Students at the universities of Auckland and Victoria are planning to protest today’s budget and impending to cuts to student allowances.

The student action group ‘We are the University’ at both universities are holding student association and TEU endorsed protests.

At Auckland University, over a thousand students have said that they will attend a ‘student strike‘ outside the library at 1.00pm.

At Victoria University of Wellington students are planning to march to Parliament from their Kelburn campus at 12 noon.

We Are the University Auckland says the government is planning to attack students with this year’s budget:

“It will affect current students, ex-students and potential future students by limiting allowances to the first four years of study or 200 weeks (with no exceptions for longer degrees or postgrad study), by freezing the parental income threshold to get the allowance (so even fewer students can get it), and increasing the repayment rate from 10 percent to 12 percent. We have had enough of the short sighted, mindless politics of austerity that limit who gets access to tertiary education and that see us paying rent to a generation that had everything they are taking from us.”

TEU will have analysis and comment on Budget 2012, as well as links to coverage of tertiary education-related and employment-related Budget news on its website.

Also in Tertiary Update this week:

1. TEU rejects performance pay in education
2. Good employment law crucial to good vocational training
3. Time to reinvest universities’ million dollar surpluses back in staff
4. Insecure work rife in Australian universities

Other news

Campaigners are calling for a “living wage” in New Zealand, inspired by policies in United States cities and London. The Living Wage Aotearoa NZ campaign is drawing support from unions, churches, Pacific, women’s and community groups. Organiser Annie Newman of the Service and Food Workers Union said it was inspired by “living wage” policies governing council contracts in more than 140 US cities and in London, where the rate of £8.30 ($17.35) an hour is 37 percent above the legal minimum wage - The Herald

Tertiary Education Minister Stephen Joyce is defending the decision to decline loans to students failing their papers as “absolutely” the right one to make, despite targeting less than five per cent of the students it was expected to -Stuff

Tensions have escalated further in Montreal as Quebec’s legislature voted in favour of an emergency law, Bill 78, to end the 100 days of student strikes. The Bill pauses the current academic year at institutions affected by strikes; imposes steep fines for anyone who tries blocking access to an institution; and limits where, how, and for how long people can protest in Quebec. Critics blasted the bill as an affront to civil rights, an overreaction or ill-considered improvisation. Thousands stormed the streets of Montreal and Quebec City late Friday night to protest the bill’s passage -CBC/Radio-Canada

Millions of youth around the world have essentially given up looking for a job, warned the International Labour Organization (ILO) in a new report. The global youth unemployment rate (at 12.6 per cent in 2011) would be a full percentage point higher if it included the number of young people who have dropped out of the labour market, said the ILO in its “Global Employment Trends for Youth 2012″ report.  Of particular concern are young people who are neither in employment nor in education or training – known by the acronym NEET. If youth are economically inactive because they are in education or training, they invest in skills that may improve their future employability, but NEETs risk both labour market and social exclusion - ILO

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“500 members are about 5 percent of our membership. When one in twenty people are having their job changed or taken away from them we know we do not have a very stable environment for ensuring teaching and education.”

“But the worst part is that we seem to be in a state of never-ending reviews. TEU’s national council has been tracking reviews for a year now and they just keep coming,” said Ms Cormack.

New reviews have recently started at Manukau Institute of Technology, NorthTec, Wintec, University of Auckland, AUT, University of Canterbury, Massey University, University of Otago, University of Waikato and Te Wānanga o Aotearoa. Ms Cormack says TEU has recorded 49 confirmed redundancies because of those reviews via voluntary or compulsory severance so far.

“500 members is about five percent of our membership. When one in twenty people is having their job changed or taken away from them we know we do not have a very stable environment for good teaching and education.”

“In November last year we recorded 55 reviews at 12 institutions. In October 44 reviews at 17 institutions, in September 43 reviews at 18 institutions, in August 58 reviews at 20 institutions, in July 77 reviews at 24 institutions and so on,” said Ms Cormack.

By Paul Michel Taillon

The vandals are at the gate, according to David Robinson, Senior Advisor at Education International (a trade union federation representing thirty million education employees around the world) and former Associate Executive Director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers. So who are these ‘vandals’? And what ‘gate’ have they reached?

