JOHN RAINE: Ideological Illogic - Facts Not Feels, Please

At a time when universities (notably Massey University [1] and the University of Auckland) are engaged in curriculum transformation projects, we need to look hard at the current rationales for cutting courses. Sure, university courses tend to proliferate over time, and the universities have experienced heavy financial pressures following the Covid lockdowns and the loss of international student business, but we have also witnessed a blow-out in administrative and managerial staff numbers.  Currently, a further factor is present, a shifting culture in the sector, that is affecting decisions around what university degree programmes are to look like in the future.

As Johnston and Kierstead [2] have described, in New Zealand our ratio of non-academic to academic staff of 1.5 to 1 is much higher than in Australia, the UK, or the USA (where it is about 0.8 to 1). If research-only staff are treated as academic staff this ratio still only improves to 1.4 to 1. Numerous “managers” and support staff have appeared in areas such as Human Resources, Health and Safety, Student Learning Support and Pastoral Care, Outreach, Māori and Pasifika directorates, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) support.

This growing administrative overhead cost has to some extent been offset by the growth in international student business. By 2019, over 117,000 enrolled students delivered the country a total economic benefit of around $5Bn. University international 2019 student fee revenue was about $600m, or around 15% of universities’ total revenue.  International students pay up to five times the domestic student fee rate. Covid-19 dramatically reduced the number of international students studying within New Zealand, though partly replaced by students enrolled for on-line studies. Mid-2020, universities faced a year-end financial shortfall from lost international enrolments of about $200m, and this was expected to rise to $400m in 2021. The financial hangover for the universities has been major, damaging, and aggravated by financial commitments to ongoing new building projects.

Looking now at what and how we teach, it is usual for the universities to periodically rationalise their course offerings with the aim of greater administrative efficiency and to contain costs, particularly where courses may have low enrolment numbers. I note at the outset that what is important is not necessarily the low enrolments in a particular course, but the total of the taught Equivalent Full-Time Student (EFTS) count for each academic staff member. Many courses are important but will have low enrolments because they are specialised, or they are pitched at postgraduate level. A staff member’s personally attributable EFTS, added up over their undergraduate and postgraduate teaching plus supervision commitments, tells us how much they earn for the university. Most academics who teach large enrolment courses teach small enrolment courses too. This reality should be part of the analysis in current curriculum transformation projects. If a narrow view is taken simply of the enrolment numbers per course, the richness and diversity of course offerings will be damaged.

A critical and controversial factor in the current course rationalisation exercises is the increasing pressure to include courses that reflect relativist postmodern views (“other ways of knowing”) and Te Ao Māori (specifically matauranga Māori), moreover within science programmes. This situation raises questions that must be answered.

The University of Auckland has stated, “The rationale is to reduce workload to allow time to develop relational pedagogies, to address timetabling constraints, and to reduce costs….”.  One can infer that “relational pedagogies”, mean relativist views that come through in traditional knowledge courses, for example, where we are seeing courses offered in science programmes that do not strictly stand the test of being taught science, but instead may deliver a mix of observational knowledge, cultural lore, myth, mysticism and animism or vitalism. Most of us support the inclusion of such content in history, sociology or anthropology courses, but not in the Science-Technology-Engineering-Mathematics (STEM) area. This situation comes into closer focus if such courses are intended to replace pre-existing science courses, as appears to be the case.

As one colleague at the University of Auckland said, “It's quite extraordinary that we are launching a course called "Epistemological justice: indigenising STEM" while at the same time we're being forced to cut science courses.”  

There is a clear logical fallacy in any university course that seeks to indigenise STEM:

·           As regards STEM subjects, when European colonists arrived in the late 18th and into the 19th century, Māori scientific/technical knowledge was approximately at the stage of other developing societies at or pre-3,000 BC, acknowledging that the spiritual/vitalist/animist parts of matauranga Māori would have been differentiated form those of other societies by the names for, and qualities ascribed to, flora, fauna and inanimate objects, and also to gods such as Ranginui/sky father.  This was a society without the wheel, and without mathematics, physics, chemistry or biology, but which had extensive phenomenological understandings of food sources, that fire cooks and can cause burns, that clean water is necessary for life, that some plants have medicinal properties, weather patterns, and navigation by the sun and stars, etc. Such knowledge is of very considerable interest from a historical point of view, clearly desirable to preserve for cultural reasons, but of current relevance to STEM courses only if it complements modern science in a functional way, as unpalatable as that is to those who would include it.

