Like many practices, we have staff from a range of backgrounds; not a few are recent graduates from the nation’s universities. They arrive with a mix of skills and personalities, and we cast them deep into the melee that begins as the lift doors open revealing our gang, heads down focused on sketchbooks, monitors and iPads, music playing and an urgent, productive air. The younger arrivals are usually known entities. Each of them, invariably, has done some sort of time here as part of their studies, a nod and a wink transforming a passing mid-semester sojourn into a permanent position following a robust examination by those who have worked with them. In these tough times, we are fortunate to have a wide pool of graduates to interview, though this is a bittersweet experience as every bright-eyed new entrant to the studio inevitably comes at the cost of others’ hopes and dreams.

A few recent encounters with some providers of tertiary education have widened my understanding of the extraordinary institutions that universities are, and of some of the care and thought with which the young and hopeful are launched into postgraduate life. In a week of critique, celebration and formal reviewing, the size and sheer complexity of the institutions has become apparent; so, too, has the extent of their activities as they seek to ensure that they remain relevant, useful and topical. I have been interested to understand the ways that those with which I had contact are responding to the evolving expectations of our community, seeking to effect change in the goals and processes by which students are prepared for the chaotic maelstrom we have created.

My week spanned the experience of being ‘in the trenches’ with fourth-year architecture students, aiding, instructing, cajoling and learning from them as they navigate a design programme. It also included an examination of another school’s successes in ordering itself to meet the expectations of society, institution and students, and, somewhere in the middle of that, I have enjoyed the celebration of some of our best and brightest, this latter event occasioned by the launching of the latest cohort of students awarded Kupe Leadership Scholarships.

The scholarship, offered across all disciplines and now in its eighth year, is a leadership programme awarded to postgraduate students; it includes seminars, workshops, tutorials, a stipend and mentoring. The public announcement of this year’s scholars follows their gathering together at Te Tii Marae for orientation and initiation into the programme. The annual celebration of the year’s cohort is one of those moments that warms the heart, giving one confidence that our future is in safe hands.

The 18 or so students are introduced to friends, parents and supporters of the programme with brief descriptions of their studies, their sponsors and mentors; then, it is over to them to share their newly minted group values, forged in the shared experience of their immersion at Te Tii. As you might expect from a small group which has gone through all manner of selection processes, these are extraordinary young people: articulate, highly motivated and eager to embrace the opportunities offered by the scholarship.

Though my engagement is pretty light over the semester, tutoring in studio at the University of Auckland’s architecture school is a somewhat more arduous affair, but one leavened by the great reward of being surrounded by students as they undertake the increasingly demanding requirements of the first-year master’s programme. The students are invariably open and enthusiastic and their uncertainty with more demanding design requirements is familiar, yet the framework of their understanding of the world is formed by the streamed digital ecosphere in which they are natives. I am a visitor in this world and, in many ways, feel out of place; my reliance on the arcane skills of freehand sketching and my bombastic exhortations to cast aside the constraints of rules and assumptions in pursuit of the extraordinary mark me as ‘other’ in a system that is circumscribed by the constraints of quantifiable and reportable goals.

The studio spaces at the Auckland School make significant demands on the students and staff alike. Work is made, critiqued and discussed in a strange labyrinth of spaces that seem better suited to some other endeavour. The noise of immediately adjacent groups builds to a cacophony at mid-semester, when the double-height volumes are filled with the exhausted hopeful awaiting their moment in front of the critics. It is not as if the school had some earlier teaching arrangement that the building better suited. As an inmate of the building’s first year, I recall the hostility of a tutor leaning over a mezzanine and lambasting those of us below of a different group for our too-raucous response to a fellow student’s presentation. At the time, the then dean, Allan Wild, declared that the building would make a wonderful ruin, perhaps anticipating that fitting the school’s design too specifically to a particular pedagogy would render it fit for none.

The issue of having sufficient building space is a common point of pressure for the three schools with which I have had recent contact, each sharing the issues of a central university administrative structure adding yet more students into the courses and increasing course options in order to help relieve strained budgets. The collateral impact of increasing student numbers is a commensurate need for additional staff and this is exacerbated by the increasing reporting required by university administration and the requirements for both staff and students to better represent the changing demographic and aspirations of Aotearoa.

The transformation of educational structures built on a Eurocentric model to others that are more representative of an increasingly diverse student body, give effect to the requirements of
Te Tiriti o Waitangi and incorporate Mātauranga Māori is no mean feat. The critical role of universities in the education of those who will work, guide and shape the next 60 or 70 years of Aotearoa life bestows on the universities a special responsibility to engage actively in the reconfiguring of course curricula, pedagogy and even the ‘bricks and mortar’ to facilitate a more equitable learning environment.

These imperatives inevitably run into headwinds. As with any other section of society, the universities employ those who span the full range of views, from those intractably opposed to change to those agitating for immediate change. This is particularly apparent when university issues enter the political realm and become a cause célèbres in the popular press. A case in point is the provision of dedicated space on campus for Māori and Pasifika students to gather. This is a tiny step towards making our universities more responsive to the differences in ways of learning, and of being, yet provoked a howl of protest and accusations of racism from the political right wing, who chose not to explore the clearly documented improvement in academic performance by those who used the spaces.

In contrast, my brief encounters with the outstanding young graduates in the Kupe programme provide an exemplar of the synthesising of academic education and the lessons gained at Te Tii in their initiation to the course. Their assimilation of the value of collective endeavour paddling a waka, and the use of the paddles as metaphors for the values that will guide the cohort through the year, are small but potent causes for hope. The universities, and we, are the richer for their efforts to engage in and learn from the cultures of their students.