Confidence in the Vice Chancellor

In a prior life, I was on Academic Board at the University of Canterbury as Economics Department representative.

The meetings were usually tedious. Much of the point seemed to be to provide a forum for people to air their grievances so they could feel they were listened to, but without consequence. There'd usually be somebody who'd make a five-minute speech about how neoliberal managerialism was ruining everything, and then would be happy enough until making the same speech again a few months later. It all helped me realise that the point of meetings often is not to achieve any outcome at all, but to make people feel listened to. But it was also an important way of finding out what was all going on in the rest of the University and initiatives being pushed that we needed to pay attention to.

Universities run under a dual governance system. The academics run curricular affairs through one governance structure culminating in Academic Board; the administrators run financial management through a parallel and overlapping one. It's confusing as all heck for anybody outside of the system, and for many within it. The Dean of Sciences is the one responsible for academic matters within all of the degrees awarded under the Sciences. The Pro-Vice Chancellor for Sciences is responsible for financial management of the College of Sciences, HR and the like. Sometimes the Dean and Pro-Vice Chancellor are the same person. And any curricular changes would have to run through both systems because they had both academic and financial implications.

Academic Board would be the one that would be watching for things like policy around academic freedom.

The meetings generally included a report from the Vice-Chancellor on what was all going on at the University.

I'm trying to imagine going to a meeting of Academic Board after finding out that the Vice-Chancellor had apparently lied to the head of Academic Board.

The Chair of Massey's Academic Board met with their Vice-Chancellor Jan Thomas about free speech issues at Massey. David Farrar got a pile of documents by OIA from Massey, showing that the Vice-Chancellor had been working to keep Brash from visiting Massey well before any security concerns were raised. That presumably prompted somebody at Massey to send David the email that the Chair of Academic Board sent around at the University subsequent to her meeting with the Vice-Chancellor. Farrar quotes this bit.

I asked the Vice-Chancellor how long she had been aware of Dr Brash’s proposed lecture before she took the decision to cancel the lease of the room to the students. She told me that she had been aware of the event for many weeks and had been invited to attend. The students had also informed her that their planned programme of talks would include politicians from all New Zealand’s major political parties.

My understanding from what Professor Thomas told me, is that she had not considered cancelling the event at any point during that period, because she had no pressing reason to do so. She did not deny that she does not agree with Dr Brash’s views, but she pointed out that she had not at any stage banned him from campus nor insisted that the students disinvite him.

Maybe the Chair of Academic Board hadn't gotten things right. But if the Chair did, then the OIA documents show that the Vice-Chancellor was scrambling to find ways of blocking Brash's visit - and that suggests she was lying to the Chair of Academic Board.

I don't know how things will play out at Massey.

Vice-Chancellors do not report to Academic Board; they provide updates to Academic Board. The Vice-Chancellor reports to University Council, chaired by the Chancellor. Sometimes the VC sends the Deputy Vice-Chancellor to report instead if there's a scheduling conflict, but during my time on Academic Board, the VC did seem to make a point about being available to front to Board.

But I'd expect that a Chair of Academic Board who had been led to mislead colleagues because the Vice-Chancellor had lied to her would be in an impossible situation if the Vice-Chancellor continued; resignation as Chair of Academic Board would seem most appropriate. Academic Board is made up of academics on permanent appointments; it isn't like the Chair would be quitting her day-job. I can't imagine wanting to continue in that position, which requires having a decent working relationship with the VC, if the VC had lied to me and caused me to mislead my colleagues.

And I would hope that somebody on Academic Board would ask the Vice Chancellor, at her next report to Board, why they should believe a word she says when she seems to have lied to the Chair of Academic Board.

I would hope that the Chancellor would step in to resolve things before it ever came to that.