Finally. Someone in government gets it.
The Tasmanian Parliament’s Select Committee’s report on the operation of the University of Tasmania is both scathing and historic. Dropped carefully on December 23 2024, the report’s implications have gone largely unremarked outside the state.
That needs to be corrected, and this is why.
The report directly repudiates the assumptions driving the years of federal policies which created the ‘enterprise university’. It sends a clear and corrective message to the state government and to the university: that the core function of the university is education and research, that it is there to serve the interests of the community rather than just business, and that its ongoing corporatization conflicts with the ‘academic values’ that must undergird its activities.
The 86 findings are dominated by concerns about poor governance structures, inadequate consultation, limited transparency, bullying, autocratic management practices, and low levels of accountability.
The most fundamental concern, which turns up in multiple findings, is that the ‘University appears to prioritise commercial over community interests in its core functions’. The University’s ‘significant focus on corporatization’, the report finds, ‘undermines the University’s core role and identity’ and constitutes a ‘deviation from its core functions of education and research’. There is an ‘inconsistency’ between the values of the academic staff and those of their administrators.
There are certainly major contextual factors that are specific to UTAS, but the general thrust of these findings won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has worked as an academic in any Australian university.
The corporatization of the sector has been an objective of federal government policy on higher education for at least the last three decades. Ever since the Dawkins reforms of the late 1980s, governments of both colours have been telling universities to think of themselves as businesses, to commercialise their core activities, and to invest in securing non-government sources of funding.
The point of such an objective, of course, is to reduce government’s responsibility for funding the public universities.
Among their ancillary attempts to dress this up as sectoral reform, federal ministers have rabbited on about the largely imaginary capacity for university researchers to commercialise their outcomes, while setting up expensive but ineffective incentives to drive increased industry investment in research and collaboration with university researchers.
Ironically, the one avenue where governments have had some impact with their efforts to ‘reform the sector’, is in their encouragement to universities to seize on international student income as their financial saviour. We have seen how just how disastrously that has turned out.
The UTAS report provides a detailed account of how the process of corporatization has played out in that institution. Findings point to a deliberate limitation on academic representation in key decision-making bodies, a structural imbalance between managerial and academic leadership, and the damaging consequences of the conflict between the ‘values of managerialism and the values of academic decision-making’.
But, this should not be just about UTAS. This is what most Australian universities have become. They have done so without much regard for the views of academic staff, many of whom have been resisting this tendency for decades.
The slow march of corporate capture
Over this time, and as they have massively increased in size, our universities have become victims of a slow moving hostile take-over, as academic leadership has been progressively displaced by those focused upon advancing the university’s commercial interests.
It has to be said that some (if not many) of those charged with advancing those interests have limited personal or professional connection to the academic mission. The once-traditional route towards a role in university administration was through the academic career structures — from professor, to head of school, to dean and so on. That is no longer so comprehensively the case, as more senior administrators are drawn from outside the sector – from careers in business, in the military, in technology, in politics, and in public administration.
Increasingly, these are the folk who talk as if they constitute ‘the university’. This, even, though they may actually have limited knowledge or understanding of, or even much interest in, what academic staff do, how they do it, and why it matters. Nonetheless, they have been the ones to accrue power as the sector has undergone its transformation.
One pointer to this transfer of power would be a comparison between the salaries paid to senior administrators and those paid to senior academics. Given that the reputation and success of a university depends upon the quality of the work produced by its most senior academics, you might expect their pay structures to reflect this. You would be mistaken.
Instead, a number of media reports in recent months have focused on the ‘excessive’ salaries paid not just to vice chancellors but to a range of senior executives. A Sydney Morning Herald report talks of a 14 per cent increase in the number of ‘key executives’ on salaries above $500,000 pa, with a total of 198 paid above that level in 2023 across the 37 public universities. It’s unlikely that there would be any professors in the sector who pull in that kind of money.
The academic dimension of the enterprise university has become structurally under-valued. In some instances, academic input to institutional decision-making is deliberately restricted, and ‘academic values’ are routinely dismissed as anachronistic or impractical. In some of the more extreme cases, such as UTAS seems to be, it appears that management has deliberately sought to find structural ways of sidelining academic staff and students.
If the reports on senior executive pay are correct, university managements are paying themselves more than they pay those who do the work which actually constitutes the university.
Little wonder that the relationship between academic staff and their universities’ administrations has deteriorated.
The initial response from the federal government to these reports, of course, has been to fire up another burst of faux outrage at ‘excessive university salaries’ — an expansion of the attack on vice-chancellor salaries and an extension of the inquiry into university governance.
No question that an inquiry into university governance is overdue. The more fundamental question here, however, is not about the extent to which these salaries might be considered ‘excessive’. Rather, it is about how such salary structures could be seriously considered as an institutional investment in the ‘core activities’ of teaching, research, and service to the community?
To ask that, however, the federal government would have to do some ‘reform’ of its own approach to higher education, and properly recognize that these are indeed the core activities of the sector and that they require support.
If you enjoyed reading this post and wish to be alerted to future posts to this blog, please send an email to graeme.turner@uq.edu.au and I’ll add you to the alert list.
Thanks so much Graeme for drawing our attention to this significant Report
Lesley