NZ tertiary institutions risk going broke by going a bit woke

Victoria University is losing students despite changing its name.

As branding miscalculations go, the story of what used to just be called Victoria University takes some beating.

Venerable by local standards — it just celebrated 125 years in academic business here in the New Zealand capital — the university’s respectable academic reputation has until recently made it a destination of choice for around 22,000 students, including in the not-too-distant past Prime Minister Chris Hipkins.

Victoria has also long done well in the trans-Tasman scramble for fee-paying foreign students, whose surging numbers over recent decades have added much colour to the local city and even more hard cash to the university’s coffers.

Today the trend is in another direction. Enrolments at Victoria tumbled by 12.1 per cent this past academic year, the biggest such drop experienced by any of the country’s eight publicly funded universities.

Coincidentally, perhaps, it comes at a moment when, thanks to a number of ill-starred rebranding campaigns, Victoria has become a bit of an unwitting player in the wider cultural battle going on against historical place names and everyday language.

The institution’s new vice chancellor. Nic Smith, fresh from a stint as provost at the University of Queensland, warns worse could yet be to come without something drastic being done about the latest “confronting” figures.

It’s not as if blame for the situation can be blamed on rising costs of living, a buoyant job market or part of the lingering economic hangover from the government’s Covid spend-up. Not when other universities in New Zealand — Lincoln, Waikato and, especially, Canterbury — are still registering strong upticks in enrolments over the past 12 months.

As Education Minister, Chris Hipkins nixed the original plan to rename Victoria University Wellington. Picture: Getty Images.

Victoria’s current woes almost certainly go back to the tenure of a previous vice chancellor, Grant Guilford, a well-regarded administrator and scholar who is yet remembered in some quarters for waging an aggressive campaign to dump the university’s name.

Declaring that the name Victoria was “dimming our international standing,” Guilford tried for many years to have the institution reconstituted as the University of Wellington.

The education minister of the time, Chris Hipkins, nixed the scheme. Undeterred, the university seemingly doubled down, adding the University of Wellington legend to most of its signage and literature regardless, while allowing the old name to appear in smaller lettering, Last year, the university even implored the local bus operators to get rid of “Victoria

University” from their maps.

Ostensibly, Guilford only wanted to do for the Kiwis what the late Alan Gilbert did in 2004 when the former University of Melbourne vice chancellor went to England and oversaw the merger of the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology and (hem!) Victoria University of Manchester, blending them into what today is known as the University of Manchester.

In the case of the Wellington university, however, mergers were never an issue. Nor, actually, was the other argument that thousands of intending foreign students were somehow muddling the Victoria in Wellington with one in Melbourne — a bit like the American guy in the apocryphal Kiwi story who boards a plane for Oakland but ends up in Auckland.

Rather, the problem seemed to be with the monarchical name itself and its undoubted “colonial” antecedents.

Victoria University is now also known as Te Herenga Waka

Complicating matters further, the entity formerly known as Victoria University has not only become, to most intents and purposes, Wellington University, but also Te Herenga Waka, a Maori designation whose meaning may have local resonance but would surely puzzle the lucrative foreign students-in-waiting who could not be expected to understand its significance.

Victoria is not the only Kiwi institution of higher learning to have gone a bit woke and ended up a little broke.

The university’s problems are of a similar order to New Zealand Institute of Skills and Technology, a “super-consortium” of 24 polytechnic institutions now known as Te Pukenga, which made headlines earlier in the year for having issued a 30-page guidebook of on-campus language restrictions.

It recommended, for example, that faculty refrain from referring to students as such but rather akonga (a Maori word for the same) and kaimahi rather than staff, whanau for colleagues.

A touch mystifyingly, as well, educators were forbidden to use the apparently deeply offensive expression, “it’s early days”.

More recently, the same operation was back in the news after announcing its operation is also experiencing a dramatic loss of revenue as thousands of prospective students opt to spend their early post-secondary days elsewhere. It has said it will be shedding hundreds of staff, hocking off assets. It has also asked the government to help with $300m in emergency funding.

And the educational lesson in all this? Most traditions are steeped in messy history if you look closely enough, but those traditions also endure for a purpose that ought to give pause.

One doesn’t need to have a five-star MBA to appreciate the folly in change for change’s sake. But hey, if you’re looking to get such a business degree, there’s a university in Wellington that will be unusually keen to review your application.

David Cohen is a Wellington journalist and author. He writes frequently about academic affairs.