SAANZ Conference 2024

Chair: Neil Vallelly

Java Grant
Contradiction in the Neoliberal Academy: A Critical Case Study of The University of Auckland Administration

The premise of higher education in Aotearoa is of education, research and service to the community. However, NZ universities have been captured by capitalist demand for skills training and have retreated from their democratic purpose–to be critical. Administrations reduce staff to labour, students to customers, and “individual gain is prized over any public good” (Harward, 2016, p. 7). This research examined the discursive artefacts from the rupturing contradiction between capitalist imperatives and performative identity of the University of Auckland (UoA) during the 2022 university staff strikes. The strikes permissed participants to challenge the narrative of universities sustained by neoliberal administrations as suddenly “functions and mal-functions, actions and in-actions [were] all on open display” (Matthewman, 2015, p. 15). A constructivist framing enabled comparison between competing narratives of the Academic Capitalist administration. Narratives were identified through a multimodal discourse analysis of strike and university-related media. The UoA administration is identified as creating and distributing misleading symbolic structures that maintain hegemonic power structures. This work frees academic labour from negotiating with bad faith administrations, empowered instead to “seek alternative, and/or radically transformed forms of the university” (Stein, 2020, para. 3 and participate as “part of the ‘grit’ [preventing the] neo-liberal world system functioning smoothly” (Clarke, 2004, p. 44).

Brian S. Roper
Neoliberalism’s War on New Zealand’s Universities: A Critical Analysis and Evaluation of Tertiary Educational Policy-Making from 2017 to 2024.

The Tertiary Education Union estimates that the cumulative underfunding of universities by the Key-English National Government amounted to $3.7 billion from 2009 to 2018. University staff and students hoped that the Sixth Labour-led Government would be better, but apart from making the first-year fees free, it was even worse with respect to underfunding our universities. In Budget 2023 the tuition funding component (SAC) was increased in nominal terms by 5% which Chris Hipkins repeatedly claimed was “the biggest funding increase for tertiary education in 20 years.” The truth is the complete opposite. Hipkins neglected to acknowledge that the SAC funding component only makes up around 41% of the total revenue streams for most NZ universities and also that inflation was then the highest it had been for 20 years. Allowing for inflation, and the maximum fee rise caps set at 1.7% for domestic students in 2022 and 2.75% for 2023, Labour presided over deep cuts to funding of New Zealand universities. Chronic cumulative government underfunding and large funding short-falls from 2020-2023, combined with the loss of international student tuition fee income, pushed six of eight NZ universities into various states of financial crisis. Senior management responded by attempting to drive through cuts to scholarships, degrees and staff. This provoked resistance by staff, students, and their unions. In Budget 2024, the Sixth National-led Government increased total nominal funding for tertiary education from $4.934 billion in 2024 to $5.151 billion in 2025, but Treasury’s estimates suggest it will then cut funding in real terms from 2026 to 2028. Most likely, it will allow substantial tuition fee rises to offset declining government funding per student during this period. This paper describes and critically analyses the imposition of fiscal austerity on tertiary education by Labour and National governments from 2017 to 2024, and considers the best options for successful resistance.


Kate Jack
Cruel Optimism: Queer Students & Queer Futures in New Zealand’s Neoliberal Universities

Universities appear as spaces of promise for queer and LGBTQ+ people, rare sites where we expect the ability to safely exist, explore our history and knowledge, and build a secure life. Despite this appearance, largely brought about by ever-intensifying institutional DEI discourse, decades of research have established that queer and LGBTQ+ students continually report discrimination, harassment, and non-belonging whilst at university, alongside poor post-study outcomes. And, despite their apparent failure, the same solutions are continually proposed: more diversity policy, equity programmes, inclusion initiatives. I suggest that to move us beyond this cycle, researchers must seriously interrogate the university as an institution. Taking New Zealand as a case study and grounded by queer methodology, I use unstructured interviews, poetic transcription, and queer vandalism to explore the dis/connect between what the university promised students and their actual experience, contextualised by a critical exploration of the colonial origins and neoliberal restructuring of higher education. Recognising universities as core institutions for neoliberal reproduction, I argue that the neoliberal government of students serves a normalising function that works to regulate queerness through the creation of homonormative, marketised subjects. Here, a relation of cruel optimism emerges—despite their promises, universities as we know them necessarily prevent queer flourishing. How might we move beyond this condition?