Australia’s universities have become playgrounds for overpaid executives and inept governance, leaving students and staff to bear the cost of systemic failure, writes Dr Binoy Kampmark. The report states:‘The gap between universities’ perceptions of their governance processes and the experiences described by university staff and students was striking.’Here, we have a glaring problem of terminology. The university staff and students are, by definition, not the university. The Committee received evidence from staff and students showing their near-inconsequential role in the making of decisions of the university before the autocratic whims of university councils. The corollary of such inconsequentiality lies in those 306 university executives with Himalayan salaries who have proliferated like fungi in moist climes.