Slackness to cost $40,000 per year

Slack academics at Canterbury University will cost their colleges $40,000 a year from 2012.

Vice-Chancellor Rod Carr has sent an email to staff saying underperforming colleges in the next Performance Based Research Fund (PBRF) round will be fined $40,000 a year or $200,000 over five years until the next round.

The PBRF will be worth about $250 million by 2012 and 60 per cent of that money is allocated to New Zealand's tertiary institutions according to grades given to academic staff. Those with an A rating attract the most funding and those with R research inactive attract none.

Carr said the heads of each college would have to forecast how many research inactive staff it would have at the time of the next PBRF review in 2012.

The university would then decide how many it was willing and able to carry and colleges given an allocated number.

Colleges which had more than the allowed number of research inactive staff would pay a fine of $40,000 per year.

"The rationale for this approach is accountability and incentive to address the hard choices, and recognition that ... research inactive staff represent a loss of funding and a cost to the whole university as well as a risk to the overall reputation of the university," Carr said.

Tertiary Education Union deputy secretary Nanette Cormack said the move was a "further worrying sign" universities were misusing PBRF information.

"PBRF scores were designed and intended as tools for government funding allocation, not for universities to use to punish individual colleges and the staff within them," she said.

Staff have several reasons to be inactive such as being new or, like Canterbury's College of Education, not having a strong history of active research, she said.

"If the university's central focus becomes chasing research dollars it needs to be very aware that it does not let its other role, teaching, suffer," Cormack said.

Tertiary Education Commission director of tertiary investment and monitoring, David Nicholson, said universities were autonomous institutions, "free to self-manage these matters".

"Because the PBRF is a funding mechanism it is expected that universities will take steps to improve their performance in the activities the PBRF measures and so increase the proportion of the fund they receive," he said.

Universities nationwide are struggling with an unplanned influx of students during the recession, many of whom do not attract funding because funded student numbers are capped by the government.

Canterbury University has predicted the funding shortfall created by these students could be up to $27m over the next three years with about 1800 unfunded students enrolling in 2011.

In an attempt to keep student numbers within its cap, the university is amending its "academic progress regulations" to target failing students and, if necessary, kick them out at an earlier stage.

Under possible new regulations, a minimum grade-point average of 1 would trigger a review of the student's status and an academic English test could become a requirement for continued enrolment.

Carr said the university was also reviewing its 16 service units which employ 900 non-academic employees at a cost of about $70m per year.

He was hoping to find about $5m in savings from the service units to continue support of research and teaching.

Carr said changes would be determined after consultation.