TEU Tertiary Update Vol 12 No 2

Ryan and Tipene to contest TEU presidency

The Tertiary Education Union has confirmed that there are two nominations for the position of inaugural president - te tumu whakarae: Tangi Tipene, the outgoing president of ASTE, and Dr Tom Ryan, an outgoing AUS council member.

Tangi Tipene has over 30 years experience in unions, including membership of the clerical union in the 1970s and TIASA in the 1980s. She began her tertiary-education work in the 1980s for a PTE, setting up the first computer school based on a marae. She is currently on leave from her role as lecturer teaching communications, office administration, and management at Waiariki Institute of Technology while she completes her term as ASTE president, and is one of the few remaining elected union officials who was involved at the start of the TEU amalgamation process.

Ms Tipene states her goals as president would be threefold: manaakitanga, “it’s important that members in the union get to know one another”; whānaungatanga, “we need to do more than wait for the economic crisis to arrive, we need to plan to help people survive”; and kotahitanga, “we need to create a coherent organisation internally first so that we can have one voice externally”.

Dr Tom Ryan is a senior lecturer in anthropology and labour studies at the University of Waikato. He has been a union leader since the 1970s when he held elected offices in Australian mining unions. More recently, Dr Ryan has been president of the Lecturers’ Association at the University of Auckland, a member of council and academic board at Waikato, and academic vice-president of AUS.

His goals as president of the TEU would include focusing on the core business of “protecting and improving the wage and salary levels of all members, ensuring TEU governs and manages itself effectively and prudently with appropriate involvement by its local branches, sector committees, national officers, and staff and engaging with wider union issues, “especially in respect to Māori and women”.

“My understanding of the tertiary-education sector has been shaped by 25 years as a university teacher, researcher, and administrator.” Dr Ryan is keen to familiarise himself with issues “specific to TEU members in polytechnics and wānanga”. He also wants to see TEU develop its own vision of a quality tertiary-education sector, including increased public funding, greater managerial accountability, and academic freedom.

National officers elected unopposed are Sandra Grey, senior lecturer in social policy/sociology at Victoria University as women’s vice-president; Ken Laraman, internal academic auditor at Otago Polytechnic as ITP general vice-president; and Barry Foster, human resource management lecturer at Massey University as university academic vice-president. Contested national officer and national committee and sector group positions will be balloted over the next month and nominations will be reopened for unfilled positions. All successful candidates will take office on 1 April.

Also in Tertiary Update this week

1. Massey staff face possible redundancy as Maharey calls for job retention
2. Treasury calls for ITPs to pick up struggling students
3. Ako Aotearoa announces National Project funding
4. Women likely to face the brunt of recession
5. NZ students give international advice on neo-liberal agenda
6. Australian PTES left exposed by AIG collapse
7. Professor accused of genocide
8. Professors losing their grip
9. Zimbabwe $1.5 quadrillion ($NZ19) to mark exam scripts
10. NASA and Google launch school of futurology

Massey staff face possible redundancy as Maharey calls for job retention

A review of Massey Wellington campus-support staff has just concluded with at least fourteen staff being given individual notice that, unless they are successful in obtaining a position via redeployment, they will be redundant as of 1 May 2009. The staff affected are all TEU members, and the union understands that there are other non-union staff who have also received notice but does not know how many.

The announcement came at the same time as a speech Massey University vice-chancellor, Steve Maharey, gave yesterday, also on the Wellington campus, in which he stated, in relation to the recession, that keeping people in jobs is probably the best social policy available.

“Investing heavily in educational infrastructure, for example, will keep people in jobs and improve our education system. Keeping people in jobs is probably the best social policy available,” said Mr Maharey, “but it is unlikely that the public and private sectors can supply everything that is needed, especially for no- and low-skilled workers. Innovative ways of providing productive work will need to be found.”

