The regulator’s intervention at ANU establishes a precedent it could use almost anywhere.
On Tuesday, the Australian National University’s Council announced its unconditional surrender to the regulator’s requirements on the process for selecting the university’s next Chancellor.
The terms are carefully worded, the agreement is “voluntary,” but the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency has selected its former chair, Peter Coaldrake, as head of the hiring panel, it will specify two of its members and have a veto over the council’s selection of the other two, (ANU council proposes external council member Andrew Metcalfe and academic Juliana Ng).
And if council rejects Professor Coaldrake and colleagues’ pick, TEQSQA will want to know why, in writing.
The Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency is created by Commonwealth legislation, as is the Australian National University but other universities can take no comfort in being established by State and Territory parliaments.
TEQSA’s power to enforce the Higher Education Threshold Standards comes from the Commonwealth’s constitutional power to regulate trading corporations, which universities are held to be. That the national government has funded them for 50 years plus pretty much ensures the States go along with it.
If ANU had kicked-up, TEQSA already has the power to cancel, suspend, shorten or place conditions on its registration as a university, “to address an identified concern about their higher education activities.” No public university has ever been cancelled or suspended, but there are a couple of cases of shortened or conditional registration.
And more TEQSA authority is in the offing. Education Minister Jason Clare is committed to the agency having extra options and the agency nominates eight areas of risk for focus, which are broad enough to mean whatever it wants them to mean. So does TEQSA’s suggestion in the way it will work; “when we are concerned that key risks are not adequately mitigated or managed, we will take targeted and proportionate regulatory action to be assured the provider has appropriate systems, governance and controls in place.”
We might learn how bad TEQSA considered things had got at ANU on any/all these concerns if it releases the report commissioned from Lynelle Brigges “to inform its compliance assessment.”
What we already know is that TEQSA will now intervene in universities’ operations when it wants to.