The executive of Charles Sturt University is putting on a brave face, but news that the national regulator had granted it just a four-year registration extension must have sent shivers down some spines.
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The Tertiary Education Quality Standards Agency (TEQSA) notified CSU a fortnight ago that there were concerns regarding some of its regulatory processes.
TEQSA re-registered CSU for just four years instead of the standard seven and has imposed a number of conditions for the university to meet.
These include strict reporting rules with regard to academic risk management, student performance reporting, academic governance processes, academic misconduct and the scholarship activities of staff at the CSU Study Centres.
Vice chancellor Professor Andrew Vann has, naturally, sought to play down concerns about the TEQSA decision and the university stresses it has plans already under way to respond to the conditions placed upon it.
But still there must be some concerns.
This move from TEQSA is certainly unusual and we have to believe the regulators would not have taken it lightly.
The concerns raised by TEQSA generally relate to governance issues rather than teaching standards but they are still serious issues.
No-one enjoys uncertainty and denying CSU the security of a seven-year re-registration was always going to make waves.
CSU is both a major employer and major educator in regional NSW and, simply, must be considered too big to fail.
Education is the biggest industry in Bathurst and CSU to is a major contributor to that. Further, the federal government has put its faith in CSU to deliver a new medical school to train GPs to work in the bush and the Bathurst-based engineering school has proven to be one of the best in the country.
CSU has a proud record of its graduates finding jobs and the university's average graduate incomes compare well to any other institution in the country.
It's impossible to imagine that all of that could be put at risk due to governance irregularities and we must have faith that each of the conditions imposed by TEQSA will, in turn, be revoked.
Until that time there will be furious activity going on behind the scenes at CSU while it will be "business as usual" in public.
And this will be fixed - hopefully sooner rather than later.