Australia’s university sector is in tatters. Why?

[00:00:00]They just seem to have lost their moral compass. They seem to have lost the purpose which is the education of students and research and public good and community engagement. That is the purpose of the university.

[00:00:12]>> Hello and welcome to Cutthrough Krikey spin-free analysis of Australian news, politics and power. I'm your host Crystal Andrews and I'm here today with contributor Julie Hair who is one of Australia's most experienced higher education journalists and we're going to talk about what on earth is going on in the university sector. Julie, welcome to Cut Through.

[00:00:32]>> Thank you for having me. Some of Australia's most prestigious universities have been plagued by scandals over really like the past few years and that has been running alongside a public discussion about you know what role a university should play in modern Australian society. That is all a very very big topic and we're going to try and get into as much of it as we can today. But I think probably the best way in is for us to start by talking about the investigation into the University of Wulingong that is currently being conducted by the New South Wales anti-corruption body IAC. Uh so earlier this month we had the conclusion to the public hearings. Um but Julie maybe for those who are not totally across the details of this you know particular saga can you give us a bit of a snapshot of of the story and what's going on here? Okay. So, um I think this is where local media are really important and the demise of local media outlets in a lot of country and regional areas in Australia is you know really diabolical for um for getting to know what's going on in towns because it was the work of the Ilawa Mercury a guy called Ben Langford who has just been on top of this. So a new chancellor arrived in tw in December 2013 and his name was Michael Still. He had no real experience of universities. Um, and he just seemed like an odd pick, like no one really knew why he was there. Within 4 months, the vice chancellor had been sacked and within the next 12 months, every senior member of the executive had gone. So there there were three key areas to the IAK inquiry. One is that there is uh a chief governance officer at the University of Woolingong who forged a very close relationship with Still. Um she'd been hired from the University of Sydney and was seen like a very good appointment. But over the course of the next year, year and a half or two years, she ended up using her position to employ 11 of her friends and former associates. That was a bit of a shock when I cut came out. was something that really hadn't been covered in the media or any um reporting beforehand. Uh so that was the surprise. Uh she worked with still he sat on it's very unusual for a chancellor to sit on recruitment panels but he actually chaired recruitment panels for the recruitment of some of her friends and together they cooked up a $400,000 new job for her in the vice chancellor's office uh that while the university was going through massive cuts and redundancies.

[00:03:04]The second part of it was that um Mr. Still had created a $2 million fund essentially for the chancellor to use forever he wanted to. That was unheard of at the university and he used that to pay for some of the positions that he and Alys White had created. and also to um employ as a contractor an old friend of his who who he'd met when working back for a property firm back in 2011 or something like that. Uh so that was odd.

[00:03:38]And then I think the third thing that is the one I'm most interested in is that um he after he sat Patricia Davidson they obviously didn't have a vice chancellor. So he started talking to people and the name of John Dwer came up. Now, John Dio had been a vice chancellor at um Lrobe University for 10 years. He'd been a deputy vice chancellor at Melbourne. He's a really nice guy. He was really well respected.

[00:04:03]And after he quit at Lrobe, he took on a job at Cordmena, the consulting firm.

[00:04:09]And within four months of starting there, he'd basically taken leave without pay to take on this interim vice chancellor position at Wllingong. And the accusations in IACK is that he used his privileged information and confidential information to feed back into Corda which ended up winning $3.8 million worth of work as a result of the restructure that he put in place with Michael Still. So um it's not a pretty state of affairs. Um >> and it's it's pretty devastating actually that this can happen. Yeah, I I know when the um the public hearings were you know ongoing and sort of keeping an eye of the different people and commentators and you know writers and journalists who have been following along with this story and and the the bigger stories in the sector. Uh people seemed quite shocked by a lot of the testimony that was coming out and and some of the pieces of information that like you say were being revealed that were previously unknown. Was there anything that really stood out to you from from those hearings as like, you know, a bit of a wow moment or something that really encapsulated the issue?

