The fact that this news has come out immediately after exam season, when all of the students likely to protest have buggered off home, makes the announcement almost bittersweet in a sense (they’re afraid of our might!).
Mostly, however, the announcement is just sad. It makes me angry and upset to see such a decision pass through council so abruptly, with a half-arsed apology or two from those on the council meaning little to the students (or non-students, which is likely the bigger issue) who will have their lives ruptured by this increase.
It’s shocking. Grant Robertson’s "heavy heart" raising the proposal will be little consolation for the thousands of students who will no longer have university as a possibility in their lives.
Always the politician, Robertson announced that he would be donating part of his own salary to seven new $7000 entrance scholarships for students requiring additional support, just days before this announcement.
While it is a noble gesture, that $49,000 divided evenly among seven (yes, seven) students is an absolute drop in the bucket when compared to this fee hike.
Students who are in most need of a university experience will be disproportionately affected, and our entire society will be bereft, university expertise failing to make its way into any more than one or two wealthy communities in Auckland.
I’ll talk about how the decision will actually affect decisions later but there’s another thing I have to say.
Otago University Students’ Association (OUSA) president Keegan Wells abstained from the motion, letting fly to the ODT with a halfhearted "let’s not make this increase a habit. This kind of sucks".
I’m sure that’ll show ’em.
What kind of student leader is afraid to advocate for students on a clearly student-related issue?
It’s angering to see that someone elected to represent students has, however well meaning, opted to follow her common sense and words of the university higher-ups she has been wooed by. OUSA needs to be organising active protest against these changes.
Students rely on the organisation for a voice against the injustices levelled against them. Is this really the voice advocating for them?
Let’s consider the university’s defence. The first is a pretty strong one which I wasn’t really aware of. The Tertiary Education Commission has allegedly said that it will not fund universities to a full extent if the universities can’t show they’re in desperate need of the funding, and the only way to do this is to raise fees to their full extent — which is 6%.
This possibly explains the reason Otago is merely reflecting the trend at the moment, as all universities are coincidentally looking to hike their fees by 6%.
Yet the other reasoning behind the move falls flat. Is a fee increase going to stave off further job losses at the university?
It might actually... but it’s another one of those decisions which impacts people and not assets.
What good is a mountainload of university-owned property if you’re having to cut staff and students at its expense? Sell some of it.
The time is now to make some lucky Castle St investor happy with a sweet new uniflat. Also, the fact that there have been no fee increases in years hides the fact that the price of halls has been exponentially increasing, meaning the university is still finding ways to have its kitty filled.
There are levers to be pulled: this one just happens to be the most detrimental to all, would-be, students out there.
I am aware this isn’t the full picture, and that the university is a complex beast with thousands of mouths to feed, yet there is always another way.
As soon as we start telling ourselves there isn’t, the alternative route disappears.
Heck, put me on the university sausage sizzle fundraiser. I’ll run it free of charge.
When decisions like these are made, it’s never the here and now we have to lament, but we must wave our fists about in anger for the children growing up in poverty who have had their legs cut out from under them.
On a wider scale, we must lament our society which desperately needs brainpower to figure out the issues of the coming generation.
I am aware there needs to be solutions somewhere, but a fee hike of this magnitude feels like giving up. I am a teacher aide at Carisbrook School, and it fills me with hopelessness to consider that the chance of university education has become even slimmer today for those children.
This decision did not need to be inevitable; thinking about it as such made it so.
The university is a cruel beast. I am completely and utterly gutted.
■Hugh Askerud is a 21-year-old local and student at the University of Otago, majoring in politics and religious studies.
