Te Herenga Waka Said the Cuts Were a One-Off. So Where Are the Academics?

Finleigh Frost

In 2023, Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington cut staff to fix a forecast $33 million deficit. The cuts were presented as a one-off. Vice-Chancellor Nic Smith wrote in that year's annual report that the University had "completed the programme of work" and would "return to normal business in 2024." Three years on, the University still says the same thing. In a statement provided on behalf of Chief People Officer Kate Tibbitts, Te Herenga Waka said: "The lower academic staffing level was not intended to be an ongoing position. It was intended to be a one-off adjustment." 

So why hasn't staffing gone back up? The University offers part of an answer. It says the fall from 2023 into 2024 reflected a "delayed impact" from the restructure, because some staff affected by the 2023 process did not actually leave until 2024. That explains one year. It does not explain why the workforce is still below where the University says it wants it, and Te Herenga Waka told me it currently has academic vacancies which "may be influencing these numbers." 

The cuts explain the initial fall. They do not, by themselves, explain why the combined academic workforce was still 62 FTE below its 2023 level two years later. One factor worth looking at sits in Te Herenga Waka’s own collective agreement. Te Herenga Waka publishes lower academic salary minima than the universities it competes with, while Wellington costs more to live in than most of their cities. That does not prove pay is why the workforce has not recovered. But it is the offer Te Herenga Waka is making while it tries to recruit, and the numbers students can see have barely moved: the University still has a smaller academic workforce than in 2023, vacancies are still being advertised, and there are more students per academic.

What Te Herenga Waka Pays 

A lecturer starting at Te Herenga Waka earns a minimum of $91,738. At the University of Auckland, the minimum for the same rank is $99,788. At the University of Otago, it is $97,377. The gap widens as you go up. A professor's minimum at Te Herenga Waka is $161,980, against $190,294 at the University of Auckland, a difference of more than $28,000. 

These are published minimum rates in each university's collective agreement, so the comparison is between the published floors at each institution. It does not mean every Te Herenga Waka academic earns less than every academic elsewhere. Te Herenga Waka says care should be taken when comparing collective agreements, because its published scales are minimum rates and "the true pay rate may be higher." It also says it is limited in what it can say while bargaining is under way, and that it has recently changed how academics are promoted within faculties to create more opportunities for salary progression. 

Those are fair points. But the floor is the floor, and Te Herenga Waka’s is the lowest of the three. It is not just those three. The University Academics' Union, a new union set up by academics including two at Te Herenga Waka, compared salary scales across seven New Zealand universities earlier this year. I interviewed two of the people behind it. 

Professor Nicole Moreham, a media law specialist in Te Herenga Waka's Faculty of Law, told me the result surprised the people who produced it. 

"We thought that there was a problem in patches, but we didn't realise that we were going to come out seventh out of seven for everything but the most junior employees," said Moreham. 

Professor Wayne Patrick, of Te Herenga Waka's School of Biological Sciences, said the comparison was deliberately conservative. Otago runs a separate, higher salary scale for medical and dental staff, which the union left out of its comparison. 

"We just chose to ignore it in order to try and compare like with like. Were you to add on all of the medically qualified academics at Otago, Otago would go up again,” said Patrick. 

Now put those salaries next to the rent. The union's analysis also compared living costs across the university cities, and Wellington sits above Dunedin, Hamilton, Palmerston North and Christchurch. 

"It's an acknowledged concern that Wellington is an expensive place to live, and that we pay less than a place like Otago, which is much cheaper to live in and pays its academics more," said Moreham.  

Lower pay, higher costs. That is the offer. 

What The Money Actually Did 

I asked Te Herenga Waka under the Official Information Act for separate academic and professional payroll figures from 2022 to 2024. Canterbury publishes this split in its annual report every year. Te Herenga Waka does not appear to publish the equivalent breakdown at all. 

The response showed academic payroll fell from $139.1 million in 2022 to $134.9 million in 2024. That is a drop of $4.2 million, about three percent, in nominal dollars, during two years when inflation was high. Professional staff payroll went the other way, from $125.1 million to $126.4 million. 

This is not an argument that Te Herenga Waka is drowning in administrators. It isn't, and most staff paid over $150,000 at Te Herenga Waka are academics, not professional staff. The point is narrower and harder to dodge: when the University tightened, the academic side carried more of it. 

