Staffing “Danger” In N.Z. Universities

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31906, 6 February 1969, Page 13

Staffing “Danger” In N.Z. Universities

There is a real danger that universities in New Zealand will before long have on their staffs too high a proportion of those who are there simply because they are unemployable elsewhere, writes Professor W. H. Oliver in a book recently published in Britain. “A leaven of patriots would remain,” he says, “but the lump would be very heavy.”

Professor Oliver was a lecturer, and later senior lecturer, at the University of Canterbury, and was professor of history at Massey University from 1960 until his recent appointment to a second chair of history at Victoria University of Wellington.

Entitled “The New University,” the book contains contributions by several authors, and on publication was reviewed by the “Guardian.” A reviewer, Richard Bourne, wrote: “Professor Oliver’s account of the struggling universities, depressed by a philistine egalitarianism, almost exclusively vocational and near the bottom of a world pecking order, makes instructive reading.”

"Discussing salaries of university staff, Professor Oliver concedes that they have risen considerably. “At present, a professor’s salary compares quite well, inside New Zealand, with top salaries in Government and business, but not too well with self-employed professional and businessmen,” he says.

“By and large, the university teacher has achieved a reasonable position within the New Zealand salary structure. “But university teaching and research is an international profession, and parity outside the country is more important from a recruiting point of view than parity inside. “At the moment, this parity does not exist, either with the United Kingdom, from which New Zealand traditionally recruits staff, or with Australia, its traditional recruiting rival.

“Nor, because many New Zealanders go for post-gradu-ate training overseas and because Australian universities advertise in New Zealand papers, can the universities be at all confident of holding their own abler products. “Short of the sort of increase which would put New Zealand professors on internal parity with the most well-to-do business and professional men, this is a race which New Zealand is doomed to be for ever losing. “This is probably appreciated by governments, and may account, more than parsimony or ignorance, for their reluctance to accept or apply the principle of parity with overseas countries.” Professor Oliver is critical of the quinquennial grant system of financing universities.

“In most institutions, rolls are running ahead, sometimes well ahead, of predictions made at the begining of the present quinquennium,” he says. “The consequent in-

elasticity is crippling . . . greater elasticity is necessary, either by shortening the period, or by providing for additional grants to cope with the unpredictable.” Professor Oliver says that judged simply from the standpoint of the demand placed on it by society, the New Zealand university system has performed satisfactorily, and continues to do so. But he refers to severe tensions generated as internal academic pressure has attempted to drive up ■ standards.

“Politicans, administrators, and other guardians of society, such as editorialists and editorial correspondents, ring alarm bells when they observe the statistical gap between university entrants and university graduates,” Professor Oliver says. . “They are readier to identify waste and incompetence within the system than lack of ability among entrants; to see the standard of graduation as too high rather than the standard of entry as too low.” I Some say there are not enough people trained by the universities and others that they are not good enough, he says. Both were probably right. The social demand for graduates had increased more rapidly than the output, and so was less than satisfied. “But the academic demand for excellence is as certainly unsatified, first by the slender element of general education built into most vocational and scientific courses, and second by the humdrum level and haphazard organisation of the most highly-favoured degree, the 8.A.”

University teachers whose cause may not be pleaded in terms of social and economic efficiency, should “be concerned to explore, clarify, and in a marginal way create the identity of their society,” Professor Oliver writes. “The supreme need in the humanities and social sciences in New Zealand universities is for an attention to New Zealand character and structure as useful, as direct, and as detailed as the attention paid by scientists to New Zealand soils, crops, and animals," he says. Professor Oliver says the universities should be directed to activities where the I return will be the greatest. He referred to a need to contribute to the educational needs of the Pacific area. ’ A significant part of the research undertaken in New Zealand universities should follow the directions set by the country’s history, and likely future development into the Pacific region.