Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this essay are those of the author and do not reflect the views of any affiliated institutions unless explicitly stated.
I began circulating a draft of How not to run a university to colleagues nearly a year ago, in August of 2024. Since then, the piece has made its way to a diverse set of stakeholders inside and outside the university, including to members of senior management and even, I am told, government advisors. Here, I want to briefly discuss the feedback I’ve received, provide space for responses from management, issue any necessary correctives, and evaluate what all this means for the arguments I’ve laid out. I’ll then finish off by discussing some more recent events on campus relevant to the change management programme, culminating in last month’s unexpected resignation of the Vice Chancellor.
Regarding the reaction from colleagues, the responses I’ve received to date have been overwhelmingly positive. I’m under no illusions about the representativeness of this kind of feedback – those who hate the piece may not be motivated to tell me so – but the volume of positive responses from such a diverse array of sources has only strengthened my confidence in the essay’s core argument. While there will always be differing opinions about the relative merits of aspects of every new change initiative, it’s clear that a great many university academic and non-academic staff share the view that our senior management are pushing through sweeping changes based on questionable evidence, token consultation, and without giving due weight to the interests, expertise and time of staff on the ground.
The response from senior management has been different. To give credit where credit is due, there are some good things to say about the reaction from senior leadership. Over the last few months, a number of senior managers have taken the time to read How not to run a university and spoken with me about all or part of it at length, including offering their advice and, at times, even conceding that they might have gotten this or that thing wrong. I am grateful for their time, attention and honesty, and I think we need more of this kind of frank and open dialogue between staff and management. I am also grateful to senior management for not seeking to prevent publication of this essay and for explicitly acknowledging my right to express the views herein, even if they disagree with much of it.
Nevertheless, the more general overarching theme in senior management’s response has been to reject the notion that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way our university is being run. While I am entitled to my opinion, they argue, the university is, in fact, well run, and my arguments to the contrary are based on “numerous factual errors” and a misunderstanding of the constraints under which universities operate.
This reaction wasn’t a complete surprise, and I was initially philosophical about it. Maybe, despite my best efforts, I really did have the facts wrong. Maybe there really were numerous errors or blind spots in How not to run a university and maybe those errors and oversights undermined the whole argument. If so, I could spread the word among my colleagues, help to restore their trust in senior management and get back to teaching and research.
But this wasn’t how things played out. Again, to give credit where credit is due, those senior managers who had alleged factual errors agreed to actually follow through and point them out (either themselves, or by delegating to someone who would do this). This process has taken several months and I greatly appreciate the time, effort and goodwill that has gone into it. However, the results have, so far, been underwhelming.
While it seems unreasonable to insist that senior management refute any and all alleged errors in such a long piece of writing, I think it is reasonable to expect they would put their best foot forward, providing counter-evidence to knock over at least some of the piece’s core claims they felt rested on obvious errors. Yet the responses I’ve received from senior management to date have landed no such punches. Indeed, some of the data put forward as counter-evidence appear, on closer inspection, to support core arguments in the piece. Other alleged errors seem tangential or a matter of opinion. Based on this feedback, I have made a number of minor changes to the initial draft. While I can never be sure I have everything right and remain open to future corrections, the net result of this months-long process of internal review is that How not to run a university has not been seriously challenged, giving me enough confidence to share the piece more widely.
A summary of responses from senior management
I wasn’t sure whether and how to provide more detail about this exchange. On the one hand, a blow-by-blow account feels like overkill. On the other hand, giving space to senior managements’ responses to specific issues ensures their views are represented in some way. In addition, in writing this piece, one of my main aims has been to shine a light on the quality of evidence, reason and argument deployed within the university to justify top-level decision-making. In that context, the evidence, reason and argument provided by senior management in response to the piece itself seems especially germane. I have therefore decided to provide, below, some of the main counter-arguments I received from senior managers involved in change management at the university. This is not presented as their official response, just a record of some of the conversation to date. Alongside this, I give my take on the evidence and invite the reader to make up their own mind about what conclusions to draw. I’ve mostly quoted verbatim to try to minimise misrepresentation, but for issues that came up repeatedly I’ve done my best to summarise the key points. There were a couple of other alleged errors I have corrected but not highlighted because they were minor and/or I judged that those involved would prefer them to remain confidential. Readers who aren’t particularly interested in the details of this exchange with senior management can skip ahead to the section on recent developments.
Staff salaries
In response to the claim that staff salaries have not kept pace with inflation, senior management provided the following counter-argument:
Staff salaries have kept pace with inflation over an extended period of time. As you have correctly mentioned, the same cannot be said for our sources of domestic tuition revenue. I’ve included data here which tracks back a few years for your information:
I’m totally with management on the domestic tuition fees decline, but the above response confuses two different claims about university salaries. In section 2.6, I say "Those lucky enough to keep their jobs are being asked to survive on less and less and yet deliver more and more. Salaries have not kept up with inflation…” This is a claim about how much individuals receive on average for a given job. To support the claim, I cite the 2022 BERL report1, commissioned by the Tertiary Education Union, which found average salaries at the University of Auckland had fallen by 17% over the period examined. The precise numbers will vary depending on methodology and the time window considered, but this general pattern is robust. The BERL report is consistent with the union’s more recent analysis of the University of Auckland’s own salary data, which again shows salary compensation for a given role is falling in real terms – in other words, the salary of a starting senior lecturer today is less, in real terms, than they would have received as a starting senior lecturer in 2019, and the salary of a newly minted Professor today is less, in real terms, than the salary of a new Professor from 2019. The union’s analysis indicates this drop is even more significant when looking back beyond 2019.
At first blush, the above graph from senior management appears to tell a different story. It seems to show “Salary increases” keeping pace with the Consumer Price Index (CPI), a standard benchmark for inflation adjustment, at least since 2019. Doesn’t this contradict my claim and the data in the BERL report? Well, I don’t have access to the raw data used to generate this graph, but a look at past annual reports indicates that the graph is based not on average salaries or the compensation for a given role at the university, but on the university’s total salary spend in a given year.
