This article summarises the events that led to the dismantling of the School of Natural and Computational Sciences at Massey University, Albany campus, and the unsuccessful attempts to preserve the school in some form by staff, the public and various learned societies including the New Zealand Association of Scientists (NZAS). Here we suggest that the reasons given by the university for the need to dismantle the school changed throughout the process. This made it difficult to identify and react to the real motivation behind the destruction of the sciences on the Albany campus. We argue that the failed attempts to save an academically successful and financially viable school expose a weakness in the current Education and Training Act and demonstrate why New Zealand (NZ) needs an independent entity that can investigate universities, guard the national interests, ensure accountability of tertiary institutions’ administration, and protect the academic freedom of individual academics.