Australian universities are treated as a disjointed set of quasi-private enterprises, operating under separate pieces of state government legislation, and expected to compete against one another in a ‘market’ for higher education. This ‘market’ experiment is failing students, staff and the general community. Meanwhile trying to apply corporate models of management to the university sector has led to wasteful and damaging ‘change for change’s sake’ and destroyed the collegial model of academic governance.

California’s public university system, which combines mass education with research output excellence, provides lessons for better models of governance of Australia’s universities. The University of California system has a distinct constitutional status as a public trust, which provides it with legal stability, and it operates as a single institution with multiple campuses throughout a state with a population larger than that of Australia. The UC system was established to provide universal access to post-secondary education, which means students from any background have a chance to obtain a higher education. Australia could borrow much from this model.

Fixing university governance and creating an equitable university sector that treats education as a public service will require:

1. Creating a national system of university education managed by the federal government
2. Ending the corporate model of governance and refocussing on education and research
3. Guaranteeing access to university education
4. Promoting co-operation, not competition
5. Federal control over international student admissions
6. Returning to the collegial model of academic governance
7. Creating a central system of sector-wide bargaining for the university sector