Bad news from Waikato

An email from Nick Cavenagh at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand, brought the sort of bad news that is sadly all too common these days.

The university proposes to reduce the staff numbers in the mathematics department by 40%. This without substantial reduction in the student provision. (They intend that current programmes would remain but the students’ options would be cut.) As you see, this involves a huge increase in teaching load for the remaining staff, which effectively means the end of the University of Waikato as a research centre in mathematics, and also the end of research-led teaching there. It also places the mathematics major at substantial risk in the future.

And, incidentally, this would involve redundancies as well as “natural wastage”.

I do not intend to give you a point-by-point account of the University’s justification of this big cut, but I can let you have details if you ask for them.

Nick suggests that a submission to the University about the importance of mathematics might be useful to those faced with this situation. If you want to respond, please send your submissions to hinze@waikato.ac.nz and jude.macdonald@waikato.ac.nz by the 19th June. (As you see, time is short!)

Nick adds, “If you do make a submission, please be polite and cordial”, with which I completely agree.

On a personal note, Hamilton was one of the stops on my Forder lecture tour of New Zealand fifteen years ago, and I visited again more recently. I was very impressed by how active in a number of areas the relatively small department was.