AUS Tertiary Update

NZ universities in top 500
Five New Zealand universities have made it into the annual Shanghai Jiao Tong University ranking of the top five-hundred universities in the world. It is the same number as last year and up from three in 2005. The University of Auckland leads the New Zealand rankings, at between 203 and 304 in the world, or between twenty-five and forty-two in the Asia-Pacific region. It is a similar result to last year.
Massey University has recorded the biggest gain, moving from being ranked between 401 and 500 in 2006 to between 305 and 401 this year, and from between sixty-four and ninety-two in 2006 to between forty-three and sixty four in the Asia-Pacific region this year. The big loser is the University of Otago, which has slipped from between 201 and 300 in 2006 to between 305 and 401 (forty-three and sixty-four for Asia-Pacific) this year.
Canterbury and Victoria Universities have remained in roughly similar positions, being placed between 402 and 508 in the world and between sixty-five and ninety-nine in Asia-Pacific.
American universities, again headed by Harvard, comprise eight of the top ten universities internationally, with Cambridge slipping from third place to fourth and Oxford maintaining its tenth position. Japanese universities occupy six of the top nine places in the Asia-Pacific region, with the Australian National University ranked third after Tokyo and Kyoto Universities.
The Shanghai Jiao Tong ranking measures universities by several indicators of academic or research performance, including articles published in journals such as Nature and Science, staff and alumni winning Nobel or other prestige prizes and academic performance with respect to the size of the institution.
The original purpose of the ranking was to measure the gap between Chinese universities and world-class universities, particularly in aspects of academic or research performance. The current ranking is intended to help compare and identify universities worldwide. Shanghai Jiao Tong says, however, that the quality of universities cannot be precisely measured by “mere number”, and that no ranking is absolutely objective. It cautions against reliance on such rankings, including its own.
The full report and tables can be found at:
http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/rank/2007/ranking2007.htm

Also in Tertiary Update this week
1. Lecturer to challenge dismissal
2. Pacific scholars insulted at conference snub
3. PBRF report shows link between quality and impact of research
4. Lincoln, Massey expected to post losses
5. “Box City” highlights student hardship
6. Oxford told to review the way it is run
7. Italian official bans honorary degrees
8. UCU welcomes fee-waiver decision
9. A correction and an update over US dismissal
10. RAE reject forms support group

Lecturer to challenge dismissal
The Association of University Staff (AUS) has sought urgent intervention over the dismissal last week of the high-profile Political Science lecturer, Dr Paul Buchanan, from the University of Auckland. Dr Buchanan, who is a well-known commentator on security and intelligence matters, was dismissed without notice on the grounds of serious misconduct after sending what has been described in the media as an “angry” email to a student.
Dr Buchanan’s dismissal has attracted significant publicity this week, including media outlet Scoop publishing background stories and a number of views from current and former students. Similarly, a web log published in the New Zealand Herald had in excess of thirty pages of comment on the issue by yesterday afternoon. The text of the email in question has been published in the media and the University of Auckland has publicly confirmed that it dismissed Dr Buchanan after a disciplinary process.
In a statement released on Monday evening, the AUS confirmed that Dr Buchanan had sent the email in question, but had apologised to both the student and the University regarding this email. “There are extenuating circumstances surrounding the sending of the email, and the University had a range of options open to it other than to dismiss Dr Buchanan,” the statement read. “The Association of University staff does not believe Dr Buchanan should have been dismissed from his position.”
AUS General Secretary Helen Kelly said that no further comment could be made at this stage as the dismissal was being challenged.

Pacific scholars insulted at conference snub
Pacific scholars in New Zealand say they feel insulted and ignored ahead of a major conference on Pacific research, according to a report on Radio New Zealand International. The report says that, while several academics are giving talks at the Pacific Thought Leaders Dialogue in Auckland later this month, not one of them is a Pacific Islander.
The Department of Labour, which is organising the conference, says it pulls together the latest research on Pacific issues in New Zealand, with a focus on economics, trade and migration. It aims to connect academics with the public, and Pacific people are invited to attend. But of the eight speakers, not one is a Pacific Islander according to the report.
Radio New Zealand says that the lack of Pacific speakers has raised the ire of Professor Sitaleki Finau from Massey University. He says he’s boycotting the conference, which he describes as insulting. “There are Pacific researchers who could do exactly the same work that has been farmed out to the Pakehas. So overall the thing is saying, you Pacific Islanders come here, we’ll discuss you, but you’re not yet ready to lead the thinking about yourselves,” he said.
Similarly, the Director of Va’aomanu Pasifika, the Pacific Studies Unit at Victoria University, Dr Peggy Fairbairn-Dunlop, says Pacific researchers are being ignored. “Maybe in earlier days there was not a strong body of Pacific research or researchers in New Zealand, but there’s certainly no excuse for it now,” she says. “We are building a particularly strong body of Pacific researchers in New Zealand, right across all the disciplines today. In addition, our Pacific researchers are bringing a different perspective which hopefully this particular research will capture.”
The person who chose the researchers is reported as saying that the lack of brown faces is not deliberate. Alastair Bisley says Pacific experts and steering groups were consulted all the way. He says he chose the best scholars he could find.

PBRF report shows link between quality and impact of research
The nature of the link between the academic impact and quality of research produced by New Zealand universities has been established this week in a new report published by the Ministry of Education. Quality vs impact: A comparison of Performance-Based Research Fund quality score with citations compares citations per full-time-equivalent researcher with the quality of research at the universities as measured by PBRF average quality scores across ten broad subject areas. The new report is the second in a series that uses a newly available bibliometrics dataset from Thompson Scientific to analyse the research performance of New Zealand universities.
Among the key findings is that each of the ten broad subject panels analysed in the report exhibits a positive association between the quality of research and the academic impact of research. That is, a higher level of academic quality is associated with a higher level of academic impact. However, the strength of this relationship varies among the subject panels and between 2003 and 2006.
Overall, from the ten broad subject areas, the Biological Sciences panel displayed the strongest degree of association between research quality and academic impact. Engineering, Technology and Architecture, Education and Medicine and Public Health also showed a “reasonable degree” of association between academic impact and research quality. Of the remaining subject panels, the lowest degree of association between academic impact and research quality is in the Business and Economics panel.
The report says that the degree of variation between research quality and academic impact found in the report suggests that the peer-review process used in the PBRF quality evaluations is not simply mirroring what is shown in citations data. However, given the limitations of the data used in the analysis, further research, which links the citations directly to the researchers in the PBRF Quality Evaluation would more conclusively indicate the strength of the association between research quality and academic impact.
The report can be found at:
http://educationcounts.edcentre.govt.nz/publications/tertiary/quality-vs-impact.html

Lincoln, Massey expected to post losses
Lincoln has become the second New Zealand University to predict a financial deficit for this year, according to reports in both The Press and Education Review. Both say that Lincoln is forecasting a loss of $1.52 million, with Vice-Chancellor Professor Roger Field declining to comment on suggestions that the figure may balloon to as much as $4 million.
In May, it had been reported that Massey University was expecting a loss of $1.3 million this year, adding to a loss of $1.52 million last year. Massey’s Chancellor, Nigel Gould, slammed the Tertiary Education Commission in the University’s Annual Report, saying that its decision not to allow Massey to lift student-tuition fees above the 5 percent maximum increase permissible was extraordinary, misguided and showed a lack of foresight. Massey predicts that it may take as much as another two years before it makes an operational surplus of 3 percent or more, the guideline set by the Tertiary Advisory Monitoring Unit.
Education Review says that Lincoln, with the greatest proportion of international students of any university, is particularly exposed to downturns in the market and has been hard hit this year. It has also experienced a decline in domestic students in nine of the last ten years.
Figures published in Education Review show that the Universities of Auckland and Otago are in the strongest financial position, with Auckland predicting a surplus of $27 million this year, up $7 million on the $20 million surplus last year and $3 million ahead of budget. Otago has forecast its surplus at $23.4 million.
Other universities are expecting a surplus similar to or slightly down on last year. Victoria University predicts its surplus as $9.1 million, down slightly on $9.37 million last year, while Waikato is expecting around $5.4 million, down from $8.49 million last year. The University of Canterbury is looking at between $7 and $8 million against last year’s $8.68 million. A forecast for AUT was not provided.

“Box City” highlights student hardship
Victoria University students say that the construction of a cardboard-box city on campus yesterday was intended to raise awareness of student hardship and highlight the need for universal student allowances. Joey Randall, Co-President of the New Zealand Union of Students’ Associations (NZUSA), said the “Box City” was a joint initiative between the Education Action Group and the Victoria University of Wellington Students’ Association.
Mr Randall said that, with the current lack of government support and increasingly high housing and living costs, many students are really struggling to make ends meet. He said that the numbers of students receiving an allowance have been decreasing since 2001, and currently less than a third of tertiary students receive an allowance. Thousands more are left with little choice but to rely on the student-loan scheme to support themselves to live while studying, resulting in high levels of debt.
“A universal living allowance would enable students to focus on their studies rather than where the next dollar is coming from and whether they can afford next week’s rent”, said Mr Randall. “The Labour Government must take action now. Back in 2005, they promised that 50 percent of students would receive an allowance. While Labour continues to procrastinate over implementing this election promise, many students are struggling to keep a roof over their heads”, said Randall.
NZUSA calls on the Government to introduce a universal living allowance for all students to address the inherent discrimination that sees students remain the only group in society which is expected to go into debt in order to meet basic living costs.
Total student debt in New Zealand stands at almost $9.23 billion.

Worldwatch
Oxford told to review the way it is run
England’s prestige Oxford University has received a strong reprimand over its current governance structure from the government funding body, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). The Council has told the University it is not satisfied that it meets the expected requirements of a publicly funded higher-education institution, and has urged Oxford to seek independent advice to review its governance.
The report reignites a three-year row that almost toppled Oxford’s Vice-Chancellor, former University of Auckland Vice-Chancellor John Hood, in his attempts to modernise the running of the 900-year-old institution.
The University is ultimately governed by the congregation, a 3,000-strong body of Oxford academics.
The debate on Oxford’s governance started when Dr Hood was made Vice-Chancellor in 2004. He proposed plans that would have handed financial decision-making to experts outside the University. His reforms would have done away with the dons’ majority on Oxford’s ruling Council, reducing its core membership from twenty-five (including four external lay members) to fifteen.
Oxford academics accuse HEFCE’s latest report of trying to push through changes they rejected. George Smith, Professor of Materials, said it was “deplorable” that the issue of governance was being raised during the summer holidays when the democratic cogs of the University were in abeyance. Similary, Susan Cooper, Professor of Experimental Physics, said she wished HEFCEefce would be more concerned with Oxford’s performance than with the number of externals on its Council.
From the Education Guardian

Italian official bans honorary degrees
Citing the need to protect the “prestige” of its university system, Italy’s higher-education Minister, Fabio Mussi, has ordered the country’s sixty-six public universities to stop granting honorary degrees for the rest of the year. The move followed controversy last week over the University of Turin’s decision to award an honorary bachelor’s degree in Economics to Jonella Ligresti, who is chair of one of Italy’s largest insurance companies. The University awarded the degree despite the objections of Mr. Mussi.
Honorary diplomas are awarded more rarely in Italy than in many other countries and are reserved by law to those who “by their deeds or publications have achieved manifest fame or singular skill in the discipline for which the degree is granted”.
In recent years, Italian universities have honoured an increasing number of celebrities with debatable academic achievements, including the champion motorcycle racer Valentino Rossi who, in 2005, received an honorary bachelor’s degree in communication and advertising from the University of Urbino. The trend prompted Mr. Mussi to urge institutions to make “an accurate evaluation” of those they would honour in this way.
From The Chronicle of Higher Education

UCU welcomes fee-waiver decision
The University and College Union has praised the decision by the Scottish Government to waive undergraduate university fees for asylum-seekers. Although many refugees meet the criteria for domestic student fees, some universities have classed them as overseas students, making them liable for fees of up to £24,000 ($NZ64,000) per year. Normally, students resident in the Britain for longer than three years pay fees at the domestic-student level; however asylum-seekers living in Scotland for as long as seven years have continued to be charged international fees. It means, in many instances, that they are prevented from studying.
UCU Scotland’s Congress in March called on universities there to partially waive fees for asylum-seekers so they would be at the same level as for home students. UCU Scotland President, Terry Brotherstone, said that the charging of fees to refugees who have no means to pay is absurd. “We have been pressing for this iniquitous policy to be changed and are delighted that the Cabinet Secretary for Education, Fiona Hyslop MSP, agreed,” he said. “This brings all Scottish universities into line with those which had already sensibly waived fees for their tiny number of refugee students.”

A correction and an update over US dismissal
Thank you to those readers who correctly alerted us to the fact that Professor Ward Churchill, who featured in this column last week, was dismissed from the University of Colorado at Boulder, not the Colorado State University at Boulder.
Meanwhile, AUS National President, Professor Nigel Haworth, has written to the University of Colorado, expressing concern at the dismissal of Professor Churchill. “Our members are fierce defenders of the role of universities as the critics and conscience of society and of their freedom of speech as academics,” he wrote. “We believe that any erosion of these freedoms in the international community of scholars affects us all, and therefore we must voice our objection to the treatment of Professor Churchill. In particular, we reject the use of allegations of research misconduct to silence dissenting voices.”

RAE reject forms support group
An academic branded “research inactive” because his work will not be submitted for next year’s Research Assessment Exercise is forming a support group for other academics left out in the cold.
Professor Vic Truesdale from Oxford Brookes University has invited academics “unexpectedly excluded” from the Research Assessment Exercise, the United Kingdom’s equivalent of the Performance-Based Research Exercise, to contact him by email, and said that there could be many people who could do with some mutual support. “In any case, somebody should be counting us and logging the insult,” he said. “I suppose that in the big planning games, as in battle-planning, generals cannot be concerned with the plight of individual soldiers; they are merely cannon fodder. I want to register the plight of the individual, and to ask the question as to whether you think the cannon-fodder model is appropriate in a twenty-first-century democracy.”
In the last RAE in 2001, the work of about 50,000 researchers out of 116,000 full-time academic staff was submitted. Many claim that exclusion stigmatises academics and damages their careers.
Next year’s RAE is expected to be the most selective ever, with some universities attempting to improve their research ratings by submitting only a small core of researchers instead of including all who are active. There are reports that some universities are excluding even high-quality researchers as they attempt to second-guess the type of research the RAE judging panels will favour.
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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