Ananish Chaudhuri and Brian Boyd
Ananish Chaudhuri is Professor of Economics and Brian Boyd is Emeritus Professor of English, both at the University of Auckland.
Recently, the University of Auckland Senate voted by a three-to-one majority to no longer compel students to study one of a set of Waipapa Taumata Rau courses. Instead these courses will, in most cases, become optional.
Some commentators have lamented this decision to stop making the courses compulsory. A colleague wrote:
“So, the idea that first-year students – local and international – might learn a little more about the special nature of this country as part of their tertiary, including professional, learning is, from one perspective at least, part of the growing up of this country into a mature and tolerant society with a rich and varied history.”
Should all students be forced to learn about New Zealand history?
The first year of university education is no longer free. Domestic students paid around $1000 while foreign students paid nearly $6000 for this compulsory course.
Certainly universities force students to take some compulsory courses. But typically these are courses directly related to the students’ program of study. Should all students regardless of their discipline be forced to learn about New Zealand history? Especially given that having to take a new compulsory course means not being able to take another course more directly relevant to one’s area of study? Besides reducing choice, this also has negative implications for a student’s ability to complete their degrees within a reasonable time frame.
A large number of our students are international students who will move onto other countries following graduation. These students are coming here to get a high-quality education that will help advance their career goals. Should they all be forced to learn New Zealand history? This seems debatable. Most universities in liberal democracies don’t compel students to learn that country’s history.
Misperceptions about the resistance to these courses
The feedback from the students has been overwhelmingly negative; yet this feedback was not about an unwillingness to learn about NZ history. The objections related to factors such as lack of coherence and relevance to one’s disciplinary pursuit. Many students pointed out that this is material they have covered in school and is also covered in other courses they were taking.
For a while a petition, signed by thousands of students, circulated asking the university to make these courses optional. Currently, another student petition is circulating, signed by more than a thousand students, asking that the students who have been forced to take this course compulsorily be refunded.
Philosophical objections to the compulsory courses
A key philosophical question relates to the “history” being taught.
Here is a short description of one of those courses. “WTR 100 – draws on place-based knowledge to demonstrate how diverse knowledge systems and Te Tiriti o Waitangi shape perspectives and apply in your discipline.”
The term “knowledge systems” reflects a post-modern view that questions the universality, objectivity and truth of knowledge claims. Instead, knowledge is, to quote the description above, “place-based,” as if there were, say, Australasian truth, North Island truth, Auckland truth, Waipapa Tamati Rau truth, and so on. It proposes that academic (“Western”) knowledge needs to be balanced by incorporating Indigenous perspectives (Māori knowledge, Ngāti Whātua-o-Ōrākei knowledge?).
Each of these courses has a centrally mandated component common across all faculties, as if the place all students share, the campus, determines the relevant knowledge. Why not let the academics and the faculty decide the content of these courses and how they best relate to their discipline?
A related problem: in indigenous thinking, the dividing line between replicable science and testable knowledge on one hand and beliefs and myths on the other is blurry. While there is a concerted push for the inclusion of Indigenous knowledge systems in education in many countries, those within each tradition insist that it belongs only to that tradition and that it must not be contested by outsiders. Why then should mātauranga Mãori be introduced, in our case, across our education system, and as uncontestable knowledge, to people outside as well as inside Māori traditions?
Mātauranga Māori deserves appreciation as a collective creative achievement that uses the narrative imagination and the ecological resourcefulness all peoples have. But why should it be accorded a role alongside science any more than Hindu beliefs and practices (now placed alongside, or ousting, science in Modi’s oppressively ethnonationalist India) or Japanese Buddhism and Shinto (maintained but kept quite apart from science in modern and scientifically prominent Japan) or, say, the “knowledge systems” of the prescientific Britain of 1400 or 1600?
This remains a highly disputed topic, where there is little consensus as of now. Why would you take this highly controversial material and insist on making it compulsory for everyone? The university has done the right thing. Make it optional; those who wish to study this material and agree with or question its philosophical underpinning should be free to do so. The others can study what they are more interested in.