Change is coming to the way universities are run, and they only have themselves to blame
University communities are heroic complainers. Managements perennially announce they need more public money to keep teaching and researching. Staff assume they are underpaid and overworked and the union uses the industrial relations system to litigate every complaint they can.
The one thing they always agreed on was that everything was the government’s fault – until now. The alliance has unravelled and vice-chancellors and councils are now blamed by staff and unions for whatever is wrong. And new government restrictions on university autonomy makes it look as though Education Minister Jason Clare agrees. “If you do not think there is a problem with university governance you have been living under a rock,” he said last Friday.
It looks like change, unless it is an end, for the existing council membership model proposed 20 years ago by then Coalition education minister Brendan Nelson.
He called for more independent members on councils, saying: “Universities are not businesses but nevertheless manage multi-million-dollar budgets – as such they need to be run in a businesslike fashion.” State governments duly followed for all but one of the public universities (ANU) which are governed by their legislation. And ever since, councils have been awash with outsiders, people from business and government with the numbers to vote down elected staff and students.
This has never gone down well with those who think universities should be self-governing workers collectives, and now they have a chance to do something about it – by blaming university managements and councils for everything they are unhappy with.
And staff are upset about plenty, starting with job cuts. University of Sydney Technology has frozen new enrolments for next year in 120 or so low-demand degrees – staff suspect management wants to sack the academics who teach them. Macquarie and Wollongong universities have restructures under way to make savings because of lower student numbers. And there is the academic equivalent of a cage-fight at ANU over management retrenching staff to end endemic deficits, including by saving $100m a year in staff costs.
At all four staff do not get, genuinely do not get, what budget deficits have to do with them, arguing that their research/courses are so important that it is wrong to include them in a profit and loss prism. Plus, managements are denounced as “neo-liberals” – an all-purpose criticism that means whatever complaining academics and administrators want it to mean. Councils, they claim, are also out of touch, stacked with government-appointed business people who do not understand the important work universities do. And vice-chancellors are paid too much and take advice from private sector consultants.
None of this has anything to do with cost control but it gives staff a way to avoid addressing the cause of cuts – that when student numbers decline, deficits increase.
But they do have a point that really does stick – university managements don’t understand their own wage agreements and underpay people for years and years on end. The Fair Work Ombudsman says it has pursued 38 universities (out of 42), and there are ongoing investigations into 28. So far, universities have had to pay 110,000 staff $218m for wages owed. To its great credit, the National Tertiary Education Union has also pursued universities through the industrial relations system and the courts.
It is a problem that does not start at the top but it has gone on for years without governing bodies doing enough, if anything, to address it. The Ombudsman has forced universities to make staff pay a matter for councils in some egregious cases.
Mr Clare has recognised and responded to criticism of councils. He created an ombudsman to help students with complaints which university managements ignore. He has a working party looking at governance – it is all but universally assumed that it will recommend the Commonwealth Remuneration Tribunal get actively involved in setting vice-chancellor pay. And last week he signalled new powers were being considered for the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency. It already has plenty. TEQSA is presently considering whether ANU’s council missed the university’s failing finances and how management is handling the present cuts. If it is unhappy it can reduce, or even cancel, ANU’s registration. It won’t do the latter but the former would be the end for Chancellor Julie Bishop and VC Genevieve Bell.
This was Mr Clare’s smart politics. Before the election he starved the Greens of electoral oxygen with university voters by supporting students. Now he is focusing attention on university boards as the cause of staff woes.
But it’s the union that has most to gain from blaming university management, especially councils, for everything. The NTEU’s membership at any university is generally around a quarter, tops, but it’s a Bolshevik “vanguard party” leading protests about anything and commanding the respect of people who aren’t political. When it comes time to vote on pay offers, staff at just about all universities vote as the comrades advise.
The union and sundry groups of academics who think universities should be run by worker soviets are using the disconnect between top management and staff to campaign for restructures of university boards. More staff and fewer outsiders from industry who do not understand campus cultures is a big demand.
And guess who they hope staff will elect in their place? NTEU members already fill staff positions on councils across the country. This regularly leads to conflicts when chancellors exclude staff representatives from discussions of pay rise negotiations. But this would stop being an issue if the interests of staff became the interests of the university as a whole – which is the union’s and its allies’ general idea.
Right now, the union is winning the argument over who should run universities. There is a Senate committee looking at their governance with terms of references, including the membership and competence of council.
Labor senator Tony Sheldon summed up the case for the inquiry before the election: “There’s no other job in Australia where you can be paid so exorbitantly while performing so badly, with seemingly no consequences or accountability for the impact on university staff and students.”
That the committee will call for change is a sure thing, so is Mr Clare responding to calls for council reform from his own experts. But vice-chancellors who dread being bossed around by councils hope it will all be policy theatre, given that the universities, other than the ANU, are appointed under state acts.
The union is onto this. The Victorian Labor Party conference recently resolved its state government should implement national reforms. And the NSW upper house inquiry has just established a committee inquiry into “the role of governance structures in safeguarding the public mission of universities”. Between them, the Labor governments of both states can legislate for close to half the public universities in the country.
So that could be that, with universities running up deficits and demanding the Education Minister bail them out. Probably not. Mr Clare has created a new agency to oversee universities, which will haul universities into line by funding courses according to student numbers and setting individual goals for every university. Activists who loathe councils for approving cuts to staff and courses will wish they were back making a neoliberal mess of things once the Australian Tertiary Education Commission gets going next year.
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University leaderships are copping triple whammies from staff, the union and government. They are making vice-chancellors and the boards they report to (commonly called councils) look like enemies of academic values, and it could mean a fundamental change in the way universities are run – but maybe not the one the activists are hoping for.