New positions have also been created as part of the review and affected staff will have the chance to seek redeployment to these positions. Massey, however, intends to advertise all the new positions and affected staff seeking redeployment will be required to compete with any other applicants for these positions.

TEU national secretary, Sharn Riggs, said that the vice-chancellor should heed his own words and make sure that Massey’s process gives weight during its redeployment process to those workers’ experience, institutional knowledge, and proven commitment to the university. She also questions why these workers are, in effect, having to apply for their own jobs.

“Over the next months there will be ample opportunity for Massey to demonstrate an atmosphere of trust,” said Ms Riggs. Our members who have been given notice have demonstrated loyalty, commitment, and service to the university and are confident that, if redeployed, they can perform effectively in the new positions created.”

Treasury calls for ITPs to pick up struggling students

Late last week Treasury released its Briefing to the Incoming Government, and included a detailed critique of New Zealand’s vocation-education system. As expected, the country’s most powerful and important bureaucracy focused its advice to the government on reducing government spending and its “highest priority”, lowering the top level of tax rates.

While commenting on New Zealand’s tertiary-education sector, Treasury noted that “tertiary programmes for low-achieving school-aged students are variable and, on average, unsatisfactory”. It argued in favour of changes to school-funding rules and regulations to “encourage partnerships with polytechnics to provide a wider range of vocational training choices”. The goal of this advice was to improve schools’ ability to require students to attend school, but then also to give schools the ability to refer those enrolled students and attached funding and support to other providers.

Treasury also advised the government to extend the Education Review Office’s mandate to cover those tertiary-education providers which are teaching school-age students. Industry-training guidelines would be changed to place greater emphasis upon participation by young workers and foundation skills.

On the topic of student support, Treasury remained unconvinced that the government should be investing in policies to ease student debt. It argued that such policies do not appear to have a significant impact on tertiary-education participation, labour force participation, or social outcomes such as home ownership or timing of child bearing.

It suggested student debt would also be repaid faster if compulsory repayments were increased above 10 percent for those on higher incomes: e.g., 10 percent for income above $18,000 (as now), 12 percent above $40,000, and 15 percent above $60,000. The impact of this on Effective Marginal Tax Rates would be offset by the planned income-tax reductions. The existing repayment threshold could also be lowered.

Treasury also argued in favour of more targeted and restrictive student loans and allowances. “This could include requiring students to pass a certain number of their courses or limiting the number of years students can borrow for.”

Ako Aotearoa announces National Project funding

Ako Aotearoa, the National Centre for Tertiary Teaching Excellence, has announced funding of over $1.3 million to support nine projects to strategically improve tertiary-education teaching and learning. The nine projects join the three Doctoral Scholarship proposals announced last November in receiving funding under the centre’s National Project Fund, in operation for the first time last year.

The projects focus on three streams of work: research and implementation, Māori initiative projects, and collaboration. They also cover the tertiary-education sector, including adult community education, industry training organisations (ITOs), institutes of technology and polytechnics, wānanga, and universities. A number of the projects also involve cross-organisational and cross-sector collaborations.

Dr Peter Coolbear, Ako Aotearoa national director, says the key goal of the fund is to enhance educational outcomes for learners. “We are also looking to promote collaboration across and within different parts of the tertiary-education sector, contribute to the development of a more coherent knowledge base of effective tertiary teaching and learning in Aotearoa–New Zealand, and build research capability and capacity,” said Dr Coolbear.

“The projects we have agreed to support are first-rate and have every potential to successfully meet the aims and goals of the fund. They are either implementation projects designed to have direct impact on improving teaching and learning, or important pieces of use-inspired research.”

The Māori initiative projects include a pilot for the synchronous delivery of a common postgraduate programme in te reo Māori across multiple sites and a project on improving Māori-student success in health-professional degree-level programmes.

The research and implementation projects include an investigation of best practice in supervisor feedback to thesis writers in New Zealand universities, a dedicated education unit to enhance clinical teaching and learning, an a project on ITO workplace-assessment structures.

