Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that the following post contains images and names of people who have died. Permission has been granted to use the names and image of the deceased person

Reconciliation Week is an important time in Australia’s calendar. As a nation we are continually working to achieve reconciliation through a whole range of initiatives, Reconciliation Week itself brings the issue front of mind for us all.

The theme for Reconciliation Week this year is ‘Don’t Keep History A Mystery: Learn. Share. Grow”. Given what we are trying to achieve here at Charles Sturt University in terms of our work with community, as Vice-Chancellor this theme could not resonate more strongly with me. We are working to build the cultural competence of our staff and students, support Indigenous research and develop specific projects with community that enhance and inform our relationships.

Reconciliation Australia, through the theme for this year, invites all Australians to learn more about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and histories, to share that knowledge which will help us grow as a nation. Specifically they note the theme “explores history hidden just beneath the surface, ready and waiting to be uncovered”.

With this in mind, I wanted to take the opportunity to reflect on the life of Wiradjuri Elder, Uncle Jimmy Ingram. It was with great sadness that the University learnt of Uncle Jimmy’s passing on 28 March 2018, aged 82.

While Uncle Jimmy did a lot of work with the University and specifically has had great input into the Nation Building work within the Graduate Certificate in Wiradjuri Language, Culture and Heritage, I wanted to focus on his most recent story telling.

In 2017, through the Giilang biladha (river of stories) project with Burambabili Gulbali and Charles Sturt University, Uncle Jimmy wrote his book ‘A Mother as Loving as You’ that was illustrated beautifully by Bernard Sullivan. The book tells the story of Uncle Jimmy’s mother, Lilian May Richie. It reflects on her spirit and the hardships she faced in keeping her children safe and educating them.

At the start of the book, in a conversation published between Uncle Jimmy and Bernard, Uncle Jimmy highlights that the book is important to him because it explains his existence and his meaning. When you read the book, you understand the power of this. Jimmy says his mother was his key cultural guide: “Your father shows you what to do, your mother shows you how to be.”

Jimmy talks powerfully about his parents’ need to keep moving to avoid the children being taken by the Welfare and the journey takes them through all the sites familiar to Charles Sturt University staff members as they drive between campuses and around our region. The book gives a clear sense of what life was like in rural NSW in the 1920s, 30s and 40s.

Uncle Jimmy’s book allows the nation to learn, share and grow in a way that is not possible without the stories of our Elders and their families. To dive into the life and culture of an Indigenous person through story provides deep insight into the very reasons why we must continually work on reconciliation and Nation Building.

Here is a quote from Uncle Jimmy’s grandson, Peter Ingram:

“My Pop, (Uncle Jimmy Ingram), was a truly inspiring and humble man. He would always reflect deeply and question himself, then he’d go home and do some further research, continually circling back to a quieter place within himself. Many people said he was like a prophet, always nailing the issue and describing really tricky and complex things that needed addressing, but in a truly respectful and loving way. Somehow, he always managed to keep his ego in check, while being powerfully true to himself, yet always encouraging us to find our ‘own’ authentic path.

He taught many people, many things, he showed me many places on Country, taught many stories and possibly most importantly, he was a living example of how to be a good person and how to care for Country and how to care for each other.

While it’s tricky trying to directly translate deep cultural concepts into English, maybe Pop’s instructions for the future were aimed at restoring us to wholeness, creating opportunities that allow us to think about how Wiradjuri ways of being can shape our lives in modern times- Wiradjuri gilang (belonging to Wiradjuri).

Pop left clear instructions for rebuilding a more positive and vibrant, shared future for ALL, especially for the generations yet to come, we all need to work together.” (Pete Ingram 2018)

Beyond his book, Uncle Jimmy lived a life dedicated to Nation Re-Building that celebrated and shared the relationship of Wiradjuri people to their country. I was fortunate enough to be able to formally acknowledge my thanks of Uncle Jimmy’s work to him in the month before his passing. I was able to tell him that CSU is committed to his vision of supporting self-determined economic, social and cultural opportunities for the Wiradjuri people.

Without the work of Indigenous Elders such as Uncle Jimmy through storytelling, yarning and community collaboration, Australia’s history will not be complete. It is so important that as a community we continue to work together to find these beautiful hidden stories and not only uncover them but celebrate them and make them easily accessible. I will continue to support this throughout my time here at Charles Sturt University and ensure this richness informs our students, so they enter the world of work with an appreciation of Aboriginal culture and an ability to themselves contribute to reconciliation.

Please take the time, not only during Reconciliation Week but throughout the year, to regularly engage in the stories of our past – they are important and need to be understood to be truly culturally respectful to the traditional owners of the lands on which we live, work and interact.

The University’s ethos, Yindyamarra Winhanganha, is a Wiradjuri phrase translated as ‘the wisdom of respectfully knowing how to live well in a world worth living in’. At CSU we are working to achieve this every single day and it is personally one of the things that inspires me to ensure my time at the University is impactful, insightful and inclusive.

I would encourage you to buy a copy of Uncle Jimmy’s book. Read it, enjoy the illustrations, but more importantly, reflect on it and talk about it with the people around you and within your community.  It is available to purchase online here.

This Reconciliation Week, I would again like to acknowledge the wrongs of the past and on behalf of my traditional British culture to apologise to the Indigenous people of Australia and the Torres Strait Islands for all the negative impacts of colonisation. As a migrant, I also thank you for your continuing generous welcome to and sharing of your traditional lands. When I think of home, I now think not of Hertfordshire, Nottinghamshire or Avon but of Darumbal, Bindal, Wulgurukaba, Wiradjuri and Jinibara country. Your stories, and your continual sharing of them, inform us and build knowledge of culture and history in a deep, personal and meaningful way.

When I did my first media conference after being appointed to the position of Charles Sturt University Vice-Chancellor in 2011, one of the questions was “will you keep pushing for a Medical School for CSU?” So, CSU has been working towards a Medical School for a very long time. Last week, as part of the Federal budget announcements, the Government announced a package including a Joint Medical Program between CSU and Western Sydney University (WSU) to be taught in Orange and I was finally able to tick this phase off my to-do list. Needless to say, there is a lot of work to be done to get ready to accept students in 2021.

