Sisyphus
There has been considerable outrage over the mandatory Māori courses the University of Auckland is forcing on its students. As a current New Zealand university student, I want to share some thoughts.
I am in my fourth and final year at the University of Canterbury and have had more than my fair share of Māori courses shoved down my throat.
My first year of law I had the three Ps of the Treaty; partnership, protection and participation, drilled into me. I remember in one class they said there were three Ps and in the next class it had made its way up to five. This is when I began to question things.
Throughout lecture after lecture on Māori knowledge, Treaty principles and Crown reparations my classmates and I were told (and many believed) that they were guilty of this great transgression against Māori simply by virtue of their skin colour.
There was even a rumour at the time that when a white guy in my class protested an unfair mark, the response he got was to the effect of ‘Māori have it worse and now you know what it feels like’.
I soon realised law wasn’t for me. I made a change and went into commerce where I thought I’d be safe. I mean, how much influence can Treaty principles have over economics and finance?
Too much.
In second-year commerce courses, every student, regardless of major, must take part in the “Business and Culture” course. To their credit, only about half of the course was Māori and Treaty related, the rest covered Asian and Pasifika cultures.
Either way, the course elevated all the good things about other cultures while diminishing any European culture. Further, as well as the ritual mentions of Treaty principles, it claimed that Māori and Pasifika have a more special connection to environment and community.
I vividly remember being in this class and looking around at all the hijabs of the Malaysian students, one of the bigger international student groups at UC. How is all this relevant to them? They have nothing to do with the Treaty.
The worst part of these courses isn’t the indoctrination, which I had heard all before in law classes and on the news: it was the fact that these were compulsory courses for my degree. I had to pay to be told how bad I am in order to graduate.
Looking back I still cannot for the life of me understand the relevance of learning such things for a commerce degree at university.
We learnt about the Treaty in primary school and it is a shockingly simple document with three points. So why do these courses exist at all?
I think there are two things that motivate the creation of these courses.
The first is indoctrination. They want us to acknowledge our white guilt and the growing list of principles by holding it over our heads to graduate. This is useful for when, in five, 10 or 20 years, they try to push more racist policy through and we all vaguely remember something about how much we need to protect Māori.
The second motivation is simple and provable: money. As I’ve become more exposed to the bureaucracy that is the university system, the more I've come to see this as a grift. The lecturers and faculty members of these departments are able to convince the university of the importance of a mandatory course that guarantees them a certain number of students every year and therefore a certain amount of money for their departments.
It guarantees them a cushy and stable job. They have no reason to work too hard to make the course better because what are we going to do? Drop the compulsory course? They have kept these courses easy enough so that no one really complains and, when they do, it’s easy to dismiss them and proclaim the ‘importance of the Treaty’.
I don’t really blame the grifters though, because it's all just a symptom of a wider problem: the universities have become bloated and the grifters have taken advantage.
The only surprise about the news from Auckland University is that it has taken them this long to create a compulsory Māori course. It has been the norm for my university career.
These mandatory Māori courses split students up into two camps: those, who like me, put their head down, grit their teeth and put up with it. And, more worryingly, those who fully embrace the garbage they are being taught.
I pray there aren’t too many of the latter.
