Adequate staffing for every course in new oversight ‘blueprint’

Academic boards would conduct annual reviews of the “staffing profile” of every Australian university course, and the higher education regulator Teqsa would monitor staffing levels “to provide continued assurance of quality”, under proposals from a marathon Senate committee inquiry.

Academic boards would also maintain a watching brief on staff’s teaching experience and the proportion trapped in casual employment.

The Senate’s Education and Employment Committee has focused on course quality and employee relations in the final report from its 11-month inquiry into university governance. It follows a September interim report largely concerned with hot-button issues like executive pay, spending on consultancies and faux consultation with staff.

The committee’s final offering also follows a report from the Expert Council on University Governance, which successfully argued for the insertion of eight new “governance principles” in the threshold standards by which universities are regulated.

The eight principles “align strongly” with the committee’s ideas, it said. Its latest report addresses the first-principles question of the “role and purpose” of universities.

This was the “underpinning” theme of “all the issues” aired in the report, including educational quality, academic autonomy, employment security, the corporatisation of universities and their compliance with workplace laws.

“Universities are indeed public institutions, established for the public good, and their governance arrangements should reflect that,” the report says. “Poor governance, wrongly focussed decision-making and poor employment practices have damaged…trust in the sector.

“[Universities must] refocus to ensure that their primary purpose as a public good is evident in all aspects of their operations.”

The committee’s former chair, Labor Party senator Tony Sheldon, said public money demanded public accountability. “Today’s final report confirms what staff, students and academics have been saying for years – far too many universities have drifted away from that obligation.

“The mythology of the Hydra tells us that for every head cut off, two more grow back and too often the same is true of failed university leadership. The outcome of this inquiry makes it clear that without structural reform, these failures will keep repeating.”

The National Tertiary Education Union said the report marked a “watershed moment” for universities that had been “run like corporate fiefdoms”.

“We now have a clear blueprint to fix burning crises like corporatisation, casualisation and wage theft,” said national president Alison Barnes. “We need reform so courses are not at the mercy of vice-chancellors with warped priorities.”

Barnes endorsed the report’s recommendation that the Department of Education speed up work to provide better data on the numbers and workloads of casual staff. “Mandatory reporting of casual teaching rates will expose the dirty secret of Australian higher education – that universities rely on exploited casual workers to deliver core teaching.”

Transparency campaigner Peter Tregear said improved data on university employment conditions was “well overdue”. He said that while the final report had “perhaps of necessity” focused on bureaucratic structures and processes, its acknowledgement of the public good role of universities was “potentially equally consequential”.

The report’s eight recommendations are embellished by another 16 in additional comments from the Australian Greens. “It is unfortunate that the final report’s recommendations do not match the urgent need for an overhaul of governance and an increase in funding,” said higher education spokeswoman Mehreen Faruqi.

Independent senator David Pocock said the inquiry had “already been a catalyst for change”, but added a further 17 recommendations of his own. Both crossbench senators recommended more funding, better PhD stipends, default livestreaming of council meetings and a minimum 50 per cent share of elected representatives on governing bodies.

Pocock said the Australian National University, which lies within his Australian Capital Territory constituency, should be made the “gold standard of governance” through the establishment of a “dedicated, statutory accountability body”.

The committee’s Liberal Party deputy chair, Maria Kovacic, offered no recommendations of her own. But in additional comments she criticised the “confused and fragmented” roll-out of “of partially overlapping governance initiatives” including the Universities Accord, the expert council and the National Student Ombudsman.

A “case in point” was the government’s decision to give Teqsa the legislated power to regulate offshore campuses while simultaneously reviewing its legislation “to determine what changes to its powers were required”.

“Governance is not likely to improve if complex and overlapping regulatory reform processes are stacked on top of existing complex and overlapping regulatory architecture,” Kovacic warned.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com