It’s always comforting to hear politicians reveal wisdom and novel notions long known to those who vote for them. This tendency endears the dim rascals to you, showing an ignorance that remains, for the most part, unblemished. If we get democracy, as H. L. Mencken would put it, we are going to get it most deservingly hard. But that hardness will be veiled in fully fledged ignorance.
The issue of how universities in Australia are governed is a case in point. A system corrupt, riven and sundered by rapacious bureaucratic arrangements, governed by a smug white collar criminal class that deserves abomination and execration, finally made it to Australia’s parliament for scrutiny. Politicians were made aware of a deep rot in higher education. They seemed shocked by the obvious.
The interim report by the Senate Education and Employment Legislation Committee at least serves to point the finger at a particular administrative stratum that blights university education in the country. The words of the chair, Labor Senator Marielle Smith, should shock and disgust: “Universities are public institutions, established for the public good. Their governance arrangements, and the remuneration of their senior executives, should reflect that – yet we’ve heard that more than 300 university executives earn more than their state premiers.” Senator Smith would seem to have been born yesterday.
The theme through the report follows the same beat of revelation. The committee finds itself transfixed by the idea of a “gap” or “gaps” between subsidised managers on the one hand, and the exploited students and workhorse staff on the other. (The words appear no fewer than 23 times in the report.) “The gap between universities’ perceptions of their governance processes and the experiences described by university staff and students was striking.” Here, we have a glaring problem of terminology. The first stems from the plodding administrators who have appropriated the term and convinced those in Canberra that they are somehow part of an ancient lineage of teaching and learning. The university staff and students are, by definition, not the university. A true triumph of the marketer’s dark art.
There is also “a gap between policy and practice” with regards “matters of transparency and the management of conflicts of interest across multiple universities.” Those submitting reports to the inquiry were particularly concerned “about the transparency of council decision-making and university finances (including the use of consultants), as well as the handling of freedom of information (FOI) requests by universities.”
The submission by the University Chancellors Council, for its part, was coy. The committee noted “one allusion to problems in the sector”. The words of the UCC are hardly worth recounting, except to identify culpability. And the culpable always claim to be credible when found out: “Robust systems of governance, while an antidote to failure in process, are not infallible and UCC is committed to continuous improvement in governance systems.” No sycophantic hack could have said it better.
The problems of the Australian tertiary system are profound. The committee received evidence from staff and students showing their near inconsequential role in the making of decisions of the university before the autocratic whims of University Councils. The corollary of such inconsequentiality lay in those 306 university executives with Himalayan salaries who have proliferated like fungi in moist climes. The committee specifically noted a submission by Dr. Lionel Page, who remarked that the number of senior management positions at Australian universities between 1997 and 2017 “increased by over 110 per cent, while middle management roles grew by 122 per cent.” The pool of support staff, however, dried up by 70 per cent over the same period.
University vice-chancellors earn more money than Cabinet ministers, the Prime Minister and the Premiers of state. Ditto the fat clutch of acquisitive deputy executives with nebulous titles who have little to do with classrooms, teaching and research. To put it into context: political representatives can send people to their deaths, declare wars and emergencies and be voted out on relatively lower levels of remuneration; the supposed magistrates of education can, on a fatter package, enact dreadful policies with impunity and never fear a collective vote of the university body that might terminate their tenure.
Things would not be quite so ghastly were some of the administrators capable. We know this not to be the case. These tertiary education plodders are a formidable example of the Peter Principle in grim action, one expounded in the book by that name in 1969: those in any organisational hierarchy rise to levels of “respective incompetence”. What we see in place is an oligarchy of oafs.
How, then, does the report address this problem? The twelve recommendations include improvements to transparency and accountability (for instance, publishing the minutes of all council meetings and publicly disclosing the expenses for consultants, along with reasons for hiring them); greater involvement of staff and students in “meaningful consultation” before the making of important decisions; ensuring that governing bodies have a minimum proportion of elected representatives and those with “public administration and higher education expertise”; and giving the otherwise benign Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) necessary powers to investigate breaches of the Higher Education Standards Framework and enforce compliance.
The fourth recommendation by the committee urges the Australian government to work with the Remuneration Tribunal and states and territories to create a mechanism that will assess the appropriate salaries for vice-chancellors and senior executives. Unfortunately, the report still approves of university councils setting that remuneration within the devised classification. History shows that university councils, unless they are utterly reformed, cannot be trusted with such a task.
In her response to the interim report, the unchallenging Alison Barnes of the National Tertiary Education Union, more comatose-inducing than threatening to university managers, approved something her organisation could do more about. “We strongly welcome the committee’s recommendations to boost transparency, cap vice-chancellor salaries, reform university councils, and strengthen the regulatory TEQSA.”
The report, now written, risks suffering the lonely fate of others. The vice-chancellors and senior executives will drag their feet and ensure that change will be glacially slow, preferably non-existent. In the absence of regulations with true bite and an anti-corruption body with specific expertise on the wily, venal nature of the modern university, ideas for reform will suffer withering neglect.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
