My career journey is proof point of the transferability of skills associated with a transformative higher education experience. An honours thesis in evolutionary ecology may at first glance have very little to do with access and quality in higher education, but is very much entwined.
In a recent post on bounded rationality I riffed on a famous quote by evolutionary biologist J.B.S Haldane by suggesting Australian higher education policy makers have an inordinate fondness for red tape.
This post explores regulatory compliance requirements in higher education, with a view to quantifying the extent of regulatory burden, and identifying opportunities for reducing red tape in a post-Universities Accord context.
God’s love of beetles
The phrase ‘god has an inordinate fondness for beetles’ is attributed to evolutionary biologist J.B.S (Jack) Haldene. I have always found it irresistible.
There is some debate about what he actually said, and how it lines up with the written record. The phrase has origins with theological and scientific questions around the origins of life and the universe. If god did create everything, why create hundreds of thousands of species of beetle, and a relative handful of species of mammal or primate or birds. God, should she exist, must have … a predilection, special preference, or inordinate fondness for beetles.
Versions of the quote extend the logic to stars. Perhaps humans are as imperfect as we are because god was not only busy creating beetles, but also distracted by creating trillions of stars across the observable universe.
If god does exist, here is a picture of a fancy church. Please like me.
Policy maker’s fondness for red tape
My go to for risk and compliance guidance is the University of Adelaide. It publishes detailed frameworks governing risk and compliance that are the best I’ve been able to find. Their A to Z legal directory lists 258 discrete items of legislation with which it must comply. These are categorised within a taxonomy comprising five tiers of compliance and 18 categories of university activity.
Other universities may face higher or lower compliance challenges depending on their scope of operations and peculiarities of their State parliaments legislative registers. Universities that operate off shore potentially increase their legislative compliance obligations exponentially.
Legislation is the tip of the red tape iceberg. There are numerous policy instruments and guidelines enabled by legislation but not subject to the full gamut of parliamentary approval and scrutiny.
The Education Services for Overseas Students Act 2000, for example, authorises 16 other policy instruments, including the National Code of Practice for Providers of Education and Training to Overseas Students 2018, and a variety of tuition protection instruments.
The Higher Education Support Act 2003 (HESA), is more complex and across its lifespan has authorised over 900 policy instruments. On average this represents a new policy instrument being spat out of HESA at least once a fortnight.
Every fortnight for 21 years.
Putting all this together makes for an incredibly complex legal compliance regime that gets more complicated by the day. New requirements come into force from tomorrow that require international students to satisfy genuine student requirements. In a weeks time, support for students policy requirements come into effect. Both come with the need to invent new systems and processes and increase red tape compliance costs.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not frothing at the mouth with IPA level apoplexy, muttering government bad, free market good. We need regulation, but perhaps not quite so much, and perhaps not so dynamic.
University fondness for red tape
Whilst intersecting and responding to external policy drivers, one can’t let universities off the hook for their fondness for red tape. Universities are masters at producing policy to govern every facet of their operations. The policy libraries of both RMIT and La Trobe (places I once worked many years ago) have a long compendiums of policies (RMIT with 231 slightly ahead of La Trobe with around 212).
After much document retrieval and rigorous analysis I have surmised there is a truck load of policy with which universities need to comply. When tabulated and analysed it sees university staff having to comply with 13 bazillion policy clauses
[Fact check - this is not a real number, I don’t yet have a research assistant to do the compilation and analysis for me. I need more subscribers pledging inordinate amounts of money. What ever the actual number is, it is very big. If you want a more precise count ask the IPA].
My sandwich short of a picnic mental capacity does not understand the full complexity of all these regulatory obligations. I basically have a PhD in HESA and can barely make sense of it, let alone the other legislative requirements, guidelines, codes, and reporting requirements. And let alone the parallel policy systems in place within universities. The point is, no one can, it is just too complex.
Why a bazillion policies?
I have spent sometime thinking about why we have such a complicated legal and regulatory environment, how this regulatory environment evolves, and whether we might devise a better way of doing policy in higher education.
