University on a crash Course to fail
The University of Tasmania is failing the state on a number of fronts and its plan to move into Hobart’s CBD is a disaster waiting to happen, writes
APPLYING normal tests of an enterprise reveals the University of Tasmania is failing the state and has done in recent years.
Let’s consider some objectives that are or should be the measure of whether Tasmanians are getting value for money.
On school education Tasmania consistently lags the country in primary and secondary school outcomes, confirmed by NAPLAN, testing with UTAS providing the majority of the training for teaching staff.
Community health in Tasmania lags the nation while UTAS is responsible for training the majority of doctors, nurses and allied health professionals.
On the question of stakeholder influence and transparency, UTAS is managed by a chancellor, vicechancellor and council, which in reality are the chairman, managing director and board of a company. The stakeholders who provide the $700m a year to fund the operations are the federal, state and local governments together with student fees and paid research. These stakeholders have a limited role in UTAS appointments and control for their financial contribution, with UTAS appointing its own key leadership and council members. In a public company, shareholders vote for the reappointment or not of board members and executive salaries. There are no public KPIs that measure UTAS performance and, unlike all other states, where there are competing universities, in Tasmania UTAS has a monopoly.
This lack of competition puts added onus on UTAS to pursue Tasmania’s interests.
Tasmania relies heavily on agriculture, manufacturing, mining, forestry and tourism but there is limited experience in these fields on the UTAS council. The majority of council members are UTAS graduates; it is not beneficial to any organisation to have this level of in-house-educated staff of influence, leading to potential group thinking and loyalty.
There is no required annual public forum where stakeholders can question the UTAS chancellors or council members on their performance.
No business or institution can prosper without a high level of staff and customer satisfaction – the customers in this case are the under- and postgraduate students with a small amount of customerfunded research.
From union surveys and letters to this newspaper, there seem to be four main concerns held by this staff and student group.
Firstly, casualisation of the staff, both academic and service; secondly, lack of faceto-face access to lectures, laboratories and tutorials during Covid in 2020 while all other Tasmanian education facilities reopened rapidly; thirdly, the high number of overseas students, many with insufficient English language skills, which hinders lectures, tutorials and team activities, and; fourthly, the controversial plans to move the functions of the university to the CBD with little justification.
Interesting that the only publicly available data of student and staff satisfaction with this move was compiled by the National Tertiary Education Union, which showed that with the exception of parking 56 per cent of students were satisfied with the current campus in Sandy Bay in contrast to 75 per cent of students opposed to the city move, with 16 per cent in support. For staff, the numbers were 81 per cent and 16 per cent respectively.
Staff and students I have spoken to are mystified by the decision but with staff reductions under way and casualisation increasing, many feel they cannot publicly question the move without repercussions.
The proposed CBD move is a crucial issue because, unlike other concerns, once fully committed to, it will be the hardest and most costly to rectify when failure occurs.
Tasmania University was established in 1846 and concentrated its activities on the Domain. With ageing buildings, greatly increased student numbers and the need for a cohesive single location with sporting and accommodation colleges, the campus progressively relocated to the site in Sandy Bay. There it has prospered for more than 60 years.
This Sandy Bay site remains the object of jealousy of many other Australian universities with its extensive picturesque grounds, sporting fields, spacious laboratories, relatively new buildings, onsite accommodation and, importantly, the ability of students from all faculties to meet to exchange ideas and socialise.
Vice-chancellor Daryl Le Grew (2003-10) who had an architectural background and a desire to make a mark on university history, announced the relocation of all the main Sandy Bay activities to the city. Since then, successive vice-chancellors and councils have continued to pursue this plan as if it is set in stone. Recently UTAS published a “flipbook” – a supposed business case to belatedly answer the community concerns that there were no obvious educational or business reasons to justify this decision and the estimated $400m cost. The quality of data, unsupported statements and omissions in the publicity document would in my corporate experience never have been submitted to the board of a transparent public company, let alone approved. This document is very disappointing because UTAS actually lectures in business studies and awards Masters of Business Administration.
There appears to be a series of flawed ideas supporting the plan – namely, a city campus will revitalise the Hobart CBD; the great universities such as Harvard, Stanford, Sydney and Melbourne have city locations; Sandy Bay buildings are old; and there will be mutual cultural advantages.
The aforementioned universities, of course, didn’t establish in cities but rather were enveloped by the cities as they grew. Their sandstone buildings are much older than UTAS’s 1950s and later structures yet are still in use.
If there are issues with current UTAS buildings it’s due to lack of maintenance and refurbishment, not their age. Part of the city move is to reoccupy the Domain deemed too old in the 1950s.
The recent justification program by UTAS makes vague statements about parking, open space, public transport and meeting places for the CBD, all of which it assumes will be provided by the state government and Hobart City Council, which have made no such commitments and are unlikely to do so.
Meanwhile, retailers are upset at the plan and to reduce HCC objections the uni is making ex gratia payments to compensate for rates.
There is a recent concession to retailers to provide leasable retail space on the UTAS street-facing ground floors of future developments.
This brings us to today where Law, Accounting, Fine Arts and Business Studies are already in the city but the Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths – with their requirements for large
What’s to be done arrest this progressing train wreck?
equipment, laboratories, large vehicle access, noise abatement, fume discharge and often single-storey needs – are left at Sandy Bay, where social areas, cafes and other services are being closed around them.
If that is not enough, UTAS is left with two large, effectively unoccupied new residential facilities in Melville St, the Forestry Tasmania building is boarded up, the railway roundabout Fountain Side accommodation is empty and recent attempts to lease the Mid-City Hotel and a large vacant block on the ArgyleMelville St corner.
There are no up-to-date publicly available figures on the financial impact of all this. It appears UTAS is converting the Hobart CBD into a ghost town.
The citizens of Hobart and stakeholders should demand answers from the university as to why this clearly discredited strategy continues to be pursued with negligible stakeholder support, disgruntled city retailers, empty buildings, declining overseas student numbers and vague statements on infrastructure development.
So, what’s to be done to arrest this progressing train wreck?
Firstly, the university must seriously listen to the stakeholders and then undertake and release a realistic post-Covid future student plan incorporating vastly reduced overseas students and more Australian students. It must keep the yetto-be-relocated faculties at
Sandy Bay with upgrades to equipment and facilities for the STEM subjects. It has to sell off the excess property holdings in the CBD and devote its management time and saved expenditure to its prime mission, which is improving the lives of Tasmanians.
Ian Howard is a retired engineer living in Hobart who graduated at UTAS in 1968. He had a successful 35-year career in engineering, sales and marketing