Whither decolonisation? Indigenous scholars and the problem of inclusion in the neoliberal university

Abstract

What is the role of the indigenous critic and conscience of society in the neoliberal university? Much has been written about neoliberalism in higher education but less attention is given to how it is enacted in settler-colonial societies where intellectual labour is shaped by histories of imperialism, invasion and violence. These historical forces are reflected in a political economy of knowledge forged in the interplay of power relations between coloniality and free-market capitalism. Indigenous academics who mobilise a form of public/tribal scholarship alongside native publics and counter-publics often have an uneasy relationship with the neoliberal academy which celebrates their inclusion as diversity ‘partners’ at the same time as consigning them to the institutional margins. This article traces a cohort of Māori senior academics in New Zealand whose intellectual labour is structured around public/tribal scholarship and examines how this unsettles and challenges the problem of neoliberal inclusivity in settler-colonial institutions.

Keywords

decolonisation higher education Māori neoliberalism public scholarship settler-colonialism

What is the role of the indigenous scholar as critic and conscience of settler-colonial society? And, who are their publics in neoliberal times? In his 2004 presidential address to the American Sociological Association, Michael Burawoy (2005) famously called for a revival of the sociological spirit. In the face of unfettered capitalism, market tyrannies, global violence and unprecedented levels of inequity and disenfranchisement, he claimed that sociology had fallen dangerously silent. Those who were originally drawn to the field in the pursuit of social justice, economic equality, environmental sustainability, human rights and political freedom, he argued, were increasingly distracted by a burgeoning array of institutional demands, all too often, becoming deeply enmeshed in picayune professional rivalries. ‘If our predecessors set out to change the world,’ he said, ‘we have too often ended up conserving it’ (Burawoy, 2005: 5).

In making this rallying call, Burawoy unleashed what he later named the ‘public sociology wars’ where ‘radical’ public sociologists and ‘conservative’ professional sociologists furiously denounced each other (Burawoy, 2009). On one hand, he said, conservative professional sociologists claimed that public sociology undermined the discipline while, on the other, radical public sociologists accused the latter of intellectual and social irrelevance. Wading into this mix, indigenous sociologists and other native scholars committed to decolonising scholarship walk a tenuous line between these competing demands.

Debates about public vs professional scholarship are a fraught issue for indigenous scholars. They raise questions about who our intellectual labour is for and who benefits from our work (Grande, 2008; Smith, 2016; Todd, 2016; Turner, 2006). While this is true for many white academics, settler-colonial systems of knowledge production actively maintain and extend public silences about the colonial past and its material consequences in the present (Patel, 2015). Indigenous faculty who challenge settler amnesia in the course of their research and teaching may well find themselves facing diminished career prospects or being stigmatised as ‘angry’ natives and consigned to the institutional margins (Chatterjee and Maira, 2014; Duncan, 2014).

In ‘speaking back’ to settler-colonial silences, many native academics draw inspiration and resolve from decolonising movements outside universities. Reflecting Burawoy’s advocacy of an organic public scholarship, they draw directly from indigenous publics and counter-publics – that multiplicity of first peoples who are engaged in insurgent, grassroots or subaltern conversations about the pressing matters of our times. The decolonising potential of this kind of scholarship, however, is often seen as a threat in managerialist institutions which act quickly to neutralise it; but for many native scholars it is a primary commitment (Smith, 2006).

This article traces a cohort of indigenous Māori senior academics in New Zealand who have created scholarly public identities as critics and conscience of settler-colonial society. It examines how their intellectual labour is structured around a series of political and cultural ‘refusals’ in the neoliberal university and how they build solidarities at the peripheries of their institutions. These academics experienced high levels of cultural marginalisation in their universities and this had a lasting impact on their careers. However, the margins of academia can also be sites of decolonial activity where minoritised and indigenous faculty can connect in meaningful ways with native counter-publics outside the university (Kidman and Chu, 2017; Louis, 2007; Smith, 2016) and this is explored here.