[00:05:16]>> Yeah, there was. So, I went to Sydney to be there because I've known John Dur for a long time. Um, and I just kind of wanted to be in the room and experience it. Um, and for me the most stunning piece of evidence was even before he had gone into the role of interim vice chancellor. he'd been sent a highly confidential document from Michael Still and forward it to his boss at Cordantha and he says, "Oh, look, you know, Michael Still says we have to go through all this due process and you know, and we're not guaranteed to get any extra work, but you know, um I I'm really concerned that if I take this on that there won't be any extra work for Camera, and that's not what I want. Um I'll speak to you before I speak to him." And it was just it's just writ large what his intentions were and what the firm's intentions were when he took on that role.

[00:06:07]>> It's so yeah the the uh sort of starkness of it and how how just out there it was it is quite shocking in some cases. I mean you you've been really prolific across your whole career in your coverage of the sector and it seems to me you know that there are there is this theme that comes up again and again in your work and it should be clear like this is not just an issue at the University of of Wulingong like this is not about just one university um but your sort of description of the the heart of the issue is that there is a greed and moral rot that you say you know really sits at the core of the many varied problems within Australian in universities. What do you mean by that?

[00:06:49]How do you how do you see the yeah the heart of this issue >> somewhere along the way universities just the and I don't universities not generally but the leadership of universities both the executive and the um governing bodies and this is not in every university but it's in too many and um they just seem to have lost their moral compass and that it's they seem to have lost the purpose which is the education of students and research church and public good and community engagement. That is the purpose of a university. It's not to be property developers and it's not to be run like businesses because you know there are there is an argument that they are businesses but they're not. They're actually public good. They're largely some less so than more publicly funded get large amounts of government money into them and they exist for a different good and education is a public good and it's not something that should be marketized because the marketization of education never ends well. I think also that is something that um Australians would pride themselves on and is often like a a point of pride in discussion of our national identity that education is valued maybe in contrast to how it operates in some other western countries and that you know we see this as a really important thing which kind of stands in contrast to how some of these higher education institutions seem to approach that um responsibility.

[00:08:16]>> Yeah. Well, you know, Australian universities have been world leaders in a number of ways. We were the first country to pioneer international education. uh we were the first country to introduce income contingent loans uh you know hex as it's commonly known which you know enabled the massification of education so that more people from poorer backgrounds could go to university and we got away from elitism um you know there's we have high numbers of people going to university now u more than 50% of school levers go it's it's a kind of a right of passage whereas it didn't used to be when I was younger but I do think we expect better from our universities but somewhere where along the line universities I remember years ago the unions used to go on about um the corporatization of universities and managerialism and I I was kind of a bit like oh yeah whatever it's just you know whatever but I actually do think that is actually part of the narrative now that the there was moves in the early 2000s funnily enough when Julie Bishop was education minister to uh get university councils to make them smaller, more agile, more corporate-like with a skills matrix of people outside universities.

[00:09:32]Those smaller governing bodies are now dominated largely by people from consulting firms, finance backgrounds and so on. And so that their view of universities is very different from the academics view of universities. So there's this real tension built up between academia and managerialism.

[00:09:52]In the meantime, vice chancellors exe and executives their salaries have started going through the roof. Now then Australia has the highest paid vice chancellors in the world by an absolute long shot. We've got vice chancellors here in third tier universities and I can name them if you want who earn more than the vice chancellors of Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard. It's insane. And I think where this started, the more I think about it, it started during the 2010s when the Gillard government introduced what was known as the demand-driven system. So basically, they uncapped places and universities just went for it because they saw students as cash cows. So there was money pouring in. At the same time, the international student market was really starting to boom and there was a lot of money in universities, but they still cried poor.

[00:10:51]They still get kept going to capand government saying we don't have enough, we don't have enough. And then in 2014, the great 2014 budget of um Joe Hawk and Tony Abbott, I remember sitting in lockup in the infamous one. No, what was it? No. Um, no cuts to the ABC, no cuts to education, and no cuts to health.

