Australia’s island state has been urged to consider banning “gagging clauses” and to introduce new protections for academic freedom as part of a comprehensive overhaul of university legislation.
In a 300-plus page?, a select committee of the Tasmanian parliament’s upper house has recommended 19 changes to the University of Tasmania Act, including restrictions on the sale of university land, changes to the composition of the governing council, mandatory detailed reporting of executives’ pay and a new requirement to “protect and promote academic freedom”.
The amendments should be part of a “comprehensive review and update” rather than “piecemeal” changes to the act, according to the report, which was triggered by “considerable constituent communication” over the university’s practices and its plan to?relocate its main campus.
The “lengthy” inquiry, which lasted more than 30 months and was paused twice due to elections, identified a “tension” between the university’s purpose to create, preserve and transmit knowledge and “the comparatively recent adoption of a corporate, managerial approach to governance and management”.
The report highlights a lack of genuine consultation, transparency or accountability illustrated by the “apparently pre-determined decisions” of management, the domination of the academic senate by the executive, the erosion of student and staff representation on the governing council and a general reluctance to criticise administrators “due to a fear of repercussions or reprisals”.
Musicologist Peter Tregear, who testified to the inquiry, said similar criticisms could be made of almost any Australian university amid a “drift away from what we might call the public mission”.
Professor Tregear, who holds honorary positions at the universities of Adelaide and Melbourne, cited the leverage of institutional real estate to produce income. “I’m not frightened of good management, but at what point does the proverbial tail wag the proverbial dog? Have we lost sight of…our fundamental mission? Does the pursuit of economic stability end up in danger of being the mission?”
The report’s 88 “findings” include an observation that non-disclosure agreements and non-disparagement clauses “reduce public criticism of the university by former staff”. The inquiry heard that these clauses often formed part of the “standard deed of settlement” terminating employment at the university.
The clauses routinely accompanied redundancy packages offered to staff who were “less compliant or more vocal in their criticisms”, as an alternative to “the direct threat of disciplinary action, usually based on weak claims of behavioural misconduct”.
The university’s human resources chief, Kristen Derbyshire, said non-disparagement clauses were “now widely used…to provide protections to all parties in complex circumstances. These aren’t used in any way to gag,” she told the inquiry.
Vice-chancellor Rufus Black said he would be “very comfortable” with a ban on non-disparagement and non-disclosure clauses in situations where employees were being terminated “because of their conduct” – particularly sexual harassment or assault, and especially if such mechanisms were “seen as some way [to be] limiting academic freedom”.
Professor Tregear scorned any suggestion that “both sides” benefited equally from non-disclosure requirements. “They tend to…protect not only this kind of spurious notion that the university brand equals senior management, but senior managers individually,” he told?Times Higher Education.
“It…encourages a repetitive failure of honest introspection when things go wrong. How can you have good governance if it’s not possible to speak truth to power?”
The university said it would study the report before responding.
