Posts by Kyle Matthews
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But the idea is that a lecturer has a practice. It might be you are getting taught Early Modern Europe by someone who spends most of their time researching the pilgrimage routes of France in the High Middle Ages. But they will be an active historian, so even though the content differs, they will have a strong grasp of process and practice.
Most academics are paid to spend 40% of their time doing active research. The cost of that will vary, but it's likely to be between $25 - $50K year. That's a tremendous amount of money to spend on someone to maintain the link between research in a completely unrelated field of history, and the survey course they teach at 1st year level. I don't think we need to spend that much to have someone teach first year anything, when we're not actually spending it on them teaching, but on their research so we can tick a box that says 'research-informed teaching'. Because in many instances it's no more research-informed than a high school teacher.
Higher level courses, absolutely. But much of what universities do these days is sausage factory stuff, which is unfortunate, but reality. You don't need a world class professor to make pre-cooked sausages.
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The Maori Party have always campaigned for the party vote. And have been annoyed about pundits telling people that a party vote for the Maori Party was wasted. The electorate vote is more important to them, yes, but that’s far short of a deliberate strategy of causing disproportionality.
In terms of amount of power, it does make sense to campaign for the party vote. If they win four electorates and all are overhang (ie, no candidates would qualify via party vote), they're 4 out of 124 MPs. If they win four electorates and win about 3% of the party vote, they're 4 out of 120 MPs.
There may be some strategic reasons to let go of the party vote (like if you think national are going to get 61 MPs and therefore need your four because of the overhang), but difficult to judge.
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I think the odd thing was that they headlined the story with the “top 10 points” or whatever, then the story spent quite a few words waffling and not delivering on the headline. I felt badly served as a reader,
Oh sure. But "reprint anything that party leaders say" is a terrible solution to bad journalism, which is what people were suggesting.
Labour party have plenty of platforms to get their list of the week out themselves without the expectation that daily papers should reprint their adverts as news.
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As soon as they prosecute the police who acted unlawfully during the early 90s student protests and aftermath in a fair trial held in public I will. Sure.
As someone who wrote his honours dissertation on the event, and was there, I can confidently say there was no basis for any police officers to be charged.
What they did on that day was stupid and wrong, but not illegal. They got well and truly spanked by a high court judge who called their actions "gratitutous and unnecessary".
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Nothing new to see here.
Apart from all the stuff that's new to see here you mean?
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Even teaching-only, bachelor's degree-only institutions in the US have active researchers doing a lot of the teaching, and postdocs doing research under them. That's kind of the point of having a university, that link between extending the field of knowledge and teaching in it. I'd want to think very long and carefully before drawing any sort of separation there.
I'd argue that it was the point of the university. Now universities have expanded to fill up so much of the space in preparing people for the workforce and wider society, I'm just not sure it's needed any more as a universal truth.
No high school teacher is active in research at the cutting edge of what they teach. And yet going from one to the other all of a sudden this is a requirement of our first year lecturer. And the lecturers teaching first year history at university might actually research 1% of the survey course that they are teaching, or even none at all.
The distinction also makes little sense when comparing universities and polytechnics. In theory that's a research/non research split these days. But physiotherapy is taught at university, nursing at polytech. I'm dubious that physio needs research active teachers when nursing doesn't. Nursing is taught in both types of institutions in NZ. It doesn't make sense, and yet our limited funding follows the model that doesn't make sense.
I also think that there's a fair bit of elitism involved. Research-led is the one thing that distinguishes universities and their funding from not universities.
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By not engaging *well enough* against neoliberalism, more broadly, the left let down its constituents.
Well maybe. But in terms of tertiary education, we let the new right choose the battle ground - public vs private benefit. Once you engage in this as a basis for how much you should pay, you've already lost a whole war - we don't charge for social services on this basis.
We never had this discussion properly in the 1990s. If our answer to the new right had been - "are you going to apply that to primary school?" we might be in a different space in the tertiary sector now.
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The current system allows opposition by filibuster which only has the effect of slowing down the passage of a bill, not developing it.
Not really. Any government legislation can't be filibustered just by moving into urgency. And private bills filibustering is limited, as Labour's attempts to stop VSM found out.
Filibustering in the USA can actually stop legislation and requires a supermajority to break. In NZ it really just requires the government whip to say "fuck it".
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The Granny finally publishes Goff's Top 10... but still framed around Key rather than Goff.
I don't see why The Herald or any other paper is obligated to reprint the entirety of any list that Phil Goff or anyone else comes up with. That would make them the mouthpiece of Labour, not National. I hope they pick and choose what they print throughout the campaign.
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Act's policy here reminds me of McGillicuddy Serious Party policy. I asked a friend who was standing for them where he got all his ideas from, and he said that if it's outside their basic great leap backwards policy, just make it up, make sure it's funny and stupid, and the 'head office' such as it was will back you.
Act seems to be the same. We don't have a policy, but we'll happily fall back on free market theory in the absence of one. Guaranteed to be stupid.