University of Otago vice-chancellor Prof Harlene Hayne has hit back at a suggestion that the method used to evaluate research at New Zealand universities has meant academics no longer have the time to participate in community service.
Tertiary Education Union (TEU) branch co-president at Otago University Dr Brent Lovelock told student magazine Critic that increased workloads caused by the Performance-based Research Fund (PBRF), which is used to fund and evaluate the quality of research, meant community service had fallen away.
"PBRF means that staff are now much busier in terms of doing research, so whether they dedicate as much time to things like lecture planning, I don't know. And community service?
Pfft, it's dropped off the edge somewhere!" Dr Lovelock told the magazine.
Prof Hayne disputed that the PBRF had resulted in a decline in community service, saying that, if anything, there had been an slight increase.
She told the TEU the university's annual assessment of its academic staff involvement in community service showed the percentage of staff who were involved in community service had stayed about the same (between 90% and 95%) over the past 15 years.
"Indeed, if anything, what one sees over time is a small increase in ... the time devoted to [community] service," she said.
The university's survey found that between 1997 and 2001 (pre-PBRF era), respondents spent an average of 7.3% of their time on community service, and during the past five years, the average time spent was 7.8%.
Last month, Dr Lovelock told the Otago Daily Times there had been a large number of redundancies at Otago and other universities because they were "desperately trying to maintain or improve" their positions on PBRF tables.
"Otago, being the No1 research university [in the last PBRF round in 2006], want to retain that as a marketing tool to attract students and staff," he said.
