Financial restrictions impact Auckland University's curriculum

Stuart McCutcheon, the Auckland University Vice Chancellor, has no sense of problems with remaining Elam staff, but is aware of concerns about combining disciplines. Picture / Martin Sykes

Stuart McCutcheon, in sharp suit and tie, stands surveying his domain. Hands spread on the balcony balustrade, the Auckland University Vice Chancellor ponders the photographer below in the atrium of the Old Arts Building.

He's a picture of power. Yet among this English collegiate setting of stone columns and vaulted ceilings, McCutcheon, the businessman, looks a little out of place.

Suits don't fit well here. The clock tower, with its barbed spires and neo-gothic wedding cake layers, is where rumpled academics should roam. This is their ivory tower, a sanctuary for ideas to float free as the air between the filigree ornament of this steeple to higher learning.

McCutcheon laughs when it's suggested traditional notions of a university have disappeared in a wave of managerialism and that he is the latest in a line of vice chancellors determined to run the university like a business and in a manner more hardnosed than the most corporate of corporations.

"It's an absolute nonsense," he declares, pointing to how, in the past, all decisions were highly centralised. "These days faculties and departments have their budgets and within the constraints of needing to do things properly, they make a high proportion of their own decisions. There is far more flexibility."

More flexibility for whom? McCutcheon the manager isn't well disposed to hear of rumblings of discontent from within the organisation he heads. Yes, he is aware of concerns from the Elam School of Fine Arts, but says that's because a number of staff have lost their jobs. Yes, he is aware the Dean of the university's newest faculty, the National Institute of Creative Arts and Industries (NICAI), has a number of formal staff complaints against her for bullying. But that's not unknown in other faculties. And yes, there are other departments with concerns too.

But that's normal as well - the university is a big place. As for the Association of University Staff's (AUS) ongoing industrial action over wage claims, well, McCutcheon doesn't have much time for unions.

AT the far reaches of the Auckland campus John Turner sits in his shared, cramped third floor office in Whitaker Place. Surrounded by shelves stuffed with papers and books, and his desk similarly piled high, the bearded senior lecturer in photography at Elam is a picture of an academic at work. But he's not happy, finding the university's management style increasingly inflexible. And worried too about "the potential dumbing down of the school" - an issue he's raised with the head of department and the Dean.

Turner is concerned about an "unprecedented level of confusion, suspicion, anger and fear" among academic staff at Elam. "I see talented and caring staff asked to carry out rapid and questionable academic and structural changes, in the name of financial necessity, then dumped unceremoniously for their efforts. I see senior staff including two professors and three of the most experienced senior lecturers excluded from decision making or helping to manage changes at the school."

Of most concern is a new regime installed by Elam head Derrick Cherrie which sees specialisations sidelined in favour of an "interdisciplinary" approach.

"It's a crazy tried-and-failed experiment," says Turner. "Taking away the specialist subject areas and making all the staff and all the students work together on projects means nobody is going to work to the peak of their capacity - it's bringing things down to a very low common denominator."

He says he and other staff are being pressured to teach and assess work outside their area of expertise. "I'm a specialist in photography. I'm not a specialist in painting. I shouldn't be teaching painting. I can't teach painting, I'd be hopeless."

Professor of Fine Arts Carole Shepheard echoes Turner's concerns: "These are anxiety filled days for this art school and this university." In her Customs St studio loft Shepheard slumps on the sofa. No, she's not being overdramatic. "A lot of us feel we don't know where to go or what to do with our concerns." She's thinking of working it out through her art.

Shepheard is concerned about the lack of wide consultation and believes many of her colleagues feel marginalised from any debate. "I want a pedagogical reason given for such radical change - not simply a financial one - and a clear philosophical position taken for the new structure." She has since been brought on to a steering committee to see the changes through, but is still to be persuaded about the one-size-fits-all approach to art education.

