What might a university actually look like if it were led and governed by academic staff to a much greater extent than today?
In our paper Imagining a Revolution in University Governance , published by the University of Melbourne today, we set out a complete constitution for the Australian Exemplar University (the AEU) as it would be in 2028.
By then, in this imaginary future, the Australian Public Universities Act 2027 has been passed which, from 1 January 2028, re-incorporates all of Australia’s public universities under a single piece of federal legislation.
The incoherent patchwork of state and territory governance models has been swept away. There is instead a common legislative framework for public universities. The government that provides almost all the taxpayer money going into universities now has a direct line of sight on their governance.
A central requirement of the Australian Public Universities Act is that during 2027 each university must propose a constitution that meets certain criteria. The Minister must approve the constitution if in their view those criteria have been met.
Central to the whole revolution is academic self-governance. This follows an (imaginary) awakening in 2026 that “corporate governance” is the wrong approach for universities. Large, for-profit companies operate in a quite different context of share prices, institutional investors, activist shareholders and general meetings. Directors know exactly who they are accountable to. To import university governance thinking from that quarter is a category error.
The Australian Exemplar University (AEU) has a bicameral legislature called “the Boards of Governors”, comprising an External Council and an Academic Senate. Completing the governance authority is a University Adjudicator, whose role effectively is to enforce an internal rule of law.
There is no longer an Academic Board, because the wholly elected Academic Senate is now an equal chamber of governance. Like all bicameral legislatures, proposals must be approved by each chamber, although we include a tie-breaker mechanism if there is disagreement over supply – ie the University Budget – or compliance with the law of the land.
The External Council comprises ministerial appointees and two alumni members. It is up to the Minister how many appointees there are. Each chamber must approve a non-delegated decision, so a large number of ministerial appointees gives it no greater weight than a small number.
The AEU is based on the idea of membership. All continuing academic staff are members of the university. They choose the University Adjudicator and the chair of the Academic Senate. They can petition the Boards of Governors for the removal of the Vice-Chancellor but it is up to the Boards whether to accede to this.
Self-governance features at all levels. Deans are elected by their Faculty. Academic Senate comprises the Deans and elected representatives of faculty boards, undergraduate students, coursework postgraduate students and research postgraduate students.
A chart in the paper summarises who chooses whom.
The Executive of the AEU is quite separate from governance. The Vice-Chancellor may attend but is no longer a member of a governance board. The AEU has decided that the Vice-Chancellor may not be remunerated at a higher level than the Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia (entailing a pay-cut from current levels).
The Vice-Chancellor of the AEU must be a person of high academic standing and achievement, who may only use the title of professor if they are eligible for appointment as such under the University Appointments Policy.
Our paper sets out all this and more in the form of a Constitution. The intention is that everyone should be able to see how the university is governed and managed by consulting a single, readable document.
Readers of Future Campus might reasonably wonder why on earth would higher education move in this direction?
One reason is hard-headed. Universities may be heading for tumultuous change, due to technology, demography, international factors and a rebalancing of tertiary education towards vocational education and training. Some will need to re-invent themselves to remain viable. The more that universities are regulated in detail by government agencies, the more that government will come to own the failures.
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.
Of course, everything comes at a price. If scholars really want to control the destiny of their institution, they will have to step up, take management and budgeting seriously, and see quality assurance as something other than form-filling.
As we say in our paper, some may come to pine for the good old days when other people made decisions that they could complain about.
The AEU is intended as only one model. There is scope for quite different arrangements that are still consistent with academic self-governance.
We are aware that the AEU’s constitution might be thought a recipe for endless meetings and admiring problems at length rather than solving them. There would be a sharp learning curve for the newly enfranchised.
But we think it offers a more promising future than the current slow strangulation of universities through detailed and costly external regulation which is unlikely to prevent the failures of governance and management that are now so depressingly well-documented.
In short, forget corporate governance and give democracy a go. Stop tinkering and change the model.
Emeritus Professor Stephen Parker is former VC of the University of Canberra and former Dean of Law at Griffith and Monash Universities, among many other roles. Emeritus Professor Stephen Bottomley is a former Dean of Law at ANU and the author of numerous studies of corporate law and governance.