I write this not from an institutional podium or position but from a garden, where the soil remembers what institutions forget.

For nearly a decade, I contributed to Australian universities as a casual academic, first at RMIT, then at the University of Tasmania (UTAS). I completed a PhD in 2020, published internationally, mentored students and pioneered policy design rooted in sustainability and community-led innovation. Despite this, I remained trapped in insecure contracts, paid around $13,000 per year and denied formal recognition or career progression. Students requested me as a PhD supervisor, yet I was told by leadership I was ineligible due to my casual status. My voice and labour were welcomed but not respected.

The Pro Vice-Chancellor at UTAS earns over $1.1 million a year, more than 120% higher than the salary of the Australian Prime Minister. This is the same for all vice-chancellors in Australian universities. This stark pay disparity reveals how executive compensation in Australian universities has spiralled beyond public accountability or community logic. If even part of that salary were redirected, it could fund secure roles for dozens of early career researchers doing vital work in our communities.

This is not a personal complaint. It is a structural crisis.

In April 2024, of the 545 seats on our universities’ governing bodies, 366 were filled by appointment, 143 of them corporate executives or consultants from for-profit organisations, while a mere 137 representatives were elected by the staff, students and graduates they purport to serve. At the same time, over 300 senior managers draw salaries higher than those of state premiers, and universities funnel up to $730 million into consulting fees in a single year. https://betterunis.nteu.au/inquiry/ Insecure contracts plague 68% of all staff, even as $271 million in systemic wage theft goes unpaid and another $168 million is set aside to contend with further stolen wages.

These figures, drawn from the latest report from the National Tertiary Education Union of Australia (NTEU), lay bare a university system captured by corporate interests and built on precarity. It’s time to demand transparency, resist profiteering and restore our institutions to the public good, with fair representation, secure work, and genuine accountability at their heart.

According to publicly available data, UTAS employed 2,957 full-time equivalent staff in 2023. While exact role breakdowns are not published, sector-wide trends suggest that 57–60% of these are non-academic administrative positions, meaning around 1,700–1,800 of these positions may be administrative. Meanwhile, many academic staff remain on insecure contracts. The NTEU has identified over $11 million in underpayments at UTAS alone, part of a broader pattern of wage theft affecting more than 97,000 university staff nationwide. Many of these staff are casuals working without stability, benefits or recognition, despite being responsible for core teaching and research delivery.

The injustice is systemic and fully documented.

Consider this: UTAS is also a direct beneficiary of the $130 million redevelopment of the University of Tasmania Stadium in Launceston, which includes $65 million in federal funding. While marketed as urban renewal, this investment reflects a broader pattern where capital infrastructure, branding and property development are prioritised over student experience, research integrity and fair academic labour. In the same period that casual academics earn just $13,000 per year, tens of millions flow into concrete, turf and naming rights.

The UTAS stadium project exemplifies how Australian universities are increasingly functioning like property developers rather than stewards of learning or social good.

This is not surprising to me. In my early twenties, I worked for one of Australia’s largest energy infrastructure companies. I witnessed firsthand the largest overnight sell-off of Australian energy assets in the country’s history, when Singapore Power acquired them. One of the key figures behind that stitch-up later became involved in the UTAS redevelopment and Sandy Bay relocation.

It confirmed what I already suspected: the focus at UTAS is no longer on knowledge, scholarship or the betterment of society. It is on money, on asset management, real estate and speculative capital gain disguised as innovation.

Another revealing example: a Pro Vice-Chancellor at an Australian university was offered a prestigious role at Oxford University, one of the most respected academic institutions in the world. He turned it down. Why? Because the Oxford salary was less than half of what he was earning in Australia. This story exposes just how inflated and out of step Australian university executive pay has become. When even Oxford can’t compete with our executive salaries, we must ask: who is the university really for?

Across the sector, universities have become increasingly corporatised. Grants vanish into paperwork and institutional performance metrics.

