University mismanagement in Australia is capturing the federal government’s attention, with recent headlines exposing wage theft, inflated executive pay, exorbitant expenditure on external consultants, among other issues. It’s hard to defend the status quo.
In searching for the root cause of universities’ broken governance, consider democracy, or rather the lack thereof.
Australia’s public universities are created and supported by democratically-elected governments, but are also highly autonomous, and need to be so to protect their credibility as truth-seeking institutions.
But in the absence of democracy within universities, there are almost no checks on the quality of management decision making. Universities exist in an accountability vacuum, and so they frequently fall into dysfunction and autocracy, with arbitrarily-enforced, underfunded policies and self-serving power structures.
Universities commit wage theft, while paying their senior executives more money than state premiers (or even the Prime Minister), because of the sheer concentration of power in the hands of those senior executives, unrestrained by any democratic process.
University leaders often fail to listen, because they just don’t have to. Universities suffer from their own internal enshittification, brought on by vague or narrowly-defined performance objectives, which incentivise leaders to cannibalise parts of the university that actually work. Everyday systems and processes routinely break down or limp along with grinding inefficiency. Little is done to fix them, or build resilience, because leaders are not held responsible for any but the worst disasters (and even then, one wonders how much of an impact these events really have on an executive’s career trajectory).
This all perpetually endangers the quality of teaching and research.
Democratic control of universities would have a major, positive impact on university governance. Such control could come about via a combination of mechanisms:
- Elections of senior executives—the Vice Chancellor and immediate subordinates—by popular vote of the entire body of staff. (Some positions within a university are already voted on, but generally not the key decision makers.)
- Referendums for any substantial management decision, including policy and workforce changes. (Many things won’t be significant enough to vote on, but decisions with far-reaching consequences ought to have popular support.)
- Referendums for any petition acquiring a threshold number of signatures from staff.
Elections may be the most obvious democratic reform, but referendums and petitions may be more decisive. Referendums would force whomever is in charge to build and defer to consensus. Petitions leading to referendums would ensure that systemic problems cannot be ignored.
On reflection, it is extraordinary that we do not already do this. Australia prides itself on its democratic processes, and conducting elections and referendums within universities is logistically trivial compared to federal, state and local governments. University staff are highly informed and highly engaged, certainly within the context of the institution.
The economic and societal power wielded by a typical public university easily rivals that of a typical local council, and we would not accept undemocratic local government.
Even publicly-traded, for-profit corporations are held accountable at annual general meetings to their shareholders, who have voting rights. Modern universities are often disparagingly compared to corporations. Yet, the for-profit corporations are currently more democratic than public universities, which are statutory organisations ostensibly here to serve the public good.
Perhaps it’s time to have the courage of our democratic convictions.