One of my favourite recent papers on higher education is Universities as peculiar organisations by Charlie Eaton and Mitchell Stevens. It’s a really good read and makes three key points relevant to regulatory complexity:
Universities have positional centrality. They intersect with almost all facets of modern economies. This intersection means that they will inevitably intersect with more and more regulation associated with the modern nation state.
When the first Australian university came into being in 1850, there were comparatively few laws in effect, and those that were in place were short and succinct.Universities have quasi-sovereignty. Whilst comprised of academic entrepreneurs marching to the beat of their own drum, the risks of complete anarchy are moderated by organisation actorhood that establishes boundaries of membership (ie - admissions criteria, elected positions) and regulate members behaviours (strategic plans, 200+ policies etc).
Universities are polysemic. As a function of their centrality, and quasi-sovereignty, universities take on multiple and often contradictory meanings of internal and external actors and influences. Eaton and Stevens make this point really well:
“Universities exist at the interstices of state, economy, civil society, and private life, partaking form and function from all of them. In doing so, they also take on meanings associated with each institutional domain.”
The ‘peculiar’ explanation is a generalised position on the role and structures of universities (drawn particularly from a USA understanding), but does not offer much by way of Australian-specific contextualisation. I have been one of the few people silly enough to take a close look at financing policy across time, and there are Australian-specific insights that emerge from this approach. Another person to do this is Bridgid Freeman, who looked at university policies over time since Dawkins- and her PhD is in my opinion, very very good.
The summary version of my study is that, at least from a financing policy perspective, Australia has been particularly short sighted in how it has allocated resources to higher education. The long-term trend of increasing participation and ever expanding frontiers of knowledge systems has not been well planned for, nor accommodated, necessitating internationally distinctive high rates of policy reform. New policies, new instruments, new requirements, subject to intermittent consolidation once complexity gets out of hand. If the Accord gets its way, we are heading for the next major consolidation of financing legislation, opening a window to a temporary reduction in complexity until the cycle starts again.
If HESA and other higher education legislation is re-written and its detail consolidated, it won’t in my view have a substantial bearing on the totality of regulatory complexity. Positional centrality guarantees that we’ll still face an inordinately complex regulatory context. We might see however, key items of legislation being a little easier to wrangle, and this is what the Accord recommends. Whether the Accord can pull this off is another thing altogether.
Act in your university’s best interest
To close this rant on red tape, I’m going to go all in on Netflix. I’ve see eyes glaze over and hair stand on end when I’ve mentioned this as a conceptual provocation. Chill everyone, its just a thought experiment about institutional policy.
The Netflix Culture Deck has been viewed 17 million times. The slide deck outlines Netflix’s distinctive approach to staffing and performance management. It has deliberately strived to recruit and retain good people and allow them tremendous freedom in how they go about their work with the minimum of red tape. There is for example no vacation policy - staff take leave when they need/want to, rather than having X days per year. Another example they cite is their five word Expensing, Entertainment, Gifts and Travel policy:
Act in Netflix’s best interest
There is a more serious academic piece on the Netflix approach - but my recommendation is to start with the slide deck.
The key question that flows on from the Netflix five word policy aspiration, and perhaps a challenge for those that might go on to work with the Australian Tertiary Education Commission is whether succinct principle based policies grounded in a culture of freedom and responsibility are possible?
Five word policies are a bridge that is way too far, but could we have policies that are 450 words, rather than 45,000. And yes, I downloaded the National Statement on human research ethics, coverted it to word and did a word count, 45,239 to be precise. I’ve done this as I think it is a particularly good example of how longer policy documents can be internally incoherent and self-contradictory.
HESA as a more egregious example is 139,000 words (yes I have no life and it is 139,887 words to be precise).
I suspect that even if the Australian Tertiary Education Commission works really hard to streamline policy, it will continue to get more and more complex. It’s baked into the system and the regulatory paradigm. The recent Higher Education Provider Amendment (Support for Students Policy) Guidelines 2023 is a case in point. It mandates that universities do things that are (in my opinion) not in the best interests of students and creates more red tape that detracts from its underlying intent. The only people I’ve met who think it is a good idea are policy makers with an inordinate fondness for red tape.