Another week of universities in crisis.
Last week ended with two embattled VCs unrepentantly defending their business models against criticisms from academic staff and the media. The tide, however, was turning. This week, the Senate enquiry into university governance delivered a scathing report on what they describe as the universities’ ‘rotten culture’, that is failing their staff and students. TEQSA snapped out of its slumber and demanded more teeth. And then Genevieve Bell’s resignation at the ANU suggested that there may be some limits, after all, to what a Vice-Chancellor can do.
Rotting from the top
The Senate inquiry’s interim report focused on precisely the things that academics and students have been criticising for years now. These include a lack of transparency from the top of the organisation, the sidelining of academic staff and their expertise, the disinterest in input from students, incompetent governing councils, the wasteful commissioning of consultants, ineffective regulation, and the widening division between academics and their managers over the primary purpose of the university.
Some general factors backgrounding the committee’s recommendations include the accusation that too many universities have prioritised their commercial interests as businesses, and that too few members of some universities’ governing councils come with an appropriate level of understanding of the higher education sector.
While the ANU situation has its own specific contexts, the scale of the reaction to ‘Renew ANU’ has also served to highlight the consequences of an autocratic management style which has become all too familiar to many of those working in the sector.
Don’t listen to the academics
But, at the same time, the inevitable pushback has begun. Rufus Black, the UTAS VC, and Renee Leon, the VC at Charles Sturt, have come out defiantly, claiming that universities ‘must be run like businesses’ whether ‘academics like it or not’.
While this might look like a bit of ‘real world’ pragmatism from the vantage point of these respective chancelleries, and while it was uncritically recycled by some lazy media, this claim is clearly nonsense.
For a start, the record of these ‘businesses’ is not good. 70% of the nation’s universities are in deficit.
But it also begs the question of exactly what it is about ‘business’ (to pretend, for the moment, that there is such a singular entity or set of practices) that might be useful for universities to emulate.
How good’s business?
In general terms, it’s not a great fit, you would have to say. The primary objective of a successful business is to make a profit. Generating income is certainly a practical necessity for universities who are insufficiently funded by the government but, as non-profit institutions, it is definitively not their core purpose or function.
It is also worth reminding ourselves what the single-minded pursuit of profit has led to in some of our most successful and powerful businesses. Think Woolworths, for instance (price gouging, deceptive advertising), or Qantas (illegally sacking a large chunk of its workforce), or any one of the big four banks (unconscionably extracting fees, say, from dead customers). By and large, the business sector in Australia has not been that interested in the public good.
But the call for universities to operate as a business is not actually about adopting specific practices and behaviours. It is simply there to provide cover for damaging and self-interested commercial behaviours that do not at all fit with the purpose of a public institution such as a university.
This has been pointed out already to Rufus Black. In late 2024, the Tasmanian state parliament tabled a devastating independent review of the management and direction of the University of Tasmania. Among a long list of very critical findings, it said that the ‘University appears to prioritise commercial over community interests in its core functions, with a significant focus on corporatisation, which undermines the University’s core role and identity’.
It is not just the academics who don’t ‘like’ how Rufus Black has run his university.
Band-aid measures won’t be enough
The developments of the last week or so might at least begin to shape a narrative for the correction of the governance and behaviours of many in the higher education sector. There is much to be done, however, before this narrative could result in meaningful change.
At present, as we are seeing at UTAS, UTS, and ANU, there is little at the national level which can rein in administrations which have gone rogue in their treatment of their staff and students, and in their failing commitment to the provision of programs the nation needs. In at least these three cases, their ‘business’ decisions have cut into our knowledge infrastructure, they have eroded the base for our future workforce, and they will diminish Australia’s capacity to deal with the challenges of the future.
Leaving all of this to the independent and self-interested strategies of individual universities, rather than coordinating the sector as an integrated national system, is what has brought us to the current situation. How is this going to be fixed?
The Accord has had its shot, the Senate committee is ongoing, but we can’t keep on stacking up piecemeal reviews and enquiries – and then leaving their recommendations to wither on the vine. There is no indication that the federal government is focused on doing a proper job on this. They have shown us that short-term and partial fixes won’t be enough. We need a root and branch independent enquiry into the system, its funding, its governance, and its value and rationale for the nation.
Did someone say ‘royal commission’?
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