Institutional autonomy is not seriously jeopardised by the establishment of a “university strategy group”, which will be dominated by outsiders and tasked with implementing a plan by which universities are judged and funded, New Zealand vice-chancellors believe.
University of Waikato boss Neil Quigley said the new group would bring the sector inside the policy development tent. “There’s a natural tendency for ministers to focus on conversations with their officials and to task those officials to consult with the universities separately,” he told the 91茄子 Campus Live ANZ event in Christchurch.
“The opportunity to have that conversation sitting at the table together…far outweighs any potential threat to universities. We have to deal with the political winds as they blow in any event, so we might as well be at the table to hear it directly.”
The strategy group, scheduled to meet for the first time in October, will be chaired by universities minister Shane Reti. An “independent” member – either an academic with no administrative role, or an outsider to the university sector – will be deputy chair. Up to three vice-chancellors will be enlisted, but they will be outnumbered by a plethora of industry and civil service CEOs or their nominees.
The group’s role will be to give effect to an updated tertiary education strategy framed around the government’s economic growth agenda. The strategy will provide a reference document for the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC) in assessing universities’ plans and allocating their funding.
Lincoln University vice-chancellor Grant Edwards said the sector was awaiting more details of the new group’s composition and terms of reference. But the information released so far appeared to “preserve” university autonomy, with governing councils and representative group Universities New Zealand (UNZ) maintaining their roles.
“Autonomy of universities is very important to consider in this construct as it’s developed and progressed forward,” he told the forum.
Cheryl de la Rey, vice-chancellor of summit host the University of Canterbury, said the new group posed an opportunity for “a more joined-up conversation rather than the bilateral conversations we’ve had in the past”.
“There will be challenges making sure that we respect the boundaries of institutional autonomy, the mandates of respective agencies but…multilateral engagement [is] a good thing for the whole of New Zealand.”
The Tertiary Education Union said the new group placed “more power in the hands of a minister”, and the revamped strategy would do little to address the “real problem” of longstanding underfunding. “None of this makes much of a difference without serious investment,” said national secretary Sandra Grey.
“Universities cannot deliver…on the smell of an oily rag. It’s time to stop tinkering and get serious.”
The new group and revamped strategy are the government’s main responses to the long-awaited recommendations from the University Advisory Group (UAG), whose final report has been published five months after it was tabled. Reti also announced widely anticipated changes to the Performance-Based Research Fund and flagged modifications to university quality assurance and governance arrangements.
The government ruled out a dozen of the UAG’s 63 recommendations and?mostly disagreed with, or deferred consideration of, another 15. It disputed or deferred most of the panel’s funding ideas and rejected proposals to create a more distinctive university sector by funding it separately from other institutions, raising admission thresholds to make universities more elite, and giving them a near monopoly on the delivery of higher degrees.
De la Rey rejected the suggestion that the UAG had been “an exercise in kicking the can down the road”. She said vice-chancellors welcomed the opportunity to discuss the “bigger picture” and “speak about our future”.
Edwards said the government’s snubbing of some UAG recommendations proved that the UAG exercise had been a “good conversation”. He cited the rejection of the panel’s proposal for a new agency, the “NZ Universities Council”, which would have appropriated many of the functions of both the TEC and UNZ.
“That shows…that some things that required quite fundamental change were considered,” he said. “It’s not clear that the benefits [were] material enough to make those really significant changes worth it.”
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