Last month’s final report by New South Wales’ parliamentary inquiry into university governance was the third such document published in Australia in the past year. But its statement expressed the recurring theme of more representative boards most boldly.

The report recommended that elected academic staff, professional staff and students make up at least half of every university governing body and that the president of the student representative council be mandated a seat. As the representative body for postgraduate students, we welcome all that – but we are still not sure that postgraduates will be heard.

In August, federal education minister Jason Clare also his long-promised powers for the university regulator, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (Teqsa). Clare often describes the current powers as a feather or a sledgehammer with nothing in between. The new powers are poised to change that, raising the minimum fines for breaching standards from A$40,000 – a touch above a PhD student’s stipend – to A$2 million, roughly a vice-chancellor’s salary.

Such fines will enforce the governance standards and tighten compliance. But the inquiry reports aim to make the imposition of such fines unnecessary by ensuring the right people are in the room to ensure that standards are followed.

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All this comes amid a prevailing assumption that Australia’s universities are in a “governance crisis”, after several high-profile failures, most recently at the Australian National University. However, in our view, universities may be suffering more from a “legitimacy” problem.

Governance concerns structures, reporting requirements and strategy. To put it simply, university governance is all about how we set priorities at universities, how our systems enable those priorities to be implemented, and how outcomes are captured. In contrast, legitimacy concerns whether students, staff and the broader community believe universities deserve their trust and their tax dollars. That cannot be legislated for – and it is in short supply.

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Graduates feel disconnected from their former institutions. Staff experience increasingly unfair working conditions. Students spend months navigating opaque policies. And communities perceive universities as detached from “the real world”. None of these people lost confidence because university governing bodies failed to publish another glossy report or an em-dash-heavy action plan. It happened because these key stakeholders no longer feel that universities listen, respond or remain loyal to the communities they exist to serve.

The government’s response is understandable. When confidence declines, regulation often appears to be the safest political answer. New reporting obligations, governance reviews and disclosure requirements all demonstrate that the government is “doing something”.

But trust has never been built through compliance-based regulation. In fact, many would argue that the ever more complex, bureaucratic web of centralised policies and procedures has only alienated them further.

This is not an argument against accountability. Universities should absolutely be transparent, including in relation to executive remuneration, conflicts of interest and institutional decision-making. The public deserves nothing less from public institutions. However, no amount of additional reporting to the university regulator will persuade a student who felt silenced that their university genuinely values their voice. No amount of governance reviews will restore confidence among staff who feel their concerns about the integrity of opaque performance management processes or promotion applications have gone unheard.

Corporate governance seeks consensus because efficiency is its principal objective, and the bottom line demands it. However, universities are communities of learners, and their legitimacy depends on engagement with those communities’ principal members, because imparting knowledge demands it.

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Moreover, universities do not become stronger by insulating leaders from uncomfortable conversations. University decision-making, just like academic debate, should be open, robust and, at times, a bit messy. It works best when the institutional culture values and encourages intellectual discussion and debate.

But late last year, the Expert Council on University Governance found instances of exclusion and lack of openness in governance processes, to the detriment of student and staff representatives. The result is that disruptors, the people who are independent enough to disagree and commit to improving the institution, cannot effectively contribute to setting university priorities.

Rather than asking how universities can satisfy yet another governance checklist, then, governing councils should ask a more difficult question: who can raise problems we may not want to hear but who are central to the work and learning that occurs in universities? If the honest answer is “very few people”, no amount of legislative reform will restore public confidence.

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The New South Wales report gets the distinction between governance and legitimacy right. Its 50 per cent elected minimum declares outright that the mixture needs to change. But the way it is drafted shows how easily a principle can be defeated in practice. The report treats “students” as a single constituency and ties the guaranteed student seat to the president of the student council, which at most universities is undergraduate-led. But just as professional and academic staff are not one cohort, neither are postgraduates and undergraduates.  

Legitimacy is not about whether the checklist is satisfied, but whether the people a decision affects are genuinely able to shape how that is done. Vice-chancellors insist they can be trusted to bring these voices in voluntarily, and some are doing so. But voluntary goodwill is precisely what the Expert Council found lacking. At the same time, legislating a seat for postgraduates will not, on its own, manufacture trust. That must be earned, decision by decision.

Australia’s universities do not need fewer critics – they need the courage to invite them into the room where decisions are made.

Jesse Gardner-Russell is national president of the Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations (CAPA) and a PhD candidate in ophthalmology at the University of Melbourne. Richard Lee is the national vice-president of CAPA and a PhD candidate in university governance at the University of Queensland, of whose Senate he is a former member.

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