A Kafkaesque instinct for bureaucratic self-preservation has made Australian higher education a ¡°leading example¡± of ¡°bad and ugly¡± employment practices, a Melbourne conference has heard.

UNSW Sydney economist Gigi Foster said the growth of ¡°non-academic middle management¡± had occurred at the expense of the people who ¡°produce the value¡± at universities.

¡°We are teaching more students with fewer staff, the staff we do have are becoming less academic and the academics we have are becoming more casual,¡± Professor Foster told a??at the University of Melbourne. ¡°That¡­does not inspire confidence in our higher education system¡¯s direction of travel.¡±

She said student-to-staff ratios had increased and the share of non-academic staff ¨C who already outnumbered their academic colleagues ¨C was getting larger. While university funding had risen since early this century, both in raw and proportional terms, money was being siphoned off to pay for ¡°more and more middle managers¡±.

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¡°Anybody who has ever read Kafka or knows the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire will know that the main objective of a bureaucracy is to keep itself alive,¡± she said. ¡°It will figure out ways to argue for its continued existence and the need for more money.¡±

Professor Foster said bureaucracy was growing to address both legitimate and ¡°self-inflicted¡± compliance requirements. Examples included accreditation systems, research ethics regimes and learning outcomes mapping exercises.

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Any academic with an idea to improve university practices was required to produce a business case demonstrating how the proposal would save the university money. ¡°When in heaven¡¯s name did that become the mission of the university?¡± Professor Foster asked.

Professor Foster said there was little evidence that any of this had made universities better. ¡°What does [the higher education regulator] Teqsa say has happened to student outcomes? Have they gone up? Have we had better quality learning? Have starting salaries gone up? You can¡¯t really tell,¡± she said.

¡°We¡¯ve got too many bureaucrats and we¡¯ve got bureaucrats who want to keep themselves alive in their bureaucracies. If we were in the private sector, those bureaucracies would be a lot smaller because the market wouldn¡¯t let them survive.¡±

Money was also being siphoned off to pay ¡°the top brass, [who] would be strapped to get a similar salary in the private sector¡±. More was being spent on consultancies, ¡°for services that one would think universities could actually staff in-house¡±.

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Professor Foster said Melbourne had??(?20 million) last year on consultants to help with the implementation of a finance and human resources system, advisory services for a strategy performance framework, accommodation architectural services and ¡°microstrategy development¡± for data policy governance.

¡°If there is a kernel of need in there, it could be serviced by the university¡¯s departments of management, architecture, strategic change and so on. We have supposedly world-class staff with terminal degrees in [these] disciplines,¡± she said.

She said the current university model would survive another 10 to 15 years as the gulf grew between ¡°formal statements and systems on one hand, and useful or innovative work on the other¡±. Students and academics would ¡°further detach emotionally¡±, seeing university as ¡°merely a springboard or a pay cheque¡±.

¡°Those who¡¯ve worked out how to milk the system for their and their mates¡¯ benefit will continue to do so until there¡¯s nothing left to milk, and then they¡¯ll switch jobs,¡± she predicted. ¡°That¡¯s what greedy people do.¡±

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john.ross@timeshighereducation.com