Vice-Chancellor’s Mid-Year Town Hall

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Reflecting on achievements and rededication to purpose

I appreciate many of you taking time from your University commitments to attend my recent Town Hall.

I believe it is timely mid-year for us to pause and reflect on our purpose at Macquarie University and to celebrate our achievements.

I noted just a couple at the Town Hall meeting – the wonderful accolade afforded to Associate Professor Ronika Power in the Department of Ancient History, who recently received one of the most prestigious medals from the Australian Academy of Humanities, and Macquarie’s shortlisting in the final round for an Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence. We have great hopes it will get over the line.

I also reflected during the Town Hall on the purpose of the University. We have witnessed another graduation season, celebrating another wonderful set of new graduates leaving the University to explore the rest of their careers.

I noted the continuation of the outstanding work on the curriculum redevelopment that is happening every day, and acknowledged with great appreciation the extraordinary work in which many of you are deeply engaged.

Keeping pace with a changing global landscape

I want to offer you some of my thoughts about the nature of the rapidly changing world and its very real complexity. Many of you may be asking the questions “Why am I doing this”? “How does my work fit into the bigger picture?”

Let me share with you from where I see this complexity emanating, and why we are doing the work that we are doing. Graduates of today, particularly if they are undergraduate high school-leavers, will reach the pinnacle of their careers in 25 or 30 years’ time. It is essential we keep asking ourselves “How are we doing in preparing these folks or career transitioning more mature graduates to lead the world that is out there in the year 2040 or 2050?”

Megatrends affecting our society

There are a number of megatrends around the world already affecting us, and many more side issues which will dramatically change the way we operate by 2050.  A number of these observations emanate from the two retired US military officers (Admiral James Stavridis and General John Allen):

  • A move of geopolitical power from the west to the east;
  • People are becoming more urbanised – by the year 2050, more than 70 per cent of the world’s population will live in cities;
  • Many of those people will live in so-called megacities, larger than 10 million people;
  • We will be dealing with new epidemics. How many of us 10 years ago had ever heard of Ebola virus? How many of us five years ago had heard of the Zika virus?
  • Global food security is a huge issue affecting the world due to climate change;
  • The networked world becomes more complex by the second;
  • There is no question there are emerging economies of the world – the GDP from the emerging world eclipsed the developed world approximately four years ago;
  • The rise of economies based around natural resource wealth;
  • There is escalating Western nationalism; and
  • With an ageing population we have a whole new set of challenges.

Global university trends

I have come to the concerning view in the last few years that there has been an emerging erosion of trust between societies and universities. The Hungarian government essentially forced the Central European University to shut down and move to Vienna, for example. In the last few months, the Brazilian government unilaterally cut more than 40 per cent funding to one university.

If we look at what is happening in Australia, the landscape is shifting. There are multiple reports that are about to be delivered by the Government relating to:

  • Performance funding under the Commonwealth Grants Scheme (CGS);
  • Reallocation of Commonwealth Supported Places (CSP);
  • Higher Education Provider Category Standards (PCS);
  • Australian Qualification Standards; and
  • Legislation to ban contract cheating.

In addition, there is government interest in:

  • Student retention and completion rates;
  • English-language skills of international students; and
  • Freedom of speech and academic freedom.

The current focus in the media is around how universities are not doing enough to protect and preserve freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of enquiry and academic freedom on university campuses. Those are the things where Macquarie’s policy framework by and large stands us in very good stead. There is a very active Academic Senate working party looking at freedom of speech and aligning that with our other policies.

I profoundly support the notion of freedom of speech on university campuses in any democratically elected society.

University’s role in society

What is a university? What is our role in society? How did we get to where we are now as a nation whose future economic and social prosperity should be supported by the work of universities? The modern universities in the 1800s and beyond came out of several different and competing traditions.

The Humboldtian German universities came out of a fervent belief in the primacy of academic disciplines. The discipline, and its associated research, was what was really grounding about what it meant to be a university. The tradition was quite different in the United Kingdom, and particularly Ireland and Scotland. It came out of a belief that a university should be about the search for broadly based truth. While if you look at French universities, it was the primacy of engineering schools.

Where did Australia land? The founding of our universities, and the traditions that we have here today at Macquarie, came from an amalgam of all those ideas. An amalgam of the importance of a disciplinary strength individually, about the importance of broad education  and about preparing people for vocations in some fields more directly than in others.

Australian universities, by and large, are an amalgam of the historical trajectory of the other European universities where we find our origins. I see Macquarie University, as we are now, as a blend of those historic traditions. On the one hand engaged in teaching and researching areas of direct relevance to specific careers and businesses/industries; on the other hand, we have preserved rich traditions in the liberal arts and humanities which are the bedrock of preparing our students to be civic minded members of society. Those disciplines also provide thought leadership into many aspects of public discourse and scholarship in its own right. In this blend, we are an amalgam of the foundational differences of the various European origins of the modern western university.  My view is that we should protect and preserve this construct of how we have evolved.

