Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume. 34, Number 9. 1971

[Introduction]

Two cartoons of the vice-chancellor

Cartoon of a fallen angel being eaten by a rat next to another angel blowing a trumpet

When a university is overcrowded, who are the first to be thrown overboard? The answer, as the University Administration has recently shown us, is the students. Maoris are the first to lose their jobs in a recession; Newtown or Porirua housewives cop the final punishment - the end of the line of price increases of an inflationary welfare economy; Gallery interviewers are the first to be forced to resign from the NZBC. The place Maoris have in the labour market, housewives in the affluent society and Gallery interviewers in the NZBC the student has in the university system. Is it time for an alliance?

Let's look at these four situations. Central to each is the system's insistence that it is serving exactly those people whom it most victimises. The housewife, alias the consumer, is supposed (according to the Stage One Economics textbooks) to be exercising 'consumer sovereignty' over the entire apparatus of supply and demand. In fact she is the one out of whose tattered bag the last inflated price of some half-bankrupt backyard kiwi factory is finally paid. The Maori, whose subsistence economy provided him with a guaranteed living until the pakeha arrived, was promised all the privileges of advanced pakeha society in return for selling out to Queen Victoria New Zealand's independence. (We became independent in 1836, but now never celebrate the date.) The Maori and Island Affairs Department demanded that the Maori integrate; what integration means is the dole. The NZBC is supposed to provide an exciting, independent and thought-provoking commentary on public affairs, and the interviewer an its public affairs programmes is acclaimed by the media as the apogee of the news system, the last champion of common sense against the politicians. In fact the NZBC's best known interviewers have all left under a cloud, The only documented account of the relations between the NZBC bureaucrats and the National cabinet remains Gordon Bick's The Compass File.

And so it is with students. They are told the university exists solely to educate them; and if this is not the purpose of the university one may well wonder what it is. But the first hint of financial stringency, of overcrowding, or the first caustic aphorism from a Minister of Finance, and university administrations everywhere discuss the curtailment of student numbers.

In all these apparantly very different case histories there are obvious common elements; the rhetoric, or if you prefer the ideology of capitalist democracy, must console the people who are always the refuse of the economic, communications of university systems with the illusion of power.

There is no limit to the injury a student who really believes he is being educated will endure from the university system. (Scrutinise carefully the tortured faces of your lecturers.) There is no limit to what an interviewer who genuinely believes he is doing a public service will suffer from the NZBC. (Look at the curious relationship between David Exel and the Minister of Defence.) There is no price a housewife who believes supermarkets are devised for her benefit will not pay. And have you ever seen a Maori accountant? Who makes the decision to dump the refuse from the system when it becomes too expensive to service any other way?

This article is not intended to investigate in depth the role of the weathervane of the University Council, Dr. I.D. Campbell, who backed the last student fight about admissions because the students might have won, but initiated the first move to cut student numbers once Dr. Culliford brought out his report (and Bill Logan was safely in Australia.) If Campbell wants to cut student numbers one can be sure they will be cut, but Campbell is not the real power - the Vicar of Bray should never be confused with the Cabinet he follows right or wrong. Muldoon's first misgivings about the University system were related to the numbers of students enrolled in Political Science at Victoria University, and if the funds for Victoria's expansion have now been cut by the University Grants Committee one can guess that what part of this decision did not result from the incompetence of Victoria's negotiators came from gentle leaks from the Treasury. As Bill Logan observed, last year's rumblings about admission were also accompanied at administration level by wry obeisances to the deity of Muldoon.

But there is more to this than the general rule that at the apex of every network of our plural society stands the National Government. As Eldridge Cleaver said, "The white man turned the white woman into a weak-minded, weak-bodied sexpot and placed her on a pedestal... the white man turned himself into the omnipotent administrator and established himself in the Front Office." This is as true of the university as anywhere else; the summit of an academic career is to become the administrator of a department (called a Professor,) a position virtually incompatible with a sustained direct role in either educating students or doing academic research. So little real interest in education exists among lecturers that you will persuade virtually none of them to renounce the goal of a chair, even if it means the final close of his academic work.

The invisible link between the professor-bureaucrat and government is the solidarity of administrators. No matter how bad another bureaucrat's decision may be, no other bureaucrat can afford to expose his comrade publicly for, were he to do so, his own power would be threatened when he too made a wrong decision. In a society like New Zealand's where the businessmen are so relatively weak they have always needed bureaucrats to defend them. The link between the University Boards and the big corporations which exists in Britain and the United States is replaced by the link between the University Council and the Public Service. (Kevin O'Brien considered the most reactionary Council member stands as the best example of the obviousness and danger of this hidden link.) The favourite Government tool here is the 'independent' advisory or statutory body, each of which must have its token academic, who can be made to 'respect' (without directly obeying) Ministerial directives, and absorbs the whole follow-my-leader Public Service quite unconsciously when he does not do so enthusiastically. Here the same principle of bureaucrat-businessman coalition applies to all the students' potential allies. The man who deprived the Maori of his land to place him at the mercy of a pakeha boss who refused to employ him was a bureaucrat. The man who rubber stamps every businessman's price increase and refuses to believe in payment for housework is a bureaucrat. The man who stops the people who create broadcasting programmes following the news is a bureaucrat, who cannot allow businessmen to be libelled.

Why has this not been said before? (and it has not.) Because every student who thought of the Public Service as a potential buyer of his devalued arts degree has been afraid to think of it. Because few people have thought bureaucracies dangerous. And because the real lesson of history is that if everybody cannot administer their own affairs, the bureaucrats will do it for them. The real solution to the problem of overcrowding in the universities is for an Association of University Teachers and the Student Representative Council to jointly take over administration and sack administrators whose only solution to difficulties is getting rid of students. Either the students take over from the administrators or the administrators get rid of students. Of course, for the students to win they'd have to do their own administration well. But then could it be done much worse.

This of course would be only a begining. Consumer control of prices, worker control of unions, Brian Edwards, Gordon Bick and Austin Mitchell running the NZBC. The possibilities are endless. And are they really Utopian? The only real Utopians are those who believe that students (or Maoris or housewives) will always do what the bureaucrats tell them.

At its meeting on April 15th the Professorial Board received a memorandum from the Assistant Principal Dr S.G. Culliford: in it he argued the University Administration's case for its solution to the current accommodation crisis at this university - the stabilisation of enrolments.

Dr. Culliford summarised his memorandum as follows:
1. The University appears to have entered into an unforeseen and unprecedented period of growth which could mean a total of as many as 8000 students by 1974.
2. Growth to this extent has already placed major strains on almost all types of accommodation within the University and should it continue at the present rate without the urgent provision of further accommodation it is doubtful whether teaching could continue at the present level.
3. The building programme is lagging seriously behind and it would appear that no significant relief can be expected before the academic year of 1974.
4. Unless some steps are taken to bring the growth of the University into some relation with the building programme a deterioration in the quality of the University's work is inevitable.
5. The situation is now so serious that it is essential that the University as a whole should determine firmly what steps it should take to prevent further deterioration.
6. It would appear that the only practical step is the stabilising of enrolments at approximately their present level until facilities appropriate to larger numbers can be made available.