Australian vice-chancellors have forfeited public trust

The University of Sydney recently tabled a billion-dollar operating surplus, reflecting what, in a different kind of organisation, would be hailed as a nearly half-billion underlying profit. Other Australian universities’ results have been less spectacular but showed substantial surpluses nonetheless.

The managerial class presiding over this success – let us call it that, for now – are nevertheless relentless in their pursuit of more funds for universities.

Certainly, there are reasons to wish for more. Casualisation has got so out of control that a large army of highly educated university teachers faced severe poverty as universities shed their meagre, often underpaid, workforce to retain surpluses under the Covid downturn.

Even before the pandemic, casual contracts across the sector were based on piece-work rates, especially for marking, that kept management’s flexible army on what are, frankly, starvation wages. Several Australian universities now face wage theft repayments for a form of exploitation that was widely recognised and too-long ignored.

Other members of our universities also need more. Most academics and a growing percentage of professional staff have workloads that are near impossible. Admin and other workload creep make working from home necessary, not only to flatten the curve of the pandemic but also to give universities nearly every waking moment of our time. Only then might we come within what Aussies call “cooee” of getting the work done.

These conditions, while worsening since 2020, have been acknowledged for years. And yet successive governments have been reluctant to invest further in Australian higher education. Why? Because neither the politicians nor the public really trusts universities to do with money what the public expects.

This decline in trust has been long coming. A key moment was in 2014, when all vice-chancellors but one supported Liberal government proposals, led by then education minister Christopher Pyne, to deregulate domestic student fees. It was reasonable to predict that universities would charge fees as high as the market could bear. In an environment where getting most decent jobs required a degree, this would hold generations of young people to ransom.

The reforms were also set to embed even higher levels of inequality between graduates of more and less expensive universities and between graduates and those who wouldn’t be able to study at university at all. For this reason, the only way such ideologically driven reform was going to get through parliament was if these inevitably massive fees were backed by government loans. The proposal failed largely because, under those conditions, this risked sending the federal treasury broke.

University leaders knew the proposal was bad for the country. They knew it would steal the future earnings of generations of students to prop up their own institutions, contributing to intergenerational inequality. Yet they said they had no choice but to support it. This was, they said, their “fiduciary responsibility”. That is, their defence of the institution mattered more than everything the institution was for. Unsurprisingly, public trust in their motives was undermined.

Hard-right conservatives are currently pronouncing “cancel culture” to be the biggest threat to higher education. But such a thing, if it existed, would hardly affect most things universities do, such as teach engineers and physiotherapists. Arguably, our biggest threat, by contrast, is this failure of leadership.

Who would give these so-called leaders more money now? After decades of growth and millions, now billions, in surpluses, annual reports show that typically less than one-third of expenditure went to what the institutions are for, the work of teaching and research. It is not that other expenses, such as libraries and laboratories, are illegitimate, but universities are remarkably cagey about details, so it is hard to be confident that the money is being well spent.

In this context, it was surely not Sydney management’s plan to record a billion-dollar surplus in the same year as they also needed to negotiate wages and working conditions via a new enterprise agreement. For the one thing we know about university managements is that to them, reinvestment means spending on literally anything but improving the conditions for core work.

Universities probably do need more funds, largely to undo business models that we can surely no longer label as success. The new government’s priority ought to be fixing those while dismantling the Liberal government’s misleadingly titled Job-Ready Graduates programme: a kind of Pyne-lite set of higher fees applied to courses the minister did not like.

Many are looking hopefully to new Secretary to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Glyn Davis. But as University of Melbourne vice-chancellor, Davis unsuccessfully sought reforms, focused on diversifying institution types, that were unlikely to improve the conditions for teaching and research. And he supported the Pyne reforms.

Following Raewyn Connell’s excellent book The Good University, I suspect that rather more democratic changes will be required. We need effective but inclusive structures of decision-making. And we need employment conditions that nourish and sustain work that is authentically embedded in community and that do not depend on further pillaging our students’ future earnings.

Yet university managements, at least as currently constituted, show little evidence they can do the work that is needed. Whatever reform we undertake, it probably needs to start at the top.

Hannah Forsyth is senior lecturer in history at the Australian Catholic University.