[00:11:11]>> No cuts to education, no cuts to health, no change to pensions, no change to the GST, and no cuts to the ABC or SPS.

[00:11:22]>> Yeah. So they uh tried to introduce uh the deregulation of uni fees and every university every university vice chancellor in the country got behind it and it was just shocking like there was the evidence was that it was just pure greed.

[00:11:38]It at the time I remember writing a story about the then chair of universities Australia a woman called Sandra Harding who was the vice chancellor of um James Cook University.

[00:11:48]It's a small regional university in the, you know, north of Queensland and Townsville and Canes. And her salary had gone up, I've wrote it down, her salary went up uh from 559,000 in 2010 to 927,000 in 2014.

[00:12:05]So just the fact that a vice chancellor of a small regional university is earning $927,000 and yet they were crying poor and saying that the they needed more money so they needed fees deregulated. It just the hypocrisy was outrageous. As it turns out it the um legislation didn't get up.

[00:12:27]There was a backlash. one vice chancellor stood up very publicly and um against it and then the government just kept trying to get it through and making more and more awful tweaks and then eventually the group of eight pulled out and the whole thing fell down. Thank goodness. But I think it was the greed of that time and the amount of money at that time and yet they still saw themselves as poor and not having enough money. And I think that has kind of perpetuated and that's really where we started seeing the separation between you know executive salaries and um and those of academics. Um I I think that is a question that really commonly pops up within this you know this topic is that huge pay disparity between um you know the lecturers, the tutors, those sort of staff who are delivering the you know education in a frontline sense to the students um and the uni university executive and leadership. Um and this idea that yeah that these universities can simultaneously be so flushed with cash that you know they they command these incredible executive salaries but at the same time be in such financial procarity that would be used to justify those really low rates of pay for the other educational staff. How does that like how are they able to make those arguments simultaneously? H how is that essentially allowed to allowed to happen at all? It's a very uncomfortable tension. Um I've looked for any studies to to actually kind of quantify the you know the rise in executive salaries compared to um academic salaries and I I really can't f I can't find any studies.

[00:14:07]There might be something out there but I can't find it. But the thing about academics it has one of the most uh casualized work forces in in Australia and most academics are not on a permanent role. Most of them are on casual roles or contract roles. They're highly precarious jobs. Some of them are working, some academics, young academics are working, you know, two and three jobs at different universities, running across cities just trying to get enough hours in um while trying to hold together a research profile so that they can uh continue in their careers. And it's a very common story you hear these days of people who just it's just too hard. and >> they just can't continue it. So, it's it's not an easy life and it's, you know, there's very few who really prosper when they're young.

[00:14:58]>> I mean, and then on the other hand, I guess to bring it back to some of the investigations that are ongoing at the moment, um, at that leadership level, at the executive level, um, there is apparently not an issue with having a side hustle or a side gig. um that might be incredibly lucrative on top of the very high salary you're already getting from a university that that is leading to some of these um real or perhaps perceived conflicts of interest um that that I think for for institutions that receive so much public funding, I mean it would not be acceptable to many to many people of the public to find out the details of some of these uh highly paid you know, consulting gigs, board appointments, etc. Do you think that is really >> more prolific throughout the sector than the public realizes?

[00:15:50]>> Absolutely. It's a lot more prolific than I expected. Um, >> the only reason I really kind of started digging into this is because I'd found out that when Genevieve Bell was the vice chancellor of Australian National University, she continued to be paid by her former employer, Intel, where she'd worked for 20 or 30 years beforehand.

[00:16:12]And it seems it was never disclosed to council the fact it was paid. Everyone knew about her connection, but no one knew that it was paid.

[00:16:19]>> And so after that, I decided to start digging around and see what I could find.

[00:16:24]Um I think so Duncan Mascll who was previously the vice chancellor of Melbourne University uh had a so he was the highest paid vice chancellor in 201 134 he earned like nearly $1.6 million but he had a side gig being on the board of CSL for $300,000 and was on the board of something else for another $78,000.

