At the end of August this year, I clocked up two important milestones: 12 years in Australia, and my departure from Griffith University in Brisbane, where I had spent those 12 years after arriving from the European University Institute in Florence in 2014.
This time of change has led me to reflect on university life in Australia, at least as I’ve seen it. My initial years in academia here were wonderful – without doubt the best of my career so far. The School of Government and International Relations where I worked provided a fantastic environment. I had colleagues and mentors who were generous with their time and advice. I was supported in my teaching, published well, won Australian Research Council grants, and by 2018 I had been promoted from Senior Lecturer to Professor.
Most importantly, I felt part of a community, within my department and more broadly within my university. Over time, however, things changed, and I keep coming back to this phrase:
“The ties that no longer bind”.
There are three key sets of ties that have become far weaker in my view for academics in Australia: the ties with management; the ties with students; and the ties with each other.
Ties with management
In my final years at Griffith, management and academics on the ground became increasingly distant from one another. In particular, I observed a widening gap between what senior management think academic life looks like, and what academics at the grassroots know it looks like. This is not so surprising: many senior people have not interacted with students in a classroom post-Covid and prefer to interact with staff via online town halls. Many, therefore, have little idea what it means to teach undergraduates, and what it takes to publish well today.
The management-academics relationship is further weakened by what I can best describe as the “legalistic turn” in relationships between senior management and academics. Ten years ago, when an issue regarding workload or a contract extension arose, you might have had a chat with a manager in person over a coffee or, at worst, over the phone. Now, you are more likely to get a cold and detailed email from a Dean, which has been workshopped with various Human Resources staff (who will be copied in).
Such practices reinforce the sense of “us” and “them” between academics and management.
Relatedly, management appear increasingly unaccountable to the academics under them. Even when they overwhelmingly lose our confidence according to internal surveys, or when their performance raises serious questions, they not only maintain their jobs but often advance to better ones. They “fail upwards”.
For example, 62% of respondents in my previous university’s 2024 staff survey, as reported by the NTEU, did not believe that “The Executive Group listen to other staff” and 68% did not feel that “change processes were well managed”. By the time I left, such results seemed to be accepted by management as normal.
Recent years have also been marked by the extraordinary and damaging proliferation of consultants within Australian universities. Not only did my old university spend vast amounts on these (at the same time as it told staff there was no money to pay for biscuits at seminars), but former consultants also ended up occupying senior positions in the university.
As The Saturday Paper detailed in 2025, four senior positions at Griffith, including the Vice Chancellor’s chief of staff, were held by former Nous consultants. Many other Australian universities can report similar phenomena of Vice Chancellors and senior managers listening more to consultants than staff.
This lack of accountability at the top can spread down through the organisation as part of what I call “a complicity of mediocrity”. That is, when poor performance becomes normalised in management, managers become less inclined to hold one another to account. To take just one example of how this plays out along the chain: I did not do a performance review in the final years at my previous university (and, to be honest, I did not chase one). Other senior colleagues quietly told me the same.
More worryingly, I know of at least one early career researcher who did not do a review for a similar period, at precisely the moment when such conversations are most needed. In fact, their most significant interaction with management occurred when, with their contract ending soon, they received one of those long legalistic emails from a Dean, with HR copied in.
Ties with students
There is an increasing gap between academics and students. Recently, I was talking to someone who is an excellent teacher. They had been teaching an online course where around 10% of the students showed up on a regular basis, and only a couple of those participated.
Such low numbers are unfortunately widespread. While in-person attendance is better, it is certainly not at pre-Covid levels.
To be sure, students having to work more in part-time jobs due to rising costs of living has contributed to their abandonment of campuses. But some universities have encouraged this trend by telling students that, in the name of “flexibility”, they can do degrees on their phone while walking down the street or in their bedroom. One former colleague even told me about students being in online seminars while waiting tables in a restaurant or installing roof insulation.
