This year, the University of Auckland launched mandatory courses focused on a particular view of New Zealand history, Te Tiriti, and indigenous “knowledge systems”— which is to say mātauranga Māori — for all first-year students.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re studying engineering, accounting, science or arts, you will have to enrol in one of the Waipapa Taumata Rau (WTR) papers, even if you can see no value in the topic, and object to having to pay for it. Domestic students are obliged to pay fees of more than $1300 for the single paper but international students are being stung for up to $5730.
It should come as no surprise to the university’s Vice-Chancellor, Dawn Freshwater, and her management team that the courses are not universally popular. A petition titled “Stop the WTR100 Series Courses ASAP” has gained 1467 signatures across multiple faculties since it was launched in early April.
The organisers of the petition were very careful to make it clear that their objection isn’t to students being taught about the Treaty and “the true significance of Māori history in modern Aotearoa” per se but rather the execution of the course material.
Their objection centred on students’ assessments that “the content is vague, poorly structured, and disconnected from the degrees they are enrolled in… It is oversimplified, politically one-sided, and lacking academic depth.”
However, students who gave their reasons for signing the petition were more forthright. One said: “The course has a very small amount of valuable content compared to the amount of bullshit content presented... I haven’t learned shit so far and we’ve done almost six weeks of it. Waste of time, waste of money, waste of resources. Never should have been created in the first place.”
Others described it as “racist”, “brainwashing”, “propaganda and the grooming of our youth”, and “woke nonsense”, with the content controlled by “apartheid enthusiasts”.
One female student wrote: “It’s just pure, unnecessarily forced, indoctrination of Māori mythicism and totally inaccurate New Zealand history, as well as the extortion of money... 99 per cent [of students] would elect to spend their course fees on a subject they are passionate about, rather than these Marxist courses designed to turn them into angry radicals.”
It is not clear how many of the signatories are first-year students currently enrolled in the courses (which are tailored for different faculties) but the university estimates around 7000 students in total will complete them this year.
Dissent is not limited to the petition; criticism is common on social media. A common theme is that the WTR courses “feel kinda like a scam”, with accusations the university is using them to extract income from a large number of students while making savings by under-resourcing their tuition. They are also widely viewed as “compulsory indoctrination” rather than education.
One Facebook friend contacted me to say: “I wonder how long the WTR papers will continue. My son is at Auckland Uni and he said the students are pushing back in class; the lecturers are very defensive.”
Making the course not only compulsory but also costly is a bold and risky move by the university to enforce its programme of “decolonisation” — aka “indigenisation” — on students. And it is certainly not hiding its long-term aim to expunge what it sees as the oppressive influence of “colonisation” and euro-centric structures in its teaching.
In fact, when Eru Kapa-Kingi — a vice-president of Te Pāti Māori who develops and teaches courses for Law School — was interviewed for an Auckland University newsletter in March, he said: “We need to start realising that universities were one of the primary tools of colonisation in Aotearoa, replacing Māori philosophy, Māori ways of thinking, speaking and acting. That places an obligation on academics today to really contribute to the deeper, longer-term decolonisation project”.
It is not difficult to find other papers apart from the compulsory first-year courses that are motivated by the same ideology.
One is the Anthropology third-year paper titled “Whiteness in the settler state”. The course description says it “examines the concept and construct of ‘whiteness’ within the construct of the ‘settler state’ through the lens of critical anthropology. Explores the development of white supremacy as an ideology and expression of social and political power and provides students with the conceptual and intellectual frameworks to consider the invisibility of whiteness as a social habit.”
You’d have to say, the “invisibility of whiteness” looks very much like code for “unconscious bias”.
Students are also advised, “They may find course material challenging and that they may be asked to engage in significant self-reflection in order to engage properly with the academic work.”
It is clearly not enough to discuss the topic dispassionately as you might expect of a university course. The warning seems to signal a struggle session in which only those who humbly and remorsefully accept their “white privilege” will succeed.
Just as extraordinary is the course outline for a second-year paper in Māori Studies. The blurb for “Māori 233: Tikanga Ancestral Ways” announces the course is “tapu”:
“Due to the tapu nature of the content of this course, students are required to attend all lectures and tutorials as these will not be recorded.”
A university that has courses transmitting priestly knowledge classed as “sacred” is turning itself into a seminary.
In mid-March, Act called on Auckland University to scrap the WTR courses, describing them as a “perversion of academic freedom”.
David Seymour said: “It is actually a form of indoctrination because it’s largely being taught by people outside a particular faculty, for frankly political purposes rather than educational.”
And while there is “an element of truth” in the assertion that the university is independent and is free to do what it wants, he intended to “appoint better people” to the University Council who have the “ultimate say”.
This caused consternation among left-leaning academics, including Dame Anne Salmond. On LinkedIn, the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Auckland University described Seymour’s stand as “a case of ideological overreach by a party backed by only 8.6 per cent of the electorate”. She provided a link to an article about Nazi Germany and the USSR as evidence of what can happen when academics bow to a government’s prescription.
Dave Frame, a professor of physics at Canterbury University who has also worked as a policy analyst for Treasury, didn’t share the Dame’s alarm at Seymour’s stance. He replied: “I think you’re misinterpreting what Act is trying to do. I think they’re trying to make sure that compulsory university classes do not become political indoctrination exercises. This seems a reasonable request... If we stick our fingers in our ears and tell them it’s none of their business, when so much of university revenue comes from government sources, then we put those revenue streams at risk.”
He sees Act’s position as a shot across universities’ bows: “Academics who are not of the left are likely to welcome the attempt to formalise institutional neutrality. (I certainly do.) Basically, I think folks on the right are trying to give universities a chance to reform themselves. We should take it… Why should we expect governments (left or right) to forever tolerate state-funded institutions which show evidence of clear political bias?
“My hunch is that they will give universities a couple of goes at reforming ourselves, and then go the Henry VIII/monasteries route. They’ll pluck out and save medicine, engineering, bits of science, law, and then simply defund the rest and sell the land beneath them. There was no great clamour to restart the monasteries, was there?”
Even a decade ago, such a prediction would have seemed preposterous and scarcely believable but that was before Donald Trump began his battles with prestigious US universities over their political bias, including the threat of cutting federal funding to Harvard and removing its tax-free status.
And it’s not as if New Zealand’s academics haven’t already had a taste of the government’s scalpel. In December, Science minister Judith Collins cut all support for the social sciences and humanities from the $77 million Marsden Fund. She also changed the fund’s terms of reference to mandate 50 per cent of its grants should go to supporting “proposals with economic benefits to New Zealand”.
Various online sites have publicised examples of the fund supporting research in the nation’s universities that can only be described as absurd:
• $360,000 to study Big Things such as the Ohakune Carrot, with a focus on “a critical gaze to the privileging of Pākehā-centred narratives in current research on roadside “Big Things” and “Weaving together feminist, participatory, and filmic geographies, this project seeks to re-centre alternative stories currently hidden in the Big Things’ shadows.“
• $360,000 to collect disabled indigenous stories about climate change with “establishing how such stories resist ableist narratives and theorise and advance disability-centred ways of creating sustainable and just environmental futures.“
• $861,000 to link celestial spheres to end-of-life experiences to “create opportunities to rekindle the ancient connection to the stars and re-imagine the meaning of death, while also advancing understandings about the practical application of Māori astronomy in contemporary times.“
• $861,000 to help decolonise ocean worlds from imperial borders.
How long taxpayers will agree to support universities which dedicate themselves to “decolonisation” and the overthrow of “Western knowledge” — and boast about it as Auckland University’s newsletter has done — is an open question.