The journey to securing a Medical School has been a long one and has involved a huge amount of effort. This has included work done internally at CSU, by supporters in the community, by local representatives and political leaders and work in partnership with other Universities.

We know there have been continuing chronic issues with maldistribution of doctors and despite a lot of dedicated work, we have not yet solved the problem. Regional people deserve doctors that will be there with them long term and develop care plans that improve their long term health outcomes. The right, consistent, care has flow-on effects in terms of reduced hospital admissions and deferred entry into care facilities – an important point in our aging society.

There is compelling evidence from both Australia and overseas that when trained in the regions, graduates stay in the regions. I am confident Charles Sturt University and Western Sydney University working together will deliver graduates that understand the needs of regional patients and deliver better health care to benefit our regions.

This program is different in some ways from the model we were proposing with La Trobe University. In particular, the curriculum is slightly shorter at 5 years and obviously we have a geographically closer partner. We will work to develop a rural stream of the WSU curriculum to ensure it meets the needs of regional and rural doctors. La Trobe University will now work with the University of Melbourne to create a pipeline into their Postgraduate Medicine degree. Overall, there will be five medical schools across the Murray Darling basin involving seven universities. It is really pleasing to see the commitment from all these universities to delivering end-to-end regional training which, as I noted earlier, is a critical part of developing doctors who want to work in regional areas. It was plain to see at the launch last week that the staff in those universities devoted to regional training are excited about this prospect.

Partnering with WSU to deliver this Program is a great opportunity and we are very grateful to them for their willingness to work with us and their enthusiasm. Having worked with WSU Vice-Chancellor, Professor Barney Glover at both NSW and national level, I have great respect for him and his staff. WSU have delivered a program which is focussed on the needs of their community, including Rural Clinical School placements in the Central West. This will provide a great basis to deliver the education that medical graduates for our communities need.

One of the other things that I am really excited about with this announcement is that there are school students in years 9 and 10 now in regional NSW thinking about their future. They can now know that studying medicine close to home is a real possibility.

To close, I’d like to show how this kind of approach is part of CSU’s DNA. This week, the Nomination and Remuneration Committee of our University Council approved an Honorary Doctorate for Mrs Judith van der Wal.

Mrs Judith van der Wal was instrumental in the establishment of the Nursing program at Charles Sturt University’s predecessor, the Riverina College of Advanced Education (RCAE). Mrs van der Wal, now in her 87th year, led the first non-metropolitan pilot, and the second pilot overall, of nursing training outside the traditional hospital training ground. The approach was innovative at the time and was the first real step in providing skilled nursing professionals to regional New South Wales. The pilot attracted not only Government attention but also national and international nursing community interest.

In 1985 the program’s success saw the whole of the nursing education sector education in New South Wales move to the tertiary sector, closely followed by the other Australian states in 1990. We know this has improved the standard of nursing care in regional NSW and we look forward to the ongoing contribution that this Joint Medical Program will also make.

Now, on with the job!

Andy

I want to welcome everyone to the 2018 academic year which is now in full swing across all our campuses in Australia and at our partner campuses internationally.

Image: CSU Instagram @charlessturtuni

This week all Australian and many international universities attended the Universities Australia 2018 Conference in Canberra.  The Conference theme was ‘Future Fundamentals’ and we had some great sessions on how higher education and universities are changing with the impacts of new technology and globalisation.  The way we interact and learn is changing as we adopt technology and the world becomes more connected.  I think we also heard quite a bit of nostalgia about the way universities used to be and concern about whether the future will be as good.  Personally, I’m optimistic about the future – and the present – the world has changed and we have to change with it.

It also made me think about my own experiences with education. I was very lucky to be part of the generation that went through university education in the UK when there were no tuition charges and with living support for all.  Many people have nostalgia for the social side of University and I have to admit I enjoyed that too!  However, I realise what I really enjoyed and valued was the opportunity to learn knowledge, develop skills and form attitudes that would allow me to become a fully-fledged professional, make a good living for myself and work to make the world a better place.  That to me was the most important thing and that is why I left engineering practice to become an academic – I wanted to be help others have that same experience.  Charles Sturt University in my opinion does this job of preparing students for a life and professional career particularly well and, as we have the highest graduate employment rate of any Australian public university, I think our performance speaks for itself.

Learning is a process of challenge.  If we are to build our knowledge and understanding we have to engage with ideas that are difficult, challenging and sometimes disagreeable.  Unless we test our ideas and understanding we cannot learn and we cannot decide for ourselves what is right, what are the truths of which we are certain, what we need to change and what we need to work harder to understand. That is why the freedom to speak and express ideas is such an important part of the Australian university tradition. Only by engaging with others and testing our own understanding and theirs can we learn and grow.

I mentioned globalisation earlier on.  Some see this as a challenge but as a nation, as a higher education sector and as a University we have gained enormously through our engagement with other nations and from having students studying with us from (and in) other countries as part of our CSU community.  The opportunity to understand another culture and learn to work with people from different backgrounds is one of the most important 21st Century skills.  It is one of our key Graduate Learning Outcomes and we are working to provide this for all of our students.  Our international university partners play a huge role in helping us ensure our students become truely global citizens and we greatly value these long standing (and new) relationships.

So, I send a very warm welcome to our students wherever you are studying with us; whether on campus in Australia, at one of our international partners or online (or all three, as many of you do through your degrees).

Just recently, the Minister for Education, Senator the Honorable Simon Birmingham, sent a message to international students welcoming them to Australian universities.  I would like to echo this message and welcome our international students to CSU in 2018.  Enjoy your time with us, work hard, make friends and make sure you have fun along the way.  I look forward to seeing you all at graduation; whether in Australia or at one of our many international ceremonies. But more importantly, I look forward to you contributing to the CSU ethos and living well in a world worth living in.

I wish everyone an safe and successful 2018.

So here we are at the end of the year. With the completion of 22 graduation ceremonies across CSU this week, we will see out the academic year.

