This is the first article in a series on Australian University Governance by Sean Brawley, including:
- Part 1 – The Origins of Governance in Universities Globally
- Part 2 – The Foundations of University Governance in Australia
- Part 3 – Post WWII Stability in Governance
- Part 4 – The Dawkins Revolution – From Coordination to Control
- Part 5 – The Howard Years – The Maturation of Commonwealth Control
- Part 6 – The Governance Settlement
OPINION
Part 1 – What do we mean by University Governance?
A Potted History of Australian University Governance
In an article for Future Campus last year, technologist Mark Byer and I raised the question of rediscovering the soul of the university when reflecting on the implications of artificial intelligence for higher education and society more broadly.
That discussion connected directly to wider and increasingly charged national debates about the purpose of the modern university and its social licence. At the centre of those debates has sat the question of “university governance”. In recent times, I have been struck not only by the intensity of that discussion within the academy, but also by the number of acquaintances outside the sector who now want to talk to me about university governance!
I have long thought this debate overdue. My concern has always been that university governance is too often treated as a technical or procedural matter, when it is in fact a constitutional one. Yet, as the debate has gathered momentum, it has also become increasingly frustrating and, at times, surprisingly confused. Much of that confusion, it seems to me, turns on a basic problem of definition. In many conversations about “university governance”, it quickly becomes apparent that participants are not speaking about the same thing at all. I have therefore developed a habit of beginning such discussions with a simple question: what do you actually mean when you speak of university governance?
Sometimes, my interlocutors are referring to what TEQSA describes as “corporate governance”. Sometimes they see this in a narrow legal or fiduciary sense, but more often they want to engage with discussions on the role, composition, or bona fides of university councils or boards.
At other times, university governance is used as a proxy for leadership and management, often degenerating into performative distractions — most notoriously debates about vice-chancellors’ remuneration.
For many academics, much of what is now perceived to be wrong with the Australian university is traced to the erosion of “academic governance” — the authority of scholars over teaching, research, and standards — even if that loss is more readily sensed, than easily defined.
Outside the academy, however, academic governance attracts far less attention. In those discussions, universities may well require greater oversight and control, but little consideration is given to how academic authority is exercised — or diminished — in the process.
One further source of confusion lies in the tendency to treat university governance as an exclusively internal matter. Much contemporary discussion focuses on councils, senates, academic boards, or executive leadership, as if governance begins and ends within the institution itself.
Historically, however, universities have also been shaped by external arrangements — including funding mechanisms, regulatory frameworks, advisory commissions (see Keelin George and Rorden Wilkinson’s recent piece), and the machinery through which governments have sought to coordinate the sector as a whole.
For much of the Twentieth Century in Australia, these forms of sector coordination were rarely seen as “governance” at all. They were understood instead as policy, administration, or oversight, leaving the term governance to be reserved for internal constitutional arrangements. With the establishment of the Australian Tertiary Education Commission, however, broader conceptions of what we might call external or sector governance have re-entered the debate.
This brings me back to the idea — and the soul — of the university.
Returning to the very idea of the university is not an antiquarian exercise. It is a way of clarifying what is actually at stake in contemporary governance debates — debates which I would argue have increasingly become proxies for a deeper uncertainty about what universities are for.
Here, the discipline of history can offer timely and necessary reminders about how we arrived at the present moment.
Historically, universities have oscillated between different organising ideas: communities of scholars, professional training institutions, civic bodies, national cultural projects, and engines of economic development, among others. When governance debates feel incoherent, it is often because these competing purposes are being assumed simultaneously but rarely spelt out. Revisiting the idea of the university exposes those competing logics and may force us to make choices — or, at the very least, to be more honest about the priorities we are implicitly privileging.
In my own academic lifetime, the meaning and practice of governance have shifted markedly. That observation may reflect my own trajectory — from tutorial room to the C Suite — but
it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the past four decades have seen notions of stewardship progressively displaced by notions of control.
Historically, governance of the western university was framed around custodianship of an intellectual and civic inheritance, exercised at arm’s length from church, crown, or state. By contrast, contemporary debates — whether framed as corporate or academic or sector governance — are saturated with managerial vocabularies of risk, compliance, assurance, and performance. This represents not merely a change in language, but a redefinition of authority: from governing a scholarly community to supervising an organisational asset. That shift goes a long way toward explaining why many academics construct contemporary university governance as alien, extractive, or performative rather than enabling.
The current moment also revives long-standing tensions between autonomy and accountability. Universities have never operated without oversight. Even at their most autonomous, they were accountable to church, crown, parliament, city, or benefactor.
The enduring question has never been whether accountability exists, but to whom it is owed, for what ends, and by what means.
Historically, accountability was mediated through trust in scholarly judgment and relatively light-touch external supervision. Today’s reliance on audit, metrics, and performance frameworks marks a shift from trust to control. While such mechanisms may appear novel, universities have renegotiated their social contracts before, particularly during periods of fiscal stress and mass expansion.
Contemporary debates about “corporatisation” likewise echo earlier moments of structural transformation in the university. In Australia over the past half-century, massification, the professionalisation of administration, competitive research funding, and the rise of national regulatory frameworks have progressively reconfigured how authority is exercised within universities.
Accountability that was once grounded in scholarly self-regulation is now increasingly expressed through external oversight and compliance regimes. Revisiting these earlier moments allows us to identify which changes genuinely unsettled the idea of the university itself and where internal balances of power were materially altered. At the same time, it guards against nostalgia for an imagined golden age and fatalism about the inevitability of the present. Universities, especially in settler societies such as Australia, have long been instruments of nation-building; what has changed is not that role, but how it is governed.
Finally, history provides a vocabulary for critique that is neither reactionary nor managerial. Without historical grounding, governance debates tend to collapse into familiar binaries: efficiency versus tradition, agility versus collegiality, accountability versus autonomy. Returning to the idea of the university introduces a richer and more productive set of questions: what forms of authority are appropriate for knowledge institutions; how power should be distributed between expertise and oversight; and what obligations universities owe not only to funders and students, but to the future.
This is the point at which history becomes not background, but method. If contemporary debates about university governance feel muddled, it is because they are taking place without a shared understanding of what sort of institution is being governed, or why it was organised as it was in the first place. Governance cannot be disentangled from purpose, and purpose cannot be understood without attention to the long institutional history of the university.
It is from this standpoint that this series will proceed, with a focus on the Australian experience. Together, they are intended not as a nostalgic exercise, but as a way of recovering the assumptions that once made university governance intelligible — and of clarifying what is at stake in the choices now confronting the sector.
The next part in the series traces the evolution of the western university and its governance from its medieval origins in Bologna through to the Australian system as it stood by the 1960s, examining how ideas of community, authority, and scholarly self-rule were translated — and sometimes diluted — as the university moved across time, geography, and scale. It shows that Australian universities had negotiated the balance between academic autonomy and state involvement long before the reforms of the late Twentieth Century.