Read our Discussion Paper!

However, if you're short on time, we've summarised answers to frequently asked questions on this page. 

A set of further recommended resources are also available below. 

Across the sector, Australian higher education faces governance challenges that threaten institutional effectiveness and public confidence; international rankings are falling, funding is constrained, and reputational harm is significant. The role of universities in fostering national intellectual growth, leading scientific and evidence-based public education, and underpinning Australia’s sovereign capacity for research and innovation must be urgently safeguarded, especially as our societies become increasingly disrupted by global and algorithmic technologies and at a time when other advanced economies are rapidly escalating investments in research and development to avoid being outcompeted. Yet higher education governance continues to incentivise perverse outcomes, such as:

• Cost-cutting over fulfillment of our national mission: there is no established mechanism to protect areas of national interest under current ANU governance. 
• Excessive executive remuneration: Vice-Chancellor salaries at Go8 universities reached nearly $1.3 million in 2023, with pay determination processes disconnected from key performance indicators such as student satisfaction. Unlike private sector CEOs, university executives are not directly accountable to shareholders. 
• Administrative expansion: Proliferation of non-academic management roles whilst core value-adding academic positions remain precarious.
• Consultant dependency: Australian Universities spent over $734 million on external consultants in 2023, often without transparent procurement processes and overlooking the world-class expertise of their own staff. Higher education consultancy firms have made a business of offering one-size-fits-all advice for university restructuring contrary to the importance of maintaining a diverse higher education system. The ANU has sustained significant reputational damage in 2025 due to allegations it misled the Senate about the value of consultant contracts.

We think the Australian National University (ANU) has an opportunity to lead the sector as a model of stakeholder-led, collectively-designed governance reform commensurate with our mission to deliver public and social good for Australia in a responsible and efficient manner. We are uniquely well-positioned for such a task: we have a proud history of and deep expertise in contributing to cutting-edge, evidence-based Australian public policy, and we are the only federally-regulated university at a time when the Federal Government has clearly signalled its intent to reform the higher education sector. 

Governance is a broad term, but for this project we mean how university-wide decisions are made at ANU and how our leaders (Senior Executives, ANU Council, and Deans etc) are accountable for those decisions. We want you to think about how this high level governance impacts you (not school or unit level governance).

 

If you liked to see more discussion of governance as it applies to the ANU, including examples of governance reform, read our discussion paper.

Quite a lot. Strap in - or read the full overview in our Discussion Paper.

 

ANU governance is regulated by:

• The ANU Act of 1991, The Public Governance, Performance, and Accountability (PGPA) Act of 2013, The Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) Act of 2011, and a handful of other acts including the Public Interest Disclosure Act of 2013, the Freedom of Information Act 1982, the Archives Act 1983, Education Services for Overseas Students Act 2000, etc. For a more detailed overview of the key implications of each Act for ANU Governance, read our Discussion Paper.

ANU Council 

The ANU Act legislates that:

• ANU Council “has the entire control and management of the University” 
• ANU Council be comprised of 15 members, of which 2 are the Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor, 7 are appointed by a nominations committee appointed and led by the Chancellor, and only 6 may be drawn from current staff or students. Among the 7 appointed members at least two must have financial expertise and one must have commercial expertise, but is no requirement that any of these members have experience in the higher education sector.
• Council appoints the Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor, Pro-Chancellors, and Deputy Vice-Chancellors, and sets the term and conditions of their appointments. Various ANU Statutes, approved by Council, govern the resignation or removal of these officials. 

Some challenges potentially impacting Council’s capacity to effectively govern the ANU:

• Managing versus Governing the ANU

A distinction has been created between ‘governance’ and ‘management’ of the university in a way that undermines the oversight role of Council. For example the 2019 ANU Governance Handbook explains that the “Council’s role is to govern the organisation rather than manage it, the latter being the responsibility of the Vice-Chancellor, as chief executive officer.” While Council should not need to immerse itself in day-to-day management of the university, this distinction has been used to relegate Council oversight away from an expansive definition of ‘managerial’ matters - even though Council is still ultimately responsible for overseeing the management of the university. This is especially problematic as the ANU Act very clearly states that Council cannot delegate its “reserve powers”, including its power to “review and monitor the management of the University as a whole or the University’s performance as a university”. 