A couple of graduation photos from the recent ceremonies, first one of graduates from the Graduate Certificate in Wiradjuri Language, Culture and Heritage including Uncle Stan and Aunty Flo Grant

and second one from the Port Macquarie graduation today featuring Policing graduates:

2017 has proved to be a big year for the University with many great achievements as detailed in our 2017 EOYW_FINAL.  Not least it is great to see that on the recently released 2016 figures we are still leading in terms of undergraduate and postgraduate online load, as well as leading on Indigenous enrolments and completions.  We are also leading in terms of graduate employment outcomes.

Based on the strategic foresighting work we did in 2016, we have worked long and hard throughout the year to develop the detail of the strategic direction of the University. That has challenged us to be more market-oriented – to think about how well we are serving our students, our communities and our industries – in order to live up to our ethos. As a result of this work, we finish 2017 with a clear picture of our students so we can confidently progress the strategic plan.

We have also taken the opportunity in the second half of the year to strengthen change management at CSU.  This was picked up in feedback in the Your Voice survey and we are using the key strategy projects to develop our in-house change management framework. Through this we will support all managers to manage and communicate change better.

From discussions with staff across the University, it is clear that we have significant talent, intelligence and resources at CSU. I have every confidence that what we can work with and by our communities to deliver positive change and future-proof our regions.  We saw just a taste of what is to come in this space with the launch of the Royal Far West partnership earlier this month.

If you are a member of CSU staff, you can read more about where we are up to with the strategy in the documents from the Vice-Chancellor’s Forum here.

Our students have achieved great things this year, and helped to fill the trophy cabinet yet again. They have also raised funds for many great community organisations. This is testament not only to the focus and determination of our students, but also the support and culture we have built here at CSU.

I am immensely proud of our entire CSU community and the successes we have had this year in our teaching, research and administration. We have won awards for individuals who have excelled in teaching, celebrated the architectural brilliance of our facilities and stayed in the headlines with our research efforts.

I would like to note with great sadness that the CSU community also suffered the loss of many good friends and too many students this year with the passing of Wal Fife, Joe Schipp OAM, Richard Wise, Maddie Clarke, Alexandra Henderson, Emma Philip, Uncle Bill Allan Senior, Emeritus Professor Bruce Mansfield, and Professor David Biles OAM. I will be thinking of the friends and families of all of these great people over the Christmas period.

This week we have seen announcements regarding higher education in 2018 as part of the MYEFO headlines. While we don’t understand the full impact of these measures, we are seeing funding capped at 2017 levels. We will need to work to understand the impacts of this fully, but given this is in many ways worse than the reforms rejected by the Federal Senate, I would expect significant community backlash to this. Certainly, while it was unfortunately not unexpected, this has not been a great start to my Christmas! In the New Year we will ensure we continue lobbying for the higher education sector and are able retain essential funding for our regional students and our communities.

Next year we will also continue to focus on the priority areas highlighted in the Your Voice staff survey. Respect and recognition was one of these areas and I have released a What’s New message on that this week for staff. A renewed approach to ensure we have impact on cross-unit collaboration will be a joint effort from all members of staff in 2018 – so I invite you all to come up with innovative ways to work together and communicate the great work you are doing.

From a leadership perspective, and with the retirement of Professor Ken Dillon, we welcomed Jenny Roberts to the CSU family as DVC Students. Next year we will farewell Professor Julia Coyle and Professor Toni Downes.

2018 will, I am sure, be a big and exciting year. I am going to enjoy some down time over the Christmas and New Year period. After that, I am very much looking forward to the challenges and projects we will see developed as part of our strategic direction. I know that staff will continue to deliver for our students and our regions on a daily basis. I also hope that we can settle on an Enterprise Agreement soon, to support our employees through the next phase of the Charles Sturt University journey.

On a (hopefully) fun note, this year I have tried to merge my love of the humble banjo with a Christmas carol (and save my staff the embarrassment of live carolling on campus!). You can see the outcome of this in a video message here.

I wish you all a peaceful, restful, safe and happy break and look forward to seeing you in 2018.

Andy

As is plain from the debate in the media, the issue of Marriage Equality has been a difficult one for us as a nation. Clearly there are many people in favour of Marriage Equality. I recognise that there are also many of those within our community who are opposed. There are a further category of people who feel uncomfortable about this issue because even if they are personally supportive or undecided, they are concerned about others being forced to deal with the question.

Speaking personally, the decision to support Marriage Equality is straightforward for me. I know many same-sex couples in long-term relationships, some of whom are parents. Personally, I cannot see how it can be right to deny them the opportunity to have their commitment to each other legally recognised by society. I have already ticked ‘yes’ on the ABS survey form.

But that is my personal decision. Unlike most people, as the Vice-Chancellor of this institution, I have additional responsibilities on behalf of the whole University community. In an organisation of nearly 5000 staff and 40,000 students, this is a more complicated decision to make while being respectful of the different positions I outlined above.

I have had representations from staff members individually, from the ALLY program members and from the Online Student Representative Council all of whom have asked me to pledge institutional support.

I have sought the advice of a number of people including my Leadership Team and the Chancellor. From this advice it is evident that ultimately, as with the broader society, there is not a unanimous and perhaps not even a consensus view on this. There are a good number of people who think the University should not take a position except to encourage people to participate in the national vote.

However, from my discussions and the representations that have been made to me, I do not believe we can sit on the fence. This would be celebrated by some and seen as an abdication of responsibility by others so it is not a neutral choice. Given the lack of clear consensus, it is also clear to me that this is a decision that ultimately I have to, and must, make myself in my role as Vice-Chancellor of the organisation.

I do not want to stifle debate. As a University, we should be a space in which difficult issues can be discussed. That is the academic mission of the University and I fully support that and the right of people to exercise free speech within it. As Vice-Chancellor I cannot tell anyone in the University what to think.

However, the University also exists as a corporate body, as an employer of staff and a community of students, and it is in that light that I consider the question of the institutional position. When I consider our key Value of ‘Inclusive’, I believe the right decision is that we should support Marriage Equality before the law and that is the decision I have taken.

