I skimmed your article though as there is a very obvious reason why there are not more Maori Professors and deans. They start their studies at a much older (40s age). By let’s ignore that and explain it as racism

Cooper, frock-maker rather than the barrel-maker of her forebears, is creative, she is an artist. To be able to make dosh as well as being able to create is great stuff – most don’t. Ask any poet. I think that Landfall used to pay a dollar a line for poetry – might have been less.

Robert Frost : “ Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both work from knowledge, but I suspect that they differ most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by… poets get theirs cavalierly and as it happens…let what will stick to them like burrs when they walk in the fields”.

Frost’s complete passage here is well worth reading in full, but I didn’t want to imply that Kidman is a scholar, and my typing finger is sore and my left eye.

A song … It seems that Cooper may have picked up, on something, somewhere, in any what way, when naming her frock, but Kidman’s clobbering her for this turned Cooper’s pretty ethereal Trail of Tiers into her own personal Trail of Tears.

Beware the Kidman.

John T Others have also commented about Joanna’s crude mode of parlance ( great word – let’s abolish it – burn the Scottish hymnal ) but alley-speak may be a requirement for persons in her position now, I might try and find out; it rather looks like a lashing out at accepted conventions and proprietaries, who knows.