State politicians inquiring into the governance of their universities have heard that the most helpful thing they can do is to leave institutions alone. 

University of Queensland economist John Quiggin told a New South Wales (NSW) parliamentary hearing that the blurred lines of responsibility for Australian universities, which mostly operated under state or territory legislation while Canberra controlled funding and policy, was the root cause of the sector’s governance problems.

State governments provided universities with little money, had “little or nothing to do with their management” and took “very little interest…in what’s happening in universities”, Quiggin told the NSW Legislative Council’s Standing Committee on Social Issues. Meanwhile the federal government, which had “no legislative obligation”, had been “shifting the blame for failures in university councils onto the individual universities rather than sharing that blame”.

This was most evident in the treatment of international education, as funding shortfalls forced university administrators to seek revenue from non-government sources. “Universities go out, as they have to in some sense, and recruit international students. They’re then repeatedly blamed by federal ministers of education for their excessive reliance on this source.

����Vlog

“[We must] force the federal government to take proper responsibility for a sector which in practice it controls, but for which it takes no responsibility when things go wrong.”

In a reflection of the dual lines of reporting, NSW and Victoria have both launched inquiries into the governance of their universities while a Senate committee is examining much the same issues at the federal level.

����Vlog

Quiggin told the 7 November hearing, the first of three planned by the NSW committee, that the ambiguous oversight of universities enabled Canberra to sidestep accountability in a way that would be impossible if it had clear responsibility for universities – just as the states had clear responsibility for schools.

“If problems emerged in the schools, and the state minister said, ‘well, it’s all the fault of the principals’, that would obviously not pass the so-called pub test. But the federal minister does this all the time,” Quiggin said.

“There are many steps that need to be taken to remedy this, but the first is for state governments to get out of the business of regulating universities altogether.”

Quiggin said the reliance on international education revenue had also encouraged a corporate mindset in the sector. “University managers…see themselves as the chief executive officers of corporations which are in competition with each other in a market for education.”

����Vlog

He said Australia would be better served by a more cooperative approach, like the University of California system. “Bearing in mind that California is about size of Australia…we should have the University of California model, but for Australia as a whole – not for the six Australian states.”

The committee grilled University of Technology Sydney vice-chancellor Andrew Parfitt about the financial crisis necessitating proposed cuts of around 10 per cent of the institution’s workforce. Parfitt said “changes in federal policies, particularly those relating to domestic student funding and international student numbers”, had caused “serious shocks to the financial system”.

“We still have no multi-year indication on what international student numbers will be,” he told the hearing. “We still have no clarity around how…funding for domestic students will flow over the next several years. That’s the environment that we’re working to.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com