Research is shaped by vested interests. There is little space for work that is grounded in land, people and long-term transformation.

What is missing is not talent, but justice in how funding is distributed, how labour is recognised and how institutions relate to the communities they claim to serve.

Yet we know there are better models.

At the Polytechnic University of Milan, design for social innovation is not just a theoretical exercise; it is put into practice in partnership with municipalities, cooperatives, local banks, food producers and cultural organisations. Their research manifests as living systems: food box programs, circular economies, shared markets and civic infrastructure.

Why can’t we do the same here?

Instead of propping up top-heavy hierarchies, we could:

  • offer secure, part-time research fellowships to early career academics embedded in communities;
  • direct grant funding into long-term, place-based initiatives in partnership with state and local governments;
  • support research that brings benefit to land, people and future generations, not just institutional reputations.

This is the work I now continue through Regen Era Design Studio, a platform for living systems design rooted in justice, place and imagination. I no longer wait for institutional validation. I plant, design, teach and collaborate from where I am. But I will not stay silent about the system I left.

Let this be a call: to restore universities to their public purpose; to invest in research that lives in the world, not just in journals; to honour the labour of those who have held the light through years of invisibility.

I do not speak for power. I speak for possibility. It is time to compost what is no longer working, and regenerate what is. From the garden, I offer this not in protest, but in invitation.

Let’s rebuild what learning was always meant to be.

16 Scenarios for Regenerative University Reform

  1. Fivefold Governance Council

Under the Fivefold Governance Council model, the traditional vice-chancellor and executive suite are replaced by a rotating Committee of Five drawn from diverse domains, Indigenous knowledge, science, arts, policy and the student body, emphasising leadership as service rather than power. Each councillor serves a fixed two-year term with fair, capped remuneration, preventing hierarchical entrenchment and aligning incentives with the public good. Decision-making is fully shared, harnessing the breadth of community expertise to ensure governance is inclusive, context-sensitive and responsive to local and global challenges.

Research shows distributed leadership fosters organisational adaptability and collective responsibility, improving institutional resilience amid complexity sciencedirect.com. Studies of rotating leadership in knowledge-building communities further demonstrate that rotating roles enhance engagement, ownership and equity among all stakeholders arxiv.org. By embedding rotation, domain diversity and co-governance, the Fivefold Governance Council transforms university leadership into a dynamic, service-oriented practice that truly reflects its institution’s mission.

  1. Salary Cap Redistribution

In a bold redistribution, capping all university salaries at $150,000 frees the finance officer’s $800,000 salary to fund 26 part-time research and teaching roles. Imagine a cohort of early-career scholars collaborating on community gardens, youth mentoring or local energy pilots, each position offering stability and professional development. Similarly, the Pro Vice-Chancellor’s $1.1 million could underwrite 44 vibrant community garden projects or sustain 20 youth-led programs in perpetuity, weaving the university into the social fabric of its region.

Overseas, the Mondragon Cooperative in Spain demonstrates the power of wage caps: by limiting its top salary to six times the lowest pay, Mondragon has fostered deep worker ownership and redirected surplus into reinvestment and social programs that revitalised the Basque region  newyorker.comthebetter.news.. This example shows how modest compensation ceilings can unleash a multiplier effect, delivering tangible benefits to individuals, families and communities well beyond the ivory tower. Implementing a $150,000 cap here would not only embody the university’s civic mission but also catalyse a new era of place-based scholarship and social renewal.

  1. Permanent Paths to Research Excellence (P²RE) 

All academic roles shift from precarious casual work to secure part-time or full-time contracts, with every lecturer and researcher offered automatic conversion after one year upon satisfactory performance review. Clear career pathways from Research Fellow to Professor are supported by co-created Individual Development Plans, structured teaching fellowships and quarterly research bootcamps. Each continuing staff member is allocated a permanent desk in 24/7 “knowledge hubs,” key-card entry to community wet and dry labs and an annual stipend of $5,000 for equipment, software, or materials. A two-day offsite onboarding retreat, combined with peer and senior mentorship networks, fosters collegial collaboration, wellbeing, and an inclusive academic culture. Seed grants of $10–20,000 empower interdisciplinary teams to tackle local and global challenges, ensuring research remains responsive to a reflective, changing society. A joint oversight board equitably elected by staff, students, graduates and appointed experts publishes semesterly reports on employment security, research outputs and staff satisfaction to guarantee transparent accountability.

