Mushrooming compliance demands in Australian higher education are drowning out the other “core responsibilities” of governance, according to La Trobe University chancellor and former Victorian premier John Brumby.

Mr Brumby told a Melbourne forum that universities’ governing bodies had more onerous workloads than boards in other sectors. “The demands on university councils are…more than your routine corporate or not-for-profit board,” he told the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (Teqsa) conference. “You could spend 60, 70, 80 hours a week just going into the detail of all of the governance requirements.”

Mr Brumby said monitoring and compliance was just one of university councils’ “core responsibilities”, which also included overseeing strategy and finance, appointing vice-chancellors and monitoring their performance. “We have an obligation, above all others, to ensure a safe workplace,” he added. “It’s university councils which, in so many ways, set the tone for culture.”

Governing bodies needed to stay abreast of “social licence issues”, he added. “Things like accountability, performance, value for money, employability of our students, student support, wage payments, gender violence on campus – all of those issues are important.”

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Mr Brumby denied a suggestion that chancellors were “failing in their role” of building trust in universities. He said institutions of all types were experiencing a trust deficit, as social media fuelled an explosion of populism and polarisation.

“That means the expectations are higher,” he told the conference. “We’ve got to be open to criticism. The truth is that we’ve got to lift our performance.”

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He said his council had been “profoundly disappointed” when La Trobe was found to have underpaid its casual staff by A$5.4 million (£2.8 million). “That was a failure of our governance and our administration,” he said, adding that the university had changed its culture as well as its systems to “tackle…the disease rather than just focusing on the symptom”.

Mark Rigotti, chief executive of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, said universities were seen as places to “get educated and have a better life. That’s a very hard proposition to sustain if people don’t trust you,” he told the conference.

Mr Rigotti said the lack of trust in institutions could be shrugged off as “a flash in the pan” that had been “weaponised” to sell newspapers or win elections. Alternatively, university leaders could accept the criticism as “true, in which case it raises questions around who you are and what you stand for”.

Another interpretation was that “there’s elements of truth in it, but it’s been over-amplified. Either way…the sector needs to come up with a response.”

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He said over-regulation was “chilling” productivity in universities and elsewhere by monopolising governing bodies’ time and fostering a “risk-averse” climate. Directors were eschewing aspirations of best practice and instead aiming for “minimum compliance levels”.

Mr Brumby said governing bodies needed to focus on the “big” issues rather than allowing themselves to be distracted by compliance minutiae. “It is important to separate out the wood from the trees,” he told the conference.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com