Kia ora fellow AUT students,

This is a petition to reinstate AUT academic staff who have been made redundant based on unjust and flawed performance criteria. This decision heavily impacts postgraduate and undergraduate students who were not considered in this process. Numerous academic staff members who are integral to the success of students and the university have been made redundant and we urge the AUT senior leadership team to reinstate them.

A letter has been written to the AUT senior leadership team regarding the impact on postgraduate students (see text below). The impact on undergraduate students may not be clear until 2023, but it stands to reason that reduced staff numbers and the significant loss of expertise will come at a cost to students. 

It is unclear how AUT intends to staff undergraduate papers that require the knowledge of experts who have been made redundant. If those papers are cancelled, it affects students’ paths to completion of their degrees. If those papers are taught without the necessary expertise, the quality of student's education will suffer. In subjects where AUT does retain the necessary expertise to deliver papers, filling the gaps created by redundancies will leave remaining staff overworked and may impact their ability to provide students with individual attention and support. 

If you are a student at AUT we ask you to sign this petition in support of this letter and movement. 

Ngā mihi.

 

29/11/2022

Dear AUT Vice-Chancellor and the Executive Leadership Team

RE: AUT academic staff redundancies

We have been made aware of several supervisors who received a redundancy letter in November 2022 based on not meeting a minimum teaching threshold, external research income, and publications per annum. We dispute these criteria due to their retrospective and individualistic nature and the significant and impactful teaching that supervisors provide us, postgraduate students at AUT. We urge you to reinstate staff who have been made redundant based on these faulty grounds and given the huge distress and disruption this is causing us.

Postgraduate supervision is in fact, teaching. We would like to refer to the “Workload Guidelines for Postgraduate Supervision” section of the AUT Academic and Associated Staff Members’ Collective Agreement. This section clearly states that postgraduate supervision is a teaching activity of great importance that is equivalent to timetabled teaching hours (TTH):

• 5.1 Introduction
• These guidelines relate to academic staff who supervise postgraduate students for research activities and the consequent products of research (theses and dissertations and their equivalents).
• “Supervision of a postgraduate thesis is a learning/teaching activity of great importance to the research/teaching nexus at AUT. Supervision workload may include regular meetings/email/phone contact with the student, research methodology training, provision of guidance on research resources and AUT systems (e.g. enrolment, research proposals, ethics approval, reporting progress, assessment) reading student work, giving formative feedback, formal reporting about the student and sometimes summative assessment, guiding students through the research process, and organising peer support”.
• 5.3 TTH Equivalency
• The time allocation for an individual supervisor, for the supervision of one fulltime student, is 0.5 – 2.0 hours/week over the supervision period.
• In disciplines where supervising a cluster of research students is equated with teaching modules to calculate a fair workload across a department or school, 5-6 supervised students equate to the workload of teaching one AUT module.
• N.B. Notwithstanding the above, a staff member is not normally principal supervisor to more than five doctoral students or nine postgraduate students in total.

We would also like to express our own experience of postgraduate supervision as teaching. Being a student implies that one is learning. As postgraduate students, we are learning how to become researchers, academics, lecturers, and professionals. We are self-directed learners who rely heavily on our supervisors to guide us and teach us. In the absence of classes or lectures, we pay postgraduate fees to be taught by our supervisors and the university receives funding for our successful completion. As such, their supervision time should be considered teaching time.

As students, we see that the successful functioning of our research groups, schools, and faculties relies on a collective contribution of staff’s individual specialised skills and assets. Some staff contribute by focusing on attracting external research income, others in teaching, and others in research output (among many other skills). To make staff redundant based on a retrospective application of only one of these criteria without considering the collective success of their affiliations is not in line with AUT’s values of tika, aroha, and pono.

Redundancies of AUT staff has and will negatively impact our study progress and quality, our mental health, and our motivation to continue our careers at AUT. As PG students, we chose to study at AUT based on supervisor expertise and relationship. Failing to include PG supervision as a performance criterion leaves PG students feeling unvalued. This approach is not in line with AUT’s vision of nurturing ‘Great Graduates’.

AUT has not acknowledged PG supervision time as teaching time and made academic staff redundant based on this contention. However, we have provided evidence to show that PG supervision is in fact teaching based on AUT agreements and the postgraduate student experience. Additionally, we have shown that other criteria used to enact academic staff redundancies were retrospectively applied and do not reflect the collective success of our institution. Therefore, redundancies made on these grounds are unfair, flawed, and ultimately harmful to the long-term success of our university. With this petition we urge you to reconsider PG supervision as teaching, reconsider the performance criteria used, and reinstate supervision staff who have been wrongfully made redundant.

We look forward to your response and your action to redress this situation in order to restore our confidence in the senior leadership of AUT.

Yours sincerely,

AUT student: