Critical thinking

For many of his toughest critics, the University of Auckland’s longstanding vice-chancellor, Stuart Mc-Cutcheon, is the archetypal manifestation of the free-market-era campus boss. At the library-closure protests in May, banners and placards reading “VC McCutcheon, Whose Side Are You On?” and “Stuart’s Got 2 Go” summed up a growing mood of discontent about his leadership and a sense of betrayal, particularly among arts students and faculty. (In fact, he is going: aged 65, he’s retiring at the end of 2019.)

There’s his apparent fixation with STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — and flash buildings to do it in. The $700,000 salary. The sharp suits. The Northern Club membership. The CEO swagger.

On his watch, some of his critics say, top-down managerialism has become standard practice at the university, and a kind of bureaucratic cynicism permeates an army of middle managers. More than one source spoken to for this story said McCutcheon himself doesn’t take criticisms of management decisions well, and that all of this has had a chilling effect on the willingness of staff to speak out against administrative decisions.

In 2018, this tension came to a nasty head. It started with the proposal that three creative arts libraries — music and dance, fine arts, architecture and urban planning — should be closed, their collections absorbed into the university’s general library in Alfred St, and jobs lost as a result. The Tertiary Education Union (TEU) representative Enzo Giordani issued an ominous warning: more slashing and burning was just around the corner.

Cuts came in the faculty of music and the faculty of education and social work, which is also going to be moved from its Epsom campus, where generations of teachers have trained.

When it came to the library closures, many staff and students, particularly at the Elam School of Fine Arts, decided enough was enough. There were public meetings, “teach-ins” and rallies. Students shut down Symonds St traffic for four hours. There were heated exchanges of letters between the TEU and McCutcheon, and accusations that the university leadership was stifling academic freedoms and gagging staff from speaking out.

Heavy-hitting English professors past and present, including Brian Boyd, Wystan Curnow, CK Stead, Michael Neill, Witi Ihimaera and Albert Wendt chimed in, writing a searing op-ed for the Herald in which they argued that the libraries decision “is a symptom of a much deeper sickness afflicting universities in this neo-liberal age that began in the mid-1980s, when vice-chancellors were formally redefined as CEOs”.

For one side, these upheavals represent the tip of an ideological iceberg: a sense that, for years now, the arts have been under attack in an institution, backed by successive governments, that values STEM subjects above all else; that McCutcheon wields too much power; and that, consequently, the university has lost its way — lost its democracy, and its commitment to critical thinking, creativity and free expression.

For the other side, though, this is simply the reality of 21st-century university life. In a globally competitive environment and operating with straiteneddifficult calls for the greater fiscal good. Three separate libraries, serving four per cent of the university’s population, were, in this framework, ripe for a restructure. Likewise, departments with waning student enrolments.