Focussing on total salary spend can mask a decline in average salary or compensation for a given role in several ways, including shifts in the composition of available roles (like, say, an increase in highly paid managerial positions offsetting a reduction in pay for others) or changes in the total number of staff employed. Again, I don’t have access to detailed HR data to provide a full analysis, but past annual reports indicate that at least part of the explanation is we are employing more people but paying them relatively less on average. Total academic FTE increased 3% between 2019 and 2024, while non-academic FTE increased by 11%. Accounting for these increases together with concomitant salary costs in each area, average salaries declined by about 7% for academics and between 4% and 13% for non-academic staff (depending on whether you include university subsidiaries in the calculation, which saw disproportionately high increases in salary costs for non-academic staff over the period).
The university’s total salary expenditure and the compensation we offer each employee are both important components of how we run our university. But so is the distinction between the two.
Academic to non-Academic staff ratios
In Section 1.5, I reviewed increases in non-academic staff numbers at the university between 2002 and 2022 and concluded that “in 2022 we employed well over a thousand more non-academic staff (an additional 46%) than we would have if we’d maintained the 2002 ratio of students to non-academic staff.” The responses I’ve received from senior management don’t seem to question the staff numbers I report (which I took from the University’s own annual reports). Instead, they present three ways this increase in non-academic staff numbers might be justified.
The first justification offered is to argue that other universities have at least as many non-academic staff as the University of Auckland. As they put it:
The University regularly compares its level of professional staffing by function to that of some 40 universities across Australia, the UK and Canada who have agreed to share such data. These comparisons indicate that the University of Auckland is staffed at or below the median level for the majority of its core professional staff functions.
This is not an unreasonable comparison to make and I don’t want to question the underlying data here, or delve into a close analysis of which core professional staff functions are under- or over-staffed according to some benchmark. That’s because, whatever these data show, the argument I make in Section 1.5 doesn’t rely on the University of Auckland being an exceptional case when it comes to non-academic staff ratios – indeed, in support of the argument, I cite a report from the New Zealand Initiative highlighting that, while non-academic staff ratios in New Zealand are high, they are part of a global trend that has been playing out around the world over the last few years. The message in the New Zealand Institute report (consistent with my own view), is not that we should be reassured by the widespread nature of increased non-academic staff ratios in universities around the world, it’s that, even granting the critical value of non-academic staff to our universities, these trends are alarming and difficult to square with claims of cost savings and increased efficiencies during this period.
The second justification provided by senior management was that most (or perhaps even all) of the increase in non-academic staff ratios is attributable to roles linked to “third income streams”, which essentially pay for themselves, like student accommodation, health, childcare, conference hosting and cafes. As it was explained to me:
The University of Auckland has over 1,000 professional staff engaged in activities where their costs are recovered from third income streams. For example we have about 180 professional staff supporting student services such as accommodation, early childhood and health where the costs are covered by specific service-related income. In 2024 we had over 300 staff employed in UniServices in supporting technology transfer and related impact services. Over the 2024 financial year the University employed an average of 2,645 equivalent full-time professional staff in roles supported by core teaching and research income. This compares to 2,427 full time equivalent academic staff.
I don’t contest this claim and I think these numbers are an important part of understanding why non-academic staff ratios have increased so dramatically in recent years – that is, many of the roles are not directly supporting teaching and research, but are linked to new activities that generate additional income for the university. The figure of 1,000 staff involved in “third income stream” roles is convenient in that it is roughly the number of staff I estimate we have added over the last two decades, based on our 2002 staff ratios and accounting for increases in student numbers. However, since we have always employed staff in third income stream roles, senior management’s figure of 1,000 can only be an upper bound on the number of new roles linked to third income streams – the actual number of new roles has to be less, likely much less. In a follow-up response after I pointed this out, senior management said:
Whilst some of these non-core services have always existed, growth in these non-core services and associated staffing has far exceeded the growth in core operations staffing over time. For example, as a driver of professional staffing in student accommodation, University operated beds have almost doubled in less than a decade.
More services are being offered, to a higher standard and we have been successful in supporting and commercialising research through Uniservices. Importantly and as communicated previously these services also generate revenue and hence staff costs are fully recovered.
Management also state that the University of Auckland has made less use of external contracting than other universities, which the New Zealand Initiative report claims only makes the increase in non-academic staff numbers more striking.
While this may be true for New Zealand universities as a whole, this is not true for the University of Auckland. Like many other universities we have outsourced certain activities such as cleaning and specialised maintenance work, but our contracting out rate has declined by 40% over the last 10 years. The University of Auckland has not outsourced several activities that many of our peers have such as traffic and parking, IT services, recruitment, marketing, access and security, student accommodation, health services, retail and outlet management etc. It should also be noted that UoA has one of the lowest contracting out rates of any university that we benchmarkable data for, and a contract out rate at half of the rate of our peer Universities in Australia.
We could dig further into these claims – for example, while a 40% reduction in the contracting out rate over the last 10 years might seem significant, the number of non-academic staff employed by the university has increased by 42% during this time. If “contracting out rate” represents the proportion of work completed by external contractors, this reduction in rate might have more to do with increasing non-academic staff numbers than an absolute reduction in external contracting.
Regardless, even if, as seems likely, a reasonable chunk of the increase in non-academic roles on campus can be linked to third income stream activities, there are good reasons to think this still leaves much of the increase unaccounted for. For example, the same New Zealand Institute report states that across New Zealand (I don’t have access to University of Auckland staff breakdowns) between 2002 and 2015 we see the largest increase in roles related to student welfare (some of which, no doubt, generate third income streams), but we also see increases across all other categories examined except technicians, a pattern that is difficult to explain as simply the result of new third income stream roles (although the report does not provide a breakdown of these roles specifically). Between 2016 and 2021, the only category to show an increase across NZ universities was “Executive staff”.
