I often write these columns with second-years in mind, because that’s usually who reads this magazine. And so I tend to write silly little editorials with fun facts and stories in them because life is already pretty stressful and depressing and the last thing a second-year wants is another reason to feel existentially anxious. But with only ten issues of Critic left in my time here, I think it’s time to begin the editorial warpath.
I want to outline, over the next few weeks, a series of decisions made by the Clocktower that I find to be genuinely bad. I want to explain why I think they were bad, and I want you to understand what these decisions mean for your future - because otherwise they’re just another sequence of decisions made by faraway bureaucrats in an already-gloomy world. Basically I want you to understand that despite the suits and stigma of a boardroom, the leadership of this university is a fundamentally human enterprise, and is fraught with fundamentally human mistakes.
The first thing I’d like to address is the rebrand, because that’s a hot topic. And before I say anything else, I want to make it very clear that I support the idea at the heart of the rebrand: working with mana whenua to “emphasise… the transmission of knowledge between generations.” I’m on board with it. I like the logo, I like the whole thing. But I think the announcement was a terrible decision.
The uproar caused by this announcement was going to happen regardless of timing. The racist and bigoted were always going to be racist and bigoted, but the University wasn’t always going to be in a period of financial deficit. In fact, this is literally the worst it’s been since WWII. The decision to go ahead with this multi-million dollar enterprise could have waited - it already took several years to get this far.
Effectively, what the Clocktower has done has been to arm the otherwise-baseless critics with a genuinely solid piece of ammunition: financial critique. Even if the price tag of the rebrand is dwarfed by the total deficit, their “spending money on image rather than staff” argument does hold water. Even if that amount of water is pitiful by comparison. And now that new tohu - the whole new image that they spent so many years working on - all of it will be associated with controversy about misspending and culling of staff. Timing is everything for a brand launch. Considering how precious the Clocktower is over their marketing department, you’d think they’d know better.
The decision to rebrand was probably a good one and surveyed responses showed that. The decision to announce it amidst the worst financial storm in the University’s history, I would argue, is undeniably a bad one. It is one bad decision in a long pattern of bad decisions that has culminated in the mass culling of institutional expertise: the very product that executives are hoping will lure an extra 20% of students to campus. From where? And who’s gonna teach them?
I want to reiterate that not ALL of this is the Clocktower’s fault. The funding system they are dependent on is inherently flawed, and ultimately, right now, what we need is a government bailout. But the route that led us to this eventual trainwreck was defined by a series of wrong turns; a pattern of mistakes that has landed us all in a position where nobody wins, abiding by a set of rules that nobody particularly agrees with. And while we can't turn back the clock, we can be very loud about what we want to happen next.