A right-wing government vows to modernise academia: what are the chances?

And another shot at a four-year term for the NZ parliament.

The Universities Advisory Group (UAG) has released a final report – and the minister, Shane Reti, has announced the next steps for the government.

There’ll be a new Tertiary Education Strategy and a University Strategy Group that will “strengthen collaboration between universities, government, industry and global experts”. The Strategy so far is set out in one page of colourful platitudes.

The minister has not, however, accepted the UAG’s highest-priority recommendation: to establish a New Zealand Universities Council (NZUC), carved off from the present Tertiary Education Commission, to allocate funding to and monitor performance of the eight universities. This is a government that’s averse to creating new bureaucracies, and the UAG should have seen that coming.

After more than a year’s work to produce an uninspiring document, it looks like most of the UAG’s recommendations won’t be implemented, given that its “highest priority” one has been rejected by the minister. Many of its subsequent recommendations depended on the creation of a NZUC.

Moreover, the government won’t follow the UAG’s suggestion to limit entry to universities in the interests of academic excellence. The UAG report says: “The higher the entry standard, the more likely that the university’s reputation is enhanced, with flow-on effects for the marketability of graduates, the retention of high-quality faculty, and research intensity” (para. 119). Exclusivity creates desirability, but RNZ’s John Gerritson reports that this idea is also rejected.

There are always calls for greater “collaboration” between universities, but the incentive to push for growth has made them a more competitive breed. It’s not yet clear how a business-oriented centre-right government will manage this, but the proposed Strategy will no doubt be a turning point.

The government does, however, accept the UAG’s recommendation to ditch the time-consuming, individual-level assessment that was used for the Performance-Based Research Fund. (In fact, the government had already ditched it!) They will replace it with a simplified Tertiary Research Excellence Fund based on institution-level statistics. The PBRF was originally intended to improve research quality in New Zealand’s tertiary education sector (polytechs could participate in it too), but the UAG now talks about “research intensity” – which is not the same goal. But it’s high time the funding system adopted openly accessible metrics, rather than forcing all academics to submit portfolios for grading by peer-review panels.

The old PBRF methodology was an unethical state-mandated inspection of individual employees, imposed without the participants’ consent. Despite some supposed “rules”, it had become inextricably mixed up with internal employment matters, affecting academics’ careers and their research plans. It caused unnecessary stress and anxiety for thousands of people. (But don’t exams do that too?)

The UAG report makes some quotable comments, which will probably be ignored by university administrators, and it fluffs around on the big issue of AI.

“Universities should be careful to restrict compulsory courses to those required by vocational bodies or to where there is strong disciplinary and pedagogical justification” (para. 31). For example, a compulsory course introduced by the University of Auckland generated political controversy and mixed reviews from students, as covered by Radio NZ in March at the commencement of the academic year. Apparently not all students felt they needed to learn about New Zealand history, the Treaty of Waitangi and indigenous culture. But it suited the university to corral large numbers into low-cost-per-unit courses.

“University councils and administrations should give more attention to the negative impacts of the expansion of centralised university systems and services on staff welfare and morale and the mitigation of these effects” (para. 36). Universities are top-heavy bureaucracies that are taxing their core academic activities out of existence, as well as stressing people out. In my experience, one can raise this concern at the highest level, but no one cares and it only gets worse.

“Universities must serve societies that have a breadth of political and ideological views. When they undertake actions that are perceived as manipulating those views or of promoting a particular ideology, their social licence is threatened. Yet universities are important and critical places of debate and contested ideas” (para. 300). Unfortunately, that needs to be said out loud these days, and it’s nice that the UAG has stated the obvious.

The impact of AI on university education

The UAG recognises that “most students now entering university are using generative AI including large language models and this is now a norm within society, [so] universities will have no choice but to accept that reality and consider how that affects teaching and assessment” (para. 152). But its recommendations on AI are utterly ineffectual. “Strategic oversight will be needed…”. “Government and universities must be ready to seize technological opportunities…”.

What they don’t talk about are the massive contradictions underlying the ongoing changes. Let’s look at it first from the students’ point of view.

Young people are indeed living in a world full of AI-generated stuff and they know how to use AI tools. They are told that AI is their future, and yet also that it threatens their future, as jobs will disappear. But, at uni, they can only use it in strictly limited ways, for fear that they might be caught cheating.

