Comment

Tim Moore
Stacked boards driving ‘rotten’ university sector

The chair of the recent Senate inquiry into the quality of governance at Australia’s universities, Tony Sheldon, can describe the situation in a single word: rotten. While not employing the same colourful language, the Senate’s interim report, recently released, is no less damning. A “lack of trust” and “abuse of process”, it says, lie at the heart of the many governance issues that face Australia’s tertiary institutions, ones that are now covered almost daily in the national press: excessive executive salaries, not just for vice-chancellors; constant restructuring and cuts to faculties; unreasonable spending on consultants and widespread underpayment of staff; management bullying and intimidation.

Among its recommendations, the inquiry sees major changes to the make-up of university councils – the peak governing bodies in institutions – as essential to arrest the decline. What’s needed, it insists, is less “stacking” with corporate appointees, including with former consultants, and a corresponding increase of elected representatives from the ranks of university staff, students and others with education backgrounds. Senators noted how limited the voices of these latter groups have become, with executive decision-making losing too much focus on the educational priorities of institutions as a result. It has been under such governance arrangements that many of the less-than-desirable developments in the sector have been allowed to fester.

The saga of declining authority of academics and students in universities is a long and regrettable one. Some trace the shift back to the reforms implemented by then education minister John Dawkins in the late 1980s, under which universities were made to operate on a more competitive footing. Arguably, though, the most potent seeds were sown in the mid 2000s when Brendan Nelson, as minister for education, embarked on reforms to bring the sector firmly into line with the Howard government’s market-based agenda. Under Nelson’s National Governance Protocols, universities were required, on threat of funding cuts, to reduce the size of their councils and to ensure a predominance of appointed external members, especially those from the commercial sector. The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), in its submissions to the recent inquiry, noted that Nelson’s protocols “empowered and emboldened vice-chancellors to reduce elected staff and student representation to a minimum”.

Executive ambitions were further enabled in some instances by state governments. In Victoria, for example, the Baillieu government legislated to make any staff and student representation on councils entirely optional. A number of Victorian universities grabbed this opportunity – and for a period, their councils were able to go about their affairs unhampered by the input and oversight of their immediate university communities.

Across the country, nowadays, all university councils do have some representation from their academic and student communities – but, as the inquiry noted, this has been in decline since the Nelson reforms. The NTEU reported that in April last year, elected members made up only 137 of the 545 council positions across Australia’s public universities, with 366 being appointed members. At many institutions, these figures translate to a single elected staff and student member on council.

In line with this imbalance, the Senate noted that elected representatives appear to have little capacity to bring influence to bear on matters. More concerning, however, was “troubling evidence heard in relation to the treatment of these staff by senior executives”. The NTEU was more explicit, citing instances where elected staff and students have faced “aggressive manoeuvres by senior leadership intended to isolate, ostracise and undermine ... and even target [their] employment and financial security”.

One such case is Dr Liz Allen from the Australian National University, who testified at the inquiry and whose evidence has since gained wide coverage in the press. As the elected staff representative on her university’s council, Allen alleged being harassed, threatened and bullied by council members – including by Chancellor Julie Bishop – to the point that she contemplated suicide. The case is now in the hands of an ANU-appointed panel charged with investigating the circumstances behind Allen’s account. Bishop has denied any wrongdoing.

Other troubling cases of council hostility emerged in the hearings. Notable was the testimony of Dr Mathew Abbott, the sole elected staff councillor at Federation University. He claimed that, in his experience of raising queries about council decisions or behaviour, he was often “subjected to intimidation, vilification, [and] attempts at silencing”. Efforts to contribute to discussions, he alleged, were at times “mocked by the chair” – the chancellor. The university acknowledged the allegations were “serious” and said it would respond “through the Senate process”.

Student representatives, it appears, are treated not much differently. Again at ANU, the elected student representative, Will Burfoot, spoke of a lack of respect from councillors: “There have been times where I have made a point … The response to that, I felt, was demeaning. It was dismissive and it ignored my core concerns and almost made a joke out of them. I can’t imagine any kind of corporate board or any other decision-making body like council where that kind of behaviour would be acceptable.”

The Saturday Paper has previously documented a range of other cases where elected staff representatives have suffered serious adverse outcomes as a result of their participation on university councils, including being locked out of council meetings (University of New England); being threatened with legal action (Murdoch University); or losing their position altogether (Swinburne University).

In the inquiry, senators expressed grave concerns about the many instances of staff bullying reported in the hearings, praising these staff for their “immense courage” in coming forward to report these experiences “despite the risk of consequences they may face for telling it like it is”.

Of equal concern were the “opaque” and “unaccountable” council processes that have allowed such behaviour to flourish. Senators heard, for example, that many councils currently operate without publicly issuing meeting agendas or minutes. Meetings are also typically closed to observers. In many instances, staff and student representatives are prevented from reporting back to their constituencies by dint of items being deemed commercial-in-confidence. It was noted, too, that the enforcing of confidentiality provisions has often meant staff and student representatives are left off key governance committees. These include the all-important remunerations committees, which set vice-chancellor and other executive salaries, and whose determinations remain secret from the larger university community.

Along with this lack of internal scrutiny, a number of submissions noted that councils, and the executives who control them, face almost no scrutiny from outside. Economist John Quiggin described the accountability void that university executives have come to operate in: “A large proportion of university council appointments are drawn from the corporate world, [yet] university councils do not face the kind of scrutiny that applies to corporations … Unlike corporate directors, members of university councils have no responsibility to shareholders or even (as in the case of government business enterprises) shareholding ministers. As a result … the council is effectively dominated by the vice-chancellor, who faces fewer constraints than either the CEO of a publicly traded corporation or the Chair of a statutory authority.”

The senators’ report acknowledges pockets of good practice across the sector. Its conclusions overall, however, are withering: “This inquiry has … exposed what lies beneath the tip of the governance failure iceberg – overpaid and arrogant management and their largesse, opaque, unaccountable, and top-down decision-making, and governance bodies stacked with corporate appointees.”

The inquiry is now calling for sweeping changes to both the structure and operations of university councils. The politics of this will not necessarily be straightforward. This is because of the historically anomalous situation, whereby the federal government, which is backing change, has responsibility for policy and funding of universities, but the states have oversight of actual governance.

A problem here is that state governments have not always kept a firm eye on the tertiary education ball. This is no doubt partly due to the more overriding concerns they have with those areas of education that come fully under their ambit: the primary, secondary and TAFE sectors. Nevertheless, as Quiggin notes, it is a problem that the states have come to have “almost no role, and little interest, in the funding and performance of universities”.

Successful reform of the way Australia’s universities are run will require serious commitment and coordination between the federal and the state governments. In particular, the laggards in the piece – the states – will need to step up.

These matters – the “interoperability of regulation across Commonwealth, state, and territory jurisdictions” – will be considered in a final report to be released later this year. Also to be covered, the interim report notes, will be “evidence about the corporatisation of universities, including the influence of private sector consultants on university councils”. The university community awaits with anticipation.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 11, 2025 as "Stacked boards driving ‘rotten’ university sector".

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