The university’s senior academic deliberative body - normally called the academic board or senate - is formally responsible for the admission of students, assessment, recommending on program requirements and the award of degrees and university prizes and academic matters in general. Most senior academic deliberative bodies are established by the university’s subordinate legislation and a few are established by their universities’ Acts, so there is some substance to their claims of power independent of the governing body. Others are established by a simple resolution of the governing body and thus are formally no more than an academic committee of the governing body.
Senior academic deliberative bodies range in size from a score to 100. Typically they comprise the vice chancellor, deputy vice chancellors, deans and in some cases heads of department or school ex officio, and elected representatives of various classes of staff and students. The senior academic deliberative body would also normally include heads of academic support services such as the library, and the registrar and academic registrar.
Some members of the senior academic deliberative body argue that almost all decisions of the university – on budgets, staffing, buildings, even the design of the enrolment form - have academic implications and thus require the body's approval. Other members of the university, typically members of management (who may also be members of the body), argue that the body’s powers are much more limited in scope and are only advisory in nature. Perhaps the most broadly true generalisation about Australian universities’ senior academic deliberative bodies is that their actual roles and powers in their university’s decision-making are quite different from their formal provisions, whatever they may be. Bodies’ roles are shaped by the university’s tradition and culture and by the attitudes of the vice chancellor, chair of the body, its members and the university community generally. It is also true that many of the senior academic bodies of the older pre-1987 universities have less power now than they had three decades ago when they were professorial boards comprising the university’s ‘God-professors’.
These and other issues are discussed in an interesting collection of case histories of five senior academic deliberative bodies edited by Michael Stoddart (1994).
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