Hello from the UW (University of Waikato)

This is my first dispatch from New Zealand, where I am spending spring semester 2010 on sabbatical from the University of Idaho. My base is the University of Waikato, located in Hamilton on the North Island, about 80 miles south of Auckland.

The government-supported university was founded in 1964 during an expansion of tertiary (higher) education. Today, it has more than 12,000 students, of which nearly a fifth are Maori, the indigenous people of Nez Zealand. There also more than 400 New Zealanders of Pacific Island descent and 2,000 international students, primarily from Asia.

Waikato is organized into a Faculty (college) of Arts and Social Sciences, and six professional schools: science and engineering, mathematics and computing sciences, education, law, management and Maori and Pacific Development. Surprisingly, there is no school of agriculture, even though Hamilton is in the centre of a rich agricultural region. A large ag-research station near the university is administered by the Crown Research Institute, part of the government’s Ministry of Science.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences is led by Dean Dan Zirker, a former faculty member in Political Science and director of the Honors Program at the University of Idaho. The Faculty comprises ten departments, including Screen & Media Studies, to which I’m attached. Screen & Media has ten full-time academic staff, so it’s slightly larger than JAMM at the University of Idaho. The department describes itself on its Web site:
Here in Screen and Media Studies we believe that communication is the most fundamental of all human activities, and that in the 21st century the media, in the broadest sense, will be the most important aspect of communication. The variety and connectivity of cultures, identities and practices will be central to the new media and our curriculum.
Read more here.