• Sufficient knowledge of and access to information about ANU

In order to effectively oversee governance at the university, Council needs to have sufficient access to relevant information and time to process it. However, in practice, Council relies on information provided by the Vice-Chancellor and Chancellor in order to hold the Vice-Chancellor, Chancellor and other university managers accountable. Further:

• Information provided to Council is often aggregated and extremely high-level and lacks detail. Council does not have visibility of resource allocation or staffing decisions across Colleges or Portfolios.
• Despite their superficial nature, papers provided to Council members typically number in the hundreds of pages. Council members are given only one week to read and prepare. 
• Appointed (non-staff or student) Council members rarely attend campus other than for Council meetings and have little interaction with staff and students; how can they understand the ANU if they are so rarely here and not integrated into the work of the university?
• Council Committees on key topics are dominated by external appointees. For example, as of July 2025 the crucial Audit, Finance and Risk Committee does not include a single member of ANU’s staff or student body. 
• Despite the ANU’s status as a public institution, the default for Council items has become confidentiality, with rare exceptions. While there are good reasons for Council to have processes for confidentiality, how it has been determined that Council should act secretly for most of its activities is unclear.   
• Minutes from the Council are rarely shared in a transparent and timely manner, and even when they are, detail is lacking. There is no established process for Council members to engage with ANU staff or students on non-confidential items. 

Academic Board

Academic Board is composed of key executives, College Deans, 3-4 elected academic staff from each College, 2 elected professional staff, undergraduate, postgraduate, and first nations representatives, and a handful of others. It is significantly more representative of the diversity of ANU than Council, and its meetings are more transparent in terms of allowing up to 10 observers from the staff and student body to attend (excepting confidential items where observers leave the room). 

• Academic Board is tasked with ensuring the University maintains the highest standards in teaching, scholarship and research. 
• The Board has focused on degree accreditation, academic policy recommendations, and safeguarding academic freedom at the university, as well as its role as a forum to facilitate information flow and debate within the University and between the senior executive officers of the University and the wider academic community. 

However its powers also include:

• Maintaining an effective overview of the academic activities of the University and advising on them and assisting in their coordination.
• Discussing, developing and approving policy in relation to academic matters.
• Advising on the academic aspects and content of the University’s strategic plan.

Currently, Academic Board has little formal role in change management processes or other significant reforms that are likely to impact the nature and extent of ANU’s capacity to achieve its national mission and its public educational and research offerings.

Academic Board’s existence and powers are approved and alterable by Council.  

 

Convocation

ANU does have a Convocation as established in the ANU Act 1991. 

• The Convocation is comprised of all ANU alumni and all current and former members of the Council. ANU is required to keep a roll of all Convocation members.
• The VC can call a Meeting of Convocation, with a quorum of 50 members.
• When ANU was first established in 1946, up to 9 members of Council were elected by Convocation, giving ANU alumni a formal role in shaping our university.
• Currently, Convocation has no role in governance or specific powers; Convocation’s powers are alterable either via Council-approved Statutes or via reform of the ANU Act. 

The Australian National University, like most Australian universities, follows a corporate model of university governance. This model concentrates on the fiscal and managerial responsibility of those governing the university, based on a business-case model and the rationale of corporate efficiency.

Alternatively, Collegial governance models emphasise the central role of academic staff in university decision-making, aiming to safeguard the academic mission and institutional autonomy. These models offer several frameworks that could inform governance reform at the Australian National University (ANU).