A final justification provided by senior management was that legislative changes (such as the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 and the Education [pastoral care of tertiary and international learners] code of practice 2021)as well as “changes to the domestic and international student undergraduate and postgraduate mix” have led to changes in non-academic staffing requirements. I don’t contest the fact that legislative changes may also be partly responsible for increasing non-academic staff numbers, particular in areas related to student welfare - I already note this appeal to increased regulation and compliance requirements in Section 2.4. It is also entirely plausible that shifts in the composition of domestic and international and/or undergraduate and postgraduate students have contributed (although this shouldn’t be taken for granted and warrants further analysis). But again, it is hard to believe that these changes can account for the magnitude of the increase in non-academic staff we have seen across the sector in New Zealand and elsewhere, or the breadth of roles affected, let alone the more recent increases in university executive roles.
To summarise, the response from senior management has been that increasing non-academic staff numbers at my university are in line with what we see at other universities, they frequently involve third income stream activities that essentially pay for themselves, and they are also driven by both legislative changes and shifts in the mix of students we teach. I agree these are useful points to bear in mind when evaluating recent trends in non-academic staff ratios. I also agree that third income stream activities together with changes to legislation and student composition can account for a proportion of the observed increase. However, I don’t see this as undermining the arguments I put forward in How not to run a university. Beyond the specific counterarguments I provide above, there are two more general reasons why I remain unconvinced by senior management’s response.
First, I just don’t think these factors can plausibly explain everything. The number of non-academic staff employed at my university has more than doubled since 2002. Student numbers have increased too (by about 40%), but as I note in the piece, even allowing for an increase in non-academic staff due to the increasing number of students, in 2022 we employed more than 1,000 additional non-academic staff than we would have if we’d maintained our 2002 non-academic staff ratios. Based on more recent 2024 data, the back-of-the-envelope figure I get is 1,380 additional non-academic staff. The precise number may vary slightly due to changes in reporting methods, but that is a very big number, however you look at it. To put it into perspective, even after we account for the increase in staff numbers expected due to increasing student numbers, we have, on top of that, added more non-academic staff to the University of Auckland than the total number of non-academic staff employed at the main university in our nations’ capital, Victoria University of Wellington.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, the responses I’ve outlined so far from senior management are entirely consistent with the overarching themes in this essay. We are employing more and more staff on ever decreasing salaries, and we are becoming more and more focussed on finding new sources of income generation outside our core mission of teaching and research. We should absolutely have debates about whether this is the right direction for our institutions of higher learning. For example, do we want our universities directing much of their annual budget and capital expenditure toward activities unrelated to teaching and research? How reliant do we want our universities to be on the lucrative international student market, and what are the trade-offs and risks that come with this? And what aspects of learner success, pastoral care and student mental health are the responsibility of our universities versus the wider education, healthcare and social welfare systems? But whatever the answer to these questions, the massive shift in staff composition at my university and others around the world is not a factual error.
Student Services Function Review
Senior management responded to several aspects of my treatment of the Student Services Function Review (SSFR). In Section 1.4, I question the utility of the documentation provided and why the SSFR consultation process “apparently had to happen in just a few weeks. An initial service delivery model was circulated through various channels during May 2021, although information about what was actually being proposed was, as noted, hard to come by. On the 9th of July, a ‘Final’ proposal had been generated with feedback due on August 6th.” In response, senior management stated:
The SSFR consultation process took many months. The initial Student Services Delivery Model was informed by the consultation activities mentioned above [student consultation, which I’ll discuss next] and designed by cross-university working groups throughout the first half of 2021 using targeted consultations. The SSFR Consultation Document provided a detailed explanation of the changes that were being proposed alongside detailed Position Descriptions, that in our view provided a high level of transparency on the changes that were being proposed. The review committee received 223 submissions during the consultation period of 9 July to 6 August 2021, indicating that many staff had ample time to submit feedback.
In Section 1.4, I already shared my views on the quality of the SSFR documentation provided, including these same documents. Whether consultation took “many months” or “just a few weeks” may be a question of definition. If we consider consultation to start as soon as the project lead talks to people outside the leadership team, then this process may well have taken months. But if by consultation we mean the period during which a proposal is shared openly with the wider university community, then the timeline I provide seems pretty accurate. Whether the July 9th to August 6th window is “ample time to submit feedback” is also open for debate. I contributed to two of the 223 submissions the university received during this period, but as I’ve already described, it didn’t feel like we had “ample time” to understand and respond to what was being proposed. Still, to clarify my claims about the consultation window, I’ve now amended the wording in Section 1.4 to make it clear I was referring to the university-wide consultation windows, rather than any consultation from the project’s inception to conclusion.
In Section 1.4, I also ask questions about the process of consultation with students. I say “We were told that students wanted to be able to get all the information they needed in one place, but there was no detail provided about where these student opinions came from. How many students were surveyed and how many wanted this?” Senior management replied as follows:
SSFR1 was a response to Whakamana Tangata (see student-services-strategy-summary.pdf) which was developed in 2017-18 over a period of more than 12 months. Extensive engagement activities were undertaken across the University, including with students, to raise awareness and obtain key input and feedback. This included information sessions, focus group workshops, surveys (n ~ 2,500), market research, and student journey mapping activities. In 2021 we did further focus group work with a diverse and wide range of students (and staff) which informed the development of a Hub concept.
Reading this, one certainly gets the impression that considerable effort went into student consultation. But it still doesn’t get at the question underlying the comments I make in Section 1.4, which is that, for all this heat, where is the light? Yes, sessions and workshops and surveys and focus groups were run. But where is the actual data and detailed analysis that justifies the proposed changes beyond a vague assertion that this is what students want? And to repeat the question I follow-up with in Section 1.4, why did the Auckland University Students Association describe this same consultation process as “unfair and ineffective”2?
Senior management went on to note that we can see the benefits of the SSFR in student surveys:
Since the new approach to student services was launched in 2022, student satisfaction surveys indicate an increase in student satisfaction. Between 2021 and 2024 the student satisfaction survey rating of “happy with service” grew from 69.4% to 76.6% (n ~ 13,300).
