International Socialists

In the wake of Seattle a lot of attention has been drawn to the role of global capitalism in sponsoring human exploitation and environmental destruction. A major part of this process has been the opening up of key government services such as electricity, water, health and social services to the influence of market forces. In this article, J.P. Ryan looks at the increasing links between corporations and the tertiary education sector.

 

 

As this issue of Socialist Review goes to press, it's still undecided as to whether or not the University of Otago administration will accept the fee freeze proposed by the Labour-Alliance Government. Waikato has already announced its adoption of the promised $35 million finance package, leaving the rest of the country's students wondering just where their "board of directors" stands on the issue.

 

Given the fact that a refusal to adopt the proposal would mean a fee increase of as much as 30% in 2002, it's a significant issue for students and workers in Aotearoa - one that will affect us all, and for years to come. This will make for increased student hardship, a greater debt burden, and will mean a further disincentive to tertiary study. In light of this, the question must be asked of why the hell has this situation developed?

 

More importantly, what can be done about it?

 

The bureaucrats in our student unions have clearly shown their commitment to soft-option tactics, and they cling to the illusion that everyone's really on the same side in this matter. Since they're unwilling to disrupt the careful "relationship" they've built up with the university administrators, they can only cop out when faced with a real confrontation over concrete issues. A look at the actual figures shows up the holes in their belief that students and staff share a common interest with the business-oriented tertiary executives.

 

The vice-chancellors who are threatening fee rises are the same corporate lackeys who have reaped pay increases of more than 40% since 1997, far outstripping average annual pay increases over the same period. Otago's very own Graeme Fogelberg has loosened his belt buckle by a hefty 45%, bringing home somewhere between $290,000 to $300,000 in 1999 - but then what's ten grand between mates, anyway?

 

The profiteering list continues at some length. Chief executives at Victoria, Lincoln, and Canterbury have all experienced the delights of sudden enrichment, as opposed to their staff. An average annualised pay increase across all sectors at Canterbury over the same period came to the paltry figure of 7.5 percent, showing pretty clearly just whose side the administration is on - their own. Standing with them at the gates to private sector heaven are those nameless corporate bosses whose work they're quite prepared to do, and all for a cut-rate price.

 

Using the university system as a manipulative tool for the ruling class agenda is nothing new, but the direction that's been taken under successive Labour and National governments since 1984 has been something a bit different.

 

Fogelberg would probably agree, and through his teeth might add that things in the tertiary sector have gotten progressively better as a result. But just what forms have these "improvements" taken? A massive student debt burden crippling the social economy, significant reductions in actual educational standards due to reduced funding, and an emphasis on increasing corporate involvement at a day-to-day level.

 

Anyone with a grain of common sense will look at that last point a little critically.

 

Since when has corporate intervention in the public realm improved anything? Any number of private sector screw-ups, from TranzRail to the present electricity "crisis," serve as convincing arguments for keeping the bosses as far away from the public interest as possible.

 

Increasingly, university and polytech administrations are redesigning the very fabric of the tertiary system to suit the requirements of big business. The $6.25 million Otago Centre for Innovation - already $2 million over budget and scheduled for completion later in 2001 - is perhaps the most blatant example of the growing corporate involvement in the universities. Last year Otago University moved to secure patent rights to the work being carried out by its academics and postgraduate students - now it is proposing to hire out its own purpose-built research facilities to the private sector in exchange for large corporate "donations."

 

Meanwhile, staff have been rewarded with job losses and attacks on their conditions of employment. However, all of this didn't stop Auckland vice-chancellor John Hood from calling for a massive increase in the level of private investment in the New Zealand tertiary sector at the recent "Catching the Knowledge Wave" conference.

 

Clearly, the election of a Labour-led Government has done nothing to check the growing corporate involvement in the day-to-day running of tertiary institutions. VCs across the country continue to follow a delirious program of right-wing idiocy. They get the results they want, usually in the form of six-figure salary and remuneration packages, or marketing campaigns that feature their very own, less-than-appealing, faces.

 

It follows from this that they assume they've got the right to mess around with the jobs and lives of workers who have given many years of committed service to the campus. At Otago cafeteria and cleaning staff are now facing a new round of job losses, and all for the purpose of jacking up the profit margins by another notch. Staff and students need to recognise that they both stand in the same boat, and that both are ultimately affected by the policies of the Registry.

 

VCs and polytech chief executives like to pretend that they're just the meat in the sandwich, forced to carry out government decisions. The truth is, they love the way that things are heading, and they will fight any moves to steer the ship of state in a different direction. Auckland's present VC is a former director of Fletcher Challenge, and a member of the Business Roundtable.

 

He shares his seat on council with two other Business Roundtable heavies, founder Harold Tritt, and Justice Elias. Victoria's line-up is equally right wing, having had Roger Kerr on board until very recently. Here in Otago we've got the chair of New Zealand's Stock Exchange, Eion Edgar, as our chancellor, while Graeme Fogelberg is a regular reader of all the fine publications produced by the Business Roundtable thugs (as occupiers of his Registry office in 1996 discovered).

 

The corporate agenda in education need not, and must not, go unchallenged.

 

Already this year at Otago there have been encouraging signs. In March over 300 students took to the streets to demand the reinstatement of the Emergency Unemployment Benefit, and in May around 70 students occupied the offices of Labour MP Pete Hodgson in opposition to proposed fee increases in 2002.

 

For it to be a successful fight however, students and workers need to recognise their common enemy, and organise accordingly. This is a central part of building a new unionised movement, since the idea that tertiary students have nothing in common with workers is an outdated relic of past decades.

 

The majority of students are not being trained as future members of the ruling class, or even as agents of the bosses with supervisory roles. Instead, they are a real and significant part of the working class of the immediate future. Actual change can only come about through recognition of this, and through unified struggle. It is to this end that we say, workers and students of Aotearoa, unite and fight!