As patron of CSU’s ALLY program, a program dedicated to supporting and empowering the LGBTQI+ community, I stand by the LBGTQI+ community and I cannot see how to do that without supporting Marriage Equality before the law.

To the numerous staff who have emailed me personally asking for organisational support, to the Online Student Representative Committee who called for me to make a stand on this issue, and to RivColl, the Riverina Student Representative Committee and your leadership who have taken a stand, the University stands with you in supporting the right of all to have equality before the law.

I have no doubt this decision will be met with criticism by some individuals, and I accept this. I can only do what I think is right and I know that I would regret it later if I do not do that. I also accept and celebrate everyone’s democratic right to take a position in the Marriage Equality debate and I encourage all of you who are entitled to vote to do so in line with your own views and conscience.

Given our Value of Inclusive, CSU is stronger together and we will accept and support all members of the CSU community and recognise their equality before the law. I trust that whatever the outcome of the vote and whatever process follows, we will retain respect for and continue to support each other.

Thank you for taking the time to engage in this important debate in Australia’s history.

Regards,

Andy

Support is available: If you need support or feel distressed during the same-sex marriage debate, please contact a Student Counsellor, the Employee Assistance Program or an ALLY trained representative on your Campus.

Professor Andrew Vann

Vice-Chancellor
Charles Sturt University

As you may well have read or heard in the media, the Federal Government has released its long-awaited proposed higher education policy. While we are still analysing the package to determine what it means for CSU, I wanted to share some initial thoughts with you.

As Minister Birmingham indicated, this package has been designed to “spread the pain,” with students set to pay more, universities to receive less funding and the Government achieving smaller savings than it originally intended.  I think it has been quite cleverly constructed to do this, to address some long-standing issues as well as provide some sweeteners to go with the cuts.

One significant part of the package is the impact on students and graduates.  The ratio of student to Commonwealth payments for degrees will shift, with students to pay on average 46% (up from 42%) of the cost of their degree. This is probably not as bad as we had feared.  In addition, HECS-HELP repayment will now begin at $42,000 at 1% repayments which on the other hand is lower than we had expected.  Acknowledging these, I believe investment in higher education represents good value, particularly for a university like CSU which has very strong graduate employment outcomes.

Another significant part is the imposition of two 2.5% efficiency dividends on Commonwealth Supported Place (CSP) funding to the sector in 2018 and 2019 which the Department of Education estimates will overall have a 2.8% impact on CSU teaching and learning funding.

On the Minister’s figures, combining both measures, the Federal Government will achieve a cumulative saving of approximately 10% in expenditure which is less than their original intention of saving 20% of Commonwealth expenditure.

You will see the Government justifying these cuts by stating that universities have more money than they need to deliver teaching and learning.  This is based on a report commissioned from Deloitte which shows that Universities only spend about 85% of their funding on teaching and learning.  Previously, there has been an acceptance that teaching money supports somewhere between 15-30% research and community engagement.  If we accept this metric, universities are at best close to breakeven or actually underfunded by about 15% which is consistent with previous studies.

The Government also claims that the Deloitte study shows that university funding has risen faster than costs based when compared to previous findings of the Lomax-Smith Review (2011).  In my view, these two studies can’t be directly compared.  They were conducted using different samples and methodology so you can’t draw clear conclusions by comparing the two.

Overall, while the package is less severe than we feared, I of course do not welcome yet another round of cuts to university funding.  I am very concerned that these cuts will again challenge our mission of extending a university education to Australians who have previously been excluded from higher education.

Over recent years, we rightly sought to improve our efficiency, and best use the public money provided to us.  University staff have worked hard for this and should be proud of their achievements.

We will therefore be strongly communicating that further squeezing budgets can only have a negative impact on our ability to serve our regions.  As we all acknowledge, universities are a critical part of driving innovation and we need to help rural and regional Australia expand and grow our economy.

A portion of our funding, 7.5%, will now be contingent on reaching performance measures. In 2018 these relate to providing teaching and research data, as well as compliance with the new admissions transparency requirements. In 2019 however, we understand these measures may reference retention and employment outcomes amongst others. This will require extensive discussion with the Government to ensure it really does support universities to do better work.  I also note that one of the cuts that has already been applied to the sector is the removal of additional performance funding.

In positive news for the University, the Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program (HEPPP) will now be moved into the Higher Education Support Act (HESA) legislation, guaranteeing the fund moving forward. As we all know, HEPPP has played an important role assisting us to extend a university education across our communities, and I am pleased this wonderful work by many dedicated CSU staff may continue and have certainty.

Sub-bachelor degrees will now be part of the demand-driven system, as long as they meet industry needs, which is a great outcome. Likewise, the current clinical loading for medicine will be extended to dentistry and veterinary science programs. This will provide an additional $1394 per student. CSU has advocated strongly for this outcome, and we are pleased to see it included in the policy package.

Finally, we are still working to understand how a number of other measures will impact universities and CSU in particular. Postgraduate Commonwealth Supported Places will initially be cut and then be moved to be student-centred on merit, with the scholarship tied to the individual student and applicable at any institution. We will need to understand how ‘merit’ is defined to appreciate what this will mean for students – for example teachers in regional NSW studying Masters degrees.

The Federal Government is also to provide seed funding for eight new regional study hubs, based on the Geraldton and Cooma models where they support many students.  We have had experience with both of these so look forward to getting more details on this.

Lastly, a new Work Integrated Learning program is to be developed, with work experience able to be counted towards degree programs and with better support from Commonwealth funds.  CSU has a strong track record in work integrated learning, and if this helps to better support students on placement that would be a really good thing.

Obviously this is a significant package of policy measures and changes. We are committed to considering each fully, and advocating strongly to ensure the best results for our institution, staff and students.

You can see our initial media release and response here:

20170502 Higher Education Policy Media Release

As always, if you have any thoughts I am happy to hear from you.  I look forward to providing more detail and analysis as it becomes available.