·           STEM rests heavily on knowledge discovered during the liberal enlightenment from the 17th century up to today, and modern science (not “Western” science, as many non-Western societies Asia, the Middle and the far East contributed, for example) went through similar earlier processes of knowledge development through observation of nature and phenomenological discovery, as did matauranga Māori.  It then developed through new discovery to the present day.

·           Unless it adds science content to a STEM degree programme, to insert matauranga Māori or other indigenous knowledge back into modern STEM education means excluding something else that had been deemed important in any one course, with older knowledge and belief that has long been superseded in the same way in which Mechanical Engineering students no longer study the steam engine – as I confess we did when I was a student!  STEM course content is continually updated to reflect latest scientific discovery, computational techniques, and the advent of AI, for example.  When I was a student, we were learning about how transistors worked, as they were then a recent development. By contrast, we spent little time on obsolescent radio valve technology. Why should we be obliging students to study something in the sciences that should be sitting in a course outside modern science (e.g. history, history of science, anthropology). Abbot et al., in “In Defense of Merit in Science” [3] compare liberal epistemology, under which the scientific method falls, versus critical social justice theory, where indigenous and traditional knowledge find a more comfortable home. To “indigenise” STEM can only mean to re-introduce older knowledge and belief into courses where it is no longer relevant, and to do so can in my view only be for ideological or political purposes, as otherwise it defies logic.

My foregoing remarks are not intended to diminish or disrespect traditional knowledge. However, curricula in STEM degree programmes are constantly under pressure to introduce new content and drop material that can be let go.  Even this is problematic, and past considerations have been given to increasing the Bachelor of Engineering (Hons) from four to five years to avoid dropping essential content.  In our modern world we cannot afford to impose traditional knowledge content in science programmes for purely ideological reasons (or to determine academic staff career progression based on their acceptance or adoption of this ideological position).  Apart from the potential diminishment of the overall scientific content of the degree, doing so will inevitably reduce the standing of these degree programmes internationally.

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John Raine is an Emeritus Professor of Engineering, and has formerly held positions as Pro Vice Chancellor (Research and Innovation) at AUT, Deputy Vice Chancellor (Albany and International) at Massey University, and Pro Vice Chancellor (Enterprise and International) at University of Canterbury. He has had a long-term involvement in NZ’s innovation system and chaired the Government’s Powering Innovation Review in 2011.

References

1.         David Lillis, “New Initiatives at Massey University”, Breaking Views NZ, June 2024. https://breakingviewsnz.blogspot.com/2024/06/david-lillis-new-initiatives-at-massey.html 

2.         Michael Johnston and James Kierstead, “Blessing or Bloat? Non-Academic Staffing in New Zealand Universities in Comparative Perspective” Research Report, New Zealand Initiative, 1st August 2023 https://www.nzinitiative.org.nz/reports-and-media/reports/blessing-or-bloat-non-academic-staffing-in-new-zealand-universities-in-comparative-perspective/

3.         D. Abbot, A. Bikfalvi, A.L. Bleske-Rechek, W. Bodmer, P. Boghossian, C.M. Carvalho, J. Ciccolini, J.A. Coyne, J. Gauss, P.M.W. Gill, S. Jitomirskaya, L. Jussim, A.I. Krylov, G.C. Loury, L. Maroja, J.H. McWhorter,S. Moosavi, P. Nayna Schwerdtle, J. Pearl, M.A. Quintanilla Tornel, H.F. Schaefer III, P.R. Schreiner, P. Schwerdtfeger,  D. Shechtman, M. Shifman, J. Tanzman, B.L. Trout, A. Warshel, and J.D. West, “In Defense of Merit in Science”. Journal of Controversial Ideas 2023, 3(1), 1; 10.35995/jci03010001, pp1-26.