The ‘vandals’ for Robinson are those who believe in the philosophies of the free-market and have foisted then upon public tertiary education. Just a few of the negative effects are the undermining of the integrity and independence of the academy; narrower of research agendas; constrained of professional autonomy; and, attacks upon academic freedom.[i] Then there’s the impact on the academic workplace: the rise in fixed- and short-term contracts; stagnating salaries; greater levels of micromanagement; and pressure to cough up research outputs to meet the requirements of metrically-driven research funding regimes for tertiary institutions (never mind that the quality of those outputs can end up taking back-seat).

And do these developments help academic staff produce an educated critical-thinking citizenry, equipped to deal with the economic, ethical, social, and factual complexities of contemporary life? Despite lip service to the importance of teaching, there are few incentives to devote oneself to teaching well (a 1990s study of US universities found that staff commitment to teaching was negatively correlated with compensation).[ii] Overall, academic citizenship—academic freedom, the responsibility to participate in the governance of the institution, and the social and the moral obligation to serve various communities (from students to the wider public)—has diminished over the past three decades because tertiary education institutions have been turned into large markets and required to act as private corporations.[iii]

I’d say the vandals are not just at the gate—they have breeched the walls.

All of the negative effects David Robinson (and a host of others) talk about should sound familiar to anyone who has paid attention to tertiary education in New Zealand over the past decade. The vandals have ravaged public access, public funding, and public governance of tertiary institutions. So what’s to be done? My answer: organise and unionise.

As I see it, academic unions are the best (perhaps only) hope to reverse the spread of heavy-handed corporate style micro management, defend academic freedom, reinvigorate academic citizenship, and address the spread and condition of contingent teaching staff.[iv] If attacks upon academic freedom, the undermining of academic self-governance, and the erosion of university working conditions are the result of a ‘more market’ philosophy running rampant, then it follows that unions, as entities historically dedicated to ameliorating the pitiless effects of market forces, can be effective counters to these management practices.

If university senates have become marginalised and withered as effective means of representing the views of staff, and vice-chancellors operate more as CEOs than as members of communities of scholars, then unions, which are set up to engage with senior management, must take up the challenge of not just bargaining for decent wages and working conditions but also advocating for meaningful staff participation in university governance.

Such an agenda must begin with resisting the trend to fixed-term, casual employment. Unions can also negotiate for participation clauses in collective agreements that require the university to include the union in discussions around policy changes that may affect conditions of employment. More fundamentally, unions can argue for promotion policy criteria and workload norms that not only allow for staff to engage in service – to their students, their disciplines, their workplaces, and their communities.

Unions must also play a key role in revitalizing academic citizenship. To flourish, academic citizenship needs space in the workplace, and unions are best placed to deliver it. Union members can demonstrate academic citizenship through example (in my experience, they tend to be the most active and collegially-minded members of staff) and unions can nurture academic citizenship by reminding members of the responsibilities they bear as academic citizens.

Universities are not-for-profit entities.[v]  Of course, their purpose is to make doctors, engineers and the like. However, they must also create citizens, fully-developed human beings who can tackle the social, economic, and ethical dilemmas facing our world. The market may value the former but has little use for the latter. By defending the conditions necessary to academic citizenship, unions can help universities fulfill this vital function.

One place to start this defense is by highlighting just what has happened to public education in New Zealand. David Robinson’s lectures, organised by the Tertiary Education Union, will help spark debate about the world the vandals armed with corporate ideals and market philosophies are leaving in their wake.

At least nine New Zealanders have joined a global boycott of Elsevier, the world’s largest scientific journal publisher. The protest has rapidly gained momentum since it began as an irate blog post at the end of January. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education by Tuesday evening, about 2,400 scholars had put their names to an online pledge not to publish or do any editorial work for the company’s journals, including refereeing papers. Protesters accuse Elsevier of charging too much and supporting laws that will keep research findings bottled up behind a company pay-wall.

Employees of the universities of Auckland, Lincoln and Otago have signed the pledge as well as one staff member at NIWA.