Global Politics

In the last blog post I mentioned that I had been mulling over the implications of political events and an era which sometimes seems to be ‘post-truth’.  It seems (unsurprisingly) I was not the only one and I would recommend anyone to watch two speeches from the Universities Australia Conference, firstly former Ambassador Jeffrey Bleich’s keynote address:

https://www.universitiesaustralia.edu.au/Media-and-Events/media-releases/Ambassador-Jeffrey-Bleich–Keynote-address#.WOC0JFJL0UE

and secondly UA Chair Barney Glover’s address to the National Press Club:

https://www.universitiesaustralia.edu.au/Media-and-Events/media-releases/Professor-Barney-Glover#.WOC1uVJL0UE

They said what I wanted to say, but much better.

Royal Far West Ride For Country Kids

It’s now three weeks since the Royal Far West Ride For Country Kids in which we had nine CSU staff riding.  This was definitely a challenge – I was relieved to see Daniel Gibson, from Channel 7 who looks supremely fit, describe the first day as one of the toughest rides he’d ever done.  We had temperatures in the high thirties and a strong headwind that was like riding into a hairdryer.  When you reached for a water bottle, it was hotter than you were.  Every peloton had someone who just couldn’t continue about 15kms outside of Cootamundra.  I’m pleased to say all the CSU riders made it in under their own steam (no pun intended).  The second day was wet and cold, and on the third day we hit strong and gusty headwinds about the same time we hit the big hills on the way in to Orange.  I think we earned the sponsorship money.  Having started at CSU Wagga, we finished at the CSU Orange Campus and our Physiotherapy students were on hand to deal with knotted and aching muscles.

Between the two CSU teams, we raised over $30,000 and the event raised over $600,000 in total, which is a great result.  A big thank you to all the riders, to everyone who provided sponsorship and to all those who attended the barbecue campus events at Port Macquarie, Bathurst and Wagga Wagga which raised more than $2000 out of the total.  Six out of the nine of us – before we started riding, but after Jonathan had had his head shaved – are in the picture below.

On the cycling theme, I also wanted to thank our Paramedics students for assisting in the Blayney to Bathurst Ride last Sunday – and in particular to Ash and Callum for helping my cycling buddy out with a cramp problem at the bottom of Rockley Mount – much appreciated!

Strategy Progress

Last week we had Vice-Chancellor’s Forum (VCF) in Bathurst which was the largest we have had (I’m tempted to say ‘period’) as we invited all the Heads of School.  At this, we worked through the first cut of the sub-plans for the 2017-22 Strategy document approved by University Council at the end of last year.  The aim was to expose the thinking about how to take the strategy forward, think about prioritisation as well as possible overlaps and conflicts.  My sense was that there was a really good spirit around this and we certainly got a lot of useful feedback from the participants.  Further information on this, included the documentation presented at VCF, will be posted on Yammer in the next week or so.  The aim of this is to expose it further and gather feedback from across the university – I encourage everyone to get involved in this process.  We want to be sure the strategy is as good as it can possibly be.

Support for Regional Innovation

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve had launches of our support for entrepreneurship.  In Bathurst we launched CenWest Innovate which is a program led by Professor Mark Morrison to support innovation and entrepreneurship in Small-to-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) by providing masterclasses and linkages to University staff.

Another arm of this is work led by Associate Professor Michelle Evans to support Indigenous entrepreneurship.  This is the Walan Mayinygu Program which is running ‘Pop Up’ events in various communities across our footprint and includes advice from successful Indigenous entrepreneurs.  We are also investing in The Agri Business Park in Wagga to encourage Agri Business start-ups and this is being led by Professor John Mawson.  Through all of these programs the aim is to support economic growth and jobs in regional NSW and this work has been supported through the NSW Dept of Industry Boosting Business Innovation Program.

Road Shows

My office is once again planning out Road Shows across the University starting this week through to the end of the year (it’s a big place!). I am trying to make the briefings at team level via campus – so please get in touch if you have a team session already planned for later in the year to see if we can combine the two. Email vc@csu.edu.au

Will sign off for now, more to come.

Welcome to the start of the 2017 Academic year.  I have to confess that I got blocked in writing the first blog post of the year by events in world politics and wondering about the role of universities is in a ‘post-truth’ era.  But I’ll come back to that in a subsequent post.

Yesterday I went along with other staff to greet new students and parents arriving in the residences at Bathurst.  We are holding similar events across our campuses.  It was really great to see the new faces and to welcome everyone back to campus – it always seems very quiet without the students around.  A week ago, I and other members of the Senior Executive met with the Resident Assistants (RAs) as part of the training they receive before taking on the role.  This is a wonderful way to start the year as the RAs are a very impressive and motivated group of people. It’s also a great opportunity to hear first hand how they are finding the University.  They do a terrific job of setting the tone and culture in our residences and we are very proud of them for this and the support they provide their fellow students.

I mentioned in the last post that we will be rolling out the new 2017-22 University Strategy over the first half of the year.  At this point, our Directory of Strategy, Planning and Information, David Bedwell and his team are working with various areas to fully scope and define the content of the strategic goals.  Stay tuned for more updates on this as the work progresses however, at this stage I am really happy to see the direction progressing with our communities, students and our staff in mind.

As a final note, last year we had four staff taking part in the Royal Far West Ride For Country Kids and this year myself and eight other CSU staff from across our campuses are taking part.  We have been working with Royal Far West on a number of fronts given our shared interest in promoting rural and regional health and we hope to do more in the future.  This year the route is 420km over three days starting from the CSU Wagga Wagga Campus and finishing at CSU Orange Campus.  The teams are made up of Executive Deans Tracey Green and Tim Wess, academics Greg Linsdell and Johnathan Hewis, Gethin Thomas and Elizabeth Dunlop from the Research Office, Liz Smith from Office for Students and Nicole Rogers from Student Admin as well as a friend of Nicole’s, Andrea Anthony.  Everyone has been training hard for this and I have been relieved to find that, despite a slack period over last winter, I don’t feel as exhausted as I was last year after the 100km+ rides on the weekends.