Although the language here doesn’t make an explicit causal claim, the implication is that the SSFR has made our students happier. This surprised me. Were students really happier with the new centralised student services system built around a Student Hub? That didn’t fit with the dysfunction that I’d heard about from my colleagues and students, or with my own experiences with the new service (see Section 1.5). Maybe, I thought, it wasn’t working well for staff but really did cater better to student needs. Even if the evidence-base and rationale for the SSFR was questionable, maybe it really did hit upon a better solution.
Curious, I decided to look more closely at the student survey data. The University of Auckland runs a fairly large “Learning and Teaching Survey” of several thousand students every year, with items that range from “Teaching staff are helpful and considerate” to “My programme workload is manageable” and “I am developing skills in spoken communication”. A database summarising the results over the last 10 years is available via our staff intranet. I couldn’t find the item referred to in the quote above from senior management, probably because it is a composite of items, possibly from another survey – I have asked for clarification. In the meantime, however, I did manage to find some items that seem very relevant to assessing the success of the SSFR.
Each year, from 2016 to 2022, we asked students how satisfied they were with the (now defunct) “Faculty student centres and student advisors”, and in 2023 and 2024, the same question was asked about the new “Campus Student Hubs and Academic Advisors”. From 2016 until 2019, the average satisfaction rating (defined as the percentage of students who agree or strongly agree that they are satisfied with the service) for the old Faculty student centres sat between 73% and 77%. This level of satisfaction was about average for this kind of item - not outstandingly good, but certainly not suggesting a broken system either. In 2020 and 2021, during the COVID pandemic, student satisfaction with the Faculty student centres did take a hit, dropping to between 64% and 68%, although many student satisfaction measures declined similarly during the COVID pandemic, so this doesn’t really suggest a significant problem with the service. In 2022, satisfaction dropped further, to 61%, but this is an odd case – the question asks about the “Faculty Centres” but the new Student Hubs were already being rolled out in 2022, and there were also still ongoing disruptions due to COVID. So what happened in 2023? Did we see a significant rebound, with COVID behind us, with the new and improved Student Hubs in full operation just as students had supposedly wanted, and with a question that specifically asked about the new Student Hubs? No. In fact, student satisfaction plummeted, to just 55.9%. Since then, the 2024 survey shows a slight increase in satisfaction with the Student Hubs, at 58.7%. But that is still low – indeed the University’s own summary of the 2024 survey lists this item as the second lowest satisfaction rating in the survey for that year.
I don’t want to make too much of these numbers. As I’ve noted more than once already, chasing simple metrics like this can be misleading. And there is more to a successful student support system on campus than a single-item student satisfaction rating. At the same time, the SSFR is a student-facing service that was justified on the grounds that it was giving students what they wanted (supposedly following extensive consultation). And since its implementation, senior management have defended the SSFR as a success (to me and, I suspect, to others) with reference to student consultation and satisfaction ratings. The story we are told is that the system was broken, students were not happy, we listened to their concerns and created a new and improved system that has produced happier students. But a closer look at the student satisfaction data seems to support the opposite conclusion, and one consistent with the change management programme as I have described it. That is, senior management appear to have taken a system that was, at least according to student satisfaction ratings, functioning reasonably well and, following a massively costly review process (costly in money, time and the well-being of the many staff affected), given us a new system that students are less happy with.
Senior management responded to one other minor point regarding the SSFR. Near the end of Section 1.4, I quote a non-academic staff colleague working in student support who said the new system included more low-paying roles. Senior management contest this and have provided a breakdown of salary bands before and after the changes. Based on these data, there appear to be fewer low salary band roles in the new system. It’s not clear how these changes map on to actual roles – e.g. whether people are being paid more or less for the same job – and I won’t attempt to investigate that further here. One feature of the new salary band distribution that is pretty clear, though, is there are more managers in the new system – e.g., for senior managers at the very top of the new system, in the highest paid salary band, we now have six roles when we previously had one.
Staff turnover
Near the beginning of How not to run a university, I say that “a growing number of academics in New Zealand and around the world are expressing their discontent with the way universities are run, either in print or, sadly, by exiting the profession.” Senior management have responded by noting that: -
UoA’s turnover rate has gone down since 2021. Judging from available data, UoA has a lower turnover rate than public service employees in New Zealand. Permanent academic staff also have a much longer average service length than both NZ and US employees overall.
There are several problems with this response. First, I wasn’t making a claim about the University of Auckland here, but a general claim about academics around the globe, and I cited some reputable sources for that, including articles in Nature, theChronicle of Higher Education and theGuardian[6]. I think it’s useful to look at what’s happening at the University of Auckland, but that’s a different question and not indicative of a factual error. Second, staff turnover is not the same thing as leaving the profession. Turnover could be high, but staff could be finding other jobs in the same field. Conversely, rates of turnover could decline, and yet those who are leaving may be more likely to be leaving the profession. Still, it’s not crazy to read low turnover rates as a good sign, and at least somewhat related to staff satisfaction. However, third, the comparisons offered here are, I think, pretty misleading. Noting a decline in turnover rates at the University of Auckland since 2021 is misleading because 2021 was an anomaly. Turnover includes not just resignations, but also redundancies and retirements. In 2021 we had just been through a voluntary redundancy process in which we offered staff big payouts to leave, and which (according to our annual report) accounted for 28% of staff turnover in that year, so it’s no wonder subsequent turnover rates look lower. Turnover rates before 2021 were very similar to the 2022-2024 range, and 2021 looks fairly normal too after accounting for the effects of the voluntary leaving scheme. Finally, while it is true that in any given year turnover rates are shorter and tenures are longer for academic staff than the rest of the labour force in New Zealand or the United States, this doesn’t mean academics have it good. As I noted in Section 2.5, academics are much less mobile than most professionals. They frequently occupy the only job in their specialisation in their city, possibly even in their country, and they are often heavily invested in local research networks and communities. That means things have to get pretty bad at an institution to justify resigning and seeking work elsewhere, which for an academic typically involves moving cities or countries.
