Universities - Time for a Change in their Governance

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Universities are created by law as corporations, separate from government and from the people who work and study in them. In the past they were run democratically by academics or faculty members, and sometimes by students as well.

Now they are run by highly paid management teams, and governed by small boards. From the outside, legally they look similar to large for-profit companies. "Corporate governance" ideas apply to both.

But is this appropriate? Universities are vastly different from large companies. Their management and governance is not particularly accountable to anyone in practice. So more and more money goes into more and more management. Failures keep on occurring and little happens.

Governments are waking up to this but their response is more regulation. We argue for a return to a modernised academic democracy. Drawing on our recent paper for the University of Melbourne, Imagining a Revolution in University Governance, we talk about a model constitution for our own Australian Exemplar University. See https://melbourne-cshe.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0009/5477778/Imagining-a-Revolution-in-University-Governance.pdf

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