RMIT – what's going on?

Recent reports of staff bullying at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology have been overtaken by the university flagging a new bizarre behaviour modification scheme called the ''Behavioural Capability Framework' (BCF).

The BCF wants staff to adopt more positive attitudes and concomitant behaviours and these will be assessed against a yearly work plan.

I ran the writing programs at RMIT for six years and taught there for 12 years as a tutor, lecturer and senior lecturer. My home faculty was Art, Design and Communication (now Media and Communication).

I left in 2004, just before RMIT sacked more than 500 staff. I could see the writing on the wall. The payout was generous and almost every staff member I knew in my age cohort (mid 30s-early 40s) jumped at the chance of a voluntary departure package.

I look back at my time at RMIT with fondness and humour. I got my big break at RMIT in the late 1980s. I had teachers par excellence in Sally White and John Wallace in journalism and Professor Jack Clancy in communication theory.

Dark clouds have been hanging over my alma mater for more than a decade. In 2004 Vice Chancellor Ruth Dunkin resigned creating a 'palace coup' whereby the managerialists in the Faculties of Business and Engineering took over.

Their top down edicts changed the political culture of the organisation, turning it from a relatively stable oligarchy of five faculties (with various degrees of business acumen) to a dictatorship directed by the Chancellery. The factionalism within the restructured mega faculties is tearing the place apart.

As The Age reporter Erica Cervini pointed out in a recent article:

"Is this the same mentality that led the Victorian ombudsman, George Brouwer, to criticise RMIT last year? In October, Brouwer released his report, Investigation into How Universities Deal with International Students."

The report stated that some universities were admitting students with substandard English and passing students who should have failed. RMIT refused to acknowledge there were any problems and stated that Brouwer didn't have jurisdiction to investigate them.

My story may be typical of others at RMIT. I was planning to leave RMIT when a new head of school was appointed from a science department (we were an arts and communications department) in 2002 who enforced his 'vision' on the school much like Hitler enforced his 'mission statement' on Poland.

The new boss was right to sack some staff as they had been woefully underperforming. But like a wolf down from the fold, he got a taste for it.

In the last year of my service at RMIT, the same leader terminated the funding of my doctorate because he didn't believe my work on modeling generational behaviour had much to do with teaching in a creative discipline. Fair enough.

My thesis looked at how the baby boomer generation would head back to TAFE or university to reskill and/or undertake arts and science degrees. On leaving RMIT I bundled up all of my training and expertise and focused on education and generational workforce issues. I haven't looked back since.

From 2002-2006 more than 50 lecturers left RMIT of their own accord and many took their post-graduate research students with them to other organisations.

But this is not all one-way traffic. In my experience, some older staff confused a right with a privilege and left accountability and responsibility out of the equation. In short, they thought slander, gossip and passive aggression were reasonable and mature reactions to work tasks they simply did not like.

Back in 1999 I attended a HR meeting at RMIT, which included a number of senior staff from the then Faculty of Art, Design & Communication. It was a warm Friday afternoon and my attention wasn't really on the PowerPoint presentation until they started talking about sick leave rates, compensation payouts and mortality.

Stress leave as very high and highest amongst middle managers. They also showed a slide on staff mortality. This had nothing to do with work accidents but staff who had died of cancer, stroke or heart attack. This was before the Building 108 cancer/electro-radiation scare. While I had nothing to compare it with, it seemed high.

It was an incisive moment for me. What is the relationship between organisational culture and staff physical and mental health?

Leon Gettler's excellent book Organisations Behaving Badly used Greek Myths to demonstrate, amongst other things, how organisations such as RMIT exhibit psychosis through the suppression of dissent and by a lack of awareness of their own dysfunctional state.

Narcissism and omnipotence go hand in hand with the suppression of dissent. And this is what the RMIT behavioural capabilities framework is all about. Views that challenge the omnipotence of the organisation and raise difficult questions are dangerous, and therefore not tolerated. It is a theme that runs through the case studies of management failure time and time again.

RMIT dramatically needs to lift its game. Erica Cervini states that in the recent Excellence in Research for Australia evaluation of disciplines, RMIT managed just one category of 'excellence' (Architecture). The very average research performance of its arts disciplines is of considerable concern.

RMIT did not make it into the most recent Times Higher Education list or the Academic Ranking of World Universities top 500. This is poor form for an institution than prides itself on its teaching.

Returning RMIT to health involves a process that is confronting and painful, and that zeroes in on its vulnerabilities, one of which is criticism. Failing to fix these issues can be far more painful than ignoring them. Remember HIH, Arthur Anderson or Enron? Their dark secrets festered until the whole structure came crashing down.

As Opinion Online writer Patrick O'Keefe recently wrote in 'RMIT: have passion or else!'

"Perhaps RMIT should work on fostering a sense of belonging among staff, which may then reciprocally display the behaviors that RMIT is craving. This could involve providing adequate resources for staff, adequate staffing for departments, the fostering of inclusion and respect."

Conflict and paradox is embedded in any system that involves different types of people. The question is how these can be managed. The best organisations know how to use these differences creatively in ways that bring out the best in people.