Studying In New Zealand: November 2014

In late September, after meeting with a senior advocate at Auckland University in late September and making a brief stop at the Human Rights Commission at the bottom of Queen Street, I decided to spend the rest of this sunny, spring afternoon trekking to Ponsonby, a well-to-do neighborhood in the Auckland hills overlooking the harbor. With independent cafes named Clear Water Peak and Bam Bing Ponsonby, and thrift shops selling affordable, expensive looking boutiquey clothing, Ponsonby is New Zealand’s answer to Tribeca in New York City. From my table at the AllPress Café, a fair trade business occupying a sliver of sitting space barely large enough for five customers, I have a clear view of the Sky Tower’s peak in the distance. Here, the main thoroughfare is Ponsonby Road, and despite the noise the busy traffic generates, it is nothing compared to the congestion and bustle of Queen Street and Newmarket.

As I sip my fair trade coffee, allowing the bitter brew to linger on my palate, I take notice of the difference in my stress level. Compared to this morning, when I anxiously awaited my 11:30 am meeting with the senior advocate, I am now much calmer and happier. Simply by physically removing myself from the university environment and making the transition into another part of the city, my mood changed considerably. I realize that I live in two different worlds in New Zealand. In one world, I can enjoy a fairly normal life, where I go for the occasional run, sightsee landscapes and town settlements, where I learn a little bit about the history of neighborhood places, tick off errands on my various to-do lists, and have random conversations with people.

The other world is the university, where I have become preoccupied with university politics and the uneasy sense of being confronted with the unknown, a feeling that should not even be there. In university life, there should be the certainty that efforts spent on academic work will reap positive rewards. I have always understood that this nexus between studying and academic success is a normal if not accepted part of university life, but the academic experience in New Zealand is surprisingly antithetical to this knowing. Unlike my previous graduate experiences in Australia and America, in which I could always count on making the grade if I put in the effort and could rely on an honest appraisal of my assignments, in New Zealand the diligence, discipline, and meticulous efforts invested in my academic work means little. Here, I sense that something else underlies the assessment that only the academic staff understand. I can connect this sense to quantitative and qualitative evidence that emerge in the labor demographics of the university and in the comments rendered about my research proposal.

The most recent decisions by the university leadership, with respect to my stringent efforts to retain my doctorate standing at the University of Auckland, merely stokes my suspicions that something else is at work here. Since meeting with the Senior Advocate, I have lodged and filed two appeals with the university leadership, including the Office of the Vice Chancellor. In both appeals, I highlighted the errors in the interpretation of policies (including the assertion that doctorate students could not appeal decisions by the Board of Graduate Studies) and the lack of merit in the comments from both my PhD Committee and that reviewing my final research proposal, all of which I argued amounted to a biased judgment of my academic work and of my doctorate candidacy. What I realized, after receiving the response from two leaders of the Graduate School and the Office of the Vice Chancellor was that not only is there a reluctance to follow rules and regulations, there is just as much a tendency to rubber stamp a student out of a doctorate program. These responses reinforced the understanding that the leadership does not exercise the checks and balances embedded in the university by virtue of its mission statement and the New Zealand federal laws that apply to the protection of individuals from unfair treatment. Also to my surprise, from these responses to my appeals from the university leadership, I discovered that they are not aware of the responsibilities and obligations of the University of Auckland to the partnership agreement signed with its education partners. Called the Program Partner Agreement (PPA), this document is a contract made between the US Department of Education and all of its education partners in regards to the administration of the US federal loans (the US federal loan is funded by the US Department of Education). Among other things, this agreement governs areas of academic administration.

This moment at the AllPress Café is representative of the intersection of the two worlds that now defines my life in New Zealand. At the same time, I am cognizant of the fact that all this drama riddled with unnecessary stress, time and mind energy spent on reviewing policies and laws, etc. can all be avoided if the US Department of Education bothered to review universities seeking partnership with the US Federal Loan Program beyond statements of academic quality and capabilities. I can only presume that the US DOE does not have the staff power to scrutinize every international university, but my experience with two universities in New Zealand should give them reason to start doing so now. In the two years I have studied in New Zealand, I have discovered that copyright rules and supervising guidelines are not observed and are likely not enforced. Massey University, for instance, has demonstrated a failure to exercise compliance with its policies when one of its doctorate students returned to India empty-handed following the plagiarism of his research. As I had explained in an earlier blog, when this student was about to graduate, someone had published his research exactly as he had written and designed it. Most universities, if not all, in OECD countries require that when hiring students to conduct research, students must not only be guided to pursue their own research topics, but also be given credit for their contribution to a publication. This policy generally complies with the labor laws of the OECD country.

In my case, my former supervisor at Massey implied that I did not have copyright ownership over the research I designed. When I answered in the affirmative to her question about whether or not I could take and continue my research with me to the University of Auckland (keep in mind that my studies have been funded entirely with US federal loans), she answered, “no!” What makes her response to this question even funnier is in the way she interpreted the university copyright policy. She was of the opinion that the university would be given copyright ownership through solely commercial interest; she failed to see that commercial interest is indicated by giving a scholarship to the student. The terms of the credit given to the student with respect to the scholarship are then negotiated and succinctly defined. This example is just one of many reoccurring errors in interpreting policies throughout the time I have spent in New Zealand as a doctorate student. The most recent was the assertion that I cannot take my fight to retain my doctorate standing at the University of Auckland any further than the Vice Chancellor. Others have corrected him, including an ombudsman at the Ministry of Education.

The failure to exercise the system of checks and balances normally associated with tertiary institutions implies that the university neither observes nor respects accountability. When this is the case, disciplinary action against academic staff is rarely taken and further implies that the university does not view its academic aspirations very seriously. Moreover, failing to follow the rules of due process or exercise checks and balances when the situation requires it, the university conveys the message that rules matter very little – except perhaps when the enforcement of which fits the university’s agenda.

The virtual absence of jurisprudence in the conduct of academic staff at the University of Auckland triggers feelings of doubt about my future in my program from not knowing what awaits me at the end of this road. This inability to rest comfortably in my academic capacities is an uneasy feeling for a doctorate student and the experience is unlike anything I have experienced in my previous graduate trainings. Rather, it feels more like a game of chicken: I make a move to defend myself after reviewing my rights as they are laid out in the university statutes, to which the university responds by circumventing the issue (i.e. not directly answering my questions) or outright lying about the policy.

And, so, I continue to appeal the decisions to terminate my doctoral candidacy in order to retain my doctorate standing. More than US$50,000, after all, is quite a lot of money to invest for half-baked guidance and supervising.

At least I can still take photos of street scenes in this quest to enlighten myself about the more intimate parts of Auckland. After this day, I returned to this Ponsonby neighborhood to capture the buoyant, yet languid, pace of what I consider so far to be the hippest part of Auckland City.