Elect your VC!

The Saturday Paper published (August 29- September 4) an article, written by Tim Moore, about the urgent proposition that Vice-Chancellors at Australian universities should be elected. Such a practice would be true to basic democratic governance principles. But this principle goes further, because governance does not only happen at the very top of universities; it needs to be democratized vertically across university institutions. Deans as well as heads of disciplines should be elected too. This is a well-established practice in various universities in Europe and other parts of the world. We were consulted and quoted for the article, as our submission to the Victorian parliamentary inquiry into university governance made the first case for electing the Vice-Chancellor.