Indigenous scholars at the neoliberal/ settler-colonial junction

Intellectual labour in universities has changed dramatically over the past 30 years with the rise of a new public managerialism that draws heavily on a neoliberal regime of audit, ranking and measurement (Kidman and Chu, 2017). These practices are embedded in networks of bureaucratic and administrative control over academic knowledge production that form a tightly woven web of soft governance (Berg et al., 2016). The proliferation of this kind of ‘soft’ power in neoliberal institutions has penetrated universities in a variety of ways; for example, the highly discursive nature of these regulatory systems has given rise to a profound anxiety among academics (Billot, 2010; Macfarlane, 2016; Winter, 2009). These anxieties are not trivial. Along with a host of other subjectivities, they are a product of an affective regime that has come to dominate the neoliberal workplace; shaping the way that intellectual labour is configured and placing constraints on individual faculty in their roles as critic and conscience of society.

In universities, affect is often mobilised as a means of managing industrial relations and this has consequences for an increasingly casualised and adjunctified academic workforce, where ongoing restructurings and retrenchment have seen the emergence of an anxious and alienated academic precariat (Kidman et al., 2017). These subjectivities have been the focus of much research and debate in recent years (Cannizzo, 2018; Davies and Bansel, 2005; Grant and Elizabeth, 2015; Wright and Shore, 2017) but few have investigated their racialised nature. Little is known, for example, about how the neoliberal academy intersects with and entrenches coloniality in its everyday operations or how the double-helix of neoliberalism and settler-colonialism affects indigenous scholars and their knowledge production activities (Tuck and Yang, 2012).

The impact of these forces on indigenous scholarship is an important consideration in anglophone settler states, like New Zealand, Australia and Canada, where universities are part of a nexus of power and governmentality shaped by a history of colonial invasion (Connell, 2014; Manathunga, 2014). In the settler academy, native scholars operate within ‘an imperial knowledge complex’ (Chatterjee and Maira, 2014: 12) that manages and contains the means of knowledge production as well as their access to institutional resources. Accordingly, they experience academia in very different ways to their settler colleagues (de Leeuw et al., 2013). The issue, however, is not straightforward. Indigenous scholars are not simply excluded from the professoriate, although the poor representation of native academics, especially in more senior positions, would suggest otherwise (de Leeuw et al., 2013). As well, indigenous and minoritised Black faculty are frequently perceived as less able (Henry et al., 2016), less rational (Yancy, 2015), less knowledgeable (Bernal and Vilalpando, 2002) and less ‘civilised’ (Moreton-Robinson, 2011) than white academics, providing the academy with a tacit basis for marginalising them. But equally troubling is the manner in which the academic and institutional inclusion of indigenous scholars operates inside universities.

The problem of inclusion has been highlighted in recent work which posits a continuity between European settler-colonialism and contemporary forms of neoliberalism (Lloyd and Wolfe, 2016). Key to this is the recognition that settler-colonialism is not an historical event tucked safely away in the past but rather a constantly evolving structure that seeks allies in modern economies (Glenn, 2015). Yacobi and Tzfadia (2017), for example, argue that neo-settler-colonialism progresses the colonial project by drawing on a neoliberal toolkit of free-market ideas and practices in ways that disguise contemporary forms of imperial logic.

In line with this, settler-colonialism operates on the presumption that the imperial frontier – that space between settler and native worlds – has closed and that the governance of civic society, which encompasses indigenous groups that are considered conquered or successfully assimilated, has been settled (Wolfe, 2011). Accordingly, by calling on the language and ideas of the marketplace and enacting neoliberal practices of soft governance, the settler-colonial university incorporates small numbers of native scholars into the professoriate. The presence of these indigenous academics serves to reinforce the academy’s branding of itself as inclusive, tolerant and open (Ahmed, 2012a). This is evidenced in university mission statements and strategic plans that beat the drum for cultural inclusivity but rarely lead to structural change that challenges the status of white elites or fully opens the door to native faculty, especially in the higher ranks of the academic profession.

Settler-colonial discourses surrounding cultural and ethnic inclusivity in universities are therefore problematic for many indigenous scholars who find themselves enmeshed in the intellectual and assimilative agendas of their institutions (Mamdani, 2016). These inclusions are always selective and carry an accompanying risk that native scholarship will be co-opted to the project of legitimisation either within academic circles or by the settler state in its management of native populations (Miraftab, 2004). It is in this respect that neoliberalism reconstructs indigenous–settler epistemic relationships in ways that affirm colonial forms of knowledge production but which also advance the economic and ideological imperatives of market-driven academic governance and practice (Deckard and Heslin, 2016).