Our collective journey is about building community

It is good to be a part of a university that reflects the reality of the world, that reflects the need for employment and careers at the same time as preparation to be a good community citizen, to lead that world that is rapidly changing out there.

Being part of a university is about helping our students’ journey to a productive and engaged life. Community is very important.  We have an opportunity to be a model of communitarian-based futures for our students – to show our students and our colleagues what it is to be part of a community, where these things prevail, where we have shared values, where we share things in common, where we care about each other. That is what I think is so terrific about Macquarie University. This University, like no other university I have ever known, has this very strongly embedded.

It is important to reflect on the vision we set about six years ago, about what we want to be as a university. I would advocate that ‘Framing of Futures’ continues to ground us in the work we are doing.

Building renown

We get very fixated about university rankings that count for a couple of things, but don’t tell the whole picture. We get very concerned about the rankings that will help drive international student recruitment. We get very concerned about the ranking systems that measure citation-based peer-reviewed journal performance. However, what we are doing here is looking at one aspect of the whole, and not the whole.

For me, renown is the whole story. If we look out across Macquarie University, we have terrific stories of renown in many different fields. Many parts of the University across humanities, arts and social sciences, as well as the STEMM fields, are represented in the top 100 in the world. Globally, our Philosophy department is the highest ranked department in this University. That is equally as valuable in my mind as counting the aggregated rankings that drive recruitment of students.

How are we travelling?

It is important we are honest with how Macquarie is travelling, and how we compare to other universities in Australia on important indices such as quality of learning engagement, quality of student support services, and student experience. Student Satisfaction Survey figures show we are less than the norm across Australia. This is why we are doing the work around student success framework. This is why we are so heavily engaged in the curriculum development work. It is about building renown around real and measurable performance.

We have incredible success in our vision to be connected. The launch of the Macquarie Park Innovation District is going extremely well. Excellent results are being achieved in our global engagement on many fronts, including student recruitment, institutional partnerships, alumni and philanthropy.

Our performance growth in research funding is good, but the slope of the line needs to be steeper because others are outperforming us. This is an opportunity to build renown, this is an opportunity to excel in our fields of excellence. This is about becoming the best university we can be and, by doing so, empowering our staff and students to be the best they can be as well.

Our campus transformed

This is a very exciting time for this University, amidst much change, as the vision for this remarkable campus continues to unfold.

The central courtyard is well underway. It will be a magnificent new facility with multipurpose areas, particularly for teaching, a new graduation hall, and new food services and, importantly, student housing will feature in the centre of the University campus.

We have new space for Macquarie University International College (MUIC) and the English Language Centre (ELC). I encourage you to have a wander through that beautifully renovated space for our pathway students. We also have a wonderful new space outside Walanga Muru, a meeting place for our Indigenous students, staff and their guests.

The redevelopment of the arts precinct is coming along very well, including a wonderful rooftop garden. The clinical education building is well underway, wedged in between the hospital and 75 Talavera Road. The Marquee has been a very successful multi-purpose space, most recently providing  a fresh, comfortable area for exams.

We have also been doing some campus development works focussed on the safety of how you move around campus. Redirecting and closing roads and removing cars from its centre is about making our campus safer for the tens of thousands of staff and students who use it every day.

I also point out that much of the fundamental infrastructure of the campus is ageing quickly.  Millions of dollars a year must be spent to upgrade basic services such as provision of water and electricity across the campus.

Looking forward

Where are we up to right now? Enrolments are going very well. The enrolment data for domestic and international students for first session this year is largely mirrored in second session. It is very pleasing to see that in a market that has turned down in NSW domestically, Macquarie is up. I do foreshadow complexity around domestic growth into the future with the re-election of the Liberal-National Coalition; there will be no reintroduction of uncapped places.

We have recovered some lost ground in international enrolments this year. A number of steps were taken to facilitate this, particularly diversifying our reach away from China and into other parts of the world, including other parts of Asia.

The Macquarie International team and the domestic futures students’ team are doing excellent work in sustaining us in the recovery of our enrolment profile.

The research story is one where a little is good, but more is better. Our external funding for research remains a challenge for Macquarie. We are gathering momentum, however, and more interest is being shown in extramural funding of research from non-peer-reviewed agencies. I would urge you to continue with that endeavour as we work together also to protect and preserve the positions in ERA we have secured.

I thank you all for the effort you make every day for Macquarie University and its community. I encourage you all to take a multi-dimensional view as we build on what it means to be a community working towards greater things.

Thank you for the questions received following the Town Hall. A number of themes have emerged, and I have answered them with the help of my Executive Group colleagues. Due to their number, answers will appear in This Week in several sets over the coming weeks.

Leading Macquarie University continues to be one of the greatest honours of my professional life, and I do so with gratitude for the vital role you all play in making this such a special place to study and work.

Sincerely,

SBD


 A video of the Vice-Chancellor’s Town Hall presentation is now available online:

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