The Ministry of Education is consulting on the topic of "Realising the potential for technology to support personalised and tailored learning in the future". Details are on their website https://preview.education.govt.nz/have-your-say/consultation-long-term-insights-briefing-topic/details. Technology is a catalyst that is accelerating the challenges facing the tertiary education system. Those challenges are not a consequence of technology and framing a Government response on a purely technocratic basis will fail to address the needs of New Zealanders over the coming decade. Read on for my submission.

Hopefully many folk in the sector have contributed to the work of the University Advisory Group established by the government to "consider challenges and opportunities for improvement in the university sector, including the role of the Performance Based Research Fund; ways to best achieve equity for all learners; and the role of international education" (https://uag.org.nz). This is my submission. Hopefully others will be made available soon also. This is a submission made personally and may not reflect the position of my employer.

Why should you care whether we have universities? A timely question given that today we are not only anticipating the irrecoverable loss of portions of numerous New Zealand universities, we are also contemplating the inevitability of wider–ranging future cuts. It is worth understanding what we are losing. And why.

The recent op-ed on Stuff by former Minister and VC Steve Maharey places the blame on the sector – I think we need to look slightly further afield and listen to the people making these choices.

The Internet is full of folk talking about the unprecedented pandemic we are all experiencing and how its "Black Swan" character has meant the necessity to be agile and develop responses in reaction to the new and unexpected demands it is making on our societies, systems and on Universities. We have all seen a flood of newly developed advice from experts, vendors, agencies and leadership teams aimed at helping academics, professional staff, students and the wider community respond effectively. These are in the main excellent and helpful crisis responses, its just a shame that so many are in response to issues and needs that were entirely predictable, easily able to be addressed by ordinary good organisational practice. This event is not a Black Swan, at best it was a Gray one, and we need to take a hard look at how we can be better prepared for the next one as well as real Black Swans.

One of the great benefits of this time of the year is that there are more opportunities to read more widely and deeply. I have been influenced by Nicholas Carr's book "The Shallows" in holding myself to account for better reading habits, but the tempo of the year doesn't always cooperate with my good intentions. Anyway, I digress (another lovely consequence of the less frenetic context - one has time to digress even recursively...).

There's something about the start of a bright new shiney year that provokes a little reflection and consideration. It may simply be the rest giving spark to creativity, or the sense that the coming year is going to be another challenging one defined by ambiguity, uncertainty and change.

Change is almost always confronting and a natural, possibly even necessary, response is a form of displacement or avoidance. Its normal to deny troublesome knowledge, to reframe situations to avoid change. When this avoidance becomes habitual, it can enact itself as one of a set of organisational pathologies that I am going to describe as the Seven Deadly Sins of University Change.

I was very excited when I read the Cabinet paper by Education Minister Chris Hipkins outlining his plans for a major change, dare I say it - a transformation, of the New Zealand vocational educational system. Although aimed at the failing Institutes of Technology and Polytechnic (ITPs) and Industry Training Organisations (ITOs) this ambitious proposal has important implications for universities and for New Zelaand society as a whole.

The rest of this post is the text of my submission on the proposed review, joining the hundreds of others that have been made. One submission I found very interesting was from the Office of the Auditor General which I found very much in line with my own in raising concerns about the change process and the need for clear and effective leadership. Assuming the Minister creates a transition team as recommended by OAG the composition of that team will be an important signal of how he conceives this change occuring - I do hope it goes beyond solely the vested and established interests to find people with ambitions for the public interest in this new model.

One of the interesting case studies used in Rogers' book The Diffusion of Innovations is the story of introducing clean water into North African villages. The women of the village resisted using clean water from a tap for other than ritual purposes until the 'high status' women in the village started using it for cooking. It illustrates the problem that innovations are not used even when, objectively and empirically, they are better than existing practice. Indeed, the women in Africa used all sorts of creative and implausible explanations as to why they would not change their water use habits. A Canadian PhD student has now come up with another great example of how innovators need to use existing preferences and desires to motivate positive change.

An EDUCAUSE Review article late last year considered the impact that changing economic realities were having on universities, and more specifically the IT operations. In reading this article I was struck by the relevance of the advice when reformulated to address learning and teaching, not just technology.