“New Zealand universities should be alarmed by new rankings that suggest they are becoming less internationally relevant,” says ACT Tertiary Education spokesperson Dr Parmjeet Parmar.

“No New Zealand universities have improved their position in the THE World University Rankings. These rankings are of real importance to international students who pay full fees and effectively subsidise our university system.

“According to the rankings, there is one area in which every single New Zealand university has lost credibility, and that is their international outlook. That measure covers their proportion of international students and staff and their level of international collaboration.

“ACT is deeply concerned that a growing obsession with the Treaty of Waitangi and local indigenous knowledge will only see universities become more inward-looking, less internationally-relevant, and less attractive to international students.

“Take the example of the University of Auckland, which has fallen out of the top 150 for the first time since 2020, and within three years has fallen 6.1 percentage points in its international outlook score.

“From next year, the University plans to force all first-year students to complete a ‘Waipapa Taumata Rau’ course covering the Treaty of Waitangi and traditional Māori knowledge systems.

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“This compulsory course will not effectively serve international students, who make up 31 percent of the student body. Nor will it effectively serve Kiwi students who want to prepare themselves for an international career.

“The University of Auckland’s compulsory course is just one example. Academics and students from multiple universities have told ACT that indigenous knowledge and Treaty propaganda has diffused into almost every area of study. How will universities attract international lecturers by asking them to put a local indigenous lens over their years of hard-studied subject-matter expertise?

“If our universities want to collaborate on the world stage, they need to rediscover the value of universal knowledge systems such as the scientific method, and the free and open contest of ideas. Forcing students to learn and staff to teach within the framework of unscientific, politicised, indigenous knowledge systems is not the answer.

"Putting indigenous knowledge on a pedestal may impact universities' rankings on other metrics too. As ACT has previously argued, effective academic inquiry requires that all knowledge is contestable.”

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