Massive 3/4 page article in the
Sun Herald today:
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Black start to uni revolution
From
The Sun-Herald, May 13, p. 15.
Souce.
May 13, 2007
THE SAGA of Macquarie University's feud with its former vice-chancellor, Di Yerbury, continued last week in the same madcap fashion it began.
All week the 61-year-old blonde one-time queen bee of the North Ryde campus has been holed up in the Phillip Street offices of Minter Ellison Lawyers, inspecting the contents of 133 cardboard boxes that have been the subject of legal wrangling in the NSW Supreme Court.
Under the terms of the agreement reached last week between Yerbury and the university, she must inspect the boxes in the presence of an "observer" and is said to have resorted to building a wall of empty boxes around herself in an attempt to preserve her privacy.
After 19 years of devoting almost every waking minute to what she called "my beloved Macquarie", it is a sad postscript for the popular Yerbury, even with the reputed $1million payout and six-figure annual pension her energetic lawyers managed to extract from the university.
The battle with her successor, the New York-born psychologist Steven Schwartz, turned ugly long ago, with forensic auditors and lawyers at 50 paces and embarrassing leaks to the media all year about a missing employment contract, weekend secretaries, a nude painting and a dawn raid on the university storeroom, caught on CCTV.
Even the unexplained death of Schwartz's 29-year-old son in his sleep, which Schwartz learnt about in a heartbreaking phone call in a taxi from the airport the day he arrived in Sydney from England last January, has been dragged into the fray.
But behind the scandal is a serious story about corporate governance and whether the billions of dollars of taxpayer money poured into Australian universities is being managed carefully enough.
Under Yerbury's freewheeling reign, for instance, some record-keeping was so relaxed that the university claims to have found no clear ownership records of paintings, said to be worth millions, that Yerbury says are her property on loan to Macquarie, but which the university says have been "co-mingled" with its collection.
One painting the university is not contesting ownership of is a Clifton Pugh of Yerbury's naked bottom. "We're happy to hand that one over," said university spokesman Mark Gold on Friday.
Schwartz, 60, previously vice-chancellor of West London's Brunel University, has been ruthless in his pursuit of what he regards as sloppy account keeping during Yerbury's tenure. He ordered two independent audits by Deloitte: one into Yerbury's employment contract, entitlements, expenses, loan of a private art collection and outside employment; and one into the activities of Macquarie International, the university's division dealing with overseas students, which raised questions of excessive spending on travel and expenses, including a $770 cab fare. Schwartz has referred both audit reports to the Independent Commission Against Corruption.
Then there is the police investigation into the activities of the Macquarie University Students' Council after a whistleblower last month warned of possible mismanagement of student funds. The university council has appointed a provisional liquidator to the union.
Schwartz's appointment was never going to be painless.
When he first arrived at the leafy campus last year he found no office, no telephone and no secretary, and Yerbury still ensconced in the large vice-chancellor's suite with the amorphous role of "international ambassador". Quite how the university council, headed by ASX chairman Maurice Newman, could have allowed such a recipe for disaster to develop is not clear. But the inevitable clash of very different personalities has engulfed the university ever since, and a Yerbury-Newman conciliatory dinner last March did nothing to stop the tension.
The pity is that all the fuss has overshadowed the exciting ideas Schwartz has for Macquarie, to develop research excellence, recruit the best academics, attract more students and improve access for clever but disadvantaged people.
"This uni has been asleep for a while," he said in a recent interview in his office. "It has been punching under its weight ... and nowadays, when people are being asked to pay for their education, they deserve a higher level of accountability."
Schwartz also plans to open a postgraduate medical school modelled on the prestigious Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in the US, with cerebrovascular neurosurgeon Professor Michael Morgan as dean. It will be integrated with the new 144-bed Macquarie University Private Hospital to be built on campus by the end of next year.
He also aims to create a Silicon Valley environment by inviting scientific research companies onto the campus.
And he wants to send out Macquarie's lecturers to teach in local high schools to grow a new generation of science undergraduates.
Revolutions are never easy.
hahaha so true, all my 'closest' uni friends live literally close. no more than 20-30 mins away. some live within walking distance. 
