Who would have thought that Australia’s oldest and most prestigious university would give its top job to someone with management and networking skills rather than to a distinguished academic?
The appointment of Mark Scott, former ABC chief and current secretary of the NSW Education Department, to be the new vice-chancellor of the University of Sydney, runs contrary to a deep seated tradition of academe: that a vice-chancellor should be drawn from the academy.
Nobody at the university is going to say this out loud, but Scott’s ascension to the best job on campus — along with the gowns and flummery and the funny hats that go with it — is a response to a major problem that has long been building.
Universities are multi-billion dollar organisations employing thousands of people. They play a major role in the economy — educating the future skilled workforce and housing the know how needed to take Australia through the fourth industrial revolution — but most university leaders are not skilled networkers with government and business, and are unfamiliar with the levers of political power.
Some university chancellors (that is the university equivalent of board chairmen) know this, and that’s why the university lobby group Universities Australia is currently under review in response to the group’s poor record in influencing the Morrison and Turnbull governments.
And the fact is that academics, no matter how brilliant, are sometimes mediocre managers.
One way to deal with this problem would have been to appoint a business CEO. Chancellor Belinda Hutchinson, who is from the business world, wisely did not go down that route. A conventional business leader is very unlikely to succeed in running a university. They would be driven spare by the multiple lines of authority and the independence (sometimes intransigence) of academics. Business people also may not understand that a university’s mission also goes beyond the bottom line. They are institutions with obligations to the community and society in general, which cost money and need to be fulfilled.
Scott is the happy medium. He’s a public sector creature, a powerful networker, canny political operator — as a former Liberal staffer who chalked up ten years as ABC managing director he had to be — and will be a voice government listens to.
Even if Universities Australia manages to resist the calls for it to change, it won’t matter to the University of Sydney. It will soon have its own powerful advocate.
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