"I was, and still am, critical of the assumption that everybody can do everything." Shepheard says Elam has always been able to accommodate a wide range of art encompassing the traditional and conceptual ends of the scale. She fears that in a regime favouring generalists everyone's work starts to look the same. "Last semester a lot of the work was inorganic-rubbish-collection-meets-hot-glue gun."

OTHERS not wanting to be named voice more complaints: that young, but compliant staff are being given promotions at the expense of those with greater qualifications and experience; that a budget shortfall is being cited as the reason for staff cutbacks, but that managers refuse to open the books; that inequitable teaching hours and schedules are handed down without discussion as a punitive measure against those who have spoken out; and that staff feel they are being monitored almost every minute of the day.

A group of design students has officially complained about poor teaching, saying what they are getting differs markedly from what is promised in the University Calendar and is at odds with what is stated in the Elam Handbook. Unsurprisingly, many say staff morale is at an all time low. "People are really despondent, people are looking over their shoulders," says Turner.

The Herald wanted to see if these views were representative - to talk to Derrick Cherrie, and to the Dean of NICAI, Sharman Pretty, about the Elam concerns. Despite numerous requests to university communications manager Bill Williams, both refused interviews.

McCutcheon doesn't "have a sense" of ongoing problems with staff who remain at Elam. He is aware of concerns about the level of "multidisciplinarity", but says that is part of the underlying philosophy of NICAI - "to break down the traditional barriers between disciplines and to build capability across disciplines."

McCutcheon took the question of sidelining specialisms to Cherrie and Pretty who responded by email saying the decision to "reorientate" the sectional structure of Elam was academically driven.

"It acknowledges that contemporary artists frequently draw on a range of approaches and disciplines to develop their artistic expression ... Those students who prefer to continue to work in a single discipline genre are able to do that."

On the question of lack of consultation, low morale and a climate of fear, McCutcheon disagreed. "I don't know what climate of fear they could possibly be living in." He said he had not received any complaints from staff on these matters. "I have trouble being too concerned when staff haven't chosen to follow through on procedures that are available to them."

Pretty and Cherrie adopted a similar position by email. "Academic staff are consulted and can influence administrative decisions in the same collegial way they have for decades."

Yet the death of collegiality is a common theme expressed by staff the Herald spoke to, not just at Elam, but throughout the university.

Department of Physics associate professor Peter Wills describes collegiality as the old attitude of the Staff Common Room. "You went to the Common Room and everybody was academically equal. Expression of opinion by a junior staff member was valued as much as a professor's. People would meet there and discuss things. That doesn't happen any more."

Similarly staff and faculty meetings were a place where academics would slug it out in free and frank discussion. Wills and others say they don't bother with such meetings any more because decision making power lies exclusively with the deans and heads of department and attendance is merely to rubber stamp preordained decisions.

McCutcheon: "The suggestion that there is no collegiality is a long standing line from staff who are disaffected within the university ... If people have formed a view they don't want to go to staff meetings because they are not going to have an impact, there is nothing we can do about that."

It's hard to reconcile such opposing views other than to see them in the context of management versus workers, them and us - with a communication gulf of simmering resentment. As McCutcheon points out, "the university is not a democracy."

Nowhere is the difference more pronounced than in the gulf between Sharman Pretty and the "disaffected" staff of NICAI which comprises the schools of Architecture, Music and Fine Arts, the Department of Planning, and some programmes in dance and performing arts.

Depending on who you talk to, Pretty is described as a change agent, "the queen", autocratic, charming, extremely smart, efficient, ruthless, doing great things for the faculty, and a chainsaw. One person backed away holding up two fingers in the sign of a cross.

McCutcheon says much of the disquiet in the faculty is because of a $700,000 budget shortfall across the departments - a situation that predates Pretty's arrival in 2004 from the University of Sydney's Conservatorium of Music. He says Pretty's reluctance to talk is because she "has been through a fairly difficult time with some of these things."

But shouldn't someone in a taxpayer-funded position responsible for education be open to public scrutiny? McCutcheon says it comes down to "how much public vilification" Pretty wants in her life. "She has had quite a lot - courtesy of the union in various forms - and I can understand that she might be inclined to say there's only so much of this I want to expose myself to."