Two of the main models of collegial governance include:

1. Traditional Faculty Governance (Academic Self-Governance)

• • This model posits that universities should be primarily governed by their academic staff. Corporate governance is present, but the underlying rationale is that academic staff are best equipped to understand and achieve the academic goals and aspirations of a university. 
  • Some versions of this model are associated with “academic democracy,” where senior academic leaders such as Deans are elected from the professorial ranks for set terms to department, faculty, and university-level bodies, with procedures for their removal, reflecting a democratic character and ensuring universities’ institutional autonomy by preventing non-scholars (like state or corporate organisations) from driving the academic mission. 
  • Oxford and Cambridge Universities practice this model of governance, instilling a clear voice for members of the academic community including staff, students, and alumni. 
  • At Oxford, this model has allowed the university community to reject an attempt to install corporate governance, to resist a code of discipline that was restrictive of staff and students’ right to freedom of speech and expression on issues concerning the university, and to remove a graduate application fee viewed as discriminatory to those from low-income backgrounds.
  • Every model of governance requires tradeoffs. Critics argue that academic staff may lack the necessary governance skill or interest in policy, external stakeholder relations, finances, and complex management systems (although, typically in these models selected staff are trained in such skills). It may disproportionately emphasise the independent academic mission with less focus on improving corporate capabilities for partnerships with government or industry. Poor design of such a model risks representatives prioritising constituent interests over the university as a whole. Those trained in corporate governance outside the higher education sector may be unfamiliar with the role & importance of academic/collegial leadership, and external pressures including from government often push for reforms away from academic-led governance models.

 

2. Collegiality as Shared Leadership / Balanced Governance

• • This model emphasises academics as leaders, as opposed to employees. The shared leadership model acknowledges the vital but fundamentally different roles of academic and corporate leadership in university governance. The goal is to rebalance power between these two leadership streams to increase university effectiveness. It assumes majority academic leadership representation on or formal oversight of the Governing Council, backed by a significant increase in the powers of Academic Boards (Senates), to balance executive decision-making power. 
  • Harvard University follows this model of governance, and is currently considering strengthening it in response to Trump’s assault on higher education.
  • A shared leadership model is supported by Public Universities Australia and aligns with the Australian Association of University Professor’s (AAUP’s) Ethical Framework, which seeks to protect freedom of inquiry and academic autonomy. 
  • In terms of tradeoffs: one version of this model practiced in Australian universities in the 1960s had an empowered Professorial Board sitting under the VC (in place of the proliferation of Pro-VCs and other executive roles that we have today). One perverse outcome of this version was to overly empower departmental heads (“god-professors”) and enable dictatorial control over departments. A straightforward answer to this issue is to ensure that academic leaders (Deans) are elected, not appointed. For example, Deans could be elected from among existing academic staff in each College, and could sit on Council alongside the existing Council members to ensure academic oversight of management decisions.

The ANU is a Commonwealth authority under the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability (PGPA) Act 2013 and must meet its external regulatory and statutory obligations; we think a continued role for corporate governance at ANU is crucial. However, as noted in our discussion paper, over-reliance on a corporate governance model produces a perverse fixation on revenue raising and other short-term outcomes, and disincentives maintaining disciplinary diversity, basic research, and quality of education. 

We want to get the balance right. And we want ANU's most important stakeholders - staff, students, alumni, external stakeholders - to determine what that balance should be. 

 

No. This project is about the future of ANU, and what type of governance we need to face that future. We are launching this project now because the Minister for Education, the Hon. Jason Clare MP, stated in May that the government needs “to strengthen governance arrangements in our universities” - including through the formation of an expert council on university governance, the establishment of the National Tertiary Education Commission, and other initiatives. We want to ensure that the views of ANU’s community are heard through that governance reform process. Additionally, there is an important opportunity to contribute to the recently reopened Senate Inquiry into Quality of Governance at Australian Higher Education Providers

 

We think that the ANU community best knows how existing decisions have impacted them, and what principles and frameworks might be necessary to improve future governance outcomes.

We don’t intend to predetermine the reform proposal created collaboratively with the ANU community. However, to share some tangible examples of the types of reforms that could be forwarded by the community:

 

Immediate reforms

Some reforms could be implemented immediately, if Council were amenable. This would be designed to build a culture of trust among staff, students, and university stakeholders. Here are two examples:

• ANU Council could immediately improve transparency by making the process for staff and students to observe Council meetings more accessible and restricting the default designation of agenda items as confidential.
• Academic Board’s role could be altered by Council to provide official guidance to Council on protection of the university’s national mission during change management processes.

