White supervisors in New Zealand can provide far more effective support for their Maori students by ¡°embracing rather than refusing history¡¯s ghosts¡±.

That was the argument of Barbara Grant, associate professor of higher education at the University of Auckland, speaking at an event on ¡°Boundary Crossing in International Doctoral Supervision: Contexts, Cultures and Confluences¡± organised by the Society for Research into Higher Education.

Although the number of Maori doctoral students in New Zealand¡¯s universities almost doubled between 2003 and 2013 (from 248 to 481), she explained, there were still only a ¡°tiny number of Maori academics¡±.

So what challenges did that present to Pakeha (or white) supervisors who were often uncomfortable at ¡°being confronted with New Zealand¡¯s colonial history and its destructive legacy¡±? To answer that question, Professor Grant¡¯s paper drew on in-depth interviews with nine such supervisors.

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One thought it crucial to remember that a white supervisor was also inevitably ¡°a Treaty partner¡± ¨C a reference to ¡°the founding document of British settlement in our country ¨C the Treaty of Waitangi, signed by the British Crown and many Maori chiefs in 1840¡±.

Another recalled working with her first Maori student, when an awareness of ¡°colonial power imbalances and everything¡± had made her reluctant to ¡°be as directive as I would¡¯ve perhaps been at times with other students¡±. Fortunately, her student had been able to point out that such ¡°diffidence¡± in a supervisor was not helpful at all.

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A third supervisor, by contrast, refused to allow her Maori doctoral student to give up on her PhD, on the grounds that ¡°you made a commitment to me and now I¡¯m calling it in¡±.

Yet despite the complexities of relationships across ¡°the Pakeha-Maori hyphen¡±, Professor Grant argued that they often offered white supervisors ¡°many opportunities for intellectual intrigue, friendship, joy, as well as invitations to events and places in New Zealand not easily accessible to non-Maori¡±.

However, it remained essential that supervisors adopted the role of ¡°good gatekeeper¡±, remembering the long history of Maori being ¡°shut out from higher education by gatekeepers of all kinds¡± and willing to ¡°hold the gate open¡± for Maori students today.

matthew.reisz@tesglobal.com