Women likely to face the brunt of recession

The current economic crisis was high on the minds of women participating in the newly formed Tertiary Education Union national women’s committee, te kahurangi māreikura, which held its inaugural meeting in Wellington this week. The TEU national women’s committee urged both government and tertiary-education leaders to consider fully the ways in which this sector is crucial to the nation’s response to the world-wide economic downturn.

The committee acknowledged that recent history shows that, both within their own sector and in the labour market generally, women are likely to bear the brunt of this current recession. Within the tertiary-education sector, women are more likely to hold less–secure, casual, fixed–term, or temporary positions than men, increasing their risk of losing their jobs through redundancy. In the labour market as a whole, investment in “hard” infrastructure projects seen by the state and private business as an essential to economic recovery, is likely to come at the cost of jobs within the human and social-service sector, a sector dominated by women employees.

Women’s committee co-convenors, Dr Sandra Grey and Sue Bretherton, called on tertiary-education institutions to consider creative ways in which they can support women who become unemployed in using the recession to develop new skills and knowledge.

“Tertiary-education institutions have an important role to play in the coming years ensuring that those women who find themselves out of work as a result of international economic factors have the opportunity to find their way back into the workforce with new skills and knowledge,” said Dr Grey. “Governments need to realise the importance of investment in education at all levels at such a time.”

“Within the tertiary-education sector itself, institutions should be resisting cutting jobs on their campuses while so many workers are looking to learn new skills and knowledge to combat the recession,” said Ms Bretherton. “Where institutions are forced to engage in cost–cutting, though, they need to make certain that they are doing so in a way that ensures that women do not carry the brunt of the impact.”

NZ students give international advice on neo-liberal agenda

The New Zealand Union of Students’ Associations (NZUSA) is supporting a European student association initiative to develop a global representative body for students. NZUSA president Jordan King joined students from around the world at a Paris summit organised by the European Students’ Union and UNESCO to investigate the viability of developing an international peak body for higher education students.

The conference issued a statement which UNESCO has promised to present to its intergovernmental world conference on higher education in July. The statement calls for an increased focus internationally on access, educational quality, student rights, and critical thinking. Mr King noted that it is not often that New Zealand students get to participate in global society and he is excited about the potential of a new international student body in the future.

“Education problems are global and students associations, currently, are not. From a New Zealand perspective, the neo-liberal ‘Project New Zealand’ agenda is quite advanced. So our contribution to the conference was, “Hey, this is our experience and our system. It’s been incredibly divisive.’ We were in a position to talk with countries that are just starting to go down that path.”

The conference has developed a draft plan for an international secretariat and NZUSA holds a seat on the working party charged with bringing together the new body. Education International, the global education union to which all New Zealand education unions belong, has joined UNESCO in giving the student initiative its blessing.

Mr King expects that the global union will take an activist stance on issues it engages with and will be keen to engage actively with governments at a national level, and to run vigorous solidarity campaigns in support of students.

WORLD WATCH

Australian PTES left exposed by AIG collapse

The credit crisis has left Australia’s booming private-tertiary-education industry dangerously exposed in the event of further college collapses. One of the world’s largest insurers, American Insurance Group Inc, has not renewed its coverage of the Australian consumer protection fund that compensates overseas students if their college collapses.

The AIG, on which the US Treasury had to spend $US85 billion in bailing it out last September, is the insurer of the country’s Educational Services for Overseas Students Assurance Fund (ESOS). The fund refunds the fees paid by the country’s 266,180 private, overseas, higher-education, vocational-education, English–language, and school students if they suffer a college collapse and can’t be suitably placed.

The pullout by AIG means the millions of dollars in annual premiums paid into the fund by bona fide and even rogue providers to protect the international standing of the industry could be wiped out by further college collapses.

Public universities and further-education institutions have their own consumer-protection guarantees and are not directly affected by the latest ESOS fund developments.