At least 10 of the 20 part-time and limited term staff who will lose their jobs at the end of the year in the Elam shakedown are contesting the cuts. "Our view is it's an unnecessary loss and waste of experience and diversity and commitment," says AUS branch organiser John Leckie. The union is challenging the legality of the terminations.

PRETTY is also trying to mop up positions in dance, music education and arts management - debris from the closure of the School of Creative and Performing Arts (SCAPA) and the merger of most of its activities back into the music department.

In April senior lecturer in music education Chris Naughton won his case for unjustified dismissal. The university, which is appealing the decision, was ordered to pay $10,000 compensation for humiliation and reimburse all salary lost.

One who experienced standover tactics was senior lecturer and dance programme co-ordinator at SCAPA Timothy Gordon, who resigned from the university in 2004 and now heads Auckland's City Ballet. "I started receiving micromanagement. It was quite sudden, extremely interfering, very investigative and also timed in a particular way to create stress."

Gordon talks about a barrage of emails, being frequently called to meetings to explain the workings of the dance programme, and regular checks on his physical whereabouts. In one instance, management questioned a dance staff member and when told that Gordon was in the studio teaching, asked why he was doing that.

Gordon was offered employment in the reassembled dance programme, but declined. He describes what he experienced as tyrannical. "I always used to describe them as 'the new management'. I never called them by name. They only think about the end result. They don't think about the process of how things are accomplished."

Others see what is happening at the university as normal upheaval in a period of transition. Associate Professor Tamas Vesmas has taught piano at the School of Music for 20 years. Like most at the university he is being asked to do more with less. When he started, he had six students. Today he has 14, including three at doctoral level. "I have more students and more responsibilities."

How does he cope? "I have to be better organised and I think, for the moment, I'm managing. I certainly think there is a limit. I signalled this problem. I don't want to complain because I love my work." Ideally he would like an assistant. He agrees there may be too great an emphasis on administration and "organising the money". But like budget cuts he sees such change as part of a worldwide trend. "I cannot imagine anybody would come here to destroy the fine teaching in the faculty."

Vesmas says while he doesn't make decisions he believes he is able to influence them - at both departmental and faculty level. "I think they are listening and when funds are available I'm sure something will be done. There is no reason things could not change for the better."

CHANGE for the better? It's a question Nicholas Tarling has been pondering. The emeritus history professor, former Dean of Arts and deputy vice chancellor was in a key position in the early 90s when managerialism rolled into the universities. The role of the vice chancellor then changed from leading academic to chief executive with the sole power to hire and fire. "Executive deans" were put in charge of faculties, and administrative managers as heads of departments. Classic line management.

"I think we missed a beat about how we were going to govern ourselves," says Tarling. "There was some kind of slippage in the difference between running things in a business-like way and running it like a business."

Oddly, in a place where thinking should be valued, Tarling says not much occurred - especially in terms of figuring out how best to meet university objectives of academic freedom, the right to do research, standards of teaching and even collegiality. "Not having thought such things through, people I think tumbled into a clumsy kind of managerialism," says Tarling, paraphrasing criticisms about the same trend at British universities.

He says academic life flourishes through the exchange of ideas. He's concerned the current managerial climate is thwarting that ideal. "If you're afraid to put your point of view and there is no opportunity for doing it, you have to wonder whether the institution is going to lose something by that or if the acquisition of knowledge is going to be limited."

The flipside of the debate is that collegial governance is slow and inefficient and that one of the reasons for the reforms of the early 90s was that universities were bogged down in a mire of decision by committee. McCutcheon says in any system there is always a balance between competition and collaboration.

"I think sometimes there's a lack of appreciation of reality. People talk about the disadvantages of the competitive system and certainly through the 90s when the competitive system was quite new and people were quite nakedly competitive there was some behaviour that was inappropriate. But the question to be asked is how would you have a non-competitive system?"