  1. Place-Based Impact Mandate

Under the Place-Based Impact Mandate, universities must allocate at least 70% of all research funding to community-rooted, place-based initiatives that directly address local challenges. Local councils, social enterprises, Indigenous groups and grassroots organisations serve as genuine co-designers and co-evaluators, ensuring projects reflect the priorities and lived realities of the communities they serve. Prototype interventions, whether regenerative agriculture in rural Tasmania or urban health innovation hubs in major cities, act as living laboratories whose methods and outcomes are shared through national and global knowledge networks.

By embedding scholarship in the daily life of society, this mandate transforms universities into agile civic partners driving locally anchored innovation and social renewal. Transparent reporting and open-access repositories guarantee that every community-driven insight informs best practices, policy reform and cross-regional collaboration.

  1. Open Knowledge Commons Framework

Under the Open Knowledge Commons Framework, universities abandon proprietary Intellectual Property regimes in favour of freely shared, community-governed knowledge. All research outputs data sets, publications, software and design blueprints are automatically published under permissive licenses with no paywalls or commercialisation hurdles. Community partners co-create “community briefs” and host local translation forums to ensure academic insights are immediately actionable in their places of origin. Joint stewardship councils including researchers, community representatives and legal advisors oversee equitable governance of knowledge assets and funnel any residual licensing revenues into community-driven capacity building. Real-time impact dashboards track usage, collaboration and social outcomes, making openness and communal benefit central metrics in funding decisions and academic evaluations.

  1. Public Purpose Index

Replace journal rankings and publication metrics with a Public Purpose Index measuring community impact, knowledge co-creation, land stewardship and policy relevance.

This index would prioritise tangible, place-based outcomes over abstract citations. Examples might include:

  • a regenerative farming program that revitalises degraded land and trains young farmers;
  • a partnership between design students and local councils to co-create disaster-resilient food systems;
  • collaborative work between researchers, social enterprises, and care providers to reimagine aged care or youth support from the ground up;
  • restorative justice projects where conflict resolution is embedded in community healing, not just theoretical models.

Real projects, real impact, real learning. These are the metrics that matter.

  1. Campus as Garden

Transform campuses into living landscapes: biodiverse gardens, outdoor classrooms, seed banks, compost hubs. The university becomes a model of ecological literacy and beauty.

With just $500,000 redirected from a Pro Vice-Chancellor’s salary, a network of gardens could be created across campus, each becoming a hub of knowledge exchange and regenerative practice. These gardens would not be ornamental, but activated spaces:

  • a real job is created for a garden coordinator to program seasonal workshops, cross-disciplinary gatherings, and community events;
  • students and staff can share knowledge from their studies in context on soil, water, food, healing, justice;
  • community members are invited to co-create the space and offer feedback to the university on further place-based improvements.

The garden becomes a living interface between research and relevance, between theory and thriving.

  1. Embedded Social Enterprises

Every faculty partners with a local social enterprise, coop or commons-based initiative. Students intern, co-design and conduct research that feeds back into community wealth. Many social enterprises in our society struggle to make ends meet, yet they are the ones filling in the gaps left by the extractive, trickle-down economy we exist in. It is 100% the ethical responsibility of universities, whose core purpose is the betterment of society, to meaningfully partner with these enterprises. This means not just internships or placements, but the allocation of real research dollars, staff time and long-term collaborative frameworks to help these initiatives thrive, not merely survive.

