Academic debate lacking Drop warmonger’s name

Once, the words academic freedom were central to any thoughtful appraisal of university education ( Staff speak up over divided campus, Sept 19). Today they have become an embarrassing relic of the notso-distant past.

Universities have morphed into massive neoliberal business corporations controlled by unrepresentative elites who rule from the secrecy of the vicechancellor’s office. Meaningful staff and student representation is a fiction. Those who step out of line are ignored or marginalised. The grossly overpaid vicechancellor’s contempt for dissent was never more apparent than in his recent puerile assault on Dave Armstrong’s satirical article.

Tellingly, in a universitywith 3500

staff, only Lydia Wevers was courageous enough to speak up under her own name. Academic caps off to her.

The rest dived for cover. So much for spirited and open academic debate.

Bob Rigg, Roseneath [abridged]

If we are truly a nation for whom ‘‘Peace, not war, shall be our boast’’, as our national anthem bravely claims, why do we continue to honour an imperial European warmonger in our capital city.

And, when this entitled aristocrat later went into politics, he opposed the extension of the electoral franchise to even the middle class, believing that centuries of inbreeding by the ‘‘right sort of people’’ was an essential precondition for political judgment. These are surely not the values which modern Kiwis, whether Ma¯ori or Pa¯keha¯, espouse.

So let’s find an alternative belonging to this part of the world.

But please, not Poneke, which is a corruption of Port Nicholson. According to historical accounts, Captain Nicholson was the Sydney harbourmaster of the time, so scarcely a suitable hero for the capital of Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Te Whanganui-a-Tara (the great harbour of Tara) sounds pretty good for the capital city, with the provincial region identified as the ‘‘Head of the fish of Maui’’ (Te Upoko o te Ika aMaui) – much more exciting and descriptive than the name of a dead, foreign, belligerent, European imperialist.

Graeme Pirie, Raumati