Student life is marked by so many indignities that you’re supposed to accept: the cold, the debt, the lack of nutrition, the shift work for petty tyrants. All the labours that make you question your life choices and whether it’ll be worth it for some shining future. It gets worse, though, when we start to think about the looming cuts. Consecutive governments and the cat’s paw leaders of our unis and polytechs reckon that your efforts to improve yourselves and the world are not terribly valuable.
The tertiary education sector is being starved of the funding that it needs to survive. Not even to grow - merely to exist in its current form. While we see massive skills shortages in pretty much every sector across these islands, and problems that demand fresh critical approaches, our universities are facing existential cuts. Jobs, papers, programmes, departments - the works.
Students, staff, we’re stressed out. We’re working our asses off. The message being sent to us from the Government (almost explicitly from Education Minister Jan Tinetti and Prime Minister Hipkins) is: “Get bloody used to it, it’s gonna get worse.” Fewer courses, fewer academics, fewer support staff. We’ve been told by this institution’s leadership that they want to “do less, and do it better.” Nah. Even they don’t believe their own PR spin. Doing less is exactly that: doing less. Less of the public good that the University provides.
If you see some long faces among your lecturers, this is why. If you see a lecturer scowling, or break into tears as they fear for their career, family and city; this is why. They face the same brutal amputation of our institution as students, and feel it at least as acutely. Over the last ten years they’ve been through several rounds of restructures, redundancies, and financial forecasts of doom. Every time they’ve been assured, “This will protect the University of Otago from future cuts.” This is demonstrably pure bullshit. Many opt out of careers achingly devoted to eccentric obsessions and their students, because, well, this place just isn’t what it used to be.
We feel that academics must throw themselves into the arena of a for-profit market and a University Council dominated by local business magnates (and their real estate interests and legal and consultancy firms) in order to justify their contribution to society.
The Protect Otago Action Group (POAG) was formed when plans to cut staff and programmes were announced back in April, when we were told that “several hundred job cuts” were on their way (we’re still waiting for the number!). Led by a joint coalition of students, staff, and community members, our message is pretty simple: “We can have nice things if we fight for them!”
In a very short period (during which no shortage of consultants and tertiary sector bureaucrats told us we’re wasting our time) we’ve been able to cut through plenty of obfuscation to get our message across. We organised a joyously pissed off 500-strong march on the Clocktower, complete with bagpipes, trombones, and, of course, a unicycling ukulele-toting chimp.
We put Chippy and his stooges on blast when they came to campus. In what should have been an easy election campaign photo op in friendly territory, he left town with the image of “Stop Labour’s Cuts to Otago” splashed across national media.
We’ve learned pretty quickly that getting righteously mad and focusing that fury through organisation gets results. The Acting Vice Chancellor has shifted into a collaborative stance with the Tertiary Education Union (TEU) and the Otago University Students Association (OUSA). Credit where it’s due to Acting VC Helen Nicholson: she signed on to a strong “Save Our Unis” open letter led by the Victoria and Otago student union leadership, and has urged other Vice Chancellors to put on their big kid pants and join TEU and students associations at the adults table.
We forced the Labour Government to give the sector back $128 million. Not only did we prove that there’s blood in the stone, but we’ve been vindicated by Robertson’s admission to what Critic has so deftly pointed out already (notwithstanding the obfuscation of TEC neolibs), that this was money OWED to us. This was not a bailout, but some of what was already allocated to us in the 2022 budget, secreted away through arcane accounting justifications and gesturing at a busted funding process. They even admitted that the current funding mechanisms which produce the Spreadsheets of Doom are not fit-for-purpose. No shit! A late admission, but a welcome one.
So, shout out to you. To every student, every worker, every community member who has been refusing to let their anger be only thoughts and words. Words might make you feel better, but action gets the goods.
Make no mistake, every dollar is welcome, but this is a bit of a piss take, isn’t it? Not only does this $128 million promised for 2024-2025 not cover what was promised but never delivered - it’s also recovered from university fees-free schemes that were never delivered. The Government is (under)funding our university through the very student debt that they promised to alleviate.
To be cynical, it looks like Labour is trying to take student protest off the board for this election season by doing the bare minimum. Prove us wrong, Labour: back up your acknowledgement of a broken tertiary education funding model with the funds needed to save it from immediate cuts. Heal the wound that you’ve let fester. Hell, we’ll even let you call it a bailout if you do.
But as we’ve been told, this initial funding boost will not save our universities from irreparable harm, it won’t save us from gutting institutional knowledge, identity, and our people. You can’t just turn the faucet of recruitment back on after dealing this kind of damage to a public research institution of this scale. Academia is infamously difficult to recruit to: if you lose academics, then you’re also educating fewer academics down the line. When you’re in an economically healthier position, those educated researchers don’t exist - or certainly not in the numbers they could have. You’ve tossed your expanding knowledge base in the trash, because a balance sheet told you to do so. On top of this, attracting academics from abroad to New Zealand universities is a bloody nightmare, given that you have to convince them to look the other way and ignore the glaring blemishes of a housing and cost of living crisis that makes the rest of the OECD blush.
Which brings us to the current wishcasting by our university’s senior leadership team and University Council, assuring us that we will endure these repeated amputations. But never fear, we will bounce back by attracting more international students. It’s not terribly encouraging, given that this institution has always strategically avoided such a move, and so we’re essentially competing in a global market with institutions far more practised than us. But perhaps we have no cause for worry: surely we’ve paid the external consultants at NOUS many millions of dollars to tell us that this is a smashing plan.
This cuts to the heart of our recent pamphlet ‘The Fictitious University’. You may have seen this charming wee manifesto on campus. The core idea is that we are so thoroughly colonised by market logics that our institutions are gambling on imagined future students, and pretending to be gobsmacked when literally anything deviates from their modelling. This paradigm is a continuation of the same neoliberal magical thinking that has stripped our public bare of resources and made us all beholden to consultants.
Reactionary pundits may toss their excuses around, but the proof is in the pudding: enrolments at the University of Otago dropped less than one per cent after record-breaking levels of enrolments, and now our institution is on the rocks. Six out of eight universities in the country are facing serious financial hardship. Shit’s fucked.
And it’s not going to fix itself. Politicians like to take the credit every time they finally do something. But the truth is: nothing actually gets done without pressure. A lot of the time that’s money-up lobbies working behind the scenes. We don’t have wealthy lobbies, we have something better: people with a shared experience of injustice.
The revolutionary potential of students is something rich assholes have always been terrified by. Why do you think the head vampire of neoliberalism was invested in smashing student unions? But numbers and rage don’t coalesce into action spontaneously. We organise ourselves. We put pressure where it will move the needle. We speak, we challenge, we confront, and importantly: we grow.
That’s where you come in. That’s where you join us. Every one of you reading this can have an outsized impact on this movement by showing up, bringing your perspective, and growing POAG’s organising capacity. So, let’s stay mad, and let’s get organised.
Responses to this open letter can be sent to critic@critic.co.nz.