  1. Regenerative Community Fellows Program

Under the Regenerative Community Fellows Program, universities offer secure, part-time (0.4–0.6 FTE) fellowships to early-career thinkers, activists, artists and scholars who are deeply embedded in their home communities. Fellows receive multi-year contracts, mentorship, a dedicated project stipend and full access to campus facilities, ensuring their civic and creative work is sustainably resourced. Rather than relying on citation counts, selection and evaluation focus on demonstrated contributions: tangible prototypes, policy briefs, public art or community-led initiatives that drive local renewal.

Inspired by Ashoka’s model, where fellows are chosen for their systems-change potential rather than academic metrics, this program builds a living network of changemakers co-designing solutions with community partners ashoka.org. Following Nesta’s Civic Innovation Fellowship approach, applicants document past and proposed community engagement impacts and are assessed on feasibility and transformative effect, not pedigree centerforcivic.org. Annual showcases and open-access repositories then amplify fellows’ prototypes, be they urban greening projects, youth media labs or interactive cultural events, feeding into national and global practice networks.

  1. Seasonal Timetables

Align university calendars with seasonal rhythms, solstices and harvests creating time for rest, integration and seasonal community festivals.

The recent UTAS Strategic Plan on ‘Transitions’ gestures toward change, but let’s get real about life systems. A seasonal timetable isn’t just aesthetic, it invites a cultural shift that reconnects learning with ecological and social time. This approach:

  • allows the campus to host seasonal events, farm-based festivals and shared rituals across faculties;
  • supports climatic wellbeing, reducing burnout and aligning semester breaks with natural periods of dormancy or bloom;
  • builds a community around life systems, enabling students and staff to experience the rhythms of the earth as integral to education;
  • encourages feedback loops between learners, community members and land custodians guiding further adaptations to learning spaces and culture.

By weaving life systems into daily life, the university becomes not just a place of instruction, but a place of seasonal belonging and shared renewal.

  1. Intergenerational Learning Circles Model

Under the Intergenerational Learning Circles Model, one-directional lectures give way to weekly circles where students, faculty, community elders, and industry practitioners convene in embodied, dialogical inquiry. Decades of research show that intergenerational dialogue significantly boosts engagement, critical reflection, and cultural awareness. Recent systematic reviews highlight its power in fostering meaningful learning across age groups mdpi.com. Circles are embedded in real-world contexts, with participants co-designing projects that ground theory in lived practice and drive community innovation.

Each session opens and closes with brief rituals and rotates facilitation roles, ensuring multiple ways of knowing are honoured and that dialogue remains generative rather than hierarchical (Patricia Barkaskasi and Derek Gladwin University of British Columbia) files.eric.ed.gov. Assessment transforms accordingly: individual exams are replaced by collective portfolios and public presentations co-evaluated by peers and community partners, affirming the university as a living, reflective community of inquiry.

  1. Campus Participatory Budgeting Mandate

Each year, 5% of the university’s discretionary budget is allocated to a participatory pool decided by community and student assemblies via secure online voting, fostering democratic engagement and resource equity (peoplepowered.org). Trained facilitators guide multi-stakeholder circles, including students, faculty, staff and local residents, to co-create, evaluate and prioritise proposals ranging from campus greening and renewable-energy retrofits to peer-led wellbeing initiatives link.springer.com. All outcomes and spending are published on an open-access portal with interactive dashboards, ensuring transparency, accountability and continuous community feedback.

  1. Nature-Centered Restorative Practice Units

Under the Nature-Centered Restorative Practice Framework, universities establish dedicated units to lead restorative practice, conflict transformation and social repair by integrating biophilia and Eastern philosophies of interconnectedness. These units embed regular nature-based interventions such as guided forest-bathing circles, biodiversity-rich gardens and ecotherapy sessions into campus life, harnessing humans’ innate affinity for the natural world to facilitate healing and community cohesion academic.oup.com.

