THE ANSWER IS HONOUR IS PROPRIETY.


Honour is propriety. Organisations are made up of structures. Structures are always people. People prescribe and enable policies. Culturally, people, therefore structures and policies, need to understand propriety. Propriety in terms of universities, and the management of universities and the management of university education, warrants the need to be underwritten by participatory democracy, honesty, transparency at all times, and respect for one another, and the pursuit of equitable social inclusion, obviously in the warrant of our unfolding human rights and social justice languages that Universities purport to be guided by and prescribe to.

If Universities deviate from such propriety and undertake or delegate to for instance autocracy, then the deviation, both logarithmically and exponentially, moves Universities away from the original intended core values and this is pervasive, seeping into all the mechanisms of the University and into the very curriculum, the very education we pursue as identity forming for those that come through what were presumed our hallowed corridors.

Universities do not belong to Vice Chancellors, Vice Chancelleries, Chancelleries, they do not belong to the Board of Directors, they maybe incorporated for various reasons, but they fall under the Public Universities Act (those that aren't private) and under the auspice of the Federal Government and to a lesser extent under the State Government and appointments in principle, nominally, are still subject to the State Governors.

Universities are a public concern, a public institution, and they were the hope of the people and need to be so again. They belong to the people... We must return to Boards of Directors peopled by the scholarly and with a small mix of commercial acumen to complement that such acumen employed within the University. The external members must be appointed by the State Government without any input from the University in anyway whatsoever. The internal members must be elected and with the elections overseen by the AEC, not Universities. The Chancellor should be elected by the University Community overseen by the AEC, and who must demonstrate in the very least a social justice background over a long period of time to complement any significant academic background.

The position of the Vice Chancellor should be considered as a 'calling' rather than a 'career'. Tenure should be limited, and thus maybe four years is sufficient as to ensure against the culmination of autocratic, nepotistic practices and to ensure that one person's vision or aims or even 'bias' do not circumvent the contextual and the hopes of democracy. Vested interests may diminish if tenure is limited, something I wholeheartedly believe in, even for Federal Senators who score 6 years when elected, that's more than enough. Turnover is an incredible positive balance and check. It prevents the pervasive stagnancy and arrogance that circumvents and 'corrupts' processes, protocols and prescribed democratic principles and views. When such circumvention occurs and thus a 'corruption of processes and views', as corruption has a wide definition, then not only is prescription ad hoc moved away from, everything is compounded negatively by the loss of the moral compass. No Vice Chancellor for instance can claim to be the 'moral compass', this is a horrific risk. The compass is the propriety of honest adherence to prescription. If we move away from such propriety and into the cultures of the ad hoc, of autocracy then to support these cultures there is the possibility of strings attached dispensation of favours, fear mongering, elitism, nepotism, sub cultures of pervasive denigration, attrition, intimidation, bullying, mobbing, and other forms of vindictiveness and cowardice.

The limiting of ones tenure, as with the 'calling' that should be a Chancellor and a Vice Chancellor, is an honourable path, rather than securing one's own lot over a long period of time, and often at the risk of the contextual, it is honourable to secure the holistic and only work to serve the interests of one's 'calling' contributing to entirety rather than the prospect of the 'self'. If those who enter the hallowed corridors of 'presumed' power are educated and learned in propriety, and the full underwriting of its honour in terms of foundations and intentions, in honour itself, as there is really nothing else in life but honour, we will all be better off, of course they too, and for instance with Universities, there shall once again be the opportunity for quality education, critical thinking, freedom of speech, free thinking, participatory democracy.

Ways forward also include the propriety of open galleries to Boards of Director Meetings, and AGMS with the University Community encouraged to attend.

Gerry Georgatos
BA (Philosophy), BA (Media), BA (Aust. Indigenous Studies), G/Dip (Human Rights), MA (Human Rights Education), MA (Social Justice Advocacy)