Future Campus should open with a news story.
But this week the news is the story – and the abject failure of the university sector to respond effectively is the underlying narrative.
It’s got to stop.
This weekend, Fairfax ran a story entitle ‘A kind of Monster’: Why Does Everyone Hate Universities? This follows more than a year of stories across many media channels questioning whether universities any longer offer value to the people they purport to serve.
But it’s not the stories or the journalists who are to blame. Despite their often limited grasp of the sector and how it works, the questions need to continue to be asked, in private and in public.
The thing that has to stop is what amounts to silence, in response. Of course, the same old voices are in the corner with their mouths opening and closing, but the responses are generic, unconvincing and might as well not exist at all. Our sector is represented by a void, so that the shame fairly or unfairly slopping onto the CVs of staff across the sector, sticks.
There’s one certain outcome from a growing barrage of attacks on the sector without anyone managing or maybe even bothering to mount an effective rebuttal. That’s a decline in power. A decline in social licence translated into electoral power, translated into a future where funding and revenue growth windows are harder to justify and draconian, inefficient regulation far easier.
You only have to read the comments section of any of these stories to see that universities are on the nose. Government and Opposition see it, hear it, and limit the sector’s ability to determine its own future accordingly.
University marketers are not the problem, despite the best efforts of noisy internal agitators at almost every institution who are queuing to sheet home blame towards anyone but themselves.
Individuals, even the wealthiest VCs whose pay packets continue to yoke the sector with a narrative of excess, can not bear blame; any more than the disaffected staff who while away their days sharing laughably simplistic narratives about their lust for the good old days.
Nor should Universities Australia bear the blame. The organisation that morphed from a thousand blood-lettings as the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee should not be expected to achieve consensus or lobbying impact from intractable division.
No, there must be a new answer, a new approach – and as ATEC and Managed Growth and Needs Based Funding models are currently being thrashed out, it needs to be this year.
The sector needs a new voice, and new answers, not trying to construct weak consensus-depleted campaigns that tank with the electorate and yield no leverage whatsoever with government. A coalition of strength and vision with resourcing to match its convictions – not a whole-of-sector consensus vehicle that can play vital roles in many areas of representation, but can not be expected to win the hearts and minds of middle Australia.
We need answers to the growing chorus of articles, social media posts and other media channels, many fuelled by discontented staff suffering pretensions of understanding what is going on, and build a strong position based on the future of higher education.
How it can be:
- More efficient
- More effective
- Embracing, not diminished by AI
- Led by people with salaries based on a justifiable metric and a willingness to put their communities first
- Administered effectively by people who care enough about others to pay and protect them
- Prioritising creation of knowledge that people actually care about
- Shedding the stuff that makes the sector appear self-indulgent and irrelevant.
For 18 months we have been reporting on issues with the right of universities to keep functioning as they are – what is currently described as social licence.
We have the skills in the sector to describe and demonstrate a compelling vision for the future, fronted by people with language and capacity to win the day. But we don’t have a coalition or resourcing to make change – or a group of leaders motivated enough to step forward and make the necessary change.
We have all seen the annual reports, we know the money is there.
We have all seen the void where a rebuttal should be, we know the need is there.
We have all seen ATEC, the increase in regulation, the failures in research funding and the restrictions on enrolment revenue.
So why is stasis an acceptable strategic position for any HE leader this year?
It’s time to stop pretending everything is ok. Before everything is not.
It’s time to stop the rot.