Last year overall the ride raised $650,000 to support Royal Far West’s work to improve the health of disadvantaged rural and regional kids and their families.  The fundraising pages for the two teams are here:

https://rideforcountrykids2017.gofundraise.com.au/page/AndrewVann0

Any support gratefully received!

This Thursday 24 February, I will be cooking a BBQ (proudly supported by Cheers) to raise money for the ride on the Library Lawn of the Bathurst Campus.  It will run from 12 – 2pm. If you’re in Bathurst, please come along and say ‘hi’ to welcome in our fist term of 2017 during O Week and help raise some funds for this great cause!  Hoping to see as many of you there as possible.

Enjoy 2017.

As I mentioned, it has been a year of great achievement and perhaps sometimes it can be hard to see the big picture across the University from our individual areas. This year, we have put together just a small selection of statistics and facts about exactly what we have acheived this year. I would urge you all to take a look – it is a snapshot so it doesn’t have everything in there, but it is a very impressive reminder of the scale and achievements of staff and students in a very busy year:  2016 Achievements

At the last meeting of Council, the new Strategic Direction document for 2017-2022 was approved.  This has been built on the back of the strategic foresight exercise that was carried out, and the four possible scenarios for 2030 created as part of this were posted on Yammer.  The new strategy will be worked through, planned and explained in more detail next year, but the three big areas are engaging with our communities to help them build their future, transforming our learning and teaching and finally to underpin all of this, building our internal capability.

As I mentioned, it has been a year of great achievement and perhaps sometimes it can be hard to see the big picture across the University from our individual areas. This year, we have put together just a small selection of statistics and facts about exactly what we have acheived this year. I would urge you all to take a look – it is a snapshot so it doesn’t have everything in there, but it is a very impressive reminder of the scale and achievements of staff and students in a very busy year:  2016 Achievements

At the last meeting of Council, the new Strategic Direction document for 2017-2022 was approved.  This has been built on the back of the strategic foresight exercise that was carried out, and the four possible scenarios for 2030 created as part of this were posted on Yammer.  The new strategy will be worked through, planned and explained in more detail next year, but the three big areas are engaging with our communities to help them build their future, transforming our learning and teaching and finally to underpin all of this, building our internal capability.

It’s hard to believe we are nearly half way through the year and perhaps even harder to believe that in our perpetual higher education Groundhog Day, we still do not know what the future of higher education funding and policy will be. I will come back to this point.

Load

The significant good news at the start of this year is that based on the good results from first semester we are predicting an increase in commencing load this year of about 5%. This is the result of increased marketing activity, increased focus on conversions and I am sure the excellent performance of the University in terms of graduate outcomes. It has not been the case for all universities and I want to thank all the University’s staff for the work they have done to achieve this result.

Workforce of the Future

One of my side jobs is to chair the Executive Committee of AHEIA, the Australian Higher Education Industrial Association. At the end of last year AHEIA commissioned PriceWaterhouse Coopers to look at the future of the workforce in higher education. Although it sometimes said that universities are slow to change, we have seen enormous growth and change in the sector over the last 20 years. On my reckoning, one of the most significant changes is the degree of specialisation and casualisation in the academic workforce. Both of these, I think, have been in pursuit of increased productivity and the second has been a risk management approach. University funding has become much less certain as a more market-oriented approach has been taken by government. Acknowledging the growth in higher education funding as the system has grown, governments of both sides have raided the higher education budget to pay for other things. Labor was going to use it to fund Gonski and the Coalition have attempted to meet overall budget strictures.

What has been less talked about is the fact that over this period, full-time research and teaching academic positions have grown very little – about 8% between 1996 and 2014. I suspect that these staff members – particularly those at levels B, C and D – are still doing the bulk of the academic administration and management work for the now much bigger system. I therefore think that the complaints we hear about the pressures on academic staff have some justification. I believe it is time we rethought what we expect from academic staff and acknowledge that the academic management aspects are as important as teaching, research and engagement.   In the case of CSU, we revised our promotions policy in 2014 and we will be keeping an eye on this to ensure it is delivering the things we  want for staff and the University.

Federal Budget

In parallel with the Federal Budget, the Government released an options paper which, it seems, was meant to leave options on the table while also neutralising higher education policy as an election issue. Right up front I need to say that the Government’s budget shows that they still intend to cut 20% of government funding from higher education places. It is surprising to me that there is so far not very much commentary about this – which amounts to a $2bn cut across the forward estimates – but perhaps we have all got used to the idea. From the point of view of universities perhaps this is not so bad because – at first glance – it seems the revenue would be made up by increasing costs for students. Estimates vary on the impacts of this but currently students pay about 40% of the cost so we would be looking at an average increase of about 25% in costs to students.

The arguments that are usually advanced for doing this are:

• the HELP system provides interest-free, indexed loans which means no-one has to pay upfront costs;
• students bear an equal proportion of the cost because of the private benefits;
• there is concern we are creating too many, or too many of the wrong sort of graduates and that increasing costs will help to make students think more carefully about choices; and
• international and local evidence suggests it is quite difficult to deter people from studying because they understand how important higher education is to career advancement.

Arguments in the other direction are:

• an awful lot of students are not school leavers and may in fact be making repayments because they are already working;
• OECD studies show that the public returns to higher education in Australia already outweigh the private benefits;
• one of the biggest costs of study is students’ time and they already have powerful incentives to take their choices seriously;
• it’s difficult to deter students from studying, but loading the costs onto graduates alone is tantamount to increasing tax rates for them; and
• there is legitimate concern about the impacts on equity as a result of increasing costs – acquiring a university degree does not reset your lifetime economic circumstances and there is a risk that this will have a disproportionate impact on lower-income earners.

I lean towards the second set of arguments, but I think we need a good debate about these issues. It was notable in the discussion about fee deregulation that the most enthusiastic advocates were those universities with students from the wealthiest backgrounds, I would be very worried if the higher education policy of either side of politics slipped through without scrutiny.

