AUS Tertiary Update

VCs turn up the heat on reform, Cullen gives lesson on academic freedom
New Zealand vice-chancellors yesterday turned up the heat on the Government’s proposed tertiary-education reforms, telling Parliament’s Science and Education Select Committee that universities are not government-controlled institutions, and that it would be detrimental for universities to be too tied to the demands of the government of the day.
New Zealand Vice-Chancellors’ Committee Chair, Professor Roy Sharp, told the Select Committee the implications behind the Bill were that institutional autonomy would be weakened and that the Tertiary Education Commission would tend to reduce the role of the university from one of governance to a managerial function. Professor Sharp called for charters to be retained and for the Bill to contain a statement that its provisions are subject to the preservation and enhancement of academic freedom and the autonomy of institutions.
When asked yesterday afternoon, the Minister for Tertiary Education, Dr Michael Cullen, said that he did not agree with the vice-chancellors’ concerns that the Bill posed an unwarranted threat to academic freedom. “Universities have, for at least forty years, been complaining that academic freedom is under threat and that they are losing autonomy,” he said. “When they first started doing that, 100 percent of their funding came from the government. They were directly controlled, they could not build a single building without permission from central government, and they required a great degree of approval for courses from a University Grants Committee, the Academic Subcommittee. None of those things apply today, and academic freedom will continue to be of concern for universities. A Government headed by an ex-academic, seconded by an ex-academic, and with another four persons who are ex-academics has an understanding of academic freedom.”
Dr Cullen told Parliament that what will be required of universities is that they have a clear strategic direction and a sense of priorities consistent with their placement in the education system in order to receive funding from the Government. “In other words, the Government has some right to expect that what is done bears some broad relevance to New Zealand’s social and economic development. That is not an interference with academic freedom,” he said. “Academic freedom is not about the freedom to teach whatever one likes for whatever cost; it is the freedom to express views about the areas that one is responsible for, and to do so broadly within the community without facing the danger of being penalised as a consequence of doing that. Unfortunately, in my experience, too many academics these days do not express such views publicly enough.”
In response to a question about the retention of charters, Dr Cullen said he noted the irony that, having complained about government control, institutions are now saying they need ministerial approval for a long-term vision statement.

Also in Tertiary Update this week
1. Collective agreement ballot results next week
2. Prostitution story “poppycock”
3. NZ research analysed for international impact
4. TEC Statement of Intent released
5. REAP MECA ends
6. Senate adopts crackdown on loan industry
7. Senior-staff migration grows
8. School padded university entrance records
9. Interpol to establish own university
10. Principal rejects apology

Collective agreement ballot results next week
Ballot results for the ratification of collective employment agreements covering academic and general staff in the country’s eight universities will be released early next week.
University staff have been voting over the past fortnight to determine whether or not to accept new pay deals that will see salary increases for academic staff of between 5.2 and 6.2 percent and between 3.73 and 4.73 percent for general staff over the course of the year.
Association of University Staff Deputy Secretary, Nanette Cormack, said that, while the voting papers from members of most university unions had been returned, the delay in announcing the results had arisen because PSA members were not completing their voting process until Friday this week.

Prostitution story “poppycock”
One of the more absurd stories of the past week has been that reported by the New Zealand Herald and through Fairfax Media newspapers to the effect that tertiary-education courses in prostitution or a school for prostitutes may get government funding through the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC). Under the headlines, “Prostitute school may get funds” and “Tertiary courses in prostitution possible”, The Herald and Fairfax reported the possibility that public funding for courses in the “world’s oldest profession” could be considered under changes aimed at boosting quality and relevance in the tertiary education sector.
The stories arose following a question to TEC Chief Executive, Janice Shiner, from Parliament’s Education and Science Select Committee Chair, Brian Donnelly, about the potential for the funding of courses on prostitution. Ms Shiner responded that any application to run such a course would be assessed against the same criteria as for other applications. As such, any proposed course would need to meet minimum-quality standards, demonstrate genuine community need and meet government priorities laid out in the Tertiary Education Strategy.
A subsequent media statement from the National Party Family Affairs spokesperson, Judith Collins, under the heading, “Prostitute School-PC poppycock”, said the fact that the TEC would seriously consider funding a course in prostitution would be side-splittingly serious if it weren’t so deadly serious.
Responding, Ms Shiner said that she had been answering a direct question about how the TEC would respond if a tertiary-education provider put forward a proposal to run a course in prostitution. “For any course, providers need to show the demand for it from their community and how it links with the Government’s priorities outlined in the Tertiary Education Strategy,” she said. “Furthermore, if it is a public institution, its plan must be approved by the governing board which represents its community, before it is even submitted to the TEC. I for one cannot see how the kind of course referred to at select committee would meet these robust requirements and gain funding. It is certainly not something that any TEO has ever raised with me.”

