Australian university leaders face a fresh inquisition over their governance standards, after the chair of the Senate’s Education and Employment Committee flagged a new probe.
Labor senator Tony Sheldon said he would seek support from fellow committee members to establish the inquiry before the year’s first parliamentary sitting on 4 February.
He said he wanted the committee to investigate a “spate” of governance issues including casualisation, “wage theft”, compliance with employment laws, spending on consultants and the composition, transparency and accountability of governing councils.
It would also scrutinise vice-chancellors’ pay, their perceived conflicts of interest and their “discretionary expenditure on executive office upgrades and parties”.
Sheldon said he wanted to hold public hearings with vice-chancellors and “other key stakeholders” around mid-February. He announced his push for an inquiry a day after the government had named members of a long-awaited “expert governance council” to examine similar issues.
Sheldon said “continued governance scandals” in “what is becoming a lawless sector” had raised doubts over whether university executives had been “sufficiently reined in”.
“There’s no other job in Australia where you can be paid so exorbitantly while performing so badly, with seemingly no consequences or accountability for the impact on university staff and students,” he said. “Australians deserve universities that put students and staff first, not the interests of university executives.”
The move is the latest blow to a university sector seeking community and political sympathy as it reels from a revenue hit caused by government efforts to constrain international student numbers.
The sector’s image has taken a battering over perceptions that university leaders have exploited and cheated casual staff, risked national security and turned a blind eye to sexual abuse and antisemitism on campuses.
While the evidence behind some of these accusations is questionable, vice-chancellors and chancellors have weathered a string of inquiries from the Education and Employment Committee, the Australian Human Rights Commission, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security and the Select Committee on Job Security.
On 22 January, vice-chancellors and other executives from four universities were grilled by members of the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights as part of the latest probe, which is looking into antisemitism on campuses.
Labor committee chair Josh Burns expressed bewilderment at Australian National University testimony that a “thorough” investigation had determined that alleged Nazi gestures during an online student association meeting were “not in fact an incident”.
“I’m looking at footage of it now,” Burns said. “Please help me understand how that was not a Nazi salute.”
Representative body Universities Australia said it supported any effort to ensure that campuses were “safe and welcoming” places to work and study. “That’s what people deserve,” said chief executive Luke Sheehy.
“Good governance is crucial for good universities, and every opportunity to embrace best practice in the oversight of such complex organisations is to be welcomed.”
The National Tertiary Education Union, which has been demanding a parliamentary inquiry into university governance for months, “strongly endorsed” Sheldon’s announcement.
“An inquiry would be a golden opportunity to get to the bottom of what’s allowing the wage theft epidemic, rampant casualisation and a raft of other serious problems to flourish in our sector,” national president Alison Barnes said.
