New Zealand Science Review

The impact on NZ university academic staffing over the pandemic years

Kate Lee — 2024-10-31

The New Zealand Association of Scientists (NZAS) sought information from all eight New Zealand (NZ) universities via Official Information Act (OIA) requests. The requests were for academic staff numbers on 1st May 2019 and 1st May 2023, capturing data before and after Covid-19 lockdowns. We requested numbers for permanent, fixed-term and casual academic staff for each faculty on
those dates with a breakdown of men, women and gender unknown/diverse. The aim was to look for impacts over this period on staff numbers in the sciences and how staff in different types of employment and gender were affected, but we also compared this data to other subject areas taught and researched at NZ universities.

Since May 2023 there have been several additional tranches of layoffs at multiple universities which will not be captured in the data we present here. However, while it is arguable whether these new layoffs are due to the impacts of the COVID19 pandemic and subsequent global financial turmoil, we can see that certain subject areas of
academia have already felt the effects in May 2023. Health faculties fared the best over the period, which might reflect the need for health research and development of the health workforce during a global pandemic. However, these gains were accompanied by large losses in humanities, education, and arts, as well as other subject areas such as fundamental sciences and engineering.

The destruction of Sciences at Massey University and why we need an independent entity that can investigate universities

Alona Ben-Tal — 2024-10-31

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.

Silencing Universities by Stealth: An Invisible Consequence of our University Crisis

Russell Death — 2024-12-12

Independent, well-informed experts from academia largely serve as bastions of evidence-based social and scientific commentary, ensuring integrity and accuracy amidst the deluge of false narratives. However, although it is enshrined in the legislature that universities should act as a critic and conscience of Aotearoa New Zealand, this role provides limited financial benefits to the university's bottom line. As financial drivers have become more influential in determining what is taught and how staff spend their time, this public good, which has always been on the periphery of staff tasks, is slowly disappearing. As an example, academics at Massey University have previously been active and vocal researchers, educators, and critics of the state of freshwater in Aotearoa New Zealand. However, Professor Russell Death and Dr Mike Joy, who have led the freshwater ecology team, have now both been pressured to leave, so in 2024, Massey University will no longer teach any courses in freshwater ecology. Neither of us was made redundant or directly asked to leave, but the constantly shifting teaching pressures and altered managerial priorities have left us both at Massey without time and/or support to continue our community outreach and public engagement. We will provide examples of the difficulty of being a critic and conscience at a university where the financial bottom line is the key imperative. Unfortunately, the dwindling number of freshwater ecology graduates being trained and the lack of critical commentary on Aotearoa New Zealand's freshwater crisis may go largely unnoticed. We believe the current university crisis will exacerbate the loss of this essential public good, with few people even aware of what has been lost.

How do we know ourselves?

Lucy Stewart — 2024-07-11

It is vital that discussions of the future of our research and science system are grounded in understanding of both how it functions now, and how it has changed over time. This article serves as an overview of available information about the Aotearoa New Zealand research and science workforce, considering surveys and workforce analyses published in the last thirty years. It illustrates the need for more systemic data capture in the future to support in-depth analyses over time of the scientific workforce and the trajectories of graduates of our university system into and out of that workforce. Such data and subsequent analysis will allow better allocation of resources, better design of education and training, better understanding of the science and research landscape, and informed appraisal of the career paths that emerge from PhD study in the sciences.

Devolution of New Zealand Research to a Gig Economy

Laura Bennet — 2024-11-14

In 2005 the New Zealand Tertiary Education Commission’s (TEC) put out a call for academic feedback on their Strategic Review of the Tertiary Education Workforce. Authors on this review provided a comprehensive review of the increasing reliance of tertiary institutes, particularly universities, on fixed-term contract staff, and the inherent risks for New Zealand science of relying on staff with unstable career structures and funding support. We explored some of the causes behind the transformation of the workforce from permanent to fixed-term, and recommended a suite of potential pathways to help address the challenges. This current review reports that nearly 20 years on very little has changed, and indeed the situation has gotten worse, with more researchers than ever before now on fixed-term contracts, even at senior levels. We have failed to establish and fund a career fellowship system. There has been a lack of substantive increases in funding for grants like Marsden and HRC that can sustain employment of research staff, and grant funding has not kept up with inflation. The net result is that we have essentially created a gig economy for research staff, with reliance on repeated contracts over many years, with few if any opportunities to transition to permanent positions. Researchers must write more and more grants to sustain their salaries as grants are insufficiently funded due to lack of investment leaving staff with either reducing the contract time or without a full salary for the full duration. Low funding rates due to lack of investment make it increasingly difficult to get funding to pay their salaries. Researchers see a bleak future, and the brain drain has begun. Students do not see a career in research as attractive and thus our capacity to develop the next generation of Kiwi scientists is at risk. This crisis threatens our ability to undertake and deliver science, technology and innovation that is essential for the growth of our economy. Urgent action is needed to address this fundamentally flawed approach to how we fund university based research and how we fail to support sustainable research careers.

The Science Trifecta

Georgia Grant — 2024-06-07

This is an opinion piece formed through discussion and in response to a need for society’s voice to be represented in science. This isn’t a new problem, and we join many others imagining alternatives for the science system (Fazey et al., 2020; Funtowicz and Ravetz, 2020; Kukutai et al., 2021; MBIE, 2021, 2022; Aung et al., 2022; Urai and Kelly, 2023). Our intention is that this work will encourage critical thought and examination of the science system as the reader has experienced it. Although we present three specific reforms, our primary goal is to widen the discourse and thinking on system reform. Ultimately, we want the reader to ask themselves: is the science system sufficiently representative, connected and adaptive to address the problems of the future, and to empower the contributions of all of its parts towards this end?