Practitioners trained in restorative justice methodologies and social work facilitate dialogue circles under open skies or in green spaces, using ecological metaphors and rituals to transform conflict and reweave social bonds. Eastern philosophical principles of harmony, balance and non-dual awareness inform training modules, emphasising the interdependence of all beings and the environment as essential to social repair buddhism-guide.com. By moving beyond mere compliance, these units co-create living laboratories where nature and community intersect to foster resilience, shared responsibility and a genuinely restorative campus culture.

  1. Sovereign Knowledge & Reparations Accord

Under the Sovereign Knowledge & Reparations Accord, universities formally recognise and fully resource Indigenous-led research centres as central pillars of campus life and scholarship. Each institution commits to annual land-based reparations and fair rent payments to Traditional Custodians, co-designed with local Elders and community councils. Indigenous governance protocols, drawn from the insights of Marg O’Neill’s First Knowledge Series and Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies, are embedded at every decision-making table, ensuring cultural priorities and consent guide land use, curriculum and research ethics. Co-governance bodies composed of Traditional custodians hold veto rights over any project affecting country, guaranteeing genuine stewardship and accountability. Success metrics shift to value relational accountability, community wellbeing and cultural resurgence alongside conventional academic outputs, creating a truly reciprocal knowledge ecosystem.

  1. End the Consultant & Paperwork Economy

Phase out costly external consultancy contracts. Redirect funds (like the $734M spent nationally) into long-term, community-led innovation labs rooted in foundational economic investment. This means funding projects that build the essential capacities of communities: food systems, youth mentorship, housing co-ops and participatory infrastructure. Research funding must flow through local economies, not external consultants or compliance-heavy admin.

  1. Seasonal Regenerative Charter of Accountability

Under the Seasonal Regenerative Charter of Accountability, universities codify a dynamic Charter co-created by students, Traditional Custodians, academics and workers, articulating institutional values, commitments and metrics for social and environmental integrity. The Charter is formally reviewed and updated at the start of each season in facilitated gatherings that rotate leadership among stakeholder groups, ensuring diverse voices shape institutional priorities. This iterative process embeds emerging issues such as climate resilience, equity and community wellbeing into governance in real time.

Similar “living charters” include the Holacracy Constitution, which organisations amend through defined governance processes holacracy.org, and the University of Melbourne’s Student Charter, revised on a regular cycle through community consultation students.unimelb.edu.au. By pairing seasonal renewal with biophilia-informed nature retreats and cross-cultural dialogues, the Charter keeps the university aligned with its evolving social and ecological context.

Conclusion 

This is not a blueprint. It is a provocation. These scenarios are seeds. The question is: will we compost the crisis, or cling to a dying form? From the garden, we offer this not in protest, but in invitation.

University reform and legislation must be among the first major economic reforms in Australia. Universities should be remodelled around Foundational Economic Principles supporting the life systems that sustain society. This includes care work, food systems, local resilience, and regenerative infrastructure. It is not only possible, it is imperative. Let the university sector take the lead and let the local government sector follow in its footsteps.

The urgency is now.

Dr Emily Samuels Ballantyne is an eco-philosopher, regenerative designer and founder of Magical Farm Tasmania and Regen Era Design Studio. With nearly two decades of experience in community-led innovation, policy design and ecological systems thinking, she is committed to reweaving knowledge, land and imagination. She champions regenerative learning economies rooted in justice, interdependence and community wellbeing. www.magicalfarm.org | www.regeneradesign.org

 

Tasmanian Times (TT) is a community-based news and current affairs service covering the island state of Tasmania. It exists to provide a diverse view of Tasmanian issues. TT creates and supports independent media content utilising the best of modern technologies and tried-and-true practices of public-interest journalism.

Support us in expanding our coverage and developing new content by and for Tasmanians. 

New initiatives on the way include:

  • a weekly podcast covering current affairs
  • a revamped website
  • a monthly cartoon competition
  • a user-friendly app for both Android and Apple devices
  • a weekly roundup of key stories