From a university management perspective, the financial incentives are clear: whether students turn up or not, or whether they are installing roof insulation while they do, they still pay their fees. However, as academics, we know that when students turn up, this leads to a more meaningful learning experience, the development of interpersonal skills, and better social and academic outcomes.
The student turnout problem seems particularly acute at some Australian universities, including my former one. By contrast, I was struck over the past month when giving talks at universities in Norway, Sweden, and the UK, by how their campuses were full of students. When I told colleagues there about how my previous university was still teaching online – and, indeed, online cohorts were regularly the most numerous – they were shocked.
Another contributing factor to the gap between academics and students is the massive erosion of trust that AI misuse is creating. This is fundamentally changing the way we engage with one another: out of fear that students will use AI, academics are understandably forsaking essays and other reflective forms of written assessment.
Moreover, academics are disincentivised from reporting AI misuse because it takes up a huge amount of their time and there is a widespread perception among staff that universities are reluctant to pursue such cases. The customer is, at least usually, right.
In the medium to long term, this is all unsustainable. Universities are built on student-academic interaction and mutual trust. The more fragile and fraught these become, the less legitimacy universities will have.
Ties with colleagues
Finally, there is an increasing gap between academic colleagues themselves. On several afternoons in late August, when I was packing up my office before my move to Flinders University, there were only two or three people present on a floor with thirty academic offices.
Even special occasions no longer attract some colleagues: seminars that once were packed have just a handful of staff present these days. Grant workshops, which used to see near-full participation, with people taking the time to read and give feedback on applications, are now poorly attended or not held at all. And Christmas lunches were abandoned years ago.
In short, collegiality has been hollowed out, with academics resembling independent contractors who sell their services to the university.
Many Australian universities introduced policies to redress this, post-Covid lockdowns. At my previous university, academics were in theory obliged to be present on campus three days a week. In my experience, however, it was never enforced. And, frankly, how could it have been? Many of the senior people in the department were not there themselves three days a week, and some were rarely there at all.
In any case, the suspicion was that the three-day policy was window-dressing. At the same time as management in the Griffith Business School (which my department sat within) were saying “come into your office”, they were also preparing the ground for a move in 2027 to a Brisbane CBD campus where academic staff will be without offices. Of course, if people have rarely used their offices in years, it makes it much easier to take them away.
None of this needed to happen after the Covid lockdowns. This was a choice by management, but it was also a choice by academics. Collectively, we have preferred the comfort of working from home, even though we know that it undermines the scholarly communities we and others before us built.
I should say here that I’ve been immensely lucky: I was part of a fantastic comparative politics research group that thrived in recent years, despite the desert around us. My colleague Lee Morgenbesser has written beautifully about this in his recent “eulogy” for our research group on LinkedIn. But we were the exception rather than the rule.
An uncertain future
So, where does all this leave us? In a perilous situation, I think. Unless policymakers take decisive action on university governance and make it financially easier for students to attend class, and unless (some) universities detox from their online addiction, I fear for the future.
At the same time, it is worth stressing that there are things we academics can do. The research groups that flourish are those where people keep turning up for each other. This comes down to some good habits. Agree with your colleagues on the days you will be in, and make these count: an article feedback or project brainstorming session, lunch, a coffee. Read a colleague’s grant application properly and give feedback. If you lead a department, centre or group, be there yourself. Keep your door ajar when you can. Check in on your staff, especially the early career researchers. Create occasions for being together. And, with students, everyone should defend the in-person class and make it worth turning up to.
Universities depend upon the ties that bind. Without them, they risk falling apart.
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Duncan McDonnell is Matthew Flinders Professor of Political Science at the Jeff Bleich Centre for Democracy and Disruptive Technologies, Flinders University, in Adelaide, Australia (since 1 September 2026).
The Australian’s 2025 Research Magazine named him Australia’s top researcher in political science. Duncan is on LinkedIn and has a personal website.
