Universities are big but they are not businesses, Merlin Crossley (UNSW) ARGUES in CMM 

Problem is that their size makes them look like corporations, “I think the increases in scale have had profound effects. As individual university annual budgets have grown into the billions either management has become more corporate, or it has just felt that way,” he suggests.

Perhaps the way universities present does not help. Advertising agencies prize university clients and HE collateral is always corporate quality. Some Victorian university annual reports, published last week, included glossy good news, with pics of flash facilities and smiling staff and students.

In contrast, Queensland universities annual reports are all created to the same monochrome standard – they present as institutions with nothing to sell, other than their achievements.