Time to face the music?

Academic labour is grounded in long-established, and sometimes hard-won, scholarly traditions that help to shape and direct academic disciplines and secure the trust of the wider public in the results of that labour. It should be no surprise, then, to find that academics tend to be outspoken about and resistant to changes to the ways they work if such changes appear to be motivated by reasons that are hostile to, or otherwise undermine, those traditions. In such cases, contrary to that old adage, academic politics are fierce because the stakes are actually very high.

This may explain, at least in part, why the ANU’s management of the School of Music, alongside a number of other prominent discipline-centred controversies in recent years, have caused it so much grief. Changes it imposed on the School appeared to many to have been motivated by managerial priorities that seemed at best indifferent not only to the particular traditions and needs of music scholarship, but also to this discipline’s capacity to contribute to the public mission of a university more generally.

Those changes began in earnest with the release of a “Change Management Proposal” on 3 May 2012 that foreshadowed a complete overhaul of the School’s curriculum to fit a proposed new budget and staffing structure. A ‘three-week consultation period’ followed, which then led to the publication on 15 June 2012 of a “School of Music Implementation Plan”. This detailed a process by which full‐time equivalent academic staff numbers were to be reduced from 23.9 to 13 and professional staff numbers from 9.23 to 7.5. The plan also assumed that full-time equivalent undergraduate enrolments would increase from roughly 70 to 80 per annum.

A key challenge I faced when I was appointed the new Head of the School later in 2012 was to provide a coherent academic vision for the School that could yet work within these new staffing limits and also restore lost public confidence in the University’s stewardship of the discipline.[1] It seemed to me, at least initially, that the ANU was keen to rectify some initial missteps. On the basis of what was publicly committed after the publication of the Implementation Plan, alongside undertakings that had been made to me by the University at the time of my appointment, I believed it was indeed possible to re-secure the academic integrity and administrative viability of the School. Given such apparent circumstances again I would still assert it. Certainly, they were enough to enable me to attract a team of outstanding academic and professional staff to work with me towards this goal, and by 2014 the School had not only turned around a good deal of the lingering public hostility towards it, it had also gone from ‘zero to hero’ in terms of research credibility, becoming briefly the most successful School of Music in the country for obtaining Australian Research Council (ARC) grants.

Ultimately, however these early post-Review successes counted for nothing because the ANU’ s underlying commitments and undertakings were simply not met.[2] That fact must raise broader issues not only about the potential for misuse of review and change-management processes at the ANU but also about the University’s stewardship of the contracts of trust that need to exist at all levels in order for any university to secure and sustain its underlying public mission.

At the time, the University’s basis for not meeting the resourcing commitments was because the fall in enrolments that followed the public relations disaster of the first half of 2012 meant that student numbers, it argued, would no longer support them. I was at pains to point out at the time, however, that not only was it self-evident that that the ratio of staff-to-student enrolments is never a linear one (given that a core n staff cohort would still be needed to offer a full undergraduate and postgraduate curriculum even if there were just a handful of enrolments), any failure to uphold the spirit as well as the letter of the 2012 Review so early on in the wake of the change management process would put the creditability of the ANU itself on the line. It would eventually lead to the loss of music altogether as a taught discipline at the ANU, a possibility we now know that the University’s senior executive was indeed secretly contemplating in 2015.[3] This was because the School would face an inevitable vicious circle of declining capacity and morale from within, and public confidence from without, leading to a further, and eventually catastrophic, decline in enrolments.

There was a predictable human cost to this further under-resourcing.. In their efforts to continue to deliver a high-quality music education to students, staff were burning out. Indeed, the School became an unsafe workplace and one sign of this was that I eventually had to make a claim to the ANU’s then insurer, Comcare, for what Comcare acknowledged was a workplace injury ‘sustained as a result of operational actions taken by your employer’. Unable to obtain assurances that this untenable situation would change, I eventually had no choice but to resign and left the School and the ANU in August 2015.

No one, it seems, has since been held to account for these outcomes. Rather, the so-called ‘Podger Review’, which was commissioned by the then recently appointed Vice-Chancellor, Professor Brian Schmidt, recommended a ‘moratorium on action initiated by the University to pursue specific instances of past mismanagement or misbehaviour’.[4]

That recommendation is extraordinary enough for its implicit acknowledgment that there indeed had been instances of mismanagement and misbehaviour. But it only becomes more so when placed against the content of the full report. For instance, Podger described the School he found by 2016 to be one ‘plagued by a legacy of distrust, emotional stress, years of poor management and behaviour, sliding academic standards and financial pressures’, and called for ‘a complete overhaul of governance, funding, academic direction, enrolments, staff culture and community engagement.’[5] He later observed in an interview with The Australian that this situation was one ‘compounded by appalling issues [of] management and reports of widespread bullying.’[6]

Podger also raised doubts about the legitimacy of the basis upon which the ANU had launched its 2012 changes. He noted that the School’s finances included, for instance, ‘an implicit component of the University’s block grant (the National Institutes Grant or ‘NIG’), which was a legacy of the School’s former existence as part of The National Institute of the Arts. But the lack of clarity around the size and ultimate purpose of this money meant that the School was unable to plan effectively or be truly responsible for its budget and was vulnerable instead to financial decisions being made by levels of management far removed from its own sphere of operation or influence.