NZ research analysed for international impact
The relative academic impact of areas of university research conducted between 1981 and 2005 varies considerably, both between and within broad subject areas, according to a Ministry of Education report published this week. It concludes that university research in “health” achieved the highest impact compared with the world average in that subject area over the period. This was followed by research in “medicine and public health”.
Several broad subject areas exhibited quite large variations in research impact over time, with those such as business and economics being especially prone to significant variation.
Analysis of the academic impact of research for the period 2001-2005 showed that in some narrow subject areas such as “geological/petroleum/mining engineering”, “language and linguistics” and ”optics and acoustics”, research by New Zealand universities had an impact above the world average.
The report, (ex)Citing research: A bibliometric analysis of New Zealand university research 1981-2005, uses a newly unified bibliometric database from Thompson Scientific for its analysis. In this report, the key measure used to scrutinise the academic impact of research is the average number of citations per paper. This is based on the assumption that, as publications that are of a higher quality and impact generally attract a higher number of citations, a higher average number of citations per paper should reflect higher-quality research.
The analysis took 106 subject areas and aggregated them into ten of the twelve broad areas used in the Performance-Based Research Fund (PBRF) evaluation in order to group disciplines. Māori knowledge and development and creative and performing arts were omitted from the study because of the lack of internationally comparable data.
This report is said to present important baseline data that can be used to help in future analysis of the impacts of the PBRF on research performance.
The full report can be found at:
http://educationcounts.edcentre.govt.nz/publications/tertiary/exciting-research.html

TEC Statement of Intent released
The Tertiary Education Commission has released its Statement of Intent for the period 2007-8 to 2009-10, outlining its key strategic objectives that, it says, will enable it to make a better contribution to the Government’s development goals.
The Statement of Intent sets out the TEC’s three key strategic objectives for the period: providing leadership for the ongoing reform of investment processes in the tertiary-education sector to better support the achievement of New Zealand’s development goals and stakeholder needs; ensuring an effective voice for stakeholders to inform the TEC’s investment decisions; and ensuring effective tertiary-education investment that achieves quality outcomes for students. The Statement says that achieving these objectives will ensure tertiary education contributes to the Government’s development goals of success for all New Zealanders through lifelong learning, creating and applying knowledge to drive innovation and strong connections between tertiary-education organisations and the communities they serve.
It is predicted in the Statement that the rate of growth in the numbers of students in tertiary education will slow significantly from that experienced during the period from 1999 to 2004. The size of the tertiary-student population is expected to peak by 2016 at around 483,000 students before decreasing to around 480,000 in 2021. It is predicted that people aged forty years and over will comprise over half of all domestic growth in students between 2005 and 2014.
The Statement says that priority goals for TEC include increasing educational success for young New Zealanders (that is having more people achieving qualifications at level four and above by age twenty-five), increasing literacy, numeracy and language levels for the workforce, increasing the achievement of advanced trade, technical and professional qualifications to meet regional and industry needs and improving research connections and linkages to create economic opportunities.
The Statement of Intent can be found at:
http://www.tec.govt.nz/upload/downloads/SOI-2007-10-final.pdf

REAP MECA ends
Common terms and conditions of employment for staff employed in the country’s regional education activity programmes (REAPs) may be a thing of the past, with employers from the country’s thirteen REAPs refusing to re-negotiate a national multi-employer collective employment agreement with the Association of Staff in Tertiary Education (ASTE). Until this year, staff employed in REAPs were covered by a national collective agreement providing standard employment conditions.
Current negotiations between ASTE and Eastbay REAP reveal that Eastbay wants reduce terms and conditions of employment for staff, including cutting entitlements to redundancy pay and access to what has been described as a decent salary scale. ASTE Field Officer Kris Smith said that Eastbay also wanted to increase hours of work and to abolish various allowances which are common across the sector. “It is unacceptable to our members that they should have to agree to terms and conditions that are inferior to those enjoyed by their colleagues in the sector,” she said.
Ms Smith added that it is very disappointing for staff employed by REAPS to be forced into this position. “In previous years we have bargained with all participating REAPs around the country as a group for a multi-employer collective agreement, which has meant that the terms and conditions have been consistent for all REAPs across the country”, she said.
REAPs were set up with government funding to service the community education needs of rural and more isolated communities.
Ms Smith said that the staff employed to coordinate and deliver REAP programmes are all professionals who have come from backgrounds in other parts of the education sector as well as the health and social services sectors. With the collapse of the MECA, the union has been negotiating on a site-by-site basis with individual REAPs.