Murray Darling Medical School Bid

We have continued to push our medical school bid with the Federal Government and with other parties and candidates now that the election has been called. The proposal has been widely supported and government has acknowledged the value of it in addressing maldistribution of doctors in regional and rural areas. It is very frustrating that the Government has supported a new school in Perth at Curtin University and funding for a new node at Gosford for Newcastle University, both of which are in metropolitan locations and very close to existing schools. There is a strong suspicion now that the only thing that leads to a medical school being approved is electoral advantage as both of these announcements seemed to be linked to marginal seats. I trust that this is not the case, and that we will soon get an announcement on the Murray Darling Medical School. It is certainly not credible to argue that new medical schools cannot be approved and this reinforces the importance of continuing to fight for a solution for rural and regional people.

Strategy Development Process

We are currently going through a strategy foresight exercise to plan for our 2017 and beyond strategy. This has had involvement from a range people across the University, including Vice-Chancellor’s Forum. The process has developed a systems map of the external forces acting on the University and four particular scenarios are being developed which will be used to test our current strategic thinking and set the scene for the revised strategy. The aim of all this to deepen our understanding of our operations and environment so that we can face the future more confidently.

Three Faculty Structure

We are now approaching the cutover to the new three Faculty structure. Last week I met with the Heads of School and heard that, understandably, staff are feeling some apprehension as we approach it. This is a big change, and there is a lot of effort going into training staff and communicating the changes. As per the messages sent out to all staff by the DVC Academic, Toni Downes, the details will be communicated in the next couple of weeks as we run up to the change over. I want to thank all staff for their efforts to support this important restructure.

I’m writing this as graduations for 2015 draw to a close. It has been a big year in which a lot has happened, including a lot of change. I am very proud of the achievements of staff and students throughout this year and in particular of our staff for maintaining their focus on students while we have been going through the change process.

Graduations have been, once again, a wonderful occasion. I aim to get to at least one graduation from each Faculty and at least one at each campus and by the end will have been to every campus except Canberra. It is a very special day for the students and their families and, when there is the opportunity, it is great to hear a little of their story as they walk across the stage. I wanted to thank all the staff from across the University who have been involved in the graduations process and a particular thank you to academic staff for processing and being there for the students. For the first time we held a graduation ceremony in Port Macquarie where we congratulated about 130 graduates, some from Port but some who had also studied via distance and online education.

In research, on the last set of audited figures, which are for 2014, we increased both income and publications significantly against 2013. The Excellence in Research Australia (ERA) results, which were released earlier this month, also show that we have grown the number of areas of research rated at world class or above significantly from the previous round in 2012. We now have 16 compared to 9 in 2010. This is a testament to the great work produced by our researchers, the vast majority of it addressing issues in our communities. We also have our first ‘5’ rating, or well above world standard, for Horticulture which includes wine production.

I am looking forward to 2016. We are now almost at the end of appointing people to the new Common Support Model structures in the Faculties. Once again, I acknowledge that this has been a disruptive process for staff and I know that some staff members are still waiting on the outcomes of appointment processes. However, my sense from the staff roadshows conducted over the last couple of weeks is that people are turning their minds to the new structures and want to be sure that we get the best out of them. I would like to thank all staff involved in this as it has been a significant effort both for applicants and those making the selections.  As advised last week, we will cut over to the new structures in the middle of next year in between the two major sessions. Planning is underway at present for the training development to support staff moving into their new roles and details of this will be advised in the first few months of next year.

The Engineering and Law programs will commence at the start of next year, and student numbers for these programs are looking healthy. The new Port Macquarie Campus build will also be complete in February and is a great building which will be an excellent home for the students and staff there.

We have increased our marketing activity this year and while it is early days, this is showing promising signs for 2016 with numbers forecast to increase from 2015. It is clear that the whole sector has become a lot more competitive. Applications and offers are strongly up but we still need to be attentive to conversion to encourage students to choose us – this will, I think, be the new reality. However, at least on the current figures we appear to be adapting well.

I have mentioned in the staff roadshows that CSU has achieved some amazing things:

• During 2013 we had the largest number of Indigenous students and completions in Australia. The 2014 figures have now been released and University of Newcastle have overtaken us again – we have 908 and they have 914 so it’s still pretty close.
• We are the largest provider of postgraduate IT education in Australia.
• We are the world’s largest provider of university education in law enforcement, counter-terrorism, emergency management, customs and border security studies.
• Our 15 year partnerships with four Chinese universities are among some of the longest of any Australian university.
• Our graduates continue to enjoy some of the highest employment rates in Australia.
• The Veterinary Science School had commented that with a 97.1% teaching satisfaction rating in the UES survey (and an approximate 3% error bound), no-one in the country could be shown to have a better teaching rating in the Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching (QILT) indicators. This is indeed good and prompted us to go looking where the raw number placed overall. Vet Science is in the top 6% on this basis, but it turns out that CSU Occupational Therapy had the fourth highest ranking in the country out of 1000 university/subject area combinations. Unfortunately, the Occupational Therapy subject area has been removed from QILT so this isn’t easily visible, but it does show that we have some terrific ratings for our teaching.

Being Vice-Chancellor of CSU is an amazing and privileged role to have. To close off, I wanted to let people know that I am in the process of finalising a new contract with the University Council to extend for a further five years beyond the end of my current contract period, which runs to the end of 2016. I do hope and intend to be here until the end of 2021. CSU is making a real and positive difference in people’s lives and for its communities. To my mind, there is no better contribution to make than that.

I wish everyone a peaceful and safe Christmas and a very Happy New Year.

PS: At the end of February, we have entered a CSU team in the Royal Far West Ride fundraising ride for Country Kids.  Royal Far West have provided health services to rural and remote children for nearly 100 years.  We have been finding ways to collaborate with them as our missions are strongly aligned and we have had dental students placed at their Manly site.  The ride is 380km over three days from Port Macquarie to Coffs Harbour. I will be taking part along with Dr Tracey Green, Greg Linsdell and Johnathan Hewis from the Port Macquarie Campus (pictures taken at the graduation this week).  They are all very much fitter than me and what seemed like a good idea a few months back is now coming round at a rapid pace.  If anyone would be generous enough to support the team, the fundraising page is at http://rideforcountrykids2016.gofundraise.com.au/page/CSU-Ride4CountryKids

Service Improvement Program and Faculty Restructure

Over recent months we have been focusing on the change processes surrounding the Service Improvement Program and more recently the Faculty restructure. Change is never easy and there have been a range of comments on the process ranging from it not having happened fast enough, to there not having been enough time for consultation. Clearly, there have also been objections to the nature of the change as well as the process.