Consequently, being positioned as an ‘insider’ within these organisations creates an ethical dilemma for native academics who wish to put their scholarship to work on behalf of decolonisation projects (Bhattacharyya and Murji, 2013). But neither does being an ‘insider’ necessarily confer privilege or academic status. Even those indigenous intellectual workers who operate at the managerial core of their organisations are frequently subject to paternalistic pathologising and racially based institutional practices. In many cases, institutional inclusion is presented to native faculty as a form of ‘decolonisation’ despite the fact that this ‘inclusion has not led to formal decolonisation or even to substantial institutional reform’ (Strakosch, 2013: 5).

In New Zealand, where there are widespread and uncomfortable silences about the colonial past (O’Malley and Kidman, 2017), settler-colonial and neoliberal forces cooperate within a grid of power relations that connect historical and modern forms of coloniality with market-driven ideologies. Within the academy, these ideologies, practices and values not only echo wider public silences but also reproduce and maintain them (Chatterjee and Maira, 2014; Kidman et al., 2015). The hegemonic aspect of these entangled power relations can be seen in the soft governance of intellectual labour which links economic rationalism with highly regulated forms of academic subjectivity, as discussed below.

Native academics on ‘happiness duty’

In recent years, a surge of writing about the role of happiness in public life has appeared in the fields of psychology, management, economics, public policy, marketing and organisational theory (Binkley, 2011). Also referred to as the ‘happiness turn’ (Ahmed, 2007: 7), this is a network of discourses that is aligned with neoliberal strategies of governmentality; in particular, the production of a distinctively neoliberal subjectivity (Richardson et al., 2018). Echoing C. Wright Mills’ (2000) writing about the legions of ‘cheerful robots’ who compliantly take their place in the economic order, these discourses promote a view of emotional life in the workplace that is saturated and refined by economic thought (Binkley, 2014).

Participating in these affective orders has direct consequences for all intellectual workers. In the neoliberal era, the ‘cheerful robot’ of academia has become part of a responsibilising therapeutic narrative that links university faculty to rational and economically motivated subjectivities. As Morrissey (2015) argues, at the centre of neoliberal rationality, ‘is the promise that individual behaviour and happiness, the “public good” and responsible government can be secured by the extension of the logic of the market’ (2015: 619). In line with this and as will be further discussed later, increased attention to university diversity policies and human resources practices geared towards public demonstrations of openness and goodwill to ‘non-traditional’ scholars – read, indigenous or minoritised Black faculty – have become a central feature of social liberal management in higher education. As Ahmed argues, ‘diversity is often used as shorthand for inclusion, as the “happy point” of intersectionality’ (2012a: 14). Indeed, she suggests that the promise that universities make to diversity ‘is the promise of happiness: as if in becoming happy or wanting “just happiness” we can put racism behind us’ (Ahmed, 2012a: 165).

Being included in academe should make native faculty happy. Except that it usually fails to do so. Universities manage their relationship with ‘diversity’ through the medium of a normative feel-good whiteness – a racialised form of uncomplaining happiness that positions indigenous faculty as insiders when they are complicit and as ‘angry’ or disruptive when they challenge the status quo of their disciplines or their institutions (Ahmed, 2012b). Ahmed describes this as a form of ‘happiness duty’ (2012a: 156) – a demand that native faculty are accommodating and cheerful even when confronted with the intrusion of white settler practices that contain, silence and curb them in the course of their research and teaching. As Leonardo and Porter (2010) argue, this is often where ‘people of color find themselves between the Scylla of becoming visible and the Charybdis of remaining silent’ (2010: 140). The response of many indigenous academics is to create spaces in the institutional margins where these ‘happiness’ discourses and duties are disrupted, as discussed below.

Indigenous intellectual labour in the margins

If the sites that produce power are manifold and permutable then so too are sites for counter-hegemonic and insurgent scholarship (Miraftab, 2009). As Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2016) argues, the commitment to ‘doing research in the margins is that the researchers who choose to study with and for marginalised communities are often in the margins themselves in their own institutions, disciplines, and research communities.’ (Smith, 2016: 359). Accordingly, many indigenous faculty become highly adept at navigating these sites and creating spaces for others who share similar priorities. In this regard, indigenous strategies for resistance can be highly adaptive, versatile and malleable (Walter, 2010). To that end, many indigenous academics have developed ways of working at the margins of institutional life by establishing solidarities both within the academy with institutionally marginalised others and with publics and counter-publics beyond it.