[00:16:46]Um there's a number of vice chancellors who are on board appointments which makes you wonder about their use of time and the availability of time because being a vice chancellor is a very big job. Now some of them such as Alec Cameron and RMIT donate their um fees back into the university. Um others don't. Others just keep it because they feel like they're entitled to it. But I I think it's a real question for the chancellors and the governing bodies as to why you would want your vice chancellor out there um having a second and third job because if you're on a the board of a ASX listed company, it's demanding. It's demanding work and how you can do that and run a university and really have both jobs being given their full attention is really difficult to comprehend.

[00:17:39]Is is that notably different as well from um other universities around the world? Like is this to your knowledge like quite a uniquely Australian problem?

[00:17:49]>> I don't really know but I don't I I can't answer that clearly. Um but certainly our vice chancellors are by far the best paid in the world for reasons that really don't make much sense. And so maybe that sense of entitlement goes with it.

[00:18:09]>> We have a question from a criy subscriber and I'll warn you up front.

[00:18:13]It's a bit of a doozy. It's a long one, but I'm very curious to hear your response to it. Um, so the subscriber says, "The shortcomings of postcompulsory education policy are manifold, approaching intractability, and very expensive to address. the reliance on international students, the exploitation of junior and casual staff, rapacious capital works ambition, overpaid academic administrators, and the abject integrity failures just to start the list. Unpopular opinion maybe.

[00:18:42]But is it time we reverted to universities as smaller intellectually elite institutions that no longer eat the space occupied by vocational education and trade training?

[00:18:53]>> Um, so I think probably two questions in one there. The first, do you agree that um the problems in the uni sector are how did they say almost intractable and or too expensive or very expensive to address? Maybe let's start there. H it's a it's a tricky question um because it's suggesting that we need to go back to elitist universities which always benefit the wealthy because there is a very strong and powerful and long-term correlation between educational success and wealth. Um they just go hand in hand. Um one of the things about you know postcompulsory education is that there's been a professionalization of a number of careers that weren't before.

[00:19:38]So nursing went into university. So we now need degrees to do a number of jobs that weren't done previously. In some ways that's benefited women in lots of ways in that the you know professionalization of those roles uh meant that they better paid. Of course, they're still not as well paid as bloy jobs like engineering and IT, but um so I the intractable nature of that I I think I think the bigger problem in Australia is that our universities are all comprehensive. So I think we've got 38 universities offer law degrees in Australia out of 39 universities. What we don't have is differentiation and what we don't have is anything like the those US universities the s more liberal arts universities which I think the subscriber is referring to. I think the best thing that could happen to Australia is to have a diversity of institution shapes and sizes and specializations and so that they all but all the policy and funding arrangements benefit comprehensive universities all offering the same degrees. Um, so it, you know, if that's intractable, it's because no government is wants to take it on and there's obviously no um real need to take it on because it's not going to win you any votes if you do. So it sounds like we probably are stuck in it.

[00:21:11]>> So something where where certain universities are specialized in certain areas. So there would be some some prime institutions for you know for for law and others for medicine and others for engineering. you think that type of model could help alleviate some of these these pressures or does that I mean does that really uh address the sort of >> the greed at the at the higher end of the jobs that are running these universities though >> I don't think they're necessarily associated um I I do think so you know I'm obviously you know quite old but um you know when I was at university age you know James Cook University was known for marine sciences And people would travel from all over Australia to go to James Cook to study marine sciences. Um Charles Dirt University was known for its outstanding journalism degree and people would travel from all over the country to go and study journalism at um Charles Dirt Universities. These days regional universities just look like mini impoverished versions of the big metro universities. Um there is no differentiation at all. So the one exception to this rule that is that um University of New South Wales probably one of the most cashed up unis in the country um has is opening a campus in Canberra and it's going to be a specialist university. So, it's going to be AI, engineering, um, you know, it it's going to be a small niche campus and it's so and it's working. So, it's going to be an attractant to bring people who want to work in those areas to come to CRA. Now, some people think that it's ridiculous because we've already got two full universities. We've got Australian Catholic University and there's a couple of other campuses, but I I think it's I think it's a good thing. I I see it as a benefit to the country. Oh, to the sorry to CRA >> to CRA >> to CRA.

