On Monday afternoon last week, Education Minister Jason Clare responded to claims that universities were not protecting Jewish students who felt threatened by protests against Israel on campus. “Where you have got people who feel intimidated to come to university because of words being uttered or the way that people are behaving, then that’s intolerable,” he told ABC News TV.
“And if universities don’t implement their codes of conduct, then there are powers that the tertiary education regulator has to fine them or require them to do that.”
Such as?
A spokesperson for the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency tells FC, “TEQSA can and will take regulatory action should any higher education provider fail to adopt or enforce policies to protect student and staff safety – including the prevention and response to discrimination.”
And the agency is on to it, “engaging directly with universities where protest activities are taking place to better understand how these universities are assuring student and staff safety and freedom of speech.”
It’s a ways from TEQSA’s regulatory routine, of ensuring “standards-based quality framework and principles relating to regulatory necessity, risk and proportionality.” And the agency is explicit that “it is not a complaints resolution body and typically does not have a role in addressing individual complainants’ request or grievances. We prioritise broader systemic issues.”
But this limited interpretation of its role did not save it from a savaging by a Senate committee last year, which found the way TEQSA dealt with complaints about sexual violence on campus, “was a shameful state of affairs,” (FC September 15). Mr Clare is creating an independent Student Ombudsman, a role which TEQSA could have filled using a more ambitious interpretation of its existing remit and saving the minister an avoidable political problem.
This might be why TEQSA signals it is involved in free speech and student safety, lest Mr Clare wonder why the Government has a higher education watchdog that does not bark.
A proposal to end TEQSA’s independence is already on the policy table. A recommendation in Mary O’Kane and colleagues’ Universities Accord is for TEQSA, along with skills regulator AQSA, to become “independent statutory bodies” but under the umbrella of the Australian Tertiary Education Commission. With ATEC all but universally assumed to be imminent and the Student Ombudsman coming, TEQSA’s future remit is far from clear.
