The Australian Catholic University’s senate is due to decide Thursday whether to renew the appointment of its vice-chancellor.
That might not sound like a big deal, but it comes at a troubled time for ACU. The university has been at the center of a storm over its Catholic identity since October, when students staged a mass walkout during a speech criticizing abortion, IVF, and same-sex marriage.
Critics will be watching closely to see whether the senate decides to approve a second four-year term for vice-chancellor Zlatko Skrbis. Detractors accuse him of failing to defend the university’s Catholic ethos — a charge his supporters deny.
What exactly is happening at ACU? What was the impact of the mass walkout? And what’s next for the university?
What’s going on?
The ACU, which describes itself as one of the world’s top 10 Catholic universities, opened in 1991, after four tertiary institutions were merged.
The taxpayer-funded institution has more than 32,000 students based on seven campuses in Australia and one in Rome. Its constitution emphasizes it is a Catholic university, operating under the norms of the 1990 apostolic constitution Ex corde Ecclesiae.
The university was established as Australian Catholic University Limited (Corporation), a public company limited by guarantee. The senate, led by Chancellor Martin Daubney, is the corporate governing body.
Beneath the senate in ACU’s governance structure is Skrbis, who is both vice-chancellor and president. He is the university’s CEO, representing ACU at the national and international levels.
The Slovenia-born sociologist took up the role in January 2021. Under his leadership, ACU is following a 10-year strategic plan known as Vision 2033, which underlines that “our Catholic faith, identity, and culture are central to who we are as a university.”
This year has proven challenging for Skrbis. Trouble began in January, when the ACU named Kate Galloway its dean of law. Her public statements on abortion provoked a backlash, including a petition calling for the appointment to be reviewed.
Amid the outcry, Galloway was reportedly reassigned as a “strategic professor” with a payment of 1 million Australian dollars, equivalent to a four-year salary. Skrbis is said to have lamented “errors of fact and misleading allegations” in media coverage of the appointment.
In July, The Australian newspaper published a scathing column which said that “ACU recorded a $35m deficit in 2023… keeps laying off dozens of staff, lost its chief operating officer, dropped significantly in the world university ranking index, and suffered a decline in student enrolments.”
Skrbis, it claimed, was “on the endangered species list.”
October surprise
While the Galloway appointment gained national media attention, it was in October that the university made international headlines.
At an Oct. 21 graduation ceremony, former labor union leader Joe de Bruyn was presented with an honorary doctorate for his “outstanding support of the Catholic Church in Australia.”
In an address, de Bruyn described abortion as “the single biggest killer of human beings in the world.” He also highlighted his opposition to IVF and stressed that “marriage between a man and a woman was instituted by God at the origin of humanity in the Garden of Eden as the book of Genesis in the Bible tells us.”
As he spoke, students in black gowns and mortarboards streamed out of the auditorium.
De Bruyn ended his speech with an appeal to the few remaining graduates.
“As happened to me, you will be faced with issues in your professional and personal lives where the general opinion of the majority of the population is at odds with the teaching of the Church,” he said.
“My experience is that many Catholics cave in to peer pressure. They think their professional lives will be harmed if they promote the teaching of the Church. My experience is that this is not so.”
The key, he said, was to “use logic in a persuasive way.” While others may still disagree, “they will respect you for your point of view,” he said before the emptied auditorium.
In the furor following the speech, ACU reportedly promised “a full refund of graduation fees to all students impacted.” It is also said to have offered students counseling services.
De Bruyn defended his address. In an Oct. 22 radio interview, he said: “I was in the position where I had been invited by the university to give a graduation speech in my capacity as a Catholic layman coming to Australian Catholic University for an award, an honor, for my services to the Catholic Church. So it was most appropriate for me to deal with Catholic issues which had come up in my professional life in the past.”
De Bruyn attracted high-profile defenders, including Melbourne’s Archbishop Peter Comensoli, a member of the ACU’s senate, and Cardinal-elect Mykola Bychok.
Bychok, a Ukrainian Greek Catholic bishop in Melbourne who will receive the red hat Dec. 7, insisted that Catholics “must be free to say that which we believe to be the truth as passed to us by Our Lord.”
In response to the walkout, Sydney’s Archbishop Anthony Fisher reportedly wrote a strongly worded, six-page letter to ACU’s pro-chancellor Virginia Bourke.
He is said to have written that he was “ashamed” at ACU’s “recent performance” and called for “some serious soul-searching” about the institution’s identity and mission.
He also reportedly resigned as chair of ACU’s committee of identity, though he will continue to serve as a director of the committee and of the university’s corporation.
A Dec. 3 open letter from figures associated with the St. Thomas More Society, a Catholic lawyers’ group, added to the pressure on the ACU’s leadership.
Referring to Fisher, the lawyers said: “This withdrawal of episcopal confidence leads us to believe that if ACU has not already lost its Catholic identity, it is on the verge of doing so.”
Given that ACU is a Catholic institution governed by canon law, the lawyers said, there were two ways to address the university’s identity crisis. The first would be to launch an “independent investigation” into ACU leaders’ actions in the past year. The second was to begin the process of removing the word “Catholic” from ACU’s name.
“For ACU to lose its Catholic status would be a grave loss for the whole Catholic community in Australia,” the lawyers said in the letter, which was accompanied by a five-page canonical analysis of the university’s situation.
“We all hope that this extreme course of action can be avoided, and we feel confident that all members of the corporation and the senate will also wish to avoid it.”
The ACU’s leadership, meanwhile, does not seem to have addressed the controversy publicly. But it would likely reject claims it is distancing itself from the Church, given the strong emphasis on the university’s Catholic identity in publicity materials.
What’s next?
Commentators present the Dec. 5 senate meeting as a potentially significant moment in the debate over ACU’s Catholic identity.
The Australian newspaper suggested that if the senate approved a new term for vice-chancellor Skrbis it would be “the ultimate up-yours to the Catholic Church.” It forecast that the “compliant” 18-member body would wave the reappointment through.
But despite the media focus on Skrbis, the issues swirling around ACU seem larger than any individual.
Strong economic headwinds are buffeting many universities, including Catholic institutions. Catholic universities in highly secularized Western countries face an additional pressure to dilute their identities. Consider how the Catholic University of Louvain sharply criticized Pope Francis’ remarks on women during his September visit to Belgium.
In a January address to Catholic university representatives, the pope lamented that education was seen as a business, with “great impersonal economic systems … investing in schools and universities as they do in the stock market.”
Catholic universities, he said, “must show that they are of a different nature and act in accordance with a different mindset.”
He urged them to embrace “a shared search for truth, a greater horizon of meaning, lived out in a community of knowledge where the liberality of love is palpable.”
Events at ACU show the difficulty of putting the pope’s vision into practice. But it is far from the only Catholic institution facing this struggle.