Worldwatch
Senate adopts crackdown on loan industry
The United States Senate has overwhelmingly approved a bill that bars student lenders from giving gifts, trips or other perks to university and college officials, with lawmakers citing recent investigations showing that loan companies had used such incentives to get colleges to steer student borrowers their way.
Passage of the legislation was followed by the Senate’s adoption of cuts, totalling nearly $US19 billion over five years, in subsidies to student lenders. Much of that money would be used to increase federal grants for low and middle-income students, and to offer loan write-offs under certain conditions.
The legislation, along with the earlier passage of similar bills, reflects a notable loss of standing for the student-loan industry in the wake of improprieties uncovered by Congress and New York’s Attorney General.
The Chairman of the Senate Education Committee, Senator Edward Kennedy, said that the legislation would put in place steps to ensure that the student-loan system is working in the best interest of students by pursuing needed ethics reforms in the student-loan industry.
The legislation also requires that colleges report annual growth in tuition and fees, and that the Education Department publicise the names of colleges whose increases outpace those of similar institutions.
From The New York Times

Senior-staff migration grows
More senior academics are leaving Britain than migrating into the country, according to a report by Universities UK (UUK), the national vice-chancellors’ organisation. In a policy briefing on the international market in academic staff, UUK said, however, that there is no evidence of a brain drain from the United Kingdom, and that the total numbers of incoming academics exceed those leaving the UK.
However, researchers and lecturers are chiefly responsible for Britain’s net academic gain. At senior lecturer and professorial levels, more staff leave than enter the country. In 2005-06, 2,730 senior staff arrived while 3,775 left. Overseas academics made up 19.1 percent of staff in the UK in 2005-06, with 27 percent of all academics appointed being non-UK nationals.
The President of UUK, Drummond Bone, said that the report highlights the UK as a leader in recruitment and retention of highly skilled academic staff, but warns that universities must not become complacent as they face increased competition from overseas institutions. Higher-education reforms in many countries and the Bologna Process harmonising higher education across Europe will lead to increased international competition for academic staff, the UUK report said.
The main countries of origin for non-UK academic staff are Germany, China, the United States, the Republic of Ireland, Italy and France. China provides the largest single group of non-UK nationals among research staff.
From The Times Higher Education Supplement

School padded university entrance records
A private high school in Japan more than doubled its record for university applications, allegedly by paying a top student to sit seventy-three entrance examinations at top universities during the 2005 school year. The Osaka Gakugei High School in Sumiyoshi Ward paid the male student, ranked first among its students applying for science and engineering departments, a 50,000 yen incentive and provided him with a wristwatch worth tens of thousands of yen to sit the entrance examinations.
Only thirty-three students from Osaka Gakugei High School had previously passed examinations for the four universities concerned.
From The Asahi Shimbun

Interpol to establish own university
Interpol is looking to establish its own university in Austria. The organisation has launched a €15 million ($NZ25.7 million) fundraising campaign to establish its first research and training institution in Vienna. The university-level institution would provide training for high-level officials in the judiciary and police services worldwide. It will be concerned largely with Eastern Europe, which is trying to reform deeply corrupt administrative systems that are a legacy of the Soviet era. It will receive its first 150 students in 2009, according to Ronald K. Noble, the Interpol Secretary General.

Principal rejects apology
A lecturer in the United Kingdom is set to lose his job because an apology he made for publicly criticising a college principal was considered insufficiently sincere. The lecturer was sacked after making a posting on a campaign website opposing the College’s forthcoming merger with University College Falmouth and suggesting that characters from Alice in Wonderland might do a better job of running the College than its current Principal, Andrew Brewerton.
College governors upheld the lecturer’s dismissal at an appeal hearing in June but advised that an apology might win the lecturer his job back.
The lecturer then wrote to the Principal saying he had intended the article to be a satire. “I now realise that the nature and content of that posting could easily be interpreted as a personal attack against you,” he said.
Professor Brewerton said, however, that the statement failed to adequately acknowledge the offence of gross misconduct, and that the lecturer was “regrettably disingenuous” in his assertion that the article was merely satirical. He encouraged the lecturer to write a “full and unreserved apology” after which his dismissal would be reduced to a less severe penalty. However, the lecturer has declined to make an alternative apology. “Anything more would have been grovelling,” he said.
From The Times Higher Education Supplement

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AUS Tertiary Update is compiled weekly on Thursdays and distributed freely to members of the Association of University Staff and others. Back issues are available on the AUS website: www.aus.ac.nz . Direct enquires should be made to Marty Braithwaite, AUS Communications Officer, email: marty.braithwaite@aus.ac.nz

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