News

Restoring social licence requires a new consensus

Less rhetoric and more truth-telling will help universities regain the public’s trust, writes ACU Vice-Chancellor, Professor Zlatko Skrbis

In all the words written and spoken on the topic of social licence, there have been many savoury sound bites. Universities have been scalded as ‘ivory towers’ and ‘playthings of the left’, their leaders labelled as ‘fat cats’ and told they need to ‘leave the fortress’.

These are criticisms we must accept as part of the job. As stewards of institutions that account for public expenditure in our decision-making, we are answerable to those who sustain us – even when their words seem harsh, unjustified or unforgiving.

In December, with the sector reeling from these endlessly negative headlines and declining public trust, a year-long government inquiry into university governance released its final report. It detailed a series of governance failures among several universities, arguing that without structural reform, these failures would keep repeating.

Among its eight recommendations for change, the report called for “primacy of education for the public good”. This is hard to argue with. There is not a university in Australia that would doubt our core purpose is for public good, public interest and public benefit.

Yet it is abundantly clear that sections of the community view universities unfavourably, either because we have acted imperfectly, or because we have failed to explain ourselves effectively. Rightly or wrongly, a perception has taken hold that we’ve become too focused on commercial considerations, thereby losing touch with our foundational role to serve the public good.

So, how do we regain the public’s trust, and with it, our social licence?

The hard truth is that there’s no simple answer. Recent contributions from within the sector have included some performative self-criticism, advocating for the adoption of popular measures above all else – yet the remedies proposed often ignore the financial, industrial and practical realities that make them difficult to implement. Elsewhere, we’ve had others behaving as if universities should be run like businesses, with commercial success as our primary measure of worth.

Both of these arguments contain the odd grain of truth, though neither tells the full story. Perhaps what we need is less rhetoric and more honest reckoning with reality.

Let’s begin with a snapshot of the past half-dozen years. The pandemic tore through our sector at a pace never seen before. International student numbers declined sharply, with the so-called ‘rivers of gold’ that allowed the largest universities to prosper no longer flowing as they used to. Meanwhile, domestic enrolments have slumped, and government funding has continued to decline in real terms.

At the same time, technological shifts have changed the student experience. They now attend our campuses with a different cadence than they used to. The way they conduct learning has changed, and with the widescale adoption of AI, the most radical shifts are yet to come.

All these things have culminated in a deep unsettlement, where disruption is the new normal. This has exposed existing tensions in our sector, intensifying debate about who we serve and how we justify public funding. It has also laid bare some genuine operational issues and institutional failures, corroding the credibility of the whole sector.

Against this backdrop, it may seem tempting to throw money at the social licence problem, spending our way back to public favouritism and legitimacy. Yet this approach is not sustainable in the long term. As The Australian Financial Review opined last year, “the unavoidable financial reality is that universities will need to scale back in some areas to develop a sustainable business model to cope with the very different operating environment”.

Yes, it is true we are public institutions that serve to educate, research and engage with our communities. Yet in order to fulfill that purpose, our institutions need to manage competing priorities responsibly, with budgets balanced and margins reinvested. As leaders, our responsibility is to treat these institutions with care, making difficult decisions when necessary, so that we hand them over stronger than we found them.

That doesn’t mean adopting a brutal economic rationalist mindset, making cuts without regard for consequences. As one former vice-chancellor has put it, we are “not villains twirling moustaches while gleefully slashing budgets”.

Nor does it mean that universities should put aside their core responsibility to serve the public in unique ways. As the leader of an institution guided by Catholic tradition, I take seriously our responsibility to honour our institutional mission, with its deep commitment to serving the common good. As I have argued previously, we need a new national compact – one that allows universities to pursue distinctive missions specifically attuned to the needs of the communities they serve, thereby strengthening social licence and driving meaningful change.

Regrettably, the social licence discussion appears to have been infected with the same plague of polarisation we’re seeing in the broader community. In this case, two camps have emerged: one stressing one-eyed public responsiveness with limited regard for commercial considerations; the other championing a market-driven focus on competition and surplus.

To transcend the current discourse, we must move beyond this either/or mentality. We must practice the art of holding two truths simultaneously, balancing perspectives to find consensus and chart a new way forward.

This means accepting that without sound financial management, universities cannot fulfil purpose. It means acknowledging that without a commitment to purpose, financial considerations become meaningless.

The path forward requires dialogue, not diktat. It demands that we listen to critics, learn from failures, and lead with both principle and pragmatism. Most importantly, it requires us to demonstrate – through actions, not just words – that we can balance our books while staying true to our mission and values.

If our sector can achieve that, securing the future of our institutions in a way that reconciles purpose and priorities, we might just regain the public’s trust, freeing us to focus on what we do best: serving the public good – through the students we educate, the knowledge we pursue, and the communities we engage.

This article was originally published by Future Campus and is part of the Vice Chancellor’s Blog, which highlights stories, insights and perspectives from across the university.