May Update 6: Open Letter to Warren Poh

In response to UCSA president Warren Poh's response to her previous inquiry, arts student Tanja Schwalm has written the following open letter:


Dear Warren
2 May 2006

Thank you for your considered response. I appreciate you taking the time to reply to all my concerns. I welcome, of course, that the UCSA executive opposes “the arbitrary reduction in staff”. And you are right to demand more information on the situation, and hope you will continue to push those sorts of issues in your capacity as student representatives.

However, I would suggest that if sufficient information has not been provided by now – the process, after all, has been going on for a rather long time – then something is clearly amiss, and the question is, is it enough to wait around until somebody bothers to give you all the information you would like. In fact, the only further information that will be forthcoming shortly is the names of the sacked staff members.

It is unacceptable that no adequate information and explanation that justify the staff cuts have ever been provided to students, who are, after all, paying for the services of this university. And we students are, of course, affected by the cuts, from the undergraduates who are missing out on courses, tutorials and the kind of broad education they could reasonably expect from this university, to the postgraduates who are missing out on valuable expertise in supervision, and on the opportunity to work as tutors and gain vital experience for their academic careers, for example. Furthermore, as I am sure you can appreciate, staff cuts reduce the intellectual value and qualitative output of a university, and certainly render it less attractive as a destination for prospective students and top quality staff from elsewhere.

Moreover, listening to the arguments brought forward by the AUS and staff members at the all staff forums and critics elsewhere, it is far from being a “utopian ideal”, as you suggest, to stop the staff cuts in the College of Arts immediately. It seems to me to be a very realistic option, in the absence of a deficit in the College of Arts’ earnings, and in light of the surpluses the university has achieved (without cutting any staff, I may add). Cutting staff should only ever be the very last resort. After all, the academic staff members are the reason we as students are here in the first place.

You suggest that the two Save Our Staff petitions are not enough to give you an indication of what students want, and that you need to confer with the rest of the over 15 000 strong student body. Even leaving aside the fact that the names of sacked staff members will be announced very soon and you hardly have time now to consult with such a large number of people, how are you ever going to expect to receive more than, say, three thousand responses if you are lucky? There is a reason why UCSA elections entice students with chocolate fish to vote. This is clearly unrealistic.

Therefore I would like to remind you that you do, in fact, have a strong mandate to act on exactly what the student petitions asked for. You suggest that out of the “over 15 000 students”, you not only represent the 2270 and 800 or so students respectively who signed these petitions demanding a freeze on the staff cuts immediately, but that you also represent those roughly 12 500 students who did not sign. (“This is not to say that we do not represent those students that signed, but rather we also represent those students that didn’t.”) This, it appears, would justify inaction on your part. (I note no elected student representative spoke up at the rally – presumably for this reason?)

In fact, if we followed that logic, is it not correct that at the last UCSA elections only 1 821 students voted for you personally, and if you were to represent, in the sense that you suggest in regard to the petitions, the over 13 000 students who did not vote for you, then should you not step back as president immediately, because over 87% of students did not vote for you? This is, of course, absurd. You have to go by the mandate that was given to you, by the majority of those who bothered to turn up for elections. And the mandate that was given to you by these petitions is in fact stronger than the mandate you were given to be president of this association. You have every right, and duty, to adamantly represent those students who signed the petitions, and demand an immediate freeze of staff cuts, and further to ask that a student forum be held, open to the media.

(Nobody bothered, I may add, to draft up a counter-petition. That surely gives you an idea of what the majority of students want.)

However, perhaps the most important point to me is that I do not accept what you describe as the necessary result of an open forum, that is “the lack of structure and constructive debate that a no-holds-barred question and answer section will create”. If you have ever been to a conference (or even a lecture!), you will know that in an academic environment this is common procedure. Academics respond to spontaneous, even controversial questions, all the time. After all, critical debate is what we do, what we are here for. A good chair would be able to facilitate this kind of discussion, and I would fully expect a senior academic such as Professor Roy Sharp to be able to handle this kind of situation well. In fact, an open question and answer session was part of the all staff forum. We could hardly accuse the staff members in the audience of displaying a “lack of structure and constructive debate”. What leads you to think that students’ questions would be any different? In fact, some very good points were raised at the staff forum that needed to be heard,
and which might not have been raised had all the questions been pre-prepared and filtered through a committee.

You write that your “anticipated course of action would be to construct questions that a number of people agreed with first via the UCSA website”. I find it very patronising that the UCSA deem it necessary to ‘filter’, or ‘define’ students’ questions, even to the extent that you “construct” them first and then ask people to agree to what you have drafted up. Pre-constructed questions with no open, free and significant question and answer time would certainly preclude students from responding to Professor Sharp’s answers there and then.

Instead of deciding for a ‘safe option’ of pre-selected questions and pre-selected answers, should you not be slightly braver and display some originality in relying on the reasonableness and intelligence of the students who voted for you (and of those who did not)?

You also suggest that “[s]ignificant question [sic] will be given, but only to questions that attempt to gather new information from the VC.” Who decides which questions, then, are ‘allowed’ to be asked (and answered), and which are not? It appears to me that, potential media ban aside, there is already an unacceptable degree of censorship in place. What may be old for some will be new to others, certainly in a climate where information is not readily forthcoming.

You asked in CANTA what kind of university our university is. I need to look no further than the mission statement of our very own university to tell you what kind of university I would like:

“Our purpose within the international community of scholars is to advance knowledge by research; to maintain and disseminate this knowledge through teaching, publications and critical debate; [...] to serve as a repository of knowledge and expertise; and to act as critic and conscience of society.

Our purpose within the New Zealand tertiary sector is to contribute to a tertiary education system that is characterised by excellence, relevance, academic freedom and improved access for all; to work with others to enrich intellectual discourse, educational quality and research activity [...].”
(http://www.canterbury.ac.nz/piru/mission.shtml, accessed 28 April 2006)

Sadly, this is not the university I have been experiencing over these past few months. Not only are those aims, in terms of quality of teaching, research excellence and expertise, for example, severely compromised by the proposed staff cuts and the way this whole process has been handled, but may I suggest that a student forum without spontaneous questions and, very likely, without the media presence requested by 801 signatories, stifles critical debate and the dissemination of information to the wider student community (not everyone will be able to attend), and erodes the stated values of this university, and the kind of academic culture we as students should strive for.

Yet, if as representatives of a student body, by and for students, and independent of the university’s management, you do not facilitate open and critical debate, and instead your answer to “operat[ing] within the current system” is to organise a censored forum, then your question should be what kind of student association are you creating by this course of action?

A student forum censored to the mentioned degree should be boycotted, not facilitated by our student representatives. It would not be a good look for our university. In any case, whatever form it may take (I look forward to seeing the details in CANTA, as you say), it seems to me that it is far too late for such a forum, as it would most probably happen ‘after the event’. I am disappointed by the lack of leadership shown by the UCSA representatives so far, not to mention
compassion to those who so unfairly and unnecessarily lose their jobs. I sincerely hope you will re-think your role and position.

Thank you for the opportunity to comment. I speak only for myself, and this is about all I have to say in this matter, but I would certainly encourage others who have perhaps not yet done so to voice their opinions as well.

Regards
Tanja, Arts student.