Australia’s universities should move to a new system of democratic governance, handing extensive power to current academic staff to guide institutions forward, in a bold change proposed by two eminent legal scholars.
Widespread accusations of managerial and governance failures in Australia’s higher education system last year, combined with heavy criticism of university governance from both major parties, have triggered a range of proposals for new approaches to overseeing university operations.
Former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Canberra, Emeritus Professor Stephen Parker, and former ANU Law Dean, Emeritus Professor Stephen Bottomley have proposed the wholesale replacement of the existing council structures with a new bicameral democratic system.
In a paper published by the University of Melbourne’s Centre for the Study of Higher Education today, the pair imagine a revolution in university governance.
Writing about the paper in Future Campus today, Emeritus Professors Parker and Bottomley propose a system based on membership – with all continuing academic staff given voting privileges in the new system.
They propose two Boards of Governors, consisting of an External Council, including Ministerial appointees, and an Academic Senate, elected by the members (continuing academic staff).
“Universities may be heading for tumultuous change, due to technology, demography, international factors and a rebalancing of tertiary education towards vocational education and training,” they write.
“Some will need to re-invent themselves to remain viable.
“The prevailing governance models in public universities make failures almost inevitable. However well-intentioned members of university councils are, they are part-time and remunerated little if at all. They simply cannot be expected to be across the complexity of higher education, its markets, its funding, its operations, its disciplines and its internal culture.
“And regulating university councils in more detail, as now appears to be the trend, just draws in regulators, who may not have any more clue about what to do than perplexed council members.”
The paper acknowledges that a transition to academic staff being given power over their own destiny is likely to entail a steep learning curve – but that the current system is so flawed, democracy may be the only way forward.
The paper is precise, provides clear proposals for change and also open enough to acknowledge the new democratic ecosystem is just one approach among many.
Like early democratic systems, it is as notable for whom it excludes as those it includes. Consolidating power in the hands of continuing academic staff at a time when the majority of employees are non-academic and the precarity of sessional employment remains endemic continues a path of exclusion seen in other models celebrated by continuing academic staff and no-one else, which have quietly sunk.
Perhaps recognising those issues, this model does not claim the only path forward – but makes a strong case for the likely failures should the nation expect that Government regulation of existing councils will be an effective solution to existing governance eyesores.