Universities Australia aims to work more closely with students, unions and business to achieve better outcomes, as the sector faces a challenging year.
In an extensive interview with Future Campus, Griffith University Vice-Chancellor and Universities Australia Chair Carolyn Evans said UA would work, “not just within the sector and not just with government.”
“We have shared interests with the National Union of Students with the Business Council of Australia … I’d like to think we have some real shared interests we could jointly prosecute with the NTEU.”
Creating alliances with common interests will be critical to address the scale of challenges ahead for the sector, Professor Evans said.
In the podcast interview, recorded last month, Professor Evans said improving approaches to regulation and compliance were critical to reduce costs and wasted effort for universities.
“There are all sorts of people filling in all sorts of forms, providing slightly different information, – still effectively the same information, in a different way,” Professor Evans said.
“I really believe there are far, far better ways to still have a well-regulated, high-quality, accountable university system where we just waste less time on nonsense.”
“We put some real focus on health and safety, both physical and psychosocial. That is critical. I've got no problem spending time, effort, and money on that. But we have also seen the creep and creep and creep of people filling in forms and reports and collating data one way and then collating data in a slightly different way. We'll often get demands at very short notice from government and deviating people away from what their normal job should be.
“There will always be, and there should always be, people dealing with compliance in universities. We want our staff to be safe. We want them to be paid properly. We want to make sure that There's oversight of teaching quality, but we don't want to smother great inventive, innovative teachers with so much regulation.”
While some universities were in a financially-strong position, there was a broad recognition across the sector that many regional universities in particular were struggling, and needed more support.
“I think there are some particular universities that are under enormous financial stress,” Professor Evans said.
“I am worried that there is no clear, coherent policy or vision for the future of the sector that says, ‘Do we want regional universities? What might they look like? How do we want to make sure people in the regions who already have far less access to higher education than people in cities (get access). What does good look like, and what are we prepared to invest in that?’”
All universities had to grapple with a rise in expectations of what they should provide, alongside a decline in resourcing, Professor Evans said.
“More and more is expected of us, and the resources have been narrowed further and further. Now, that doesn't make us unlike many public sector institutions. When I talk to the CEOs of hospitals, when I talk to the principals of public schools – almost every area of the public service – I think people feel the same.”
“I understand sometimes governments might need to say to certain sectors, we are prioritising early childcare education rather than universities for the next few years, you are going to have to cut your cloth to suit the amount of money we give you.
“I would then like to see those who make those decisions take joint responsibility for the consequences of them, rather than pointing their fingers at those who have been left with very finite amounts of money and very substantial demands and saying, Every time we do something to try and bring the width of demands down to the amount of money we've actually got, it's (portrayed as being) dreadful”.
“One of the reasons that we going to continue to advocate for better support and funding for universities is I actually think more should be demanded of us.
“We should contribute to the community more. We should have great teaching for our students. We should be responding to the challenges and threats and opportunities of the AI age. But within our current budget envelope, that's really hard to do.”