The head of the representative body for Australian universities has hit back at claims of a governance “crisis” in the sector, saying many alleged “failures” are in fact intellectual disagreements, broader societal problems or cases where universities have been damned for doing the right thing.
Universities Australia chair Carolyn Evans said “sweeping” criticisms of university governance often portrayed contested practices as blunders. For example, the paucity of staff and student members on governing councils was characterised as a defect.
“That’s not a governance failure,” Evans told the National Press Club. “That’s an intellectual disagreement about what university [governance] should look like. Universities moved away historically from…strong [internal] representation and started to say the people on governance bodies should represent the broader community, so that universities didn’t become too insular. You can disagree about it, but that’s not inherently a governance failure.”
Intractable social problems that nobody else had ever managed to resolve – including racism, antisemitism and gender-based violence – were also construed as university governance failures, Evans said. “[No] other institutional sector…has worked as hard to deal with those problems as we have. Just because [we] haven’t dealt with them as some people would like, that constitutes a failure?”
