UC System Unable to Accommodate Tohutō in Thesis Transcripts.

University of Canterbury post graduate student, Thomas Blakie, has been asked by UC Graduate School to change the title of his thesis as the University’s Jade system cannot accommodate tohutō (macrons). PHOTO: Supplied.

A University of Canterbury (UC) post-graduate student said he was asked to remove tohutō (macrons) from his master’s thesis title because the university’s student management system could not accommodate them.

Thomas Blakie recently completed his master’s thesis at UC. The thesis is titled “Ngāi Tahu Governance and Economies in the Ōtākaro-Avon River Corridor: Scalable Principles for Adaptation”.

Blakie’s thesis examines Ngāi Tahu governance and economies in Christchurch’s Ōtākaro-Avon River Corridor, exploring the area’s historical development and future approaches to climate adaptation.

During the final examination process, Blakie was contacted by UC Graduate School who said his thesis title would need to be altered to remove the macrons within the system.

On Blakie’s transcript, the title of his thesis was written as “Ng?i Tahu Governance and Economies in the ?t?karo-Avon River Corridor: Scalable Principles for Adaptation”, before it was swapped out for the placeholder “Thesis”.

An email from UC Graduate School to Blakie explained “this is due to a limitation in our Jade system management where we are unable to record tohutō in a thesis title in that system”.

“This will not have any effect on how the correct thesis title displays in the Research Repository or on other material such as the Graduation programme, it will only display incorrectly on your transcript,” a later email said.

The system also does not support other special characters, including umlauts and Greek letters.

Blakie said the issue is “bigger than my thesis title”, questioning “whether UC’s systems are keeping pace with its ‘commitment’ to te reo Māori and biculturalism”.

“Tohutō are necessary in te reo Māori because they alter word meanings and should not have to be swapped out to accommodate an unaccommodating university system,” Blakie said.

Blakie acknowledged “it’s an old system” but wants the University to put a plan in place to update it.

When he asked the Graduate School when the system would be updated to accommodate tohutō he did not receive a response.

“[It’s] a lack of commitment to being a bicultural institution I guess, and this seems like such a minor thing to fix,” he said. “Because it’s not just macrons, it’s other special characters, and we have people from all around the world coming to study here”.

A University of Canterbury spokesperson said “this technical limitation falls short of what we would like from our Student Management System. The tohutō cannot correctly be included in thesis transcripts; however, when the thesis is published and made available in the library and in other formats, the tohutō is included”.

“The university is committed to supporting te reo Māori and using it correctly and we are working on resolving this system issue”.

However, an Official Information Act (OIA) response dated 26 August 2026 said there were “no actions to remediate” the issue and no “business cases, project plans, recommendations or correspondence” related to improving the support of macrons.

The response said, “no formal complaints regarding the use of Māori macrons have been received” over the last four years, and there have been “no investigations, reviews, assessments, or reports undertaken in response to such complaints”.

The university has also said it enabled the Māori keyboard option on its managed desktops and laptops to allow macron input, which it said was likely implemented before July 2022.

Professor Jeanette King, from Aotahi, UC’s School of Māori and Indigenous Studies, said tohutō are “incredibly important”.

“There are a number of words that, if you don’t have a macron, it can change the meaning of a word…. They’re a part of accurate spelling of te reo Māori,” she said.

King said technical issues could sometimes arise when “transferring diacritics, especially from one platform to another”, but universities should ensure these are “corrected at the time”.

“It’s something that we need to make sure that all our systems can accommodate, because otherwise, it’s just another way of not only demeaning to the language, but also to the student and the student experience”.