Our universities are not for profit

Four decades of marketisation has all but ruined our universities. Vice-chancellors pay themselves huge salaries while presiding over wage theft of their employees. Universities charge higher fees than ever yet offer a worse education. Overworked, under-paid casual employees take on more and more of the teaching, marking and administration, knowing that they will have no income at the end of semester. Meanwhile, permanent academics face spiralling workloads and the constant fear of another round of redundancies. Victorian universities operate under state legislation which means the state government has an important role to play in ensuring that our universities serve the public good. Higher education is a human right and a social good, not a commodity.

What we think

1. Universities provide a public good and should not be privately owned, market-oriented or run on a for-profit basis.
2. Access to higher education is a social right.
3. University workers deserve job security, good conditions, reasonable workloads and to be paid fairly.
4. University research should not be dictated by market needs.
5. Universities should be democratised; students and university workers should have a say in how universities are run.
6. Technical and Further Education (TAFE) and Vocational Education and Training (VET) are essential parts of the higher education system and should be funded accordingly.

We’ll fight to

Save our universities

1. Make permanent positions available to all casual and fixed term university workers who have worked for three months or more non-continuously in the last year.
2. Give departments/schools autonomy to decide on curriculum and research, reduce workloads on academic and professional staff, and reduce research output requirements.
3. Audit university finances and holdings and cut unnecessary expenditures on marketing, consultants, licensing fees, HR departments and management perks and make that money available for immediate reinvestment in staff, education and research.
4. Fund working-class and regional universities such as Victoria University and Federation University, by redistributing wealth from Victoria’s Group of Eight universities, including through a redistributive funding levy on their endowments, campus real estate holdings and reserves.
5. Amend laws governing universities to:
   1. Ban profit-seeking and revenue accumulation, and require universities to reinvest all proceeds into education.
   2. Ban universities from employing more than 5 percent of staff on a non-ongoing basis.
   3. Cap management salaries and peg all increases to university workers’ wage increases.
   4. Cap international student fees at the actual unsubsidised cost of delivering the course, ending the practice of using international students as a profit centre to cross-subsidise the rest of the university.
   5. Ban universities from claiming research unless they compensate or employ the author/s.
   6. Shift away from competitive metrics such as journal rankings, numbers of citations, publications, etc. in assessing job applicants, and emphasise qualitative forms of evaluation.
   7. Mandate elections for all university council positions.
   8. Restrict for-profit research partnerships between universities and businesses; all research funding must be publicly controlled.
6. Demand the federal government boost funding to meet the costs of the above and to expand research funding. Where genuine funding shortfalls exist, give universities state grants to cover them.
7. Demand the federal government abolish all university fees and reinstate free tertiary education.

Vocational education and training and community education

1. Audit the VET sector to identify and deregister low-quality and dodgy private providers.
2. Boost funding to the TAFE sector to ensure that the majority of VET providers are publicly funded and controlled.
3. Require non-government Registered Training Organisations to operate on a not-for-profit basis and redirect all government subsidies back to publicly-owned training providers.
4. Democratise TAFEs, with councils elected by staff and students.
5. Have apprentices paid full wages.
6. Fund public community and adult education providers to make short courses widely available.

Support students

1. Demand that the federal government cancel outstanding student debt for all graduates earning below the median full-time wage, and prioritise the lowest-income debt-holders first in any broader debt relief scheme.
2. Demand that the federal government make Austudy available to everyone in tertiary education and raise it to the poverty line.
3. Build high-quality, not-for-profit student housing near campuses.