Six mathematics alumni and current students have sent an open letter to the University of Otago expressing their concerns over its alleged disregard of the importance of maths education. Critic Te Arohi spoke to Elliot Marshall, a signatory of the letter, about claims that inadequate funding and the University’s refusal to require maths as a prerequisite for certain courses calls into question how the quality of STEM degrees is measured by Otago.
According to the letter, “the University has routinely ignored, underfunded, and undermined the department of mathematics for the past decade…[resulting] in a greatly diminished maths department”. Postgraduate and staff members of the department have been dropping: from 2010 to 2022, Otago maths honours student numbers have gone from 15 to just two. “They’re not even retaining what few students they do keep at honours level either,” said Elliot. Of the three 2021 honours students, two moved to Australia.
Elliot pointed out that the issues covered in the letter have been known for a while, with staff apparently encouraging undergraduate maths students to look elsewhere for honours as there just isn’t the support or funding for postgrad students. “We’ve been hearing it from the staff our entire undergrad, and it’s gotten bad enough that we felt we had to at least say something,” he said.
For maths majors, Elliot explained that lack of funds has led to a limited selection of papers on offer; “You miss out on quite a lot of core topics just because there aren’t enough staff”. For instance, the sole lecturer who could teach combinatorics (a pretty fundamental part of maths) “basically retired so the department wouldn’t have to get rid of another lecturer because they lost more funding”.
The University has also refused to require or provide background maths skills “beyond a cursory level” for most STEM courses. As a tutor for first-year papers, Elliot said the level of maths he saw was “appalling… and you’ll have one lecturer who is expected to fill them in on seven years of maths information and that’ll be the only maths they’ll do.”
“The justification routinely pushed by the University is that student enrolments will drop if mathematics is required for a course.” One maths staff member stressed the need for the quality of the subject to not be measured by student numbers or attractiveness. While maths isn’t exactly attractive, it is “fundamental to modern science, industry and our understanding of the world”. They also noted that, due to the way Universities are currently funded, this shift may only be possible if the government takes responsibility as well.
As it stands, the open letter claims that “all students across the sciences and other disciplines who would benefit from a robust mathematics education are being robbed by a University which prioritises student numbers over the quality of the education they receive… in the process undermining the University’s ability to compete both domestically and internationally.”
The letter calls for three key changes to be made:
- Require maths for a wider range of degrees.
- Standardise maths across Uni and create specific papers such as Maths for Life Sciences.
- Increase maths staff numbers and hire lecturers specifically for core first-year maths skills.
The Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Sciences) has responded with an impressively thorough letter that said while the Uni agrees on the importance of maths, “in the circumstances the mathematics group are well-supported by the University.” Said circumstances include financial constraints that have been felt University-wide, the general decline of fresher numeracy skills, and the fact that “mathematics skills requirements will be determined by academic leaders from each major subject area”. The letter was backed up with data, graphs, and a long list of specific responses, most of which contained confidential information, but sent the message that the concerns were most certainly shared by University administrators.