Who runs Australia’s largely publicly owned universities? What are they trying to achieve and what is actually happening?
A stream of recently published reports, including from a Senate inquiry and a government Expert Council, have addressed those questions framed around “governance” and Labor has announced new governance principles, based on the latter report.
Meanwhile, public controversies, including the resignations of two vice-chancellors from the University of Southern Queensland and the Australian National University (ANU) after staff no-confidence votes in the last year, have raised concerns about university managements.
This otherwise bone-dry topic relates to the National Tertiary Education Union’s (NTEU) “Better Universities” campaign, which encouraged members to provide evidence to the committees.
The NTEU’s campaign highlighted how a closed-doors leadership of corporate figures has geared universities towards money making, not education and research. While management salaries can surpass $1 million, individuals also take on well-paid company directorships.
The NTEU has pointed out the consequences for staff and students: hundreds of millions of dollars in wage theft, thousands of academic and support jobs lost over the last year and widespread course and subject cuts.
ANU management is pushing forward with wage cuts of up to $130 million. Staff at the University of Technology Sydney facing drastic job cuts were told to attend to self-care, including daily teeth flossing.
Meanwhile, student bodies have added that capping vice-chancellors' pay is a start, but it would not address the woeful postgraduate below-poverty stipends they have to survive on. They also have to put up with an increasingly isolated and uninteresting student experience.
The funding and running of universities needs to radically change. The NTEU has made the following demands: 50% representation of elected staff and student members and genuine public sector or tertiary education experience on councils; executive pay to align with community expectations; transparency for the councils’ composition and activity and for a purpose that frames universities’ governance.
In denial
However, these demands do not tackle the underlying structural problems.
The Senate inquiry provided revealing examples. Universities Australia, the national body for vice-chancellors, made a 1.5-page submission suggesting that governance is largely not its concern. This is despite its role on councils as members who typically present the more important reports and, at least formally, being held to account.
Senior managers and the Tertiary Education Quality Standards Authority’s response to staff and student dissatisfaction over the lack of public funding, job cuts and the silencing of staff and students, was to tell the inquiry that there was “nothing to see here”.
Managements discount the outrage at their high pay and blame university workers’ casualised employment and underpayments on “complex enterprise agreements”. They argue for a “simplification” and “modernisation” of awards, no doubt hoping this will legalise the pay cuts.
Yet, the “complexity” of universities is the reason vice-chancellors argue for their hefty pay and why they want corporate figures on council. They argue against staff and students having greater representation, despite their experience and skills in making universities work.
Managerial dominance
Corporate council appointees are partly how vice-chancellors and other senior managers dominate university councils. But they lack the higher education expertise and engagement with university staff.
The number of elected members on university councils has fallen from a third of all positions in 2000 to less than one in four. Between 2004–08, smaller councils with a majority of external council members were a condition for public funding. Queensland Labor in 2017 legislated for reductions in elected members.
Students have little or no representation on councils. Some representatives are appointed. The student representatives reported how other council members treat them “like children”, helping ensure their isolation. The National Union of Students believes this has “set students up to fail”.
In addition, councils work in ways that ensure management decisions are rarely questioned, while their processes remain opaque. Staff and student council members are excluded from many discussions, including those related to their own experience. Where they would bring insight, they are considered “biased”.
They are also often excluded from council committees, especially those concerned with finances. Active union members, especially local branch officers and bargaining team members, are excluded from an even broader range of discussions. Some NTEU officials have had to stop efforts to ban them outright from their council.
The way information is provided to council members also has an impact. An ANU student representative told the Senate inquiry that council packs are “regularly over 400 pages — 600 pages in some cases. On a good week, they’ll be delivered to us the week before the meeting.” But, they said, the information is “a careful curation and manipulation of information … Council never know what they don’t know.”
Management will typically not provide council members with options for action; the “operational” details on management actions; the impact of budget decisions that would give councillors to make a better assessment of them; and internal or consultant reports that management relied on or disregarded.
The whole process is designed to ensure alternatives cannot be proposed, ignoring the chance to use councillors’ skills and experience in decision-making. In the worst cases, such as at the ANU recently, councillors were prohibited from even moving motions.
Confidentiality agreements largely prevent councillors from reporting back to, and hearing from, staff or students who elected them.
Publishing minutes largely fails to resolve the lack of transparency. Some universities do publish them but leave out “commercial-in-confidence” matters, which include, for example, important financial issues impacting the university.
University executives and chancellors (council chairs) can also undermine dissenting staff and student representatives, and target staff members’ employment.
Staff and students told the Senate inquiry about the hostility of some university officials. Elected ANU council members highlighted how, earlier this year, they were attacked by the chancellor, ex-Liberal deputy leader Julie Bishop, in a council meeting and at a later closed door meeting. Staff representative Liz Allen then tried to bring a formal complaint that she had been treated differently because of her union membership. This was stymied when an external investigator, who was interested in looking at potential leadership misconduct, was told by university management not to proceed.
Meanwhile, the ANU’s general counsel and chief operating officer abused council confidentiality and performance review powers to target former council member and NTEU branch president Millan Pintos-Lopez, who was campaigning against the university’s restructuring and job cuts. “I believe these actions were a direct response to my public criticism of the ANU’s leadership decision to launch Renew ANU,” Pintos-Lopez told the inquiry.
Follow the money
As University of Queensland economics academic Lionel Page argued in his submission, the “high salaries are the reflection of the power that the governance structure has granted to the top managers”.
In the past few decades, vice-chancellors’ pay has increased at more than twice the rate of university workers. According to last year’s annual reports for 36 universities, remuneration for close to 400 senior executive positions totalled $235 million — a rise by 4.7% from the previous year and well ahead of workers’ pay rises. These executives received 1.1% of employee costs at universities.
Senior executives at universities are being drawn from the capitalist class. Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi, referring to the earlier Universities Accord review, said “the number of non-academics getting executive roles in higher education has tripled since 1991”. Many senior executives are “double-dipping” through directorships and other corporate appointments that pay anything up to $300,000 each annually.
Universities are also spending more on consultancies — $734 million, nationally, in 2023 — for management and other professional services.
While this information is important for the public to know, much of the university “governance” discussion avoids scrutinising the now thoroughly established commodification of the sector. The NTEU, for instance, prefers to focus on university executives being paid more than a premier or the prime minister.
It has largely avoided discussing how management is raised above those who do the work. Management’s high pay is a symptom of the structural problems.
Private funds, mostly from international students paying almost double the fees of domestic ones, make up more than half of all university revenue.
This makes it hard to sustain the view, expressed by Faruqi and the NTEU, that the purpose of the current review is “to make sure governance changes so that [universities] are run as public institutions”.
If public funding of higher education is restored and the current commodification of university education and research ends, a basis would be laid for enhanced university governance and a better staff and student experience.
[Jonathan Strauss was a university worker for more than two decades and an elected staff member of a university council for six years. He is a member of the National Tertiary Education Union.]