The Coalition Continues to Defund Science
Another science fund bites the dust in New Zealand.
universities
NZ Science is in Big Trouble
Science and tertiary education are being ignored in NZ, which is just dumb.
The Second Major Offensive of Neoliberalism in New Zealand Since the 80s
The Coalition is fighting a multi-front blitzkrieg to entrench neoliberal hegemony in NZ.
RNZ’s Chinese Spies story doesn’t add up
On Monday, RNZ reported that “Chinese Communist Party spies are infiltrating New Zealand universities”. Our guest poster views this thin and anecdotal ‘investigative’ reporting with deep suspicion. Was any of this activity was reported to the proper authorities. Or is it just the usual paranoia / racist dog-whistling or a paid story?
Pandemic: a flourishing enterprise. Business needs to get real.
A few weeks ago we were at 14 million cumulative confirmed cases of Covid-19 worldwide. A million more cases in just 4 days. Now a few weeks later, we are at 16 million confirmed cases worldwide. The lobbyists and business groups affected by our blocked borders need to get real. We won’t be opening our borders until we get a widely used vaccine later next year (at the earliest). It is too expensive to do so.
Starving the universities
NZ’s universities are falling down the world rankings. This should come as no surprise, because National have systematically cut funding to the tertiary sector. How stupid do you have to be to deliberately run down our universities?
Large representative bodies – “slow”, “unwieldy”
That would be Steven Joyce describing university councils, but he could be describing any democratic governance.
You can’t fix what is not broken – no need to change university councils
Dr Sandra Grey from the Tertiary Education Union has a look at Stephen Joyce’s proposals to changing the governance of tertiary education institutions. She suggests that he has a look at what happened in the changes to the polytechs in 2009. And also points out that his proposals don’t follow what is known about good governance for universities.
But it has been apparent to readers here that Joyce prefers to be a fiddler rather than being effective..
Join the dots on universities
The government has been cutting funding to universities, and the effects are beginning to show.
What’s a university to do?
Some people still think of universities as fusty old ivory towers disconnected from the real world. That hasn’t been true for decades. Our current universities and tertiary institutions are business, they are structured and run to maximise their income in whatever funding framing the government of the day has in place. Predictably, the Nats latest proposed sausage machine funding model is a disaster.