Crowd-sourcing research for better uni governance

Alessandro Pelizzon, Southern Cross University & Adam Lucas, University of Wollongong

Australia's tertiary sector is in crisis. Far from being sudden and unexpected, this is a crisis that has been a long time in the making. As many of us are painfully aware, the COVID pandemic has exposed deep structural flaws in how the sector has been governed for decades.

Over the last 30 years Australia’s public universities have been transformed into revenue-generating entities that have lost sight of what the law and most reasonable people agree to be their core mission: to educate and train students for the complex challenges currently facing the world, and to conduct research that contributes to improving society and advancing knowledge and understanding.

Emblematic of this distortion of priorities is the fact that more than half of the people employed in the tertiary sector have no job security. As a consequence, university executives in 2020 were able to immediately terminate the employment of tens of thousands of our professional and academic colleagues, both permanently and casually employed. In addition to the 17,000 fulltime equivalent jobs already lost, it is estimated that another 12,000 to 16,000 colleagues will lose their jobs by the end of 2021.

The irony of all this is that staff and students are regularly subjected to a constant churn of technocratic metrics of performance and efficiency. But if similar measures are ever applied to senior management, staff, students and the public are never made privy to their findings.

The current situation can be primarily attributed to the failed experiment in corporatisation of Australia’s tertiary education system. The financial distress currently experienced throughout the sector has made this failure starkly apparent: universities have adopted the worst aspects of corporate governance but none of those elements that make for-profit corporations efficient, effective, and ultimately accountable.

The governing bodies of Australian public universities have become autocratic entities. Academics, professional staff, students and graduates have very little input into any decision-making processes. ‘Consultation’ generally consists of being told what changes will be made, and there is virtually no ministerial oversight of decisions taken by university executives and approved by governing bodies.

Conflicts of interest, lack of appropriate expertise, and opaque decision-making inevitably characterise the senior management of most of Australia’s public universities. Enabled by state and territory legislation that privileges corporate over tertiary experience on university governance bodies, they are almost completely free of any constraints on how much they pay their executives, how they spend operating surpluses, and how and when they hire and fire staff.

Instances of mismanagement, malfeasance, nepotism, incompetence, corruption and fraud rarely become public, and are dealt with ‘in-house’, with all the ethical and legal quandaries that such a culture engenders.

Academics for Public Universities (APU) is a research think-tank comprised of concerned academics from multiple universities who wish to study, understand, and ultimately oppose these regressive trends. We are developing a range of strategies to examine and confront the existential crisis currently facing higher education in Australia. Our primary goal is to develop crowd-sourced research and a range of derived strategies that can raise the awareness of our colleagues, students, publics and political representatives about the current state of tertiary education in Australia.

The two main areas we feel are most strategically important with regard to holding executives accountable for their poor management and decision-making are university finances and governance. With these two foci in mind, we invite interested colleagues to join us in an Australia-wide research project to investigate the financial situations of our tertiary institutions and the ways in which they are currently governed.

We do not accept the claim that the ‘funding crisis’ presented by COVID justifies current policies in relation to job, wage and condition cuts. Our research is being undertaken with reference to publicly available documents and data, and does not involve drawing on sensitive or confidential material.

The Better University Governance (BUG) research action group at the University of Wollongong (UoW) has provided the blueprint for our financial analysis. BUG members have been mapping UoW’s current and past income and expenditure, focusing in particular on the indefensible quadrupling of executive and senior managerial salaries and the many opaque areas of financial expenditure.

On the basis of BUG’s research, it has proposed to UoW management significant reductions in executive remuneration and financial expenditure on non-core university activities, demonstrating that significant savings can be made without any loss of jobs. Similar financial analyses conducted by staff at the University of Sydney have already proven successful in enabling the prevention of planned involuntary redundancies there.

Several dozen colleagues are now working with us to undertake this research. We would like to invite anyone who is interested in participating to join us in exploring the finances and governance of their own institutions. We are hoping to map the anomalies in expenditure across the entire sector in order to demonstrate just how profligate has been much of this public expenditure.

The statistical data we are using is being drawn from the annual reports of home institutions. We are mapping issues such as executive and staff remuneration, levels of casualisation, domestic and international student numbers and revenue, non-teaching and research expenditures and revenue, levels of operating surpluses, and the financial exposure of our universities through borrowings for capital works.

Our hope is to compile our research at a national level and leave it as a permanent repository on the APU website for future reference, elaboration and emulation. We also propose to produce a series of popular and academic articles, public reports and press releases to raise public awareness and inform our ongoing campaign for tertiary governance reform.

Examples of the analyses undertaken to date by BUG, along with methodological instructions as to how to conduct this research, can be found on the APU website.

We are adamant that there is no justification for the excessive salaries currently enjoyed by university executives and senior managers. Nor is there any justification for terminating the employment of thousands of people who are arguably better qualified to run our institutions than those who currently do so. The same kinds of short-sighted managerialist responses that have been imposed on us over the last thirty years cannot possibly get us out of this mess.

We appeal to our colleagues across the sector to work with us in developing just and sustainable solutions to the problems we confront; solutions that are informed by transparent evidence that is accountable to all. ◆