 

Medium and long-term reforms

Some reforms will require changes to the legislation governing the ANU or take some time to implement. Here are two examples:

• The ANU Act could be reformed to require a two-thirds majority of university-elected staff on ANU Council, while still preserving the requirements for specific expertise outlined by the Act.
• Academic Board’s role could be expanded to have formal oversight (not guidance or consultation) over Council on any issues which might impact the university’s capacity to fulfill its national mission. 

 

These are some ideas to start the conversation - but we want to hear from YOU, the ANU community. 

 

Our goal is transparency. We will publish preliminary results at key points on our Community Views webpage, and final results ahead of the project workshop.

For example, on 11 August 2025, ahead of the first hearing for the 2025 Senate Inquiry into Quality of Governance at Higher Education Institutions, we published a First Findings Report from the over 200 ANU staff, students, and members of the university community who participated in this project in the first five days post-launch. 

Ahead of the project workshop, we will publish all survey and kitchen table conversation quantitative and qualitative contributions to this project (moderated only to anonymise participants and filter out clearly irrelevant or abusive content).

If you have any questions about how we moderate, we are happy to discuss. 

 

This is an independent, ANU staff-led project, but we are very grateful to our local Senator for hosting our website and providing support for ANU community consultation on the crucial issue of university governance. 

 

We’d love to have you! See our Participation page.

Our Discussion Paper offers more detail than we can summarise here, but here are some of the resources we’ve found useful.

 

ANU-specific 

ANU Act 1991 

ANU Act 1946

ANU Annual Report 2024 

ANU Council Charter 

ANU Council Standing Orders 

ANU Academic Board charter 

ANU Governance Handbook 2019 

 

Higher Education Sector

Senate Inquiry into Quality of Governance at Australian Higher Education Providers 

Australian Government, “Australian Universities Accord Final Report,” (2024). 

Nardine Alnemr, “Deliberative Democracy in an Algorithmic Society: Harms, Contestations and Deliberative Capacity in the Digital Public Sphere,” Democratization (July 2025) 1-20.

Joel Barnes, “Collegial Governance in Postwar Australian Universities,” History of Education Review 49:2 (2020) 149-164.

Roy Y. Chan, “Understanding the Purpose of Higher Education: An Analysis of the Economic and Social Benefits for Completing a College Degree,” Journal of Education, Policy, Planning and Administration 6:5 (2016) 1-40.

Glyn Davis, The Australian Idea of a University (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2017).

Hannah Forsyth, A History of the Modern Australian University (Sydney: New South, 2014). 

Julia Horne, “Mass Education and University Reform in Late Twentieth Century Australia,” British Journal of Educational Studies 68:5 (2020) 671-690.

John H. Howard, Rethinking Australian Higher Education: Toward a Diversified System for the 21st Century (Canberra: Howard Partners, 2021).

J. D. Kenny, M. Bird, J. Blackmore, R. Brandenburg, D. Nicol, K. Seemann, B. Wang, & T. Wilmshurst, "Putting a stake in the ground: the development of a Professional Ethical Framework for Australian Academics." Higher Education (2024).

Stuart Macintyre, The Poor Relation: A History of the Social Sciences in Australia (Melbourne University Press, Melbourne 2010).

National Tertiary Education Union, “Ending Bad Governance for Good,” (November 2024). 

Jonathan Shaw, “Plans for a Faculty Senate Move Forward,” Harvard Magazine (15 May 2025) https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2025/05/harvard-faculty-meeting

Jack Thrower, “The high pay for Vice-Chancellors does not deliver better outcomes for students,” Australia Institute (30 January 2025) https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/the-high-pay-for-vice-chancellors-does-not-deliver-better-outcomes-for-students/. 

Leon Trakman, “Modelling University Governance,” Higher Education Quarterly 62:1/2 (January/April 2008) 63-83.

Graeme Turner, Broken: Universities, Politics and the Public Good (Clayton: Monash University Publishing, 2025).

Michael Wesley, Mind of the Nation: Universities in Australian Life (Collingwood: Black Inc., 2023)

 

Please send to us and we will upload to the website.