Building on the moment

Sandra Grey, National Secretary, Te Hautū Kahurangi | NZ Tertiary Education Union

Never let a good global crisis go to waste. Those in powerful roles in society – including the tertiary education sector in Aotearoa – certainly haven’t and neither must we.

The global COVID-19 pandemic is a moment we can and must learn from.

It is a pandemic that the New Zealand Government has responded to by ‘going hard and going early’. The result – border closures, a relatively short lock-down period by international standards, and rapid changes to policies and support for workers.

This meant tertiary education provision in Aotearoa moved to emergency remote teaching and support in the first half of 2020, and institutions lost about $300M in international education ‘revenue’.

The COVID-19 response threw into sharp relief the damage done by decades of funding shortfalls and politicians who have treated education as a ‘market’.

And it highlighted the extra miles staff go every day to make the tertiary education system work.

The question now is will we learn from the COVID-19 moment and what direction will our learning take?

Will we again see government acknowledging that tertiary education is a public good and crucial to any plan to ‘build back better’? And it will mean our university leaders realise they must change the way they think and act?

To build back better we need a new funding regime which ensures small courses and small campuses in regional New Zealand will flourish.

We need proper student support which allows everyone in Aotearoa to seize the life-changing opportunities of tertiary study.

There will be a need for universities to work together, to create a co-operative approach to tertiary education provision in Aotearoa and to end wasteful marketing of ‘sexy’ courses.

We need good jobs and an end to pushing core work – marking, teaching, researching and student support – onto workers on casual and fixed-term agreements.

There is some recognition of the need for change but, sadly, those in power (our vice-chancellors, senior leadership teams, government officials, and our centre-left government) are not quite there when it comes to reclaiming the university for all it can be.

Under the cover of COVID-19 we’ve seen our institutional leaders deepen the neo-liberal and managerial agenda which has driven our sector near to collapse.

Institutional leaders are cutting courses and jobs and denying any real conversation about the impact on learners and the quality of education.

We’ve seen good jobs being sold off. And we’ve even seen one vice-chancellor pushing ahead with outsourcing an entire bridging program to a for-profit international provider.

Institutional leaders have seen the ability of staff to be ‘nimble’ and execute emergency remote teaching functions as the rationale for advancing long held plans to move all tertiary education online – or at least as much as possible. This all corresponds to the commercial formula adopted in NZ 15 years ago – go online, divest of infrastructure (campuses), and use more casual labour.

There is another attack on the mission of the university that has been heightened in 2020. There has been more than one attempt by universities to silence criticism in order to defend their reputation. It seems corporate style ‘fidelity and loyalty’ is more important for some vice-chancellors than the core mission of universities to act as critic and conscience of society.

The vice-chancellors must not be allowed to use the impact of COVID-19 as a cover under which they can fundamentally shift the mission of the universities.

The market approach to tertiary education is failing Aotearoa right now. The negative impacts on students and staff, and on their families and communities, need to be told. And the alternative must be on everyone’s lips.

• Tertiary education is a public good.

• Tertiary education is crucial to creating a more equal and creative world.

• Tertiary education staff need to have stability and security to support learners and their families.

Perhaps for NZTEU there are some signs of hope. The current Labour Government and Minister of Education had already begun a program of returning vocational education to its rightful place as a public good, before COVID-19 hit. Those working in New Zealand’s version of TAFE have been involved throughout 2020 in helping design an equitable, accessible, high quality national network of vocational education provision that aims to reach all communities.

The question is, will the Government take what the COVID-19 moment has clearly demonstrated – you can’t design universities as competitors in commercial markets and expect them to care about people – and use it to drive home change in the entire tertiary education sector? ◆