SINCE 1883 OUR GRADUATES, STAFF AND STUDENTS HAVE BEEN MAKING THEIR MARKS ON THE WORLD.  NONE OF THEM SETTLED FOR SECOND-BEST!  THEY ALL CHOSE THE CHALLENGE OF STUDYING AT A WORLD-CLASS UNIVERSITY.  AND BY MAKING THE SAME CHOICE, YOU TOO WILL TAKE YOUR FIRST STEP TOWARDS MAKING YOUR OWN MARK ON THE WORLD.  WELCOME TO YOUR FUTURE!

The University of Auckland is a prime-opportunity investment scheme; as well as being a high-end tourist attraction, and an incubation facility for start-up businesses. Its commitment to strategic planning, long-range forecasting, and competitive benchmarking all speak of its highest aim: to rise up the rankings. It’s all about elevation.

The University moves up and down the league tables, every year. But it also stays in the same place. It stays on Ngāti Whātua land, divided in two by a barracks wall built by Māori labourers, to defend Auckland against the threat of attack from the North, by Māori warriors led by Hone Heke. It stays in a country inscribed with the pain of colonial domination, the injuries of which are embedded into the University’s every operation. These are mended with ‘acknowledgements’ and afterthoughts: one department, one subdivision of Council, one hard-won marae.

That the University might be no more than an accumulation of afterthoughts isn’t something often acknowledged by the blue skies that adorn every prospectus, poster, web page and billboard in this institution. These speak of a university that’s gazing upwards, thinking transnational thoughts. Its students are into curiosity, creativity, blue-skies thinking: they’ve got, in the words of our VC, a world of choice at their fingertips, and they’re fingering it gleefully.

But after looking upwards for so long it’s easy to lose orientation. The blue skies begin to speak of absence and extraction. Cut out from its context, the University takes on the eerie, simulated quality of stock photography. It reveals itself as a freakish average: a caricature of a university that moves in all the right ways (up the league tables, into public-private partnerships), speaks the right language (objectives, key performance indicators), and smiles a lovely billboard smile (Welcome To Your Future), yet is somehow alien, out of joint.

As with all caricature, the cost of effective imitation is simplification. The University imitates the mythical global university by importing its measuring system: research is reduced to impact, teaching to outcomes, learning to performance. At last! Learning is commensurable, and the university can be a stock service, countable within the codes of international finance. This simplifies things. Or rather, it computes them, amalgamates their particularities: the particles are so tightly compressed, com-puted, that their mosaic structure disappears from view.

It is in mind of these codes that the University grants visibility to some of the things that go on here, but refuses it to others. What is not visible – the inverse image – is the accumulation of history upon which the campus sits; the interstitial activity which occupies much of our time here, the hours of idling, the conversations between classes, the chance encounters; it is the learning that goes on through collaboration or productive cheating; the democratic participation that takes place despite undemocratic managerial structures; and the events that every so often break open the normality of the situation, making us understand it in unforeseen ways.

But the simulated University neglects interstices; all it sees in them is chaos. So, in the midst of murmurs that something is missing here, it finds comfort in being like all the other universities. All the other universities, amalgamated at once. Thus, the interiors of its signature Business School are imported from business schools across the world. The dimensions of its offices are worked out through an aggregation of offices across Australian universities. Its courses are built around the average citizen-student (likes John Key, supports gay marriage, is ambivalent about Israel, probably won’t vote), who is the walking embodiment of democratic consensus, and doesn’t actually exist. This is a university of brutal averages, averages that amputate the outliers.