International Education and the Corporatization of University
Speech from the meeting of the International Socialist's Organisation (http://www.iso.org.nz)
Thursday, 24 July 2008
By Kevin Hodder

Approximately 1 in 10 students on campus each day is an international student. These are individuals from all over the world who have chosen to come and study in Dunedin, be it for our Scarfie culture, for our prestigious academic reputation or for the easy access to the beauties of the south island. But the last few years has seen international students becoming increasingly irate as their fees are being pushed up at a truly alarming rate.

The “necessity” of this has been used to justify pushing up domestic fees, and also cut backs in a growing number of departments. At the same time, it has become a growing trend to blame the increasing number of international students for the steadily worsening conditions for students and lecturers alike, as money is slashed from practically every budget. This irrational argument has more to do with racism than with genuine concern about the state of our learning environments.
Like domestic students, International students’ fees normally rise by a minimum of about 5% per annum but are often higher. However, while for domestic students this normally means an increase of something in the order of 25-30 dollars a paper, for international students, this can mean anywhere up to an extra 700 dollars a year for a normal course, and substantially more for a professional course such as medicine or dentistry. Int. Students already pay approximately 4 times as much as domestic students so any percentage increase is 4 times the size. For example, if you’re an international student doing a bachelor of dental surgery, the fees for next year have increased by $1,884 relative to this year. Pre-clinical med fees rose by a staggering 2,370 per annum this year.

One of the greatest differences between fee rises for Domestic students and International students is that for many of us, we never see the actual fees until we graduate. International students are not so lucky.

Those who aren’t fortunate enough to have nice scholarships have to survive off what money they’ve either saved up before coming to Dunedin, what little they’re are able to make working part time during the year – as allowed by their student visa’s – or what they can save working back home each holiday.

Fees rises every year hit you really hard when you have a fixed amount of money to work with each year.

International student rep Darren Lee made a very good point during his campaign for the position. He said that international students have almost no ability to defend themselves from these raising costs. They have no representation on university councils except for the token representation that OUSA is granted (and the OUSA reps are ignored even if they bother to object at all). To make matters worse, many IS have left by the time the university sets fees for the following year, and few feel confident enough to kick up a stink for fear of being targeted by the uni. Don’t forget, expulsion is as good as deportation.

However, this does not mean that international students are the only ones who should care about what the university is doing. Ever since national abolished the $1250 “flat fee” that labour had imposed the year before in 1989, universities have attempted to supplement their income by squeezing students for every penny they can. It didn’t take long before the bureaucrats who oversee the running of our national universities started to use the escalating international student fees to justify the gross inflation of domestic fees as well.

If you have any doubts as to the charitable nature of our owners, I need only to point to Dave Skegg, the “400,000 dollar man”, as Reece so gracefully put it in a brilliant opinion piece in critic earlier this year. While extolling the necessity of budget cuts left and right, he draws nearly a half million dollar annual salary. (By the way, did anyone know that he used to be the chair of preventative and social medicines here at Otago? Big step from doctor to parasite, but there you go.) Our actual chancellor, Lindsay Brown, - who, odds are, most of you will never even have heard of, but who holds a remarkable amount of sway in the council chamber - isn’t a professor, or a doctor, or even a former lecturer – instead he’s a company director and an accountant. ‘Nuf said. In the spirit of transparency and democracy, we have absolutely no idea how much he makes…

As the university turns ever towards its primary function as a corporate entity, it has become increasingly worried about its image, both locally and internationally. As more and more of the university’s funding comes from private business investment, David Skegg and his associated cronies have been forced to do whatever it takes to make the university appealing, not as a place of learning and for exploring ideas as so many of our grand institutions claim, but instead as a conservative and reliable place that businesses can exploit to further their own interests. The Scarfie atmosphere that was the selling point of Otago for so long is no longer acceptable to the Uni administration, or the big business interests to which it is beholden.

As written by former ISO member Tim Bowron in 2001

“In 1997, Auckland University launched a private fundraising appeal. BellSouth fronted up with $1.75 million, leading to the creation of the "BellSouth Centre for Research in Network Economics and Communications." In return for a "donation" from corporate law firm Bell Gully, Law Faculty heads created the "Bell Gully Computer Laboratory," which all students are now required to use. But the entry of big business onto the campuses is doing more than turning buildings into advertising billboards. (Former) Auckland vice-chancellor Kit Carson assured corporations that in return for their "donation," the university would provide the "quality graduates" they wanted. Like other universities, Auckland is re-writing its course prescriptions according to the express wishes of big businesses. The increased links with major corporations is seeing a growing trend for tertiary institutions to hire out their researchers to the private sector.”