[00:23:04]>> What else would you like to see changed or you know if there can be a restoration of this sector and particularly in terms of the the public um opinion and public standing of some of these institutions.

[00:23:18]>> Where would you like to see change solutions some movement for the better actually begin? What what needs to happen? uh we need a better student experience. I think universities have lost sight of students and why they're there and the quality of the education they're getting. I suspect there's a lot of vice chancellors if they walk across campus it's not very often and they certainly don't go into lecture halls and tutorials and I think they're removed from the student experience and I you know I think the student experience is appalling largely compared to similar universities in the US and UK and that's that's part and parcel that's partly because Australian in higher education is structured differently in that students in Australia tend to go to the university closest to where they live so they postcode >> whereas most other countries have a residential campus that's what have a residential culture so people leave and they go and live on campus and that's what makes au very special and that it is a small campus and it's residential and attracts students from all over Australia but I think just getting back to basics about teaching small group teaching I mean there was stuff last last year where ME they had these things called letorials so there were 80 people in a tutorial you can't do so they were called letorials and then the dean last year increased the number to 120 I don't know how any law student can have a >> how does it work you know so I I so the economics of it are fantastic because you've got one tutor lots of students you I know it's hard to get enough lecturers because um and tutors because obviously people don't want to go into the sector. So it's really hard to get them. But how that can be good for any student or for their experience is just beyond me. And you know as we know I I don't know you know obviously your age group whether students you know go on campus and make friends and have the same experience that we did you know back in the day. And I I think the only way for students to do that is to get involved in extracurricular activities such as student politics or clubs or you know playing sport and those sorts of things. It doesn't seem to happen in classrooms to any large degree unless you are in a co a course that has a small cohort. So I think science students probably tend to make friends more because they're in labs together and those sorts of things. But >> you're not going to make any friends in a lectoral of 120 people.

[00:25:53]>> It's interesting. I mean this is a bit of a a bit of a tangent, but um I mean I I also went to university quite some time ago. my younger sister um finished uni in the past few years, but the co experience also I think drastically changed how a lot of those um a lot of that student experience that you're talking about >> it obviously stopped because people were not um able to be on campus during sort of the height of the the height of the pandemic and and those um social distancing restrictions. Um but then much of that did not come back in the aftermath. So I think even the pre2020 and post2020 experience of universities although that's only you know been in the past six years uh will be increasingly different again unless steps are taken to to address that >> but you know once again like universities exploited that. So um a friend of mine's son moved from Sydney to Newcastle. He actually left Sydney and went to Newcastle and um went into a residence on campus to have an um to have a university experience and while he was living in Newcastle pretty well all his courses were taught online. So a year later he moved back to Sydney and has continued to do the same course because there was no point of him no point for him to be there. I mean, and people kept telling me that about postco the the courses were still being taught online because it's cheap and it's convenient, but it's not a student experience and that's not what students want. I know they don't really go to lectures anymore, but they do want engagement with their peers and they do want engagement with their tutors and they want to know who their tutors and their lecturers are and they want to be known.

[00:27:34]So for people who are, you know, really interested in in continuing to follow the development of the stories in this sector, what do what do you think is the next thing on the horizon that we should all be paying attention to? Obviously, as I said at the top, um the public hearings into the um IAK investigation at UN University of Wllingong that's finished, but there's still, you know, the investigation is ongoing. So there'll be um I guess reports or or some sort of announcement at some stage.

[00:28:01]Where else should people kind of keep their eye um on on movements?

[00:28:06]>> Okay, so one of the most important things at the moment is that the Labor government when it was elected um absolutely shunned what's called job ready graduates. It was a Morrison era funding of um student places. It is diabolical. It is appalling. It is throwing a whole generation of students into debt with huge debt. So these are arts and humanities students. four years later, they still haven't changed it.

