Corporate values have taken over Australian universities

In the last two years there have been three government reports on university governance in Australia, one in the Senate and one each in the New South Wales and Victorian state parliaments.

These enquiries were set up following the final report of the Australian Universities Accord, which, in 2024, after a year-long investigation, made 47 recommendations to improve the Australian higher education system. Among these recommendations was the establishment of an ‘expert panel’ to investigate university governance.

Each of these parliamentary enquiries has proposed changes to legislation relating to universities and the composition of their governing councils.

They have also recommended the adoption of eight principles proposed by an Expert Council on University Governance and structural changes, such as increased staff and student representation on university governing councils and greater transparency in decision-making.

While these changes are a step in the right direction, they will not lead to the fundamental improvements envisioned by the Accord.

Efficiency vs effectiveness

The situation in which Australian universities find themselves had its origins nearly 40 years ago under reforms sponsored by then Federal Education Minister John Dawkins. At the time, the intention was to make universities more efficient and accountable to the government and enable a rapid increase in student numbers in the shift to a knowledge economy.

While the evidence indicates that universities have certainly become more efficient, it has come at a cost.

The final report of the Accord noted that, since 1988, there has been a lack of “deep thinking and clarity of direction” in Australian higher education.

The focus has been on making universities more responsive “to ministerial and government priorities”, and there has been a lack of “stewardship-focused bodies that are able to provide continuity and deep historical knowledge of the system”.

The Australian higher education system has not been “making effective use of its education institutions’ expertise or of the resources it commits to the system”.

In other words, while the Dawkins and subsequent reforms have made universities more efficient, it has come at the cost of their effectiveness.

It is far more difficult to make an effective higher education system than to make an efficient one, so it is easy to see why this has been the focus of policymakers.

The OECD noted that most governments focus on efficiency because it allows them to assess university performance based on relatively obvious and easy-to-measure criteria.

Assessing university effectiveness, however, is a totally different ball game. It requires attention to be paid to less obvious but more impactful factors such as learning through experience over the longer term and building trust.

These factors include power dynamics, the roles of the various stakeholders and how they interact to drive change in the HE system.

The dominance of the corporate executive

Another key difference often overlooked, and one that distinguishes universities from other organisations, is that their effectiveness relies on both corporate and academic governance, each acting as separate but interdependent bodies.

This distinction is in recognition of the fact that the expertise in teaching and research, which is the “core business” of universities, rests with the academic staff.

The regulator in Australia, the Tertiary Education Quality Standards Agency (TEQSA), acknowledges both these forms of leadership in its policy documentation, but it clearly depicts academic governance and academic leadership as subordinate to the corporate.

This means the primary academic body in most universities, the academic senate, is largely dominated by the corporate executive.

In an era where HE is expected to be more accountable, the leadership role played by the academic profession has largely been downgraded, even though arguably, they are the group on whom the effectiveness of the HE system relies more than any other.

In reality, in the corporatised university, academic leaders are largely appointed by the corporate executive, so their perspective tends to align more with the corporate perspective than that of their academic colleagues.

The formation of policy, therefore, tends to reflect corporate values, which, in the longer term, have resulted in very poor policy outcomes from an academic perspective.

Examples abound, such as the use of AI, workloads, casualisation, increased administrative demands, mandated online learning, work intensification through trimesterisation, unrealistic output-based performance measures, etcetera.

In other words, many of the problems aired in the Accord and subsequent enquiries have arisen due to a reduced focus on academic values in the formation of policy and decision-making arising from the subordination of the academic profession in the governance of Australian universities.

This has had a devastating impact on the academic profession.

Researchers describe ‘fragmentation’ and confusion amongst academics about their role.

Some claim that academic work has become “almost untenable” because the tensions expected to arise in a shared governance situation tend to be suppressed rather than embraced.

These claims are borne out by numerous reports of significant psychosocial stress amongst university staff.

A demoralised and impotent academic workforce is not going to lead to more effective universities or a better HE system, but unfortunately the transactional nature of the enterprise bargaining process has not been able to address the underlying systemic and policy problems that impact the academic role.

A systemic approach is needed

For HE to become more effective, these issues must be addressed from a systemic rather than an enterprise perspective.

This requires a clear understanding of the distinct roles played by the government, university management and the academic profession. It is crucial the leadership aspects of the academic role are acknowledged and supported by the HE system.

Researchers have proposed four foundational principles as necessary to achieve this outcome. These principles aim to redefine the academic role in a more accountable HE system.

They emphasise the leadership and autonomous aspects of the academic role and associated professional and ethical obligations that extend beyond the bounds of any given institution or government.

They call for a rethink of the academic employment relationship to acknowledge these as inherent to the academic role.

Although welcome, merely adding a few more staff and student voices to governance structures dominated by corporate leaders will not be enough to change these fundamental flaws.

The Australian Association of University Professors (AAUP) has established a research project to investigate how these principles might be implemented in the Australian HE context and usher in a new and more effective era for Australian higher education.

They call on the regulatory bodies such as TEQSA to seriously address the effectiveness of Australian HE by ensuring the academic profession can fulfil its role as stewards of academic values to restore trust and to ensure it serves the needs of society by helping to counter growing threats such as climate change, a rise in authoritarianism and rampant use of AI.

John Kenny is secretary of the Australian Association of University Professors.

This article is a commentary. Commentary articles are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News.