As well, many native scholars find themselves in closer proximity to tribal activism or sovereignty movements when they are positioned at the institutional peripheries. As bell hooks (1990) writes, ‘that space of refusal, where one can say no to the coloniser, no to the downpressor, is located at the margins. And one can only say no, speak to the voice of resistance because there exists a counter language’ (hooks, 1990: 341). It may be too great a claim that the margins of universities in neoliberal times are insurgent spaces although they can, at times, become this. Russell (2015), for example, suggests that it is in the margins and peripheries that scholarship can focus on ‘producing tools that you can fight with’ (Russell, 2015: 222).

In the next part of this article, the experiences of a group of older Māori senior academics in New Zealand are explored. These scholars share a commitment to Māori sovereignty and decolonisation movements outside the academy. Members of this group are nearing retirement and a new generation of Māori scholars is coming in behind them.

In the course of this research, they spoke about the challenges and negotiations involved in upholding a strong commitment to tribal/public scholarship in the settler academy and the emotional labour this entails. As one participant told us, taking an active critic and conscience role as an ageing Māori scholar in a settler-colonial university is a bit like ‘being that snuffling indigenous Eeyore eternally supping the rank waters of institutional “diversity” whilst being managed by a psychopathic bloody six-year old … who wants to stay six forever and ever. Tiddly pom!’ These are their stories.

Methodology

As part of a two-year study of Māori and Pacific academic socialisation, in-depth one-to-one ethnographic interviews and field observations (Skinner, 2012) were conducted with 43 senior academics (Māori N = 29 and Pacific N = 14) in nine New Zealand universities. Two case studies were developed, one comprising narratives from Māori academics and the other focused on Pacific academics (Kidman and Chu, 2017). For the purposes of this article, we examine the Māori scholars’ case study and focus on a smaller subset of ten participants aged between 58 and 68 years. This was an older group of participants who are part of a generation of Māori scholars who entered university during the 1970s and 1980s – a time of heightened political and economic tension in New Zealand. Their scholarship was forged alongside their commitment to Māori sovereignty movements. This was an important, albeit unexpected, finding that broadly reflects the views of many Māori academic knowledge workers of that generation. It gives an insight into what drives indigenous scholarship in New Zealand universities and how this has changed over time. During the course of the two-year study these scholars often spoke to us about the impact of these commitments on their academic careers.

Participants were selected from university lists of senior Māori academic staff and from our own networks after which snowball sampling approaches were used (Cohen and Arieli, 2011). Over a two-year period, interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. In some cases, participants chose not to be taped and we took extensive field notes which we showed them at the conclusion of the interviews. Most interviews were conducted in person although on a few occasions follow-up discussions were conducted by telephone or email. Data were also collected from observations and field journals and analysed thematically (Kidman et al., 2015).

The participants

Māori comprise only 6% of New Zealand’s academic workforce (Sutherland et al., 2013) and few are employed at senior academic levels (Nana et al., 2010). This is partly because the average age of Māori students at PhD graduation is 49 years (Nana et al., 2010) and since only 5.8% of all postgraduates are Māori, the number of graduates entering the academic profession is very small (Theodore et al., 2016). Accordingly, Māori academic careers tend to begin closer to the age of retirement than those of their Pākehā (New Zealanders of European descent) colleagues and are of shorter duration (Kidman and Chu, 2017).

The participants in this study were working as associate professors, professors and experienced senior lecturers in a range of disciplines in the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and professional and applied fields. It should be noted that New Zealand is a small country with a predominantly Pākehā academic workforce and few Māori senior faculty are employed outside of Māori Studies departments. This makes them relatively easy to identify and for this reason their disciplines and universities are not named here (Kidman and Chu, 2017).

Members of the cohort of older Māori academics had each had been the first their families to attend university. They had been politically active during the 1970s and 1980s and throughout their lives had maintained a close involvement with tribal politics and associated sovereignty movements, as well as other forms of activism (e.g. the women’s movement).

Māori activist scholars

The participants’ political views were the subject of much discussion during the course of the study. Several used the time we spent with them reflecting on the role of Māori political activism in shaping their scholarship, although it should be noted that this was not something we specifically asked them about. It was, however, a driving factor for each of them. The commitment to political activism is not unusual among left-of-centre academic faculty (Nakhaie and Brym, 2011; Rothman et al., 2005; Zipp and Fenwick, 2006), particularly in the social sciences and humanities where leftist perspectives predominate (Klein and Stern, 2005). What distinguishes this group from other academics in their institutions, however, is their deep engagement with the political struggles of indigenous Māori communities. We found that these political commitments are widely shared by other Māori in the same age group who entered academia at around the same time (Katene, 2015) and were committed to advancing mana motuhake (Māori self-determination) (Stastny and Orr, 2014). They spoke about how their early days of protest had a profound influence on the way they shaped their subsequent academic careers.

