And you will have to pay for the privilege of being railroaded onto the course — with international students paying up to $5730 for the paper. Perhaps most alarmingly, students have to pass to be entitled to move on to second-year studies.
How anyone imagines that will make the university more attractive to either domestic or international students is baffling. But that is evidently not its purpose. The compulsory course plays a key part in indigenising — or decolonising — the university.
The decolonisation programme — which, according to one definition, aims to “dismantle the colonial, Euro-centric structures and knowledge systems that have historically dominated universities in order to privilege Māori ways of knowing, being and doing” — has been underway for several years. This has been done with the blessing and encouragement of the university’s management, including the current Vice-Chancellor, Dawn Freshwater.
Eru Kapa-Kingi — a vice-president of Te Pāti Māori who develops and teaches courses for Law School — said in an Auckland University newsletter this month: “We need to start realising that universities were one of the primary tools of colonisation in Aotearoa, replacing Māori philosophy, Māori ways of thinking, speaking and acting. That places an obligation on academics today to really contribute to the deeper, longer-term decolonisation project.”
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