Brett S. Abrahams, an assistant professor of genetics at the USA’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine, told the Chronicle, “The government pays me and other scientists to produce work, and we give it away to private entities. Then they charge us to read it.” Mr Abrahams signed the pledge on Tuesday after reading about it on Facebook.

According to the boycotters, Elsevier, which publishes over 2,000 journals including the prestigious Cell and The Lancet, is abusing academic researchers in three areas. First there are the prices. Then the company bundles subscriptions to lesser journals together with valuable ones, forcing libraries to spend money buying things they do not want in order to get a few things they do want. And, most recently, Elsevier has supported a proposed US law that could prevent agencies like the US National Institutes of Health from making all articles written by grant recipients freely available.

However Elsevier rejects the complaints saying, globally, the amount of research that is published is going up every year but library budgets are not keeping pace.

Also in Tertiary Update this week:

1. WITT gains from PTE closure
2. TEU negotiates improved Canterbury timetable
3. University of Auckland pushes Teach First
4. Student loan debtors escape on OE

Other news

Wintec settled a collective agreement with its academic staff late last year. NorthTec is now the only one of the old ITP MECA polytechnics not to settle a collective agreement with its staff. NorthTec wants an employment agreement which allows it to direct staff to work any days, evenings and weekends. Tutors have not had a pay increase since November 2008.

“The government should be focusing on creating jobs and getting money into the pockets of low and middle income people by stimulating the economy rather than an inflexible deficit target,” says CTU Economist Bill Rosenberg. “We have had over 150,000 unemployed and 250,000 jobless almost constantly now since mid 2009. The unemployment rate at 6.6 percent is barely below its financial crisis peak in December 2009.” – CTU

Lower Hutt is in danger of losing its last provider of adult community night classes. Hutt City Workers’ Education Association (WEA) president Maurice Payes confirms a funding squeeze has forced the group to lay off its two part-time workers, who are owed wages. Four Lower Hutt colleges abandoned running adult community courses in 2010 when the National Government cut $13 million out of the $16m annual Adult Community Education (ACE) budget. That left the WEA as the last provider – Hutt News

United States President Obama brought his campaign for college affordability to an audience of Michigan college students last week, pledging that his administration would be “putting colleges on notice” over rising costs and issuing a call for continued public support for higher education by states so that the USA does not become a nation where education is reserved for the well-to-do – Chronicle of Higher Education 

Teach First NZ says similar schemes operate overseas, including in Britain, and it would help cover shortages in hard-to-staff areas such as South Auckland. However, the Herald on Sundayreported that two South Auckland principals are critical of the plan saying it was insensitive and not the right way to tackle inequality in education.

MIT’s director of external relations, Stuart Middleton also expressed concern about the proposal saying:

“It is also somewhat ingenuous to put the Teach First programme forward as a key contribution to lifting the value of low decile schools. There is little evidence that low decile schools need bright young novice teachers any more than any school does.”

Academic staff who are members of TEU will be voting on a new collective agreement over the next two weeks after their negotiating team reached an agreement with the vice-chancellor today.

Academics at the university are currently all on individual employment agreements, after their collective agreement expired earlier this year. Academics had to undertake a sustained and determined campaign of industrial action over the past year. Three days of facilitated bargaining before the Employment Relations Authority earlier this month helped the two sides reach an agreement.

The new agreement will include a set of principles or “collars” to govern those issues that had been at the heart of the dispute between union members and university management -  policies on research and study leave, academic standards, grades and criteria, outside work, and a revised discipline procedure. If university management wishes to alter the existing policies, any new policy will have to comply with those principles. The overall effect is to remove some details regarding these policies from the agreement, but strengthen the principles that govern those policies.

The review of the research and study leave, academic standards, grades and criteria and outside work policies will be subject to a process that involves TEU. The vice-chancellor also recognises more generally in the settlement that the union has a role to play in the academic governance of the university and provides mechanisms by which TEU can exercise that role.

