Rick Morton

So consultants appear to be coming in, and a great example of that is one I covered recently at University of Technology Sydney, where KPMG were brought in.

But we're essentially told, go and look at individual research output from individual researchers and produce a master list of those who are not contributing enough profit to the university, which, as it was put to me, would probably contravene the enterprise bargaining agreement at that university because you can't.

You can performance manage someone for not meeting expectations.

You can't make redundancies based on performance.

That's not how this is meant to work.

And so the consultants, of course, took a particularly corporate view across the board.

They're looking at profit and loss.

They're looking at ways to rationalise and centralise services.

But the actual structure of a university is incredibly special for a reason.

It's meant to be a kind of a...

a distributed network of knowledge centres, faculties, you know, people who are learned in their field, who contribute to the life of the university and who are cooperative in the way that university is run.

And increasingly, particularly with consultants like the NOWS group, which is one that we'll come to in quite a bit of detail,

The advice is centralise all of your functions and to the degree possible, handicap what it is the faculties and the academic staff are able to do and the say they have over the future of this institution, which would make it a lot more like a corporation and a lot less like a university.

Nowse is fascinating, and I particularly zeroed in on them because I think they've had the most astounding growth off the back of their participation in higher education advisory services.

And, of course, this story was first being told through the Australian Financial Review.

A former colleague of mine, Julie Herr, who's a fantastic reporter, was looking at misgivings, I guess is one way of saying it, early on within the tenure of the new Vice-Chancellor there, Professor Genevieve Bell, and her Chancellor, Julie Bishop.

Now, Genevieve Bell had announced this kind of $250 million restructure.

at the ANU because they said that they were running out of money structurally and there were going to be 600-something job losses.

But what they didn't do is tell anyone that they were using the Nouse Group's advice or paying them for that advice.

In fact, they were incredibly...