RESUMO
[...]we will examine this failure of leadership through the lens of the statutory nature and governance structures of Australian public universities, cast against the current rhetoric that metaphorically equates universities with commercial corporations, to determine the extent to which such a metaphor is accurate, and ultimately (we contend) detrimental to an effective and efficient university sector. Bullying and wage theft consistently appear in recent news reports, while the casualisation of the workforce has reached unprecedented proportions: for example, the University of Melbourne, Australia's richest tertiary institution, for example, has been recently reported by the ABC as employing 72.9% of its staff on insecure terms (Duffy 2020). [...]structural changes within individual institutions occur at an increasingly rapid pace (often as a result of a new executive member being appointed to a particular portfolio), while academics lament an overall decline in the rigour and quality of the education, notwithstanding the proliferation of reporting forms and protocols allegedly designed to ensure the opposite. [...]university executives, over the past decade, have relied heavily on an international student 'market' when such reliance was not (and still is not) necessarily required by the legislative framework that establishes and regulates Australian public universities (Howard 2021). Universities have a long heritage as corporate entities (Russell 1993), having been structured as such for centuries (Compayre 1893). [...]unsurprisingly, the enabling legislation of all Australian public universities confers upon universities the capacities and powers of a body corporate.