Opinion
Universities are vocal critics of the impact of government funding cuts.
To be fair, Job-ready Graduates left universities with about $1 billion less from the Commonwealth while students paid $368 million more. Likewise, competitive Commonwealth grant allocations have declined 19 per cent over the past 12 years. And the international education “rivers of gold” that subsidise these shortfalls have fallen victim to recent migration policy “tightening.”
When a funding base is squeezed from several directions, those pesky consultants universities hire advocate for intensive change-management programs: also known as cuts to the people and the programs students depend on. It is why student leaders lend their voice to the rest of the sector to fight for public investment in our institutions.
So you would think a university would be the last to underinvest in the students whose funding it does control.
If you were at the University of Newcastle, you would be wrong.
The Student Services and Amenities Fee (SSAF) is paid by students to fund student representation and activity. When international numbers fall, the SSAF pool falls with them. Every student organisation that depends on that pool faces the very arithmetic every vice-chancellor decries.
Yet in Newcastle’s case, instead of investing the additional student money that new legislation requires be directed to student-led organisations, into the existing University of Newcastle Students’ Association (UNSA) and strengthening it, the university is standing up a second organisation of its own and dividing the money three ways.
Surely, then, a supposed student-led organisation tipped to receive millions of students’ dollars would be empowered by a large student membership, its constitution fine-tuned by the very postgraduate students the university claims the new body is there to support?
The company’s sole member is the University of Newcastle, and students cannot even be members. The Vice-Chancellor appoints three of the eight directors, and the university wrote the constitution and retains the ability to veto changes to it. The postgraduates it is “for” never touched it.
Student-led does not simply mean holding a majority of seats on a board. It means agency: the power to set the organisation’s direction, control its purpose, and advocate for the members. This board has seats without agency. Its objectives are fixed (food, sport, wellbeing), its rules are controlled by the university, and its existence is entirely for and by the university. Its only member is the university.
If this organisation is genuinely student-led, why are students not its members and why are students unable to have a say in its constitution?
Under this model, student-led means oversight and risk management: a seat to watch someone else’s vision delivered, inside a structure students have little power to change. There is not even a meeting at which they could hold it to account. The draft constitution provides that, while the university is the company’s only member, it need not hold an annual general meeting at all.
Apparently, the new body will meet every student-majority, independence, governance, financial and service-delivery requirement set out in the legislation, with the intent of “enhancing service capacity.” But how can an organisation whose creation was not student-led claim to be student-led, and to empower students – while providing no platform to do so?
Representation is built on the social contract: the consent of the governed. Students are of voting age. They vote, pay taxes, run for public office and sit on boards and committees. Yet the university has written a constitution over their heads, one they had no say in and which their own SSAF will now fund, without their consent. There will not even be an inaugural meeting to ratify or amend the constitution, and no student would be eligible to vote if there were.
UNSA is what student agency looks like: a student-led organisation in conception and operation. Formed between 2016 and 2019, on independent research, extensive student consultation, the agreement of every pre-existing student body, and student members. It has postgraduate, international and satellite campus representation baked into the model. By contrast the university’s new body is the hollow marketised version of a student organisation, serving the same cohorts with none of the authorship and none of the ownership.
There is a way to settle what a student body wants. It is called an election, and UNSA holds them.
A sector asking the government to fund it properly and respect its autonomy should extend the same principle on its own campuses.
Imogen Reid is the President of the University of Newcastle Students’ Association and Bachelor of Science student at The University of Newcastle. Jesse Gardner-Russell is the National President of the Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations and PhD candidate in Ophthalmology at The University of Melbourne.