I come [into the university] as an ‘old soldier’ from the Māori protest movement and I can’t stop being that person. That’s what I think a lot of us have learnt. As we watch the unions getting smashed up and the university becomes more corporatised, it’s very easy to lose spaces for that kind of thinking. But these are the challenges that confront us. The old days of protest, we keep them with us. Look around us here. We’ve got quotes on the walls from the Black Power Movement, from the Panthers, from the anarchists.

At certain junctures during the 1970s and 1980s, Māori political activism overlapped with other protest movements providing a cross-fertilisation of ideas and alliances that the participants carried with them into university workplace interactions in later years.

I think what we’ve learnt over the past twenty years is important. I’ve come from the protest movements. In my early days, I was part of the union movement, part of various workers’ movements […] the women’s movement, the peace movement. I was part of that resistance. […] That’s where I come from … political movements. That’s where I cut my teeth.

[…] I learnt from older activists who would never ever, ever, ever agree to the sorts of things we agree to now. They would always say ‘No!’ I think that’s what we’ve learnt. We keep the dreams of struggle alive.

Central to these discussions was an awareness of the changing nature of political activism in the neoliberal era. Each of the participants spoke about the wide-ranging restructuring of New Zealand’s economy during the 1980s and 1990s and the devastating impact on Māori communities as well as their own scholarship. In the fractured and economically divided nation that emerged in the wake of a highly market-driven economy, Māori academics needed to decide carefully how they would position themselves in increasingly neoliberal university environments and the extent to which they were willing to compromise in order to remain in the academic profession.

I think the world has moved on from the 1970s and 1980s when there was a lot of […] talk amongst Māori … those were the days of Ngā Tamatoa, of the hīkoi, of the land marches¹ … we’ve moved from there into a world that has been changed by massive economic reforms. So a lot of the things we did back in the day – a lot of that has been cut back for our people. For Māori people, employment in forestry, for example, that was where I grew up … all of that’s been cut back. Our people are hurting. They’re hurting. They’re really hurting. […] We live in a world where communities are fractured and disjointed and as we come through as academics, we lead very privileged lives in the university but we are part of that whole thing. So it really matters how we position ourselves.

Alongside activists outside academia, these scholars drew enormous inspiration from Māori resistance to the settler state over time (Kidman et al., 2018).

Recently, I stood at Rewi Maniapoto’s grave.² He was a man who stood and fought at a time when the Crown was saying that it would take the land. And what he did was to say ‘No way!!!’ He locked down that land and he stood and he fought. So many Māori died in that struggle. So many people died for it. And that’s what we need to remember. We have a history where people fought and died for what was right. They fought for future generations and that’s what we need to do inside the institutions; we need to fight. […] We need to believe in ourselves and we need to stand up for the […] generations of Māori who will come after us.

The participants had each grown up in Māori communities that suffered significant and ongoing losses as a result of colonial invasion. Accordingly, they were highly aware of the dangers to indigenous communities when settler-colonialism is coupled with the demands of global market economies and these understandings shaped their teaching and research priorities.

I’m really genuinely scared for the future. I feel like a doomsayer but this shit is real. We are part of the last generation that came into a world that was better than the one that came before. What we have bequeathed to future generations is complete environmental catastrophe exacerbated by some of the most violent and appalling human aggression.

We don’t have world wars anymore because the world is continually at war. Meanwhile corporate greed is reaching unparalleled levels. So you have these three monolithic dangers; environmental, economic and social.

We are plummeting towards an uncertain future and I am deeply, deeply scared for future generations. To look around and see this planet being so broken.

While these participants were in constant interaction with Māori groups outside academia about the impact of these matters on their communities, they were also fighting the ‘war at home’ in their own universities. They were particularly worried about the infiltration of the neoliberal agenda into the ranks of early career academics, including in some cases, Māori early career academics and expressed concern that this could further marginalise Māori scholarship.