Fewer of Them, More of Us 

Te Herenga Waka's own figures show its combined academic workforce falling from 1084 full-time-equivalent staff in 2023 to 1022 in 2025. It went up by four FTE in the last year, which may be the start of a rebuild. It is still 62 FTE below where it was in 2023. 

Student numbers went the other way. Te Herenga Waka's statistics show total EFTS rising from 15,728 in 2023 to 16,332 in 2025. Put those figures together and there were roughly ten percent more students per academic in 2025 than in 2023.

Te Herenga Waka told me in July that academic vacancies “may be influencing” its staffing numbers. But the vacancies currently being advertised are small compared with the gap. Wayne Patrick told me that, when he checked in September, Te Herenga Waka was advertising six academic positions, three of them research-only. Filling the three advertised Lecturer or Senior Lecturer positions would barely move a combined academic workforce still 62 FTE below its 2023 level. Patrick described that level of recruitment as normal staff turnover, rather than recruitment on a scale that could close the wider staffing gap.

Why This Lands on Students 

None of this is a criticism of the people who teach here. It is not a claim about the quality of individual academics.

It is a claim about capacity. When academic positions sit vacant, the work does not disappear. It gets delayed, redistributed, or left undone. Students feel that in the things they actually interact with: how long feedback takes, how large tutorials are, whether a supervisor has time, or whether the person teaching the course you want is still here next year. 

The University has acknowledged some of this itself. In the 2023 annual report, Chancellor John Allen thanked the staff who remained after the cuts, many of whom he said were "carrying heavy workloads to ensure student success." 

Moreham put the link plainly: the conditions academics work in are the conditions students learn in. She gave one everyday example of how it shows up.

"Trying to get feedback to you on your assignment in a timely fashion, whilst also juggling a million other things, that's something that manifests for the students," said Moreham. 

Try Checking Any of This Yourself 

Here is the part that should bother students most, because it is about whether we can hold the University to account at all. 

While I was reporting this, the numbers moved. On 12 July, Te Herenga Waka's public staff-statistics page listed 732 academic teaching-and-research FTE for 2025. On 16 July, three days after I sent questions, the same page listed 796. Te Herenga Waka later explained that the original figure had been calculated on a different basis, and the update aligned the page with the method used in its annual reports and in data supplied to the Tertiary Education Commission. That explanation is reasonable, and this article uses the University's preferred figures. 

But as of 17 September, the page still does not add up on its own terms. The staff-by-role categories total 2237 FTE. The staff-total table on the same page says 2173. The academic gender categories total 959, against a combined academic figure of 1022. On 24 July, Te Herenga Waka told me its data team had confirmed that further work to align the page with its annual report and TEC methodology was underway. Nearly two months later, the tables still do not match. 

Compare that to Canterbury, which simply prints academic and general salaries as separate lines in its annual report. To get the equivalent payroll split out of Te Herenga Waka, I had to file an Official Information Act request and wait three weeks. To work out how many academics it employs, I had to compare a webpage with an annual report and then ask the University which one was right. Students should not have to do that to find out what their fees are paying for. 

Where This Goes 

To be fair to Te Herenga Waka, the financial pressure in 2023 was real. Enrolments had dropped, government funding had not kept up with inflation. The University's financial position has since improved: Te Herenga Waka reported a $9.458 million surplus on $582.112 million of operating revenue in 2025, though it still describes its margins as thin. The pressure was real, even if what it chose to do about it is open to debate. 

That is exactly why the accounting matters. If you are going to ask staff to accept a lower published pay floor than the universities competing for the same academics, and ask students to accept a smaller teaching workforce, the least you can do is publish figures that add up.

This is live right now. The Tertiary Education Union initiated bargaining at Te Herenga Waka earlier this year, and the University Academics' Union has since done the same for its members, so academic pay at this university is being negotiated as you read this. It is also the VUWSA election season. Academic staffing, workloads and what students get for their fees are squarely student-representation issues. How many people Te Herenga Waka employs to teach us is not just a staff issue.

Students do not need Te Herenga Waka to be perfect. We need it to be checkable. On what this university spends on the people who teach us, it still isn't.