The Curriculum Framework Transformation (CFT)
The feedback I received from senior management involved in the CFT included a candid discussion of the motivations behind the initiative and a three page document carefully responding to specific claims in Section 1.7 (which focussed on the CFT). I won’t present and respond to each point individually here, partly because the CFT is massive and complex and a detailed analysis of every component is beyond the scope of this essay, but also because most of the responses can be grouped fairly neatly into four main points, with the remainder constituting minor corrections that I have already addressed in the current version of this essay (e.g., I had wrongly implied the CFT mandated new “capstone” courses, when in fact the introduction of capstone courses in the Faculty of Science, where I teach, was a decision made by the Faculty and only a recommendation of the CFT). The four main points (as I interpret them) are:
The overall consultation process was neither “top-down” nor “hurried and tokenistic”. The new Strategic Plan required that senior management deliver on the Education and Student Experience priorities in the plan “but we in fact did the opposite [and] had a very much bottom-up approach.” During the second half of 2021, faculties created CFT teams of 4-8 people. Specialist working groups (which included faculty and student representation) were also created to examine areas such aswork integrated learning, sustainability, signature pedagogies, Pūtoi Ako, transdisciplinary, transitions, and the graduate profile. Over a period of 6 months, these teams looked at“what evidence said we should be doing, what our competitors were doing, what students wanted, what faculties wanted, what we were already doing well at – where we needed to enhance what we were doing well, etc.”This process involved regular working groups and forums that brought together actively teaching academic staff, as well as non-academic staff, students and experts from outside the university,“to contribute to the ideation of what the CFT would look like.” Beyond this initial phase, faculties maintained CFT leads (most of whom were Associate Deans Academic - an academic role) who were “deeply engaged in CFT decision-making”, and a faculty CFT team made up of academic staff members. The central organisational structure of the CFT included the Pro-Vice-Chancellor Education (PVC Education – also an academic position) as “Business Owner”, the Director of Learning and Teaching, and a steering committee that included three Deans’ representatives and was chaired by the Provost. The PVC Education also regularly attended and consulted with the Provost, Deans and Directors Committee (PDDC). Ongoing wider consultation and engagement was facilitated by a CFT Hub with information for staff, faculty roadshows, regular faculty updates and items placed in the Loop [the staff newsletter].
The formal consultation window was sufficient and justified. This window followed extensive informal consultation efforts. Advice received indicated that 2-3 weeks was “the usual consultation period”. In response to feedback, the initial 11 working day window was extended by 5 working days. The formal consultation had to happen when it did “in part due to milestones we needed to meet and working back from those, predominantly Council approval in October, in order that planning could get underway for full roll out by 2025 – this was pushed out some years later to 2026.”While the timing was “not great” at the end of semester, it’s not clear the beginning or middle would have been better. And while continued waves of COVID were disruptive for everyone, it was not clear how long this would last. Regarding poor attendance at faculty information sessions, CFT leads and Faculties offered multiple opportunities for staff to engage, modifying where required based on feedback, but “whether or not staff chose to engage with those opportunities was beyond our control”.
Proposed transformations were evidence-based and carefully considered the trade-offs involved. Working groups considered “evidence of best practice internationally, what competitors were doing, what we are doing that works well, analysed data where relevant, held focus groups with key stakeholders etc.” Input was also sought from a “critical friend”, an Australian academic “with extensive experience in curriculum transformation”. Regarding specific trade-offs, it was recognised that staff time was limited and arrangements were made for additional resourcing to go to those involved in designing new courses. It was also recognised that limited student time meant trade-offs in content – one of the proposed new compulsory foundational courses (“Waipapa Taumata Rau”), for example, was seen as a solution to this problem, condensing essential skills and knowledge of Te Tiriti o Waitangi into one place, rather than leaving this material peppered (and potentially repeated) throughout multiple courses. And it was recognised that replacing the existing General Education course requirement (and hence the courses that were created for this purpose) with new transdisciplinary courses could have significant implications for some Faculties and Departments that delivered these existing courses. Efforts were made to mitigate this – for example, by requiring that the new transdisciplinary courses included teaching staff from at-risk faculties as a way to direct students (and hence funding) to these faculties.
Messaging around the “course optimisation” process in August 2024 was less than ideal but was not primarily a consequence or responsibility of the CFT. This was a “Deans led initiative” that “complimented” but was not part of the CFT. Timetabling and space constraints already existed prior to the CFT.
On the face of it, this looks like a fairly robust defence of the CFT. The initiative was bottom-up, involving extensive and wide-ranging consultation with academic staff from across the university over months and years. The formal consultation window was of standard duration and was reasonable given constraints. Decisions were evidence-based and considered the trade-offs involved. And one of the most heavily criticised aspects of the process – August’s 2024 “course optimisation” – was not actually part of the CFT proper.
I do not doubt the sincerity of this defence from senior management and I don’t want to subject it to detailed analysis here. Nevertheless, even at face value, the account offered raises some important questions about the CFT consultation process. For example, if the whole thing was bottom-up and open-ended, why were consultation windows justified on the grounds that something had to be delivered to someone by some deadline? What exactly was this something, who was it being delivered to, by whom and according to what externally imposed timeline? Likewise, what counts as consultation with academic staff on academic matters? If small working groups count, how was their composition determined and what steps were taken to ensure they represented a wide range of views? Should consultation with Deans and Associate Deans count as consultation with academic staff when they are also being asked to act as agents of central administration? In addition, how rigorous was the evidence base and modelling work and how robust the analysis of trade-offs? And finally, if the course optimisation process was not primarily motivated by accommodating the CFT, why did communication to staff say that it was?
