Some things need to change once the worst of the Covid crisis passes - and one of them is what and how we teach in our universities, writes Nicholas Agar
When a vaccinated Aotearoa finally emerges from the pandemic we must think about what we’ve learned. Doubtless Kiwis will continue to miss the days when our national airline could ferry us to global destinations with little more than a quick glance at a passport. We should look to balance these losses with positive changes. Perhaps in our post-pandemic world we won’t burn fossil fuels with the frenzy we did in 2019.
Among salutary changes should be those to universities. There are some issues that vice chancellors and university councils must address.
It’s so much more difficult for young people to get a start in academia than it was for me in the mid 1990s.
Aotearoa’s tertiary institutes need a youthquake that offers today’s young thinkers the opportunities that I enjoyed as an emerging academic. Today, many are relegated to an Uber driver existence of poorly paid academic gig work in which they are expected to fill gaps in teaching schedules if or when they arise. Only the fortunate expect to be nurtured as a researcher. Academia Aotearoa needs these young people to bring their fresh, occasionally destabilising ideas.
I recently crossed the ditch to Australia and have witnessed far reaching changes here. Some of these have not been great. I’m a proud humanities scholar and I believe that the knowledge my colleagues and I impart is essential as we prepare for the future’s uncertainties. The Australian coalition government has taken aim at the humanities, significantly increasing the cost students pay to study them. The stated goal was to send a market signal that students’ time is better spent learning “job-ready” STEM.
The then minister of education Dan Tehan, a humanities graduate but definitely not proud about it, hoped to save students from the kind of education that “nearly cost me a job”. When the Minister of Education starts talking about your courses using the same logic the Minister of Health uses to discourage smoking – increase the cost of courses to break young people of the unhealthy humanities habit – you know you’re in trouble.
Can Aotearoa rethink the humanities?
Aotearoa can avoid the path of Australia but we need to rethink the way we teach and research in the humanities. The staffing of New Zealand universities leaves them out of step with the changes that have been occurring outside of the academy.
There is increasing interest throughout New Zealand in Māori ideas. The English settlers who were my ancestors taught Māori about the power of the global free market to generate wealth. But New Zealand successes against Covid-19 suggest that the transfer of ideas went the other way too. I would like to think that the calm and cohesive way in which New Zealanders responded to the pandemic results in part from the influence of Māori thinking.
Māori values like whakapapa extend concern beyond individuals. They might explain how New Zealand has largely resisted the occasionally violent insistence on the right of individuals to reject safe vaccines that characterised some of Britain’s former colonies.
I still get emails from eager young Americans seeking job opportunities in Jacinda Ardern's Aotearoa. It’s great that people want to come and teach in New Zealand. Aotearoa has long been successful at recruiting young Americans and Europeans who find their academic job markets challenging and can tolerate New Zealand’s lower academic salaries, for a few years at least.
If New Zealand wants to attract international students in the post-pandemic world, the time has come for Academia Aotearoa to focus on offering something more ambitious than educations that are almost as good as what students might have received had they stayed home.
Focusing on the New Zealand difference
The world is now paying attention to the distinctive way Aotearoa has approached the pandemic. An openness to Māori thinking may be what makes the graduate education offered in New Zealand truly appealing to a world that finds many of its certainties challenged by a pandemic, a climate crisis, and repeated failures of democracy. Perhaps the solution to the challenge of how to curb emissions will come from kaupapa Māori and not from the hunt for a market incentive that clever emitters of carbon can dodge. The young academics Aotearoa needs should find it more natural to open an article with the epigraph “He tāngata, He tāngata, He tāngata” than with something from Rousseau.
If Māori ideas are part of this then we clearly need more Māori academics. But we also need young Pākehā academics who are equal participants in Aotearoa’s exciting changes. Academics can come from overseas to report on this transformation. But there’s nothing like appointing young New Zealanders who are going through it, are keen to research on it, and also to play a part in leading it.