The opacity around the ANU’s use of the NIG is an issue that has also been raised elsewhere. A report prepared by Deloitte for the Department of Education in December 2014 entitled ‘Review of the Australian National University (ANU) Act 1991 and the governance arrangements of the ANU’ recommended statutory reform to ‘provide the basis for framing clearer accountability’ for its use of the NIG (17). It also recommended the ANU include in its Annual Reports ‘an explanation of how the National Institutes Grant has been used in the relevant year’ (18).[7]

In addition, Podger’s report noted that the student fee income figures for the School, that had been provided to him by the College of Arts and Social Sciences (CASS) ‘arguably… exaggerates the real deficits and their impact on CASS as they are based on a formula for the School’s contribution towards CASS overheads that may not reflect the actual cost, or the efficient price, of the services CASS provides.’ Whatever the truth is, what is clear is that the financial situation of the School of Music in 2012, and thus the justification the ANU had stated for all the distress that followed, was simply unclear.

Even if the stated recurrent operating deficit of approximately $2.7 million in 2012 was a completely fair and accurate representation of the non-funded cost burden of the School to the University, on that basis alone the whole change-management process was an abject failure. On 4 May 2016 The Australian reported that the ANU now faced a $3 million annual bill to ‘rescue the school’ from this institutional self-injury. Ultimately VC Schmidt announced the injection of an additional $12.5 million over five years.[8] And since 2016 the School has churned through another five Heads or Acting Heads of School as well as seen a return to the pre-2012 state of affairs, in which its research was not even put up for consideration by the University for the latest Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) rankings.

In the face of such facts, Podger’s ‘moratorium’  is now not tenable, if indeed it ever was. A proper inquiry is needed not only address these historic wrongs but also to demonstrate the University’s broader commitment to the principles of public accountability, principles which ultimately underpin the mission of a great University. Such an inquiry would also help address the growing culture of distrust between academic staff and senior management that such a stand-out case of unaccountability has inevitably fed.

The ANU is, I suspect, especially vulnerable to such a culture taking root because, unlike other Australian Universities, its constitution does not provide for an external university ombudsman or similar ‘disinterested’ arbitrator to which staff can turn when managerial actions such as the School of Music Implementation Plan go so wrong. The current system of internal policies and procedures to manage staff complaints is no substitute for one. We need only to consider the findings of the recent Royal Commissions into the Banking Industry or Institutional Child Abuse to be reminded of the obvious limits, if not the likely outcomes, of an over-reliance by an institution on self-regulation.

Changes to university governance that have emerged over the past few decades across much of the globe have served to make the need for such an arbitrator only more urgent. Once upon a time, organisational structures existed in Universities, that gave all academic staff a significant say in their own management; leadership positions such as Head of Department and even Vice-Chancellor were commonly filled by election. Of course, such structures had their own issues, but they at least helped encourage a positively framed culture of mutual responsibility, openness and accountability on campus.

What tends to arise today, however, as researchers in the US have found, is based on a much more negative perception of the capacity, responsibility and core motivations of academic employees.[9] Senior managerial appointments are now routinely made without genuine staff consultation. Loyalty within these ranks is secured by such tendencies as an over-reliance on internal promotion (as opposed to genuinely open external recruitment processes) and by the emergence of a considerable salary divide between such senior manangers and the staff they manage. In such a workplace, a ‘rhetoric of instruction and compliance’ replaces one once based in a ‘collaborative discourse of request and consent’.[10] Academics who reasonably question managerial decisions can find themselves stripped of their capacity to function in, let alone, enjoy, their workplace.

But it is not just particular individuals who continue to suffer. We are all the worse for it when our universities appear to be no longer concerned to place trust and mutual accountability at the core of their social contract with their own staff, or indeed with the wider world. If there is a longer-term moral to be learned from the as-yet unresolved troubles at the ANU School of Music, it is that the ANU’s senior leadership should not only support the fearless, open, and publicly accountable, pursuit of truth within the disciplines it is charged with managing on campus, it should also be practising it (and be seen to be practising it) itself.