Rather than delve into each of these questions, I want to make a more general point. It’s that, whatever the answers, something just doesn’t add up. As I describe in Section 1.7, in August 2024, three years into the CFT, Senate voted 108 for to 35 against that “the implementation of the Curriculum Framework Transformation (CFT) be paused, to allow Senate to fully discuss the implications of the proposed course optimisation processes, in particular, their relationship to the CFT, and the academic coherence and integrity of teaching and research programmes.”3 While precipitated by the poorly handled course optimisation process earlier that month, which the CFT leadership has sought to distance themselves from, this was clearly a vote that signalled dissatisfaction with the CFT consultation process more generally and a concern that changes were being rolled out without proper justification or consideration of their relationship to the broader curriculum and “the academic coherence and integrity of teaching and research programmes”. If there was any doubt that this vote reflected sentiment towards the CFT more generally, it is notable that an amended motion, which only sought to pause the “course optimisation process” but not the wider CFT, was defeated at the same meeting by 27 votes to 96.
In subsequent weeks, some proponents of the CFT implied that these votes were the product of a vocal minority and not representative of the views of most academic staff, noting a lack of diversity in the Senate membership and that supporters of the CFT may have been less likely to attend the Senate meeting or may have felt unable to speak up. While some may have felt this way, in raw numerical terms it is very difficult to see how this could account for such a one-sided vote. The meeting was one of the best-attended Senate meetings of recent years (hardly conducive to a coup by a vocal minority) and the votes in Senate were also consistent with the sentiment I was hearing from a diverse array of more junior colleagues and students across campus – the kind of sentiment that motivated me to include a section on the CFT in this essay in the first place. Moreover, speaking from personal experience, it is hard to believe that those students and staff who supported the senior leadership position would have felt more pressure to remain silent than those who were directly challenging the views of senior leadership.
The most obvious problem for senior management’s narrative, then, is that if there was a well-argued, bottom-up consideration of the university’s curriculum, led by academic staff and students and with enough broad support to carry the day in the university’s primary academic-decision making body, it wasn’t the CFT, it was the movement to pause it. How such a fundamental misalignment arose between the views of senior management and Senate is likely a complex story, but if I had to offer a succinct explanation, it would be that most rank and file academic staff felt that the timeline and content of the CFT rested too heavily on vague appeals to strategy documents and deadlines imposed for bureaucratic reasons, and not enough on evidence-based argument and the practical concerns of those who would ultimately have to deliver the promised transformations. As a result, academic staff on Senate voted to pause the process so they could properly evaluate what was being proposed.
Recent developments
Having reviewed feedback from senior management about How not to run a university, I now want to examine events that have taken place in the change management space on campus since I finished writing the initial draft in August 2024. What do these events tell us about the change management programme? Has it continued on unabated? Or are there signs that management are listening and will do things differently in future?
In the operational domain, there is at least some reason for optimism. One senior manager I spoke to conceded there had been a lot of big change management projects in recent years and claimed we were entering a “period of consolidation”. The University has also recently adopted the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe 6.0)4. The agile approach comes from software development, but can be applied to organisational change more broadly. Among other things, it places greater emphasis on ongoing incremental development (or “pathways to continuous improvement”) rather than large single-shot transformations. While this may represent a change in philosophy, it remains to be seen whether adoption of the framework constitutes a genuinely new approach. Some critics of SAFe argue it actually introduces additional layers of hierarchy and compliance that contradict agile principles, and is more of a box-ticking exercise than a genuine commitment to the agile philosophy. It’s also unclear how the corporate origins of the framework translate to a university setting. Even the university’s own project description will make many on campus cringe – “The University is making some changes to the way we work to deliver customer centric improvements, foster innovation, collaboration, and continuous improvement through the pathway to continuous delivery of value for our customers.”
Other initiatives indicate that the guiding philosophy behind change management on campus has not, in fact, shifted and is continuing to be applied across operational, research and teaching domains. For example, the university is currently reviewing its Enabling Environment and Operations (EE&O) portfolio, based on “expert advice” from the Australian consulting firm Nous Group. In 2024 Nous Group acquired Cubane Consulting5, the team responsible for the Getting it right piece that I dissected in Section 1.3. While Nous is not Cubane and we should perhaps give them and the changes they propose the benefit of the doubt, a June 2025 article6 from Australia’s The Saturday Paper on Nous Group does not inspire confidence, opening with the line “When global consulting firm Nous Group arrives at a university, the company blueprint is always the same: weaken the academe, centralise power and cut staff.”
Research support is also experiencing ongoing churn. From last year, and just six years after a university-wide review of research services was completed, the university’s research commercialisation arm, Uniservices, initiated a process of “transformation”. I won’t attempt to interrogate the rationale for these changes here, but staff I spoke to who were affected by the changes clearly felt frustrated and demoralised that they were being subjected to another round of restructuring so soon, especially when some of the proposed changes appeared to be reversals of changes made in the 2018 review.
In the teaching domain, while the CFT continues to trundle along, concerns raised about its core elements remain unresolved and their status unclear. Following last August’s Senate vote to pause the CFT, the controversial emergency course optimisation was abandoned in favour of a return to the normal process of course curation that departments and faculties have always engaged in. In November 2024, directly after another Senate meeting in which the CFT was discussed (and, incidentally, just a couple of days after this essay was made available to the Vice Chancellor), the Provost, who had led the course optimisation process, resigned. Meanwhile, in October 2024, senior management and University Council agreed that, while it was not feasible to pause the CFT outright, a report would be provided to Council in March 2025 reviewing core CFT components, including the compulsory foundational course and transdisciplinary course requirements.
