Unitec 'more than polytechnic'

By BOB PEARCE

The Government may have decided that Unitec cannot be a university but the reality is that on its West Auckland campus it fulfils all the criteria.

One of those is research and postgraduate work, which will be enhanced by its new graduate school.

Professor Jacqueline Rowarth, who has been appointed director of research and associate dean of the new school, has no doubts about Unitec's standing.

"The definition of polytechnic is not something which Unitec or the Auckland University of Technology (AUT) meet any more. More than half of our students are being taught at degree level and we have master's degrees. It's actually more than Lincoln University. The Government slapped an embargo on any more universities, but it would have been very much simpler if they'd let us go through the evaluation and said at the end of it 'hard luck guys, you don't meet the criteria'.

"The very fact that there was this bill passed under urgency, suggests to us they thought we would meet the criteria. Our profile as regards graduates is very much the same as AUT and they let AUT go through."

Professor Rowarth comes to Unitec from Lincoln where she was associate professor of plant physiology, with a special interest in plant nutrition and soil fertility. She is president of the Institute of Agricultural Science and has just been elected to the council of the Royal Society. In 1997 she received a science and technology medal from the society recognising her achievements in and services to science.

Her introduction to New Zealand agriculture was fairly character forming. She had been working as a student on an organic farm in Essex employing 25 people on 263ha.

She accompanied her parents when they emigrated and began work in 1976 on a remote sheep and beef farm at Awakino in North Taranaki, with 2500ha worked by her and the boss. She didn't leave the farm for five months because she had no transport.

Her studies took her to Massey, Ag-Research Grasslands and Lincoln, where she was on the staff for six years. Although she will keep in touch with her specialist subject by working with a Hamilton-based postgraduate student, Ag-Research and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology on clover research, Professor Rowarth's focus at the Unitec graduate school will be much wider.

"Unitec already has a strong area of research in education and in business," she says. "We're expanding that to try and assist some of the other faculties to move ahead. My new position is to help particularly the graduate students to work within a research culture.

"The aim will be to link in with other faculties, to provide an interdisciplinary approach. We want to provide our graduates with the market edge in terms of their leadership ability in innovation, entrepreneurship and appreciation of different research methodology.

"We want this to become a place where they can discuss research ideas so that they can hopefully come up with synergies among the different disciplines, so that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts."

Professor Rowarth is quite clear about Unitec's role. "We think we have a place as a university of technology. In this we would follow MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and nobody regards them badly any more."