Image: Loves Makes A Way [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons
Open letter submitted after gaining more than 1,000 signatures from academics in Australia
More than 1,000 academics from 36 Australian institutions have signed a letter that warns of a crisis faced by universities and calls for government reforms to the higher education system to ensure greater transparency and accountability.
The open letter to federal education minister Dan Tehan (pictured) and state education ministers, submitted on 1 August, says the Covid-19 pandemic will see universities lose more than $19 billion in the next three years.
It says that this will lead to “significant job losses and a consequential decrease in the quality of both pedagogy and research”, and that the “survival of Australia’s tradition of academic rigour, inquiry and freedom is presently under threat”.
However, the academics say that Covid-19 has merely exacerbated existing problems in higher education rather than being the root cause.
The letter, which had gained around 100 signatures when Research Professional News first reported on it in mid-July, argues that universities have “morphed into quasi-commercial corporations” in recent decades.
“The emergence of the commercial corporate university in Australia has led to systemic organisational waste, overall uncertainty and extreme financial vulnerability,” it says.
This is exemplified by “an increasing number of career-focused, institution-hopping academics, separate and distinct from the rest of the academic collegium, whose salaries far exceed those of the vast majority of their international counterparts”.
“University councils now operate as autocratic entities who internally elect the vast majority of their own members.”
Academics are demanding “structural reform” and a “return to the time-honoured and proven horizontal university model most of the world’s universities still operate under”.
The letter concludes that university councils need to be “accountable to both the university on whose behalf they operate and the larger body politic”.