Our audience is everyone, but our perspective is only as two early-career Pākehā working in the Aotearoa-New Zealand science system, at Te Pū Ao - GNS Science. (This work does not reflect the opinion of Te Pū Ao). We welcome all thoughts on the Science Trident (Georgia: georgia.grant.nz@gmail.com, Sam: staylorofford@gmail.com).

Fixing the Pakaru Pipeline: Some recommendations for Change

Sereana Naepi — 2024-12-27

Māori and Pacific people remain under-represented in our research sector. There have been recent efforts to address this particular workforce issue including targeted research funds, and fellowships. However, these efforts do not currently take into account where Māori and Pacific people are. Instead, they reflect a desire for where the government want Māori and Pacific to be. While this targeting is useful for driving Māori and Pacific people into STEM, it does leave the majority of Māori and Pacific in precarious and unsustainable career pathways. This paper considers where we currently find Māori and Pacific doctorates, where Māori and Pacific people are graduating from and finally makes recommendations for a whole of system approach while continuing to support Māori and Pacific scholars in STEM.

Marine Renewable Energy Research and Development in New Zealand in the Pre-Offshore Wind Era

Craig Stevens — 2024-08-18

Over the last two decades there have been a range of efforts to develop a marine renewable energy sector in Aotearoa New Zealand. There have been a modest number of successes along with the inevitable stalled ideas and lost effort. With the rapid growth of offshore wind in New Zealand being foreshadowed, it is a suitable time to record some of these early initiatives. The various projects, researchers and ideas all sought to improve the nation’s energy emissions profile before climate mitigation options became limited.

How do New Zealand Scientists perceive the benefits and limitation of Citizen Science?

Sally Carson — 2024-01-10

Public engagement with science in New Zealand adopted a more participatory approach with the 2014 launch of the Strategic Plan for Science in Society, joining the groundswell of citizen science research seen internationally. This study interrogates the views of scientists on the benefits and limitations of citizen science (CS) before and several years after the strategy was launched. Three groups of scientists were compared: NZ marine scientists with an international group of marine scientists around the time of launch, and NZ marine scientists four years later. At initial comparison NZ and international scientists held largely similar views on the benefits and limitations of CS, with only a few exceptions. Awareness of and involvement in CS projects were significantly higher in NZ four years later. Scientists with CS experience generally perceived more benefits, such as expanded data collection, community engagement and public awareness of science. The most frequently identified limitation was quality of data. Although this perception increased in the NZ cohort, the vast majority of scientists felt limitations could be overcome by careful project design and improved infrastructure support and professional recognition. These findings guide further recommendations for high level support systems to facilitate scientists’ involvement in citizen science.

Richard Truscoe: Biochemistry Pioneer, Science Interrupted by War

Thomas William Jordan — 2023-11-22

Richard Truscoe was appointed from University College London in 1957 to establish teaching and research in Biochemistry at Victoria University of Wellington. He had extensive experience in research in England, Europe, and the United States. His scientific career had been interrupted by the Second World War, in which he served as an intelligence officer in the top-secret British Special Operations Executive (SOE). His SOE service was regarded as remarkable. During the war he consistently supported an independent future for Poland and warned of the dangers presented by the territorial ambitions of the Soviet Union. In biochemistry he had been a pioneer researcher on the metabolism of purines, and on the metabolic functions and effects of hormones and blood electrolytes including potassium and sodium. On arrival in Wellington, he predicted a future where biochemistry facilitated production of food grown in laboratories and for advances in medicine based on molecular understanding of disease. He initiated undergraduate and Honours teaching in biochemistry at Victoria University of Wellington, established infrastructure for research and supervised a cohort of a dozen MSc students. His legacy includes graduates who were stimulated to follow research careers, and interests in human health and disease that continue today.

The 2023 Aotearoa New Zealand Sea Ice Emergency Summit

Natalie Robinson — 2024-02-29

The record low Antarctic sea ice extent observed during 2023 prompted a group of Aotearoa New Zealand researchers to organize a “Sea Ice Emergency Summit” to provide information for the media and public. The key output from the summit was a public statement - the “2023 Aotearoa New Zealand Sea Ice Emergency Statement” - that called for a “dramatic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions now”. This was achieved through the ad hoc development of a rapid-response collaborative and communication process - as often required in emergency situations. This article reports on the motivation, process, science and initial impact of the summit.

Cover and Contents

Editors — 2024-12-27

NZSR Volume 79 Number 1 - 4 Cover and Contents

President's Column

Lucy Stewart — 2024-12-27

Editorial: History never repeats...?

Benjamin Dickson — 2024-03-14

Cut, cut, and cut – the pressures on our university research system

Chris Whelan — 2024-06-19

Cut, cut, and cut – the pressures on our university research system

Climate science is critical to New Zealand's response to climate change

Troy Baisden — 2024-04-12

We are already experiencing an increase in the frequency and severity of climate-related events. Back-to-back climate disruptions such as tropical cyclones, droughts and marine heatwaves are having significant social, environmental and economic costs on the country. Climate science is vital if the country is to have the information needed to adapt to climate change, but the current absence of a clear research investment strategy risks the country's capacity to provide this information.

The New Zealand Association of Scientists Awards for 2023

Editors — 2024-06-20