University activists want to be in the room where it happens when it comes to running universities. What Jason Clare has delivered with membership of his new council on university governance will not be enough.
Perhaps apart from veteran union official Sharan Burrow, the Council is not activist inclined, including people who would fit right in on any university board. And there are no staff, student or existing union representatives, although NUS and the NTEU will each “nominate an expert” to, “provide a bridging role between the Council and the wider university community.
This is at odds with pushes for staff say in decisions on active oversight by government.
In Adelaide, an activist academic ginger group wants the state’s Ombudsman to investigate the process for the now-underway merger of Uni Adelaide and Uni SA.
Nationally, the National Tertiary Education Union is agitating for an inquiry into university governance with the comrades are reserving special volumes of outrage for Vice-Chancellor’s pay packets.
And in Hobart, people think that the University of Tasmania should answer to the people. As a report by an upper house committee puts it, “the university has been established under statute, therefore it should be accountable to the Tasmanian public through the parliament.” This is a very Tasmanian proposal; the state’s Legislative Council frequently includes independents focused on local community concerns.
All three activist campaigns are part of a wish-list for university managements to be responsible to staff, driven by outrage that billion-dollar businesses are being run by the sorts of people who manage billion-dollar businesses.
The Tasmanian Legislative Council inquiry in the state university’s act of parliament sums it all up. The inquiry follows a long and bitter dispute over management plans to relocate from suburban Sandy Bay to buildings across the CBD. Opponents include residents who oppose selling university land sold for housing and members of the university community who want to stay where they are, and are angry at being ignored by management.
The Committee report defines the fundamental dispute as follows: “there is potential for conflict under the Act between the University Council’s consideration of ‘the best interest of the university’ and the overarching function of the university to ‘promote the social, cultural and economic welfare of the community and make available for those purposes the resources of the university’. It is unclear how such a conflict should be resolved.”
Not so for academics and other university activists across the country who want universities run by the people who work in them.
It isn’t going to happen – token increases in appointments aside, no State Government is going to stack Councils with staff and students who will send universities off on ideological frolics. And it does not look like Mr Clare’s new council would recommend they do.
But what will occur is more control from Canberra. Education Minister Jason Clare’s entire strategy is for the public service, in the guise of the increasingly imminent Australian Tertiary Education Commission, to regulate courses and student numbers via funding.
Such control by apparatchiks won’t be what advocates of universities run as scholarly soviets have in mind.
