Recent reports point towards the rise of a disturbing tendency in the management of Australian universities. First, you reduce the involvement of academic staff in strategic decision-making. Then you tell them as little as possible about what you plan to do, or even what you have done already. The result? The hot mess that university governance has become over the last few years.
Don’t ask the academics
As first exhibit for the ‘don’t ask’ side, there is the parliamentary report on the University of Tasmania which slipped out just before Christmas and revealed how deliberately academic staff were excluded from representation on decision-making bodies. Then there is the engagement of external consultancies such as KPMG to handle major restructuring processes at (among others) UTS, ANU and the merged University of Adelaide/University of South Australia.
As Hannah Forsyth has remarked, apparently the decision of ‘who they should sack is beyond the capacity of the excessively well-paid managers heading Australian universities’.
Among the unique challenges facing the administration of universities is that the only ones who really know what their jobs involve are the academics themselves. When their administrators were drawn from the academic workforce, this was a circumstance that was largely understood and managed. Employing managers from outside the sector, however, risked making it a problem that was poorly understood and badly managed. Commissioning external management consultants who know absolutely nothing about the sector makes that risk a certainty.
Over time, views from the coalface of the academic workforce seem to have become increasingly unwelcome. Not only do they bother university managements, but they have been more or less dismissed from consideration within government policy formation. The Accord Review of the sector, for all its boldness and diligence, showed little interest in incorporating views from that coalface. The Albanese government’s initial proposal for the makeup of an Australian Tertiary Education Commission was so paranoid about anything the sector might want to tell them that they excluded anyone who had worked in a university within the last five years.
Be careful what you tell them
And then there is the secrecy. Rick Morton’s recent piece in The Saturday Paper claimed that UTS has allowed KPMG to use a prohibited research income metric to determine which UTS staff members were failing to ‘meet expectations’ — presumably with a view to deciding on redundancies. The UTS restructuring more generally has been the subject of a scathing assessment in the AFR recently, noting not only the riskiness of the proposal but also the ‘deep scepticism’ with which it has been received by the academic staff.
The leadership of the ANU has been accused of deliberately misleading the Senate in its responses to a Senate enquiry into university governance. According to media reports, there seems to be some evidence to support that accusation. Within the university itself, not only have staff strongly challenged the credibility of the official narrative provided to justify the foreshadowed cuts to the ANU’s budget, but also 95% of academic staff responding have supported a vote of no confidence in VC Genevieve Bell and Chancellor Julie Bishop.
A failure of trust in university governance
Over many years now, university academic staff surveys have reported declining levels of trust in their administrations. The fact that they are also facing a trend in which their senior administrators are being drawn from backgrounds in other sectors — from industry or government — intensifies this distrust. There is a view that these administrators are focused on the operation of these institutions as income generating businesses, rather than on their primary public mission of teaching, research, and the production of knowledge.
The Senate inquiry and subsequent media reports have revealed what is feeding into this distrust. They have shown how some of the more egregious habits of the corporate world have penetrated the university sector. These include a lack of accountability for senior executives, ballooning costs for travel and other privileges of power, a disdain for transparency, and a disregard for their social license and the public good.
So, how is this strategy of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ working out?
Few who work as academics in one of our universities would be likely to dispute the view that it is contributing significantly to the problems faced by a sector that the Accord described as ‘not fit for purpose’. This is a university system which is unable to properly support its ever diminishing teaching programs, unable to retain its increasingly dispirited staff, unable to resist exploiting its youngest contributors through serial casual appointments, unable to arrest the 30% yearly attrition rate among its students, and even — in some, perhaps many, cases, we are now learning — unable to convince their own staff that they are being responsibly governed.
As I’ve said before, this is no way to run a university.
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