Cynics might see the promise of a review as simply an attempt to placate critics of the CFT while its core elements rolled on regardless. But a review of the current situation is not itself unreasonable – if a major change initiative goes off the rails, it’s probably worth taking some time to review where things are at, what went wrong and how to get back on track, rather than embarking on another hasty change of direction. Unfortunately, some nine months on, the CFT review process is yet to provide a rigorous, thorough and clear-eyed analysis of the problems raised in Senate or how to fix them. A draft report circulated to Senate in February 2025, four months into the review process, was remarkable only for its lack of substance. The report comprised just five pages. Page 1 was a title page. Page 2 was a table of contents, outlining what to expect on the remaining three pages. Page 3 summarised the report’s original terms of reference. Page 5 was an appendix with a handful of bullet-pointed recommendations. That left only one page, page 4, for the meat of the actual report (the “Review group findings”) made up of just two paragraphs - three sentences making vague reference to the university’s strategic plan together with financial and operational constraints, and a second paragraph summarising the bullet points that appeared in the appendix on the very next page. The bullet-pointed recommendations themselves implicitly conceded that concerns remained with various elements of the CFT and the associated consultation process, but rather than say anything about these concerns, they simply suggested that further reviews be conducted in 2025 and 2026 before any final decisions were made.
While Faculty responses to this initial draft indicated that it held appeal for both advocates of the CFT (who could rest assured nothing had been cancelled) and its critics (who could rest assured none of its core components were set in stone), it did little to advance informed debate about how to proceed. Critics have been left with no explanation of how we got here, advocates have been left with a shaky foundation on which to build the kinds of change they would like to see, and everyone is left dealing with significant uncertainty over both how our curriculum will look over the next few years and how the situation could be firmed up. In a more recent, Orwelian twist, which only adds to the confusion, during the April 2025 Senate meeting, the Vice Chancellor announced that “it was time to move away from the term ‘Curriculum Framework Transformation’. The CFT had provided a framework which had been implemented. In the future it would be appropriate to use the term ‘Curriculum’”. So, even as we await the supposedly undecided outcome of the promised CFT reviews and continue to try to work through required changes to the curriculum based on the CFT as currently understood, we have been told the CFT is, in fact, complete and asked not to speak its name.
Alongside the confusion and uncertainty generated by the handling of the CFT – sorry, the “Curriculum” – it was decided that 2024 would also be a good time to rapidly reorganise most of the university’s higher-level academic units via two major Faculty restructures. There are good reasons to consider reorganising academic units, and there is a right way to go about doing it, but it was hard to find examples of either in the sweeping, top-down, poorly justified process put forward in each case.
The first proposal involved the creation of two über-Faculties – one combining (take a breath) the Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Education and Social Work, the School of Fine Arts, School of Music and the Dance Programme, and one combining the School of Architecture and Planning, the Design Programme and the Faculty of Engineering. While we can debate the wisdom of these mergers and their merits relative to what came before them, the problem many staff identified with the process of change was that, true to the change management playbook, the timeline, documentation, and opportunities for input made it very difficult to have said debate. The timeline was, once again, tight. Following an initial consultation in April 2024 and subsequent consultation during September 2024, the new faculty structures were to be finalised and rolled out by the 1st of January 2025. At the same time, information on why the changes were being made and why they had to happen urgently was light. A compilation of staff views put together by the Union, for example, catalogued reactions that have become all-too-common in the face of recent change management on campus. This included statements about the poor quality of documentation, such as “a lot more information is required. At this stage the lack of details is concerning and demoralising”, “It is difficult to understand whether the proposal is positive or not given the lack of information about how it will be realised in practice” and “it’s embarrassing how poorly prepared this plan is.” Many also felt the consultation documents were presenting a sales pitch rather than an objective analysis of potential benefits and costs - e.g., “We have been presented with a dumbed-down version that refers only to vague benefits but not [at] all to costs”, “This reads like jargon and spin - without an evidence base for the claims they are making” and “such a restructuring requires an enormous input of time and energy from staff, and it is not clear there are advantages from the change that merit such an effort.”
Despite these and other concerns, the new Faculty of Arts and Education and Faculty of Engineering Design were pushed through and officially launched on time at the beginning of 2025. This rapid realignment was an impressive achievement by the academic and non-academic staff working to enact the changes, whether they liked them or not. What’s not clear though, is whether they were asked to do all this work for good reason – that is, whether we needed to make a change and, if we did, whether that change should have led to the structure we now have. Senate’s view on the restructure is difficult to ascertain. There was little debate in Senate over the proposal, but this may have been because challenging it felt like wrestling with fog – the absence of clear justification making it difficult to argue for or against. And as a Professor from what is now the Faculty of Arts and Education pointed out at a 2025 Senate meeting (after the new Faculties were already in operation), Senate had not actually been given a chance to vote on the restructure, despite its obvious relevance to teaching and research.
Senate did, however, get the chance to vote on the second major faculty restructure – a proposal to combine the Law School and the School of Business and Economics, which also involved splitting off private law from public law. It turns out that whoever dreamed up the merger had failed to consider the views of at least one key stakeholder group – the lawyers. Major concerns about the proposal were expressed by law professors and other academics in the Law Faculty, law students, professional lawyers and even the New Zealand Law Society. Their concerns related to the function of the Law School, its staff and students within the New Zealand legal system and potential threats to quality and independence should the Law School become more closely tied to business (as opposed to its many other areas of civic responsibility). There were also concerns about the need to ensure all students receive adequate training across private and public law, the lack of a clear distinction between private and public law, and why the University of Auckland was even going in this direction when another New Zealand law school (at the University of Canterbury) was in the process of reversing a very similar merger. Beyond these specific concerns, a submission from the New Zealand Law Society7 captured a common set of more general concerns pertaining to a lack of evidence and argument (something lawyers should know a thing or two about) that are now familiar to those of us used to dealing with change management on campus – on the alleged economic imperatives “The proposal provides little information about the suggested economic benefits of the proposed merger and no detail of the suggested benefits for the funding of research and availability of resources, in particular for those legal subjects outside of commercial and business law” and on the splitting of private and public law, “very limited information is provided as to the perceived (and actual) benefits of this part of the proposal, nor the actual purpose of this division.”