As a science student, I have seen only too often that large amounts of money are thrown into profitable lines of research. The great glass monstrosity also known as the centre for innovation was built expressly to allow the closer functioning of businesses and the university’s science departments. Auckland has university has built a similar centre for their biotechnology department, and if the other major universities in New Zealand don’t have equivalent centres, I guarantee it’s only a matter of time.

Predictably, this trend toward privatisation has detrimental consequences in regard to the way the university administration treats its students, the more extreme examples of which are just becoming obvious.

In Otago, it began with attempts to cut the languages depts, evoking a massive wave of student protests. The registry was occupied and in the face of massive embarrassment the university was forced to back down from some of their cuts, and as a result we still have Spanish, Portuguese and a myriad of other languages avail, while at the same time, others such as Russian still got the cut.

More recently, we’ve seen first the introduction of a code of conduct, brought in after the so called “castle street riots” of 2006, where police attacked a rowdy student street party and then were surprised when it turned ugly as a response. Not entirely surprisingly, this generated a lot of bad press for the university, and OUSA came snivelling out from behind the administration to blame the students, rather than the police. The code, or as it is lovingly known, the CoC was designed to empower the university administration to deal with ‘undesirables’ - by which I largely mean activists - both on and off campus. While a reasonably effective protest movement and action from OUSA has meant that the university has been unable to use the code of conduct to expel any students, they were unable to stop it being introduced. It’s only a matter of time before the introduction of the code drops out of most students’ memories and the university feels empowered enough to begin enforcing it.

Rather than serving “to promote the University's academic aims and sense of community, through the cultivation of mutual respect, tolerance and understanding,” as Skegg described it, the singular purpose was to allow the uni to crack down on embarrassments such as conflicts between students and police and also student protests which in the past had been very large and dynamic.

Of course, with the Code of Conduct came the CoC enforcers, Campus Watch. These glorified security guards can be found on the streets on and around campus at all hours of the day and night. While ostensibly there to look out for students, they have recently shown their true colours when they acted as the instrument of the police in having a student arrested for smoking weed on campus.

From there it was a small step to the arrests that were witnessed two weeks ago when Abe, Julian and David of NORML were arrested for suspected possession of marijuana and obstruction of justice. Undercover officers in our classrooms and uniformed officers wandering through campus have now been officially sanctioned by the VC’s office.

All these actions have been taken to make Otago the number one destination for your lovely “donations” my dear businessman. And I’ve not even spoken of the dramatically increased workload, reduced quality of housing and skyrocketing rates of part time employment – minimum wage of course – that most students have to struggle through. Oh yeah, and student debt is growing by a billion dollars a year…. Who cares?

Here is where I have to emphasize – the different strands of this talk are not unrelated.

The increasing privatisation of universities, in Otago, across New Zealand and indeed across most of the world has meant that the administrations look to students to pay more and more each year. International students are a soft target because they are transitory – many are only here for 1 year or less – and thus unable to challenge the constantly rising fees. At the same time, the bureaucrats point to the international fees and tell the domestic students that they need to pay their fair share as well. And then to put the cherry on top, they are willing to stop at NOTHING to ensure that the campus is as non-controversial as possible.

So, solutions! The only time fees have stopped rising was when strong movements arose to demand that they be frozen or reversed. In the 90’s this fight was headed by the education action groups, on campuses the lengths and breadth of New Zealand. An EAG has been reformed in Dunedin, and may one day be the fighting force that it was 10-15 years ago.

But in the same way that bosses use wage freezes in one sector to justify stagnating wages in other sectors, any fees movements which focus only on domestic fees will leave the university bureaucracy with their trump card. Any movement for free education for domestic students has to include the demand for free education for international students too. Attempts by the powers that be to implicitly blame rising fees and falling conditions on foreign students are an intentional drive to generate a minimum level of racism amongst students, specifically to undermine our ability to challenge the fees system. Remember, there are some 2000 international students studying in Dunedin. A unified campaign of concerned domestic and international students, not to mention the large number of lecturers angry at wages well below international standards, could have the university council running for the hills. A nationwide campaign could be a powerful force in demanding that the government shell out some of its record surpluses to improve the quality of education and freeze fee rises.

But at the end of the day, both the universities and the government are beholden to corporate interests for their functioning and this directs their actions. This will continue to be so, as long as the profit system that sits at the very core of our society remains in place. The only way to truly make education the central tenant of a university’s functioning is to change society completely. We’re the international socialist organisation and that is exactly what we hope to do, so if you’re supportive of what you’ve heard tonight I would recommend that you join both the ISO and the EAG, but mostly the ISO.