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), the fund had already blown out in December to $US3.8 million in refunds and placement costs: more than its remaining assets.

PWC said the impact on the fund of an existing 1000 students without places would not be known for some time. However, it still has to cope with any further college collapses and any unintended fallout from a Department of Immigration crackdown on permanent-residency-driven commercial-cookery and hairdressing-training courses. A senior industry observer has predicted, “There’ll be a lot less [sic] rogue providers of hospitality courses operating over the next six months to a year due to the new training requirements.”

From Guy Healy at the Australian Higher Education Supplement

Professor accused of genocide

Goucher College in Baltimore USA has suspended Professor Leopold Munyakazi from teaching after the institution was presented with charges that he was directly involved in the 1994 genocide in his home country of Rwanda. In that year, the Hutu majority attacked the Tutsi minority and an estimated 800,000 people died from the violence. Some human rights officials, however, are dubious about the charges against Professor Munyakazi, wondering if he is really in trouble back home over controversial statements he made questioning whether what took place in Rwanda was a genocide.

Munyakazi has vehemently denied any involvement in genocide, and the evidence presented is insufficient currently either to exonerate or convict him. In an email to Inside Higher Ed, Professor Munyakazi called the allegations against him “quite false”. Further, he stated that the government in Rwanda is trying “to hinder my application for asylum in the United States of America”. He noted that, after the 1994 genocide, he was imprisoned without formal charges in Rwanda for five years.

Alison Des Forges, senior advisor for Human Rights Watch’s Africa division, said her organisation has found some serious shortcomings in the Rwandan indictment of Professor Munyakazi and believes he is being wrongly accused. She pointed out that, after having been jailed for five years, Professor Munyakazi was released without trial. That was an uncommon move for the Rwandan government at the time, Ms Des Forges said, suggesting that it probably had no reason to keep him in custody. In 1999, she said, he become a professor at the Kigali Education Institute, a major public university in the national capital.

Once in the United States, Ms Des Forges said Professor Munyakazi was of no interest to Rwandan officials until he gave a controversial 2006 speech at the University of Delaware, in which he debated whether or not the word genocide could be properly used to describe the 1994 atrocities in his country.

“I refer to it as civil war, not genocide; it was about political power. Ethnicity is not really understood about Rwanda; in Rwanda there are no tribes, there are social groups, they are one single people,” said Professor Munyakazi.

From David Moltz at Inside Higher Ed

Professors losing their grip

US professors have been described as “losing their grip” as tough economic times lead administrators to propose swift changes that short-circuit academic governance, long a prized principle that gives professors wide-ranging authority over educational matters.

The results, faculty members say, are hastily conceived plans that reorganise academic programmes, decrease professors’ roles in shaping the curriculum, and jeopardise tenure applications; all done with little advice from the faculty, in the name of saving money.

The chancellor of the Tennessee board of regents, for instance, has proposed a plan to stress online education, hire more adjunct teachers, and put full-time faculty members in an “oversight” role. The University of South Florida’s Tampa campus merged programmes and shifted some faculty members to different schools in just six months. And Ohio University has a new academic plan that was, many professors charge, an end run around some of their own recommendations.

“A decline in resources has made administrators more interested in becoming independent movers and shakers,” says Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors. He wants his organisation to be more aggressive in investigating cases where administrators and boards leave professors out of the loop. “It is faculty members who have the expertise about disciplines,” he says, “and if they don’t have input, a university’s academic integrity can be threatened.”

Administrators insist they do consult widely with professors but they also claim they can’t always spend months deliberating over a plan. Besides, they say, it is administrators who are held responsible by boards for whether a university thrives. And faculty senates, which have a reputation for being filled with disaffected professors, can be hard to work with.

Ralph C Wilcox, provost of the University of South Florida, says he had to work fast. When he took the job in January 2008 he was immediately hit with a directive to cut spending. “In Florida, we have a state law that spells out quite clearly that it is the right and the responsibility of the public employer to determine unilaterally the organization and function of the university,” he says.