New generation Māori academics

A frequent topic of discussion during the field research was a concern that younger Māori scholars would ultimately be assimilated into the colonial logic of academy and the threat this posed to the role of Māori critic and conscience of society.

It worries me that we might just create a parallel class of academics. A kind of an elite system. Māori have been mostly working class but that’s changing. That’s not to say that the divides between people aren’t increasing because they are. But as we become part of that system and that structure I worry that the risk is that we simply replicate that system; those elite structures. […] I do worry that we’ll lose our activism; that we’ll lose that sense of mutual accountability.

Another asked, ‘What happens if we all get assimilated; if we become anaesthetised? Whither decolonisation?’ These anxieties were aligned with uncertainty about the long-term sustainability of Māori scholar-activism in New Zealand universities. They had witnessed an increasing dependence on a casualised and adjunctified academic workforce and were aware that Māori early career faculty, many of whom carry high levels of student debt, are often in a vulnerable situation as members of a growing academic precariat.

I look at some of the younger Māori grads. They want, more than anything, not to have to live between fixed-term academic contracts. But there’s nothing else there for them. I watch them turning themselves into good little neoliberal citizens – preening for academic managers in the hope of getting a job. Will they pick up the fight after we’ve gone? I really don’t know. We might be the last. I hope not. But these new kids on the block, they’re all so vulnerable. Some of them are entitled little shits but they’re all really vulnerable. It’s just that the university hasn’t sucked the joy out of them yet.

Another participant commented on the impact of neoliberal economic reform in New Zealand in creating a cadre of Māori scholars who are heavily focused on job security and more cautious about speaking out.

I think that some of the younger [Māori] academics coming through; these are kids who have grown up since the economic reforms of the 1980s and 1990s and schools have done a very good job at creating academic identities that are highly individualistic and highly competitive.

There’s a lot of rhetoric about caring and sharing in schools but the practices on the ground don’t always reflect that. Education itself is very much a zero sum game played by some very determined and very hungry competitors. And those who have been successful in those contexts are coming into the universities and they are campaigning for and winning the tiny number of academic jobs available and they are performing those professional identities in ways that are highly competitive and highly individualistic and highly fucking tiresome.

These concerns are shared by many leftist academics in universities across the world. Kalfa et al. (2018), for example, argue that most early career academics have little choice but to play the neoliberal ‘game’ when building their careers and this has the effect of both disarming resistance and playing colleagues off against each other. In New Zealand, many Māori junior academics also delay having families or avoid setting down roots in order to pursue tenured positions and this has a negative impact on their willingness to openly challenge the colonial agenda of their institutions (Kidman and Chu, 2017). The older scholars in this study acknowledged the obstacles that their younger Māori colleagues confront but also expressed frustration that, like many junior academics in other parts of the world (Archer, 2008), early career Māori academics are increasingly more inclined to accept managerial regimes as an inevitable price to pay for academic jobs. Several participants commented that this makes universities even less hospitable for Māori.

Māori public/tribal scholarship

In university environments that favour and reward academic compliance, these older academics found themselves increasingly consigned to the intellectual margins of their institutions. Their commitment to public/tribal scholarship remained strong but as they aged, they perceived a shift in the way their universities engaged with them. They were still included in institutional branding exercises, for example, when photographs of smiling ‘diverse’ peoples were required for publicity purposes, but they found it more and more difficult to get their research taken seriously within their institutions. This provided some with a level of invisibility that allowed them to continue their pro bono research and advocacy for Māori concerns, but it also placed them at the social and academic edges of their universities. In most cases, however, this only strengthened their resistance to managerialist practices and also their commitment to public/tribal scholarship.

So I could publish in a journal that a handful of white scholars will read and forget about by the end of the day or I could go to [name of tribal area removed] and talk to the whānau there who are at their absolute wit’s end and look at ways of sorting out the problems they’re dealing with. Or, I could choose between getting into a polite debate with some earnest, tweedy, corduroy-ed don over a glass of sherry and a vol-au-vent or I could duke it out with the bloody stroppy kuias [women elders] in the back blocks of [name of region removed] and maybe … possibly … hopefully make some sort of constructive change to the lives of real people … Who am I going to choose? Well, what do you reckon? Seriously? I hate sherry!³

Another participant commented, ‘I won’t make Professor anytime soon … but I might make a difference where it counts.’ These were the pay-offs that this group of Māori scholars made as they neared the end of their academic careers but they also expressed considerable frustration with the more subtle ways that they were simultaneously included and marginalised within their institutions. This was particularly the case when they found themselves enmeshed in institutional discourses about diversity. Many of the participants in this study, both older and younger, considered that the language of diversity in settler-colonial universities is embedded in the affective regimes of neoliberal academic governance. In other words, diversity talk is geared towards promoting positive feelings towards settler management regimes. These affective regimes, however, are highly racialised and centre on the management of indigenous and other minoritised groups within the university to uphold colonial norms of whiteness, as discussed below.

