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The existence of a petition calling for chancellor Michael Still to leave his post wasn’t especially surprising – things had been going poorly for some time at the University of Wollongong.
An agreement to outsource its student accommodation went south during the pandemic and the university was forced to pay $169 million to exit the arrangement. A $6.6 million wage theft bill and a serious decline in international student revenue had put the university in a parlous state. Meanwhile, a spate of redundancies and the closure of several departments had also left a bad taste in the mouth of the community, staff and students.
The university earlier this year was castigated in a parliamentary inquiry into governance, which has recommended it be compelled to detail its commercial activities, including stalled controversial inroads into Saudi Arabia.
Then this month, the state’s Independent Commission Against Corruption announced a three-week inquiry into the university, starting on Monday. It came after the Herald revealed the corruption watchdog was investigating the institution.
Under Operation Scandi, the ICAC will examine whether chief governance officer and secretary Alyssa White or any other UoW staff had been “intentionally subverting recruitment processes” to benefit White’s friends. It is also investigating whether White, Still or other staff had improperly awarded work to a consulting firm called Aspirall Consulting, and whether Still or other staff had failed to manage a conflict of interest with interim vice-chancellor John Dewar and another consulting firm KordaMentha, of which he is a partner.
A former head of lobby group Universities Australia, Dewar was made interim vice chancellor in 2024. KordaMentha was awarded a contract worth $2.9 million for the university’s “transformation strategy” while Dewar was in the role.
Still told the inquiry that a “very strict” process had been followed in both appointing Dewar and giving contracts to KordaMentha.
So it was of little surprise that a petition demanding the chancellor’s exit began to circulate among academics and professional staff.
What did come as a shock, however, was the dozens of current staff who were willing to openly call for Still to step down.
“This list of names on a public site has [given] permission for the whole UoW community to ask the same question of the chancellor and UoW council without fear of reprisal,” said Lisa Simmons, the long-time UoW employee whose whistleblower disclosures bought the allegations to the attention of the ICAC in March last year.
Governance concerns began to emerge in 2024, Simmons told the parliamentary inquiry into university governance.
“Respectful questions … went unanswered, and senior leaders who raised concerns were no longer there. In early 2025, colleagues began sharing their experiences of pressure, intimidation and ethical compromise,” she said.
Simmons made claims to the inquiry including that “amendments” meant a number of the vice chancellor’s powers were given to Still; that White “may have failed to appropriately declare or manage conflicts of interest”; that “potential reprisals” had led to a university executive who had raised concerns being made redundant and a “growing distance between the University of Wollongong and the people it was created to serve”.
“These conditions didn’t happen overnight,” Simmons said.
“They developed over many years when accountability structures were weakened, risk and assurance functions stopped being able to protect the public interest, and silence became the suffocating norm.”