[00:28:33]They keep kicking the can down the road.

[00:28:35]Um, I think that's shameful. Absolutely shameful. Once again, for, you know, a government that had its last federal budget and named it the, you know, the youth budget and, you know, addressing intergenerational wealth gap. Well, this isn't an easy fix and it can actually be fixed quite cheaply from what I understand. Uh, but they're just not doing it. I think that's appalling. I'd say another big thing to look out for is changes in international student numbers. So, Chinese students have started dropping out. They've been the dominant uh students in the group of eight universities. That means those universities such as UNSW, Sydney, Melbourne, ME are really cashed up. Uh Chinese students have I think numbers I've heard unofficially numbers have dropped by about 30%. Um which is significant. And I just heard on ABC this morning that there's a huge um unemployment problem in India with graduates. So this is the first generation to really have um got tertiary education and yet um unemployment rates are up to 40%. I think that's going to have huge flow on effects for the international student market. Um so they would be the and then universities going to complain again because they don't have students and of course all the you know government policies are in reducing the number of students but government needs international students so they don't have to fund universities to the degree in which they should. So it's a very tricky uh game that they're playing.

[00:30:06]>> What a complicated cycle.

[00:30:08]>> It is a complicated cycle.

[00:30:12]Um, yes. Well, we will definitely keep publishing your work, Julie, and I'll make sure that there are a bunch of links of your recent pieces in the episode description below so that people can check it out if they haven't already. Um, before we end this episode, we'll take a quick moment for our new segment, Snooping with Kashon. Kushon is Griy's tips hog, who is always on the lookout for juicy curiosities and tidbits to investigate further. Did you have anything, it doesn't have to be related to universities, but anything that you think people should um know about, has caught your eye that we should be paying attention to?

[00:30:45]>> Yes, I do. I do actually. So, for some reason, this epic book, >> if you're listening to this in the audio version, Julie is holding up a copy of The Power Broker, Robert Moses, and the fall of New York by author Robert A.

[00:31:01]Carrow.

[00:31:02]>> It must weigh over a kilo. has become >> that's that's a big one >> has become the book dour like everyone I know says you got to read this it's the manifesto of you know power of how political power and how it's made and how it's abused and I started reading it was written in the 1960s it won the book pulit surprise it's extraordinary but it's exhausting the detail is just so much anyway let's say I gotund and something pages into it of the thousand 1,200 13 something and I couldn't do it.

[00:31:36]So hot tip, there's this >> and now she's holding up a much smaller book called working also by Robert A.

[00:31:43]Caro.

[00:31:45]>> He basically sums up >> So you're saying don't worry don't worry about the power broker.

[00:31:50]>> It's this or this. So this this is a a brief summary of two of his books. One on Lyn B Johnson and one on Robert Moses in the Power Broker. It's a neat little uh what can we say? 200 pages.

[00:32:03]>> Hold that one up. Let me see what what's the what's the title that we've got there. Working by Robert A. Caro.

[00:32:08]>> So shorter, sweeter. If your time poor, just read this and just, you know, just fib lightly that you have actually read the power broker.

[00:32:17]>> I love that. I love that recommendation.

[00:32:19]We're all going to be now very well read without having to spend uh quite so much time on the longer on the longer tome.

[00:32:25]If you have read either of those books and you're listening or watching this episode, uh give us your review in the comments. very very curious to know what what other people think of that. Um but for now, Julie, thank you so much for your time today and walking me through this uh very expansive topic. As I say, we're going to keep publishing your work on the uni sector on Krikey. Um but for now, we'll leave it here. Thank you so much.

[00:32:47]>> Thank you, Crystal. It's been a joy.

[00:32:49]>> If you enjoyed this episode of Cutthrough, please don't forget to subscribe and leave a rating or review for the podcast. Krikey is 100% independent, which means your support powers our journalism.