Diversity in settler-colonial universities

I don’t think [indigeneity] is positioned. It’s very much on the borders. I think that being indigenous is seen as useful when there’s a research project coming up and they can get someone who’s Māori […] in to make themselves look good. That’s when they find uses for us. Other than that, there’s no recognition.

In New Zealand, indigeneity is often positioned as a procedural obligation. Universities are required to incorporate indigenous ‘others’ into their mission statements and strategic plans but the participants commented that deficit perspectives tend to dominate these institutional processes.

The institution has a whole lot of equity and diversity policies in place and a whole lot of boxes for [academic managers] and Deans to tick. So Māori are always and forever a diversity question or an equity question. And in some ways that’s a bureaucratising of Māori-ness or a bureaucratisation of Pacific-ness. Ethnicity is just bureaucratised. It becomes a puzzle for university management that needs to be solved and quite often the people who are brought in to solve those problems are Pākehā. There’s an attitude that Pākehā are more knowledgeable about how to solve the problems of social injustice within the institution than we are ourselves.

Academic managers in settler-colonial universities are frequently uncomfortable about engaging with indigeneity; often preferring to frame challenges from Māori academics as a ‘problem’ of contemporary multicultural societies. However, the elision of indigenous concerns with those of other ethnicities, or the folding of native political interests into broader discussions about multicultural societies, often serves to suppress or deny indigenous claims for justice (Muehlmann, 2009). In these instances, Māori academics must constantly renegotiate their rights as intellectual workers but also as native people. As one participant said, ‘I don’t think institutions care about indigeneity. They talk about diversity but they don’t worry too much about indigeneity.’

The Māori participants in this study commented on their frustration when called on by academic managers to express gratitude or support for diversity and equity policies, or to maintain a cheerful countenance when confronted with institutional racism. Maintaining silence in these situations, however, can also be an act of refusal. As Ahmed (2014) writes, ‘[n]ot to cheer is to withdraw from the situation. Not being in the mood for happiness becomes a political action. And you know what: I am not in the mood’ (2014: 28). This was a course of action that was also taken at times by frustrated Māori academics.

Smith (2007) argues that the decolonisation project in research operates across many platforms. This kind of research uncovers and deconstructs ‘imperialism, and its aspect of colonialism, in its old and new formations alongside a search for sovereignty; for reclamation of knowledge, language, and culture; and for the social transformation of the colonial relations between the native and the settler’ (Smith, 2007: 117). In neoliberal times, the colonial project of academia has been reinvented and transformed as it aligns ever more closely with market ideologies and values. For this reason, decolonisation scholarship is as important now as it has ever been. The solidarities that Māori scholars build at the margins of their institutions may well be a central site for unmasking the alliance between neoliberalism and settler-colonialism and generating new forms of indigenous resistance. But time will tell. The Māori scholars in this study were nearing retirement and early career academics are under increasing pressure to set aside decolonising research agendas in favour of more compliant forms of intellectual labour that do not place their careers at risk or challenge the status quo.

But if indigenous peoples are going to survive in the neoliberal university, our scholarship must face outwards towards native publics or else sit forever in limbo, neither transforming the institution nor fuelling indigenous struggles against oppression and colonialism. The margins are not easy places to be. They lead us away from the academy’s glittering prizes – promotion opportunities, awards, Royal Society fellowships, scholarly recognition in the white university. But they are spaces where change can begin and, for now, that may need to be enough.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by a grant from Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga, the Māori Centre of Research Excellence, University of Auckland.

Notes

ORCID iD

Joanna Kidman

Author Biography

Joanna Kidman is an indigenous Māori sociologist with tribal affiliations to Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Raukawa and Ngāti Toa Rangatira. She works in the field of indigenous sociology at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. Her research focuses on the politics of indigeneity, Māori youth and settler-colonial nationhood.

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