Rick Morton

Why are you paying now?

And what are you doing with the advice that you're refusing to tell us about?

Yeah, that is their job and they should do it.

Yeah.

We have a fundamental structural problem with universities and, you know, to some extent they won't be financially sustainable while the government that funds and regulates them doesn't seem to care about their role in society.

But VCs are paid, you know, something around a million dollars on average in Australia to do these jobs because we're told they demand an incredibly astute and sensitive skill set, which is to manage the academic environment

and the rankings and the quality of the institution with the business of running such a large organisation.

But university councils have even fewer oversight mechanisms than a corporate board.

There are no shareholders to whom they're accountable.

There is no publicly listed ASX meeting for these council members.

The VC, particularly at the Australian National University, the VC can only lose their job if they resign or if the council rescinds it.

It's pretty grim.

And, you know, staff are already overworked and overburdened, particularly academic and professional staff, trying to just keep the wheels turning on these places that have been gutted.

And, you know, they tend to get gutted every other four years.

You know, there's always a restructure happening at a university at any given point in time.

And, of course, university VCs didn't want to make these decisions on their own because there's so much political blowback

within the organisation so they'd get these consultants in, but of course now they're very cranky that they're using these consultants.

So then you've got Griffith University now just hiring the consultants as full-time employees.

Someone told me to look at the Vice-Chancellor's office at Griffith, and there's two employees there who were hired directly from Nowth, who are principal consultants, who are now directing transformation within the Vice-Chancellor's office.

So it's pretty grim.