It was reported that at one university, for example, some students seemed to perform much better than expected in one assignment, and so the whole class had to talk to the lecturer in person to demonstrate their knowledge. Failure to pass the oral test could result in an investigation or even disciplinary action. It sounds like a form of collective punishment. That’s the “gotcha” approach to AI at uni.

An alternative model brings AI into the learning process, for collaborative, responsible and critical uses of these new tools. After all, graduates will go into AI-based work in future anyway, so it may be better to accept that fact and learn how to use AI productively and with a critical mind now, rather than be outclassed by it later. But that does mean rethinking the pedagogical model – and the UAG wasn’t up for that challenge. It’s not clear if they even understood the problem.

With AI performing many of the tasks of entry-level jobs, employers may need less of the young talent that’s emerging from the universities.

For the last 30 years, governments have assumed that a more highly educated workforce is a good thing. The more the better. But degrees are often just a first-cut criterion for recruitment into jobs that don’t really require a university education. Or maybe professional bodies decide to mandate degrees for accreditation, simply because new higher qualifications set new standards, even though shorter (and less costly) ones could achieve the necessary skill-set.

Is the supply of university graduates now exceeding the demand? The opportunities for graduates may simply be diminishing as employers reap productivity gains through new AI systems rather than through hiring new workers. It’s reported that, in the US, young degree holders “are facing a deteriorating job market, with a rise in unemployment rate that is sharper than for any other education or age cohort” – despite a thriving economy there. With AI eliminating graduates’ entry-level roles, “the consequence is not temporary unemployment, but sustained underemployment, credential inflation, and the erosion of the value of a college degree”. (Levanon, G., Sigelman, M., Mamertino, M., de Zeeuw, M., Guilford G. No Country for Young Grads. Burning Glass Institute. July 2025)

New Zealand isn’t the same as the US, but the basic problems may be similar. The AI effect may contribute to a net migration loss of New Zealand citizens, for instance, as qualified people go in search of meaningful employment. If employers can’t utilise and retain human talent (because they need it less), the whole country risks squandering the productivity and wellbeing gains that higher education is said to bring. And yet, NZ universities (and the UAG) are not reacting very smartly to the AI revolution. They are mainly defensive, bureaucratic and compliance-minded. But the changes will happen anyway.

The UAG hasn’t been very effective, nor even very interesting, and I’m wondering why the minister didn’t just get on with the job. I guess the government had more urgent priorities for its first year, and it was useful to stage a consultation process for legitimation purposes.

If you’re thinking of doing a degree, you may as well major in ancient history, if they still teach that.

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Third time lucky for four-year parliaments?

An amended and improved 4-year term bill emerges from select committee.

Readers may recall that I opposed the Term of Parliament (Enabling 4-year Term) Legislation Amendment Bill – in the form in which is was first introduced to the House.

Four-Year Term of Parliament Bill: why I oppose it

That’s not because I opposed in principle the New Zealand parliament moving from a maximum three-year term to four. I opposed the Bill at the time because it included a complicated contingency around select committee memberships. That conditionality would have meant that the term of parliament would be three years by default, but could be raised to four years after the election if select committee memberships were in line with the proportions of parties in the House that aren’t in government. This was sold as an improvement in the constitutional “checks and balances” against excessive powers of the executive. But it would also have looked like a shady deal: “we get one extra year in the Beehive; you guys get more perks on committees”.

Head-to-head pre-election debates between the leading contenders for PM would probably include the question: “three or four years in office?”

But, when they voted, the voters wouldn’t know for sure what the maximum term would be. The decision about “three or four years” could be announced by the prime minister as late as three months after the new parliament had first met. That would have violated basic values of representation. It was a daft idea!

The amended bill that’s now reported back from the committee for second reading has removed the t’s and c’s around party proportionality on subject select committees – a matter that many voters wouldn’t have taken seriously or may even have viewed with suspicion.

I’m no longer opposing this bill, as amended, and hence I’m not opposing a referendum on whether the maximum term of parliament should be three or four years. I’ll remain impartial on which it should be, however. There are good arguments for 3 and for 4 years, and I encourage people to consider the matter carefully.

I expand on this in an article in The Conversation.