Maintain focus on governance reforms, urge staff and students

Elected representatives would occupy at least one-third of the seats on Victorian universities’ governing councils under new proposals from a coalition of staff, students and civil bodies.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander input would be enshrined through an “indigenous advisory forum” at each of the eight public universities, with a Victorian Indigenous Higher Education Council operating at the state level.

The proposals form part of a “comprehensive reform agenda” developed by the National Union of Students, the Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations and the state division of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU).

It has been submitted to the Victorian parliamentary inquiry into university governance, carrying the endorsement of 21 unions, student associations and legal, religious, multicultural and rights groups.

The assistant secretary of the NTEU’s Victorian division, University of Melbourne law professor Joo-Cheong Tham, said it was “unprecedented” for an alliance of staff and student groups to produce a joint reform proposition “with that kind of detail”.

He said the groups wanted to maintain the momentum after a barrage of reviews – including the Australian Universities Accord, the Senate Education and Employment Committee’s inquiry and the Expert Council on University Governance – had shone a spotlight on universities’ “broken governance system”.

Those inquiries’ conclusions must not be put on ice, Tham said. “That’s a constant risk that we must guard against. There’s still a very strong strain of opinion that doesn’t think there’s anything fundamentally broken with the status quo. That kind of tendency…can push those issues into the long grass.”

Under the proposals, elected staff representatives would need to comprise at least three of each university council’s 15 or so members, with elected student representatives accounting for at least another two. Universities would be entitled to appoint more if it suited their “circumstances”.

The submission also outlines dozens of “presumptive standards that universities should follow” to align with the eight governance principles drafted by the expert council. Governing bodies would need to publish agendas and outcomes of their meetings, maintain “public conflicts” registers and ban vice-chancellors from taking additional employment “unless certified as not compromising their duties”.

Councils would also be required to publicly disclose instances where people who had given the universities more than A$1 million (£525,000) were appointed to governance positions, along with “mitigation strategies for perceived influence”.

Tham said that although there was nothing necessarily wrong with generous donors being on council, transparency was essential. “It might not be that there’s actual corruption or actual influence but the perception itself is corrosive.

“It’s not barring them from taking the position, but it’s basically saying that a council must say…‘we have adopted particular probity measures [showing that] this donation didn’t have any influence on our appointment process’.”

Many of the groups’ recommendations are contingent on higher education regulator Teqsa gaining powers to embed the expert council’s principles into the threshold regulatory standards. The federal government has vowed to ensure that this happens.

The submission also includes a one-page ‘Declaration of University Student and Staff Voice’, which affirms representation rights and insists that “students and staff are the university community”. Tham said the biggest single governance issue was that many universities had “lost sight” of this fact.

“A lot of things flow from that,” he said. “The educational priority becomes subordinate to financial objectives and not necessarily advanced education objectives.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com