The student body at Massey University is worried their voice is going to be silenced when it comes to voting on academic matters.

Andrew Steele, the general president of Te Tira Ahu Pae – Massey University Students’ Association Federation, told Stuff there would be a major decision made at a meeting of the university’s academic committee on Tuesday.

The academic committee sits underneath the academic board, which supports the university council.

The university said there was no major change, but Steele said the item going to the academic committee would result in students and academic staff not getting much of a say, which was because the university wanted to rush through the closure of some courses.

This year Massey introduced two policies as cost-cutting measures: the low-and-no enrolments and digital plus policies, which will manage and potentially close courses with low enrolments, and remove the duplication of courses across its three campuses.

“The recommendation they’re putting before the committee, they’re going to remove the academic board from many of the decisions now because it’s taking too long to retire the courses.”

Steele said the students and academic staff would lose their votes and the senior leadership team would be able to make decisions on it without opposition or consultation.

“As soon as this goes forward and they vote on it, we’re going to be in a world of hurt.”

He believed this was because there had been a reluctance with some academic staff to vote to close courses in their college.

“The amount of votes we’ve got at the moment is not working well to [vice-chancellor] Jan Thomas’ timelines, so they’ve put this in place.

“They’ve tied the hands of the student voice, tied the hands of the colleges and boards, tied the hands of the lecturers and away they go.”

But Massey provost and chairperson of the academic committee professor Giselle Byrnes said the discussion paper Steele was talking about did not propose a new policy and was not a major change to existing processes.

“Decisions about course offering location are delegated to college boards and will remain with colleges. The paper simply proposes that when a proposal is made to close all of the course offerings at a specific location at the same time, that decision is treated the same as closing a specialisation or qualification to new enrolments, which is dealt with at academic committee.

“This aligning of processes will provide students and staff with more visibility of offering location changes at the course level than they currently have. The paper is written in response to concerns raised by one of the student representatives on the committee at our meeting in September.”

She said it did not represent any change to consultation processes before a decision to change or close an location offering, or to voting rights for students or academic staff on the academic committee.

“It does not represent any change to the decision-making powers of the academic board. The academic committee already has delegated approval for closures to new enrolments for qualifications and courses.

“It has nothing to do with the time it takes to retire courses. Closing a course location offering does not mean the course is retired.”

All full academic committee members have voting rights.

Byrnes was happy to clarify information for the students’ association.