincoln University Vice-Chancellor, Professor Roger Fields, and the Director of the Academic Audit Unit and my former Canterbury colleague, John Jennings. Within the short time allocated to me, I focussed on the barriers to quality education in the university.

Adopting a theme familiar to AUS members, I outlined the way changes in universities have mirrored the neoliberal changes to the broader New Zealand society. Since the 1990s, universities have been dominated by a competitive managerialist model and a requirement to return a surplus. That focus has severely undermined collegiality, turned students into customers and had corrosive effect on the traditional values and mission of the university.

It resulted in an unseemly scramble for student enrolments involving almost all New Zealand tertiary institutions and a proliferation of often low-quality courses aiming to capture some fashion or trend. What has been displaced is the nurturing of scholarship, built from a coherent academic base, and the partnership of academics and students in the disinterested pursuit of knowledge.

I was asked during question time about the impact of the government’s new tertiary strategy. I replied that, as long as the current commercial drivers remained in place, the prospects of radical change remained slim. However, I also noted that, as with most Third Way policies, the current reforms do provide some space for interested groups like the AUS and NZUSA to have an influence over the shape of New Zealand’s tertiary sector, and that it was a very important time for us to get engaged on these issues.