Prof George Williams is the first Australian vice-chancellor on TikTok. He’s also the first Australian vice-chancellor willing to embarrass himself on TikTok.
During his past year heading Western Sydney University (WSU), and posting on the platform, Williams, 56, has done a headstand for 10,000 likes, given his gen Z employees full rein to edit his videos and used the “hopecore” social media trend to discuss the end of the semester.
“George is so Winnie the Pooh coded,” one commenter replied on a video of Williams unboxing open day merchandise.
“WHO IS THAT DIVA,” another wrote below a post of the VC grooving out to Ariana Grande in a university-branded T-shirt.
His motivation to take to social media was not to seek a future career as an influencer but was instead to engage with his students on their terms, in their arena.
“When I arrived, I set up an online Zoom session for 50,000 students,” he tells Guardian Australia.
“Twenty-five turned up. I reflected on what was a failure to connect, and our social media team said, ‘You’re just in the wrong place. You’ve got to go to where the students are, and that’s TikTok and Instagram.’
“I said, ‘I’ve never been on those but if that’s where I have to go, I will.’”
Now, thousands of people join TikTok for live sessions with the VC, on anything from intergenerational inequality to food insecurity. When walking around campus, people will often say to Williams: “You’re that guy on TikTok! What do you do here?”
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Placing students at the heart of the university experience doesn’t sound revolutionary. But, Williams argues, in an era defined by chasing research rankings and profits from the financial market amid an increasingly dwindling funding pool, vice-chancellors have lost sight of higher education’s goal.
On Monday Williams’ first essay on the sector – Aiming Higher: Universities and the future of Australian democracy – was published by Australia Institute Press, describing in frank detail the critical juncture the embattled sector is facing.
Some vice-chancellors have been hesitant to directly address the declining social licence of universities and backlash over corporatisation and governance concerns, which have been the focus of a Senate inquiry and unseated the former head of the Australian National University, Prof Genevieve Bell.
In its submission to the inquiry, the peak body for the sector, Universities Australia, said governance and industrial relations matters fell “largely outside of our remit”, despite having a representative on the federal government’s newly formed expert council on university governance.
“All too often, we see issues tangentially linked to governance framed as such and utilised for political purposes,” its chief executive officer, Luke Sheehy, wrote.
Williams, a leading constitutional law expert and decades-long academic who became WSU’s fifth vice-chancellor last July, has adopted a different tune.
“We are, across the board, letting young people down,” he says.
“I think the incentives within the system sometimes actively work against the interests of domestic students … universities get less for educating [them]. On the other hand, they get a lot for international students.
“I’m actually comfortable with different levels of international students, it depends on your mission. But what I’m uncomfortable with is where that’s at the expense of domestic students.”
At the same time, universities are driven by rankings, which, Williams says, are generated by strong research outcomes and international engagement.
“You prioritise your research, you get your ranking, you attract international students, your revenue goes up, it’s that cycle,” he says. “But domestic students don’t get a look in.”
In addition to returning the university’s mission to students, Williams argues in his essay for a remuneration tribunal to set the salaries of vice-chancellors, with their eye-watering pay packets coming under fire from politicians, the tertiary education and student union.
Coming to WSU, Williams rejected the $1m remuneration of his predecessor, instead benchmarking his salary against federal departmental secretaries and officials to take a 25% pay cut.
He says the issue is “more than optics”.
“I’s about values as well,” he says. “It’s about this reflecting our status as public bodies for the public good, where a large part of our funding comes from taxpayers.
“And symbolically, it’s emblematic for many people of problems with universities. It speaks to corporate cultures … I think the defensiveness [from executives] on the issue has been unhelpful.”
Williams quotes, in the initial pages of his essay, from a column published by the former academic Jenna Price in the Sydney Morning Herald titled: “Don’t go to university next year. Just don’t.”
The piece argues universities are now places of “chaotic cost-cutting” and “cruel managers whose sole interest is the bottom line”.
Asked how reading the article made him feel, he replies: “It made me sad, because I could understand where she was coming from.
“It’s reckless not to take that seriously … We’ve got to change and we’ve got to respond. If I see a problem, let’s call it out. Let’s have an honest discussion and let’s build momentum to fix it.”
