The appointment of the Australian Catholic University’s vice chancellor was the final act of a dying man.
It was 2020, and the university’s chancellor, John Fahey, had advanced leukaemia. Fahey had lived a life of public service – he’d been a NSW premier and a federal finance minister – and was determined to appoint a new vice chancellor as his final act. He chose Slovenian-born Zlatko Skrbis, a sociologist who’d come to ACU from a career in secular universities. Fahey died soon after. Some wish he’d bequeathed the decision.
Skrbis stepped into a tough job. Politics is complex at all universities, but the ACU has a particularly strange set of overlords; it is funded by the federal government and most of its students are not Catholic, but it is overseen in Australia by a coalition of bishops, …