From Robin Wilson in the Chronicle of Higher Education

Zimbabwe $1.5 quadrillion ($NZ19) to mark exam scripts

A Zimbabwean teacher wrote this week to the Australian social justice agency, Search, giving an update on the ongoing “education strike” there. Here are his or her words:

“The government and media are calling the stay-away a strike, the fact of the matter is that we do not have the money to get to work everyday/ five days a week.
E.g.. the basic commuter fare in Bulawayo is 5 Rand a trip and they no longer accept $Zim. So one would need 10 Rand a day/ 200 Rand a month just for fares.”

“The Acting Minister of Finance, Patrick Chinamasa, presented his budget last week and quoted public service salaries in Zim dollars. However, he said, we would be given food vouchers valued in US dollars over and above the salary!!... If this goes ahead, then many of us will walk out permanently as it is more viable financially to give private tuition and vend. The test case will be the February payday in a couple of weeks’ time.”

“…Very few teachers turned up to mark [2008] school exams and so the exercise is still on-going! e.g. only 11 teachers out of the expected 60 turned up to mark the GCE ‘A’ Level (Year 12) English paper. The exercise overwhelmed them after two weeks and they gave up before they were anywhere near the half-way point. They were each paid Zim$1.5 quadrillion two weeks ago, which converted to 100 Rand or $US10!!”

“Colleges and polytechnics were given money pro rata (Zim$10.7quadrillion to Bulawayo Poly) to be shared among those who volunteered to go and mark. They started the exercise early last week. It should take them two to three weeks if they don’t suffer from burn-out before then.”

Meanwhile global union Education International is calling for donations to its solidarity fund from around the world to help impoverished Zimbabwean teachers.
http://www.ei-ie.org/en/urgentactionappeal/show.php?id=15&country=zimbabwe

NASA and Google launch school of futurology

A US inventor who plans to live for ever has been appointed head of a new school for futurologists backed by Google and NASA.

Ray Kurzweil, who worked as a computer scientist before turning to future-gazing in the late 1980s, will become chancellor of the Singularity University based at NASA’s Silicon Valley campus in California.

The institution gains its name from a controversial 2005 book by Dr Kurzweil, entitled The Singularity is Near. In it, he argues that the exponential advance of technology is set to transform society by giving rise to computers that are more clever than humans. The leap in computing power will drive rapid advances in other fields, he claims, that together could solve the problems of climate change, poverty, famine and disease.

In an earlier book, Dr Kurzweil predicted the creation of “nanobots” that will patrol our bloodstreams, repairing wear and tear as they go, and keeping our bodies perpetually young.

“The law of accelerating returns means technology eventually will be a million more times powerful than it is today and cause profound transformation,” Dr Kurzweil told Associated Press after his appointment was announced.

The new institute will offer courses on artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and biotechnology and is due to open its doors to its first class of 30 students this summer.
Google has already contributed more than $US1 million to the institution, and several other major companies are planning to contribute at least $US250,000.

NASA has agreed that the institution can use buildings at its Ames Research Centre in Moffett Field, which is near the offices of US tech giants Google, Yahoo!, Intel Corp, and Cisco Systems.

A nine-week course at Singularity University will cost $US25,000. The first three weeks will be spent studying ten different subjects, with the next three weeks focusing on one in detail. The final three weeks will be taken up by a special project. Details of the new institution, which, despite its name, is not an accredited university, were unveiled at the annual Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference in Long Beach, California, this week.

From Ian Sample in the Guardian

More international news

More international news can be found on University World News:
http://www.universityworldnews.com

TEU Tertiary Update is published weekly on Thursdays and distributed freely to members of the Tertiary Education Union and others. Back issues are available on the TEU website: www.teu.ac.nz. Direct inquiries should be made to Stephen Day, email: stephen.day@teu.ac.nz
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