The chancellor of Melbourne’s Swinburne University has hit back at allegations of “overreach”, saying governing councils are too hands off in their dealings with universities.

John Pollaers said councils’ reluctance to follow through on their decisions was the root cause of most “governance failure” in universities. “While good governance doesn’t mean doing management’s job, it does mean…ensuring that what is decided by councils is delivered through the university,” he told the Senate’s Education and Employment Committee on 10 November.

“You can’t create high performance just by…the coach and the captain having a conversation. It’s got to come all the way through the team.”

Pollaers, who is convener of the University Chancellors Council (UCC), said a “hard line” had been drawn between governance and accountability. Attempts to bridge the “gap” had been “pejoratively dismissed as management overreach”.

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The line must be “pulled away”, he said. “Governance must now follow through into assurance.”

Hours before he fronted the Adelaide hearing of the committee’s inquiry into university governance, Pollaers had been accused of “overstepping his role” by giving “managerial level instructions” and “setting up Swinburne as his own fiefdom”.

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According to claims from unnamed staff, reported by the , he had tried to involve Swinburne employees and students in his “personal business dealings”. “Multiple staff” had left the university because the chancellor “frequently berated” them and “used profane language”.

Pollaers told the committee that the allegations, which Swinburne had “categorically rejected”, were an example of “resistance” to “cultural change” by “those who would prefer the status quo”.

“Pushing forward on reform is so hard,” he said. “If you want to bring change about in a university, you’ve…got to roll your sleeves up and just keep going. All I can do is suggest that we see what we can learn from these allegations and what changes we need to make. It’s only by welcoming those things not as an attack, but as another opportunity to engage, that we can change those practices.”

Pollaers said university leaders had been forced to acknowledge “difficult truths” about a “crisis” that the sector “needed and in many respects deserved”. He said that if he were chancellor of the Australian National University, he would invite local senator David Pocock – a staunch critic of the university’s leadership – onto the council.

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“[If] the stakeholders who are most critical [are] not in the room…we’ll keep missing the target. You’ll change chancellors; you’ll change vice-chancellors; and you’ll end up with the same problem.”

Pollaers said Australian chancellors had unanimously supported the recommendations of the Expert Council on University Governance. And he echoed the National Tertiary Education Union’s criticism of the “if not, why not” approach advocated by the expert council, suggesting that regulators should withhold reregistration from universities that lacked “adequate” transparency.

Chancellors have also given “in principle” support to the recommendations in the Senate committee’s damning interim report, Pollaers said. He urged the committee to demand that universities adopt uniform financial reporting standards, and publicly disclose the salaries of their senior executives and academics, in its final report.

University councils should also be obliged to publish an annual “corporate governance and disclosure statement” and to undertake a “social licence impact assessment” for every major decision, he said.

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Likewise, the government should produce regulatory impact statements for all policy and regulatory changes affecting universities, “ensuring accountability applies on both sides”. And it should exclude student debt from government funding calculations “to provide a true picture of public investment”.

“Student loans are not a subsidy but a private cost and heavy debt carried by students and families,” Pollaers told the committee. “This is…a call for clarity and honesty in how national investment is measured.”

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john.ross@timeshighereducation.com