In March of 2025, the Law / Business merger was put to a vote in Senate. The meeting began with a summary of findings from the Future Faculty Arrangements Review Committee. Despite being set up explicitly to consider comments and feedback from staff and recommend to the Vice-Chancellor whether to proceed, the Review Committee opted not to make a recommendation on whether to proceed. Instead, in a somewhat farcical dodge, every recommendation was prefaced with the phrase “Should the new faculty arrangements proceed…” thereby avoiding the need to actually answer the question that was their raison d'être. Following this shaky defence of the proposal, a succession of speakers from the Law School proceeded to politely tear the case for change apart in the way only lawyers can. When it came time to vote on the merger, it was 51 for, 121 against.
For a while it was unclear whether university senior management and Council might try to overrule Senate (and half the country’s lawyers) and proceed with the merger anyway. But on June 5th this year, the university finally announced that the Law / Business merger would be “paused” indefinitely.
My read on these events of the last year, spanning the operational, research and teaching domains, is that senior management have been pushing the change management programme as hard as ever, continuing to pursue a relentless series of sweeping, top-down changes based on weak evidence and a lack of proper consultation with those members of the university most affected by them. At the same time, academic staff and the wider university community and stakeholders are fighting back, calling out the failings of the current approach and using the tools available to them to put a stop to it where they can.
Coming full circle
On June 11th, just a few days after the decision to abandon the Law / Business merger, the Vice Chancellor announced her intention to step down from her role. This was a surprise to some, coming only a few months after her reappointment by Council for a second five-year term. No reason for the resignation was given. The New Zealand Herald cited “growing discontent among staff and students”, quoting one senior academic’s view that “She had lost the trust and confidence of most senior academics at the university”. In the same piece, however, this view was challenged by senior figures at the university (some Deans and the Chancellor), who claimed the Vice Chancellor had broad support, with a couple repeating the mantra, put forward in earlier stages of consultation on the CFT and faculty mergers, that opposition was down to a “vocal minority”.
No doubt the Vice Chancellor has some staunch defenders among staff, but it’s hard to find evidence of broad support, or that dissatisfaction is restricted to a vocal minority. My own impression from interacting with dozens of colleagues from across the university, is that most rank and file staff have real concerns about the way our institution is being run. I might be more willing to question that impression if it didn’t align so well with both staff surveys (see Section 1.6) and recent votes in Senate. While the Senate votes were not votes for or against any member of senior management, they did provide probably the most objective measure we have of the level of support for recent major initiatives being pushed forward by senior managers. Votes pushing back on the CFT and faculty mergers (and on a new free speech policy that I haven’t discussed because it wasn’t tied to a major change management initiative) were no surprise to most of us, but they would have been a surprise to those who dismissed dissatisfaction with these initiatives as simply the views of a vocal minority. It’s also interesting to note that those offering the ‘vocal minority’ argument in the Herald coverage were themselves part of the management hierarchy. This could have been an artefact of who was asked for comment, but if it’s indicative of a more general trend, then, rather than an argument in support of current leadership, it may be a sign of one of their biggest challenges – an apparent disconnect between management and staff.
Needless to say, for the reasons outlined in this essay, I too have lost trust and confidence in my university’s senior leadership, including our Vice Chancellor. While even the best managers can sometimes make sub-optimal decisions, it seems reasonable to expect that they at least abide by the principle of managerial non-maleficence and avoid repeatedly devoting significant resources to activities that incur substantial costs for questionable benefit. And yet, as I have argued, the relentless programme of sweeping, top-down change we’ve witnessed on campus over the last few years does just this, imposing significant and enduring costs in time, money, productivity, morale and well-being, while offering little sound evidence and argument to justify these changes. It’s hard to see how such an approach could provide the foundation for trust and confidence in leadership.
At the same time, I think it would be unfair to blame all our problems on a single individual. Yes, I would have liked it if our Vice Chancellor had made different decisions over the last few years, but as I’ve argued in this piece, the drivers of those decisions run much deeper and broader than a Vice Chancellor. The drivers run deeper in the sense that all of the problematic practices I have identified here were already present, in at least some form, before our current Vice Chancellor arrived – the relentless pace of top-down change, the token consultation, the focus on standardisation and centralisation, and a lack of appreciation for how each change will impact staff and our collective ability to deliver on the university’s core mission of teaching and research. And the drivers run broader in the sense that they reflect underlying causes that are sector wide, including overconfidence, impatience and groupthink among executives, the proliferation of bullshit documentation, the perverse incentives of new public management, ineffective governance lacking adequate representation of teachers, researchers and students, impossible financial and regulatory constraints, and an uncritical acceptance of universities as corporations. None of this can be dismissed as simply the fault of our Vice Chancellor.
The Vice Chancellor’s departure, then, is not going to solve all the problems we face as a university. Nevertheless, it does provide an opportunity that, rather poetically, brings my essay full circle. As I finish this afterword to How not to run a university, I find myself in the same position I was in when I started writing the piece several years ago - my university is looking to welcome a new Vice Chancellor to campus next year, I see problems with the way the institution is being run, and I want to call out those problems so that we can work to find solutions.
My hope is that by documenting and talking openly and candidly about our managerial misadventures – about how not to run a university – we can find ways to run things differently. That includes supporting a new generation of university leaders who are willing to champion the kind of change we need, rather than the kind of change we don’t. They can do this by fostering empathy, humility and patience among the executive, and combating cognitive biases and groupthink in decision-making. They can do this by themselves calling bullshit on dodgy documentation and hasty consultation, raising the standard of evidence and communication upon which decisions are made. They can do this by realigning incentives (including their own) so that our leaders are encouraged to work towards the long term interests of the university, not chase short-term KPIs. They can do this by insisting on transparent, participatory decision-making at every level, and advocating for the connected principles of academic freedom and institutional autonomy, so that academic staff are treated not as the primary group who are governed by the university, but as the primary group who must govern the university. And they can do this by tirelessly fighting for the value of our institution to society, not as a corporation, but as a university.
So, my message to our incoming Vice Chancellor, and really to any new recruit to senior management at our university or any other, is the same as it was in 2020 - “Welcome aboard! Here are some management practices that I think are doing us harm. Maybe you could do things differently.”
Thanks for reading Quentin’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
