Last month, it was announced that Nicola Phillips, Provost at the University of Melbourne, was to become Vice Chancellor of Adelaide University. Unimelb’s fond farewell noted,
During her time at the University of Melbourne, Professor Phillips demonstrated her deep dedication to the University, extending across her leadership of academic strategy and innovation, widening participation, and the many dimensions of culture change that she has championed and resolutely pursued in matters of equity, inclusion and conduct.
Nicky was also really good at sacking people.
We considered Phillips early this year, when writing about the unfair dismissal of Aleks Owczarek, a professor of mathematics at Unimelb. Our focus then was more on the Dean of Science, Moira O’Bryan’s, nasty emails to the Mathematics Department. But it was Phillips who waxed lyrical and hypocritically about “power imbalance”, and it was Phillips who wielded the axe, decreeing that Owczarek should be dismissed, a decree subsequently overturned at the Fair Work Commission.*
A Unimelb colleague has recently alerted us to two more FYC cases involving the University of Melbourne and, in particular, Phillips. One case, still in the FYC works, involves the dismissal of a marketing professor, for “nastiness” or “screaming” or something. With the professor’s appeal against dismissal still in play and with no real details to go on, we’ll leave it be; for news reports, see here and here (M,P).
The second case, involving an engineering professor, is in ways similar in factual basis to the Owczarek thing. Also, as with Owczarek, it was Phillips’ decision to dismiss the professor and, as with Owczarek, Phillips’ decision was subsequently overturned by the Fair Work Commission, with the order that the professor be reinstated.
The engineering case seems to us significantly more egregious than Owczarek’s egregious dismissal, but we won’t go into details.** There appear to be two stark conclusions, however, from the FWC judgments on the two cases:
1) The dismissal laws, as instantiated in the the Fair Work Act and the University’s of Melbourne’s Appropriate Workplace Behaviour Policy, provides the University with broad license to be vicious;
2) The University of Melbourne has been significantly more vicious than the broad viciousness to which they were legally entitled.
Anyway, Nicky is now off to Adelaide University. What “dimensions of culture” does Nicky have planned? Will Nicky instigate there the same culture of “equity, inclusion and conduct” that she championed at Melbourne? As it happens, there is no need. It is no great surprise that Adelaide has already proven itself very accomplished at throwing their academics under a bus in the pursuit of absurdity. But, Nicky will fit right in.
Good bye, Nicky, and good luck. To Adelaide.
*) True to form, the University of Melbourne has apparently appealed FWC’s Owczarek decision. The University is, of course, blind to the hypocrisy of whining about an “abuse of power” while wielding their massive institutional and financial power in continuing to pursue the matter.
**) For those who want to get a sense of the engineering case, the following paragraphs of the FWC decision are of particular note: 1, 2, 7, 16, 21, 27-28, 43, 51, 58-60, 66. Our sense after a semi-close reading is that DP Colman’s decision in the engineering case is more confused and less convincing than DP Bell’s in the Owczarek case. DP Colman also seems colder, less concerned and thus less understanding of the almost inevitable clumsiness of adult relationships. Nonetheless, DP Colman did not ignore the fundamental harshness of the University’s conduct, which formed the basis of his ruling.
