The crisis in Aotearoa New Zealand’s university and wider research sector did not happen overnight. While funding shortfalls and sweeping redundancies are now making headlines, the underlying problems have been evident for years.
As I wrote after last year’s budget, financial support for research across our universities and crown research institutes “is steadily eroding and has been doing so for some time”, given the impacts of inflation.
The year before was no better. “The 2021 budget is not the investment we needed to see,” I wrote then. “Anything other than an increase in line with inflation is rather a slap in the face.”