TEU members will also receive a 4 percent salary increase and a $2,000 (gross) lump sum payment, which will be in lieu of back pay. A further 2 percent salary increase will be paid from 1 February 2012. This is significant because that it is the first time in five years that a salary increase has been negotiated during bargaining by the union and not been announced by the vice-chancellor to non-members outside of the bargaining. Annual leave will increase to 5 weeks (inclusive of Easter Tuesday and the last weekday before Christmas).

Also in Tertiary Update this week:

1. Government’s new tertiary policy punishes failure
2. ‘The vandals at the gate’
3. Rally calls for education to be election issue
4. Two South Island polytechnics settle new collective agreements
5. Auckland general staff vote on new ‘fair’ pay model

Other news

Although good reasons can always be put forward for more bureaucratic requirements, university management must be wary of possible downsides on staff morale and effectiveness. All the time spent here can be time not spent researching and teaching – Otago Daily Times editorial

Minister for Tertiary Education, Steven Joyce, has confirmed the merger of Whitireia NZ and Wellington Institute of Technology (Weltec) councils. “It is an exciting development that will provide opportunities for the institutions to work more closely together for the benefit of students right across the Wellington region,” says Mr Joyce

Photos of Te Uepu hui on 20 November and TEU annual conference 21-22 November

The University of California chancellor has apologised to students for police use of pepper spray against campus protesters in a standoff captured by video and widely replayed on television and the internet. The pepper-spraying last week led to the suspensions of the campus police chief and two officers, and thrust the normally quiet, conservative and mostly apolitical UC Davis campus to the forefront of anti-Wall Street Occupy protests nationwide – The Guardian

“[University] Rankings are a lot like political polling and research in this respect – they can be a useful indicator of performance and add a sense of sporting competition to media coverage, but trouble emerges if they become the central motivator of decision makers,” Monash University vice chancellor Ed Byrne has warned – The Australian. 

—

Authorised by Sharn Riggs, Tertiary Education Union, 8th Floor, Education House 178-182 Willis St, Wellington 6011.

TEU Tertiary Update is published weekly on Thursdays and distributed freely to members of the Tertiary Education Union and others. You can subscribe to Tertiary Update by email or feed reader. Back issues are available on the TEU website. Direct inquiries should be made to Stephen Day.

The bargaining team for members of the two unions say the mediated bargaining meetings were constructive, with the university considering and responding to the issues raised on behalf of members.

“We are now in a position to recommend a proposed settlement to members.”

The proposed settlement includes a two percent salary increase and an agreement that TEU and PSA representatives will meet with the vice-chancellor prior to a salary increase offer being made to staff for 2013.

The agreement also includes a new annual salary review process with reference to both development and performance and it retains the joint union/employer salary review committee and an appeal process. The agreement will include safeguards to clauses about disciplinary and review processes to protect membership involvement and ensure procedures for future change are clear and fair.

A fairer pay system was a crucial negotiating issue for general staff at the University of Auckland.

In the meantime, general staff will be picketing outside Alfred Nathan House at lunchtime both today and tomorrow.

General staff have been campaigning for two year for a transparent, objective and fair pay system to replace the current performance pay system.

At the University of Auckland this provoked the protest de jour of the month – an occupation. At Lincoln University the council is seeking an exemption so it can increase the fee to eight percent for its animal science and agriculture courses. Accompanying fee rises at Lincoln are an undisclosed projected deficit and a fall in student numbers.

Rachel Boyack, the students’ association president at NMIT, would like to see more transparency across the sector when setting fees.

“It does appear that the four percent policy is now being treated as ‘business as usual’, where all programmes at all institutions are having a four percent increase applied without a deep analysis of the cost of each programme.”

“There is no doubt that high fees limit access, even if there is a student loan to pay the initial cost.”

Ms Boyack says the combination of requirements on institutions to deliver a minimum three percent return, combined with the four percent fee increase allowable, cuts to funding and a tertiary education strategy that suggests ‘flexibility’ around fees “all leads to students as the easy option for making up for shortfalls in revenue”.

TEU’s policy on fees is that institutions and the government need to ensure that tertiary education is accessible, affordable, and supportive: “That means lower fees, more investment in our public tertiary education institutions, transparent, equitable admission and selection criteria and processes, and supportive grants that help families to get by while individuals take the opportunity to study.”