As I have stressed in presentations to the University community, while the proposals were crafted as carefully as possible before being released, the consultation process was genuine. We expected that the proposals would be improved by feedback received and in my view this is what has been achieved. In particular, the issues raised around support for research students in the Faculty structures have a lot of merit and the DVCs Academic, Professor Toni Downes and Acting DVC RDI Professor Mary Kelly have been working on proposals to address these concerns. I am also confident that we will have a set of good options for a three Faculty structure to be considered by Academic Senate at the end of October.

The higher education sector is now very much more competitive and we need to ensure we can deliver reliable and consistent service to students. This is what we need to get out of the restructure and we will work through this as rapidly as possible so that we can give certainty to staff, bed down the change and be able to concentrate on our teaching, research and engagement.

Updates to CSU staff on the process will be issued over the next few days.

International Comparisons and Global Rankings

Over the last few months I have attended a number of international conferences and events. These were the World Association of Cooperative Education Conference in Japan, an invited presentation to the South African Regional Universities Association Leadership Dialogue in Cape Town and the Talloires Network Steering Committee in New York.

There are several key messages out of these meetings.

• Universities around the world are facing the same set of issues. In all countries, there is recognition that a well-educated workforce is critical to delivering economic productivity, good health outcomes and reforming the economy to meet environmental sustainability imperatives.
• Online education is having a profound impact on pedagogy in all universities. Even if some universities have engaged little in this space, they are taking a very active interest now.
• As access to higher education has expanded there is an international dialogue about the quality of education and research, and what funding models are required to allow universities to effectively meet social needs.
• There is concern over whether universities are focused on their own selfish interests or are actually devoted to improving their societies and economies.
• There is also concern about the place of global rankings systems in this and whether they are driving good outcomes. As noted in the previous blog post, the Talloires Network Call to Action in 2014 challenged the rankings providers to consider community engagement as part of their schema and Times Higher Education is considering how this might be done so hopefully we can see some progress on this front.
• There is a lot of interest in Australia as a country. This is based on our long tradition of excellence in work integrated learning and distance education (and CSU is seen as a leader and exemplar in this). Other countries are also interested in the higher education policy settings in Australia. The HECS HELP income contingent loan scheme is widely regarded as world leading and of course people are interested in how the demand-driven system has played out and the Government’s fee deregulation proposals.

Out of all this, I continue to believe that CSU is extraordinarily well positioned to succeed over the coming decades. We have expertise and a track record in delivering the very things that governments and communities are asking for – expanded access, educational value-add and deep engagement with communities and industries.

The good news

As it’s been a while since the last blog post, I did want to note that CSU is once again the successful tenderer for the NSW Police Force education contract. This is for a further 5+5 years and means that all new NSW Police Officers will continue to graduate with a CSU Associate Degree in Policing Practice. This maintains CSU’s significant strength in policing and security education where we are one of the world’s largest providers.

Recently, the Centre for Customs and Excise Studies also achieved accreditation from the World Customs Organization, these are the only English language programs to be accredited by WCO.

Last week we received the news that we have accreditation for our new Law program which will be commencing in 2016. Along with Engineering, which will also commence next year, these programs are designed to be flexible and allow students to mix work and study. Both are aimed to be innovative, distinctive and to fill workforce needs in regional Australia. However, the programs will also skill graduates to be successful nationally and internationally. I would like to thank the teams involved in both programs for the enormous amount of work involved in their development.

Deregulation and Policy update

Last week the Minister for Education, the Hon Simon Birmingham announced that the Government will, at least for now, withdraw their legislation to cut government support to universities and deregulate fees and that this will not be reintroduced until after the election. Since it is far too late for the legislation to be implemented for 2016 in any case, this is very welcome news.

Federal Labor have also announced their policy structure for higher education which would guarantee per student funding and maintain the demand-driven system. The Minister for Education has announced that he will engage in consultation with the sector about policy futures.

This week, Universities Australia also released a policy blueprint for Higher Education.  This argues for investment in higher education and research for the future welfare of the nation.

I hope this will now be a chance to have a better debate about the future of the sector and how we can arrive at funding policy that will deliver the education, research and engagement that the country needs. We will be arguing strongly for the needs of regional communities and students over the months to come.

Student Numbers

While the higher education sector continues to be intensely competitive, we expect to finish the year around 2% up on 2014 student numbers. This is a testament to the work that has been done by staff across the University to promote CSU and its courses to students. However, projections still show load plateauing in subsequent years and hence the need to continue to focus on converting offers to acceptances in line with the strategic direction of the University to ensure a sustainable future. In any case, the success in the mid-year round is an encouraging sign for the future and 2016 is shaping up to be an exciting year for the University and its students.

Now at the end of May and way past time for another blog post. There has been a lot happening over the last couple of months.

What Are Universities For?

There were two events in Canberra in the same week at the beginning of March. The first was a British Council Global Education Dialogue on ‘Catapults to Commercialisation – How Can Universities Use Their Research More Effectively’. At this, UK universities shared their experience of research commercialisation and engagement. It was interesting to me to see how far university thinking in the UK has come. From memory, universities had to be steered and bribed by the government into taking industry engagement seriously but have now embraced it as well as the benefits. One comment, in relation to managing the academic enterprise as being like herding cats, was that you need to move the food bowl. This is on the basis that academia is a prestige, rather than a financial, economy and academics respond strongly to prestige indicators.

The second event was the Universities Australia conference. The conference was interesting in that there were much stronger themes around industry engagement and social outcomes and less discussion on how we push Australian universities up the global research rankings. To my mind, all of this was good.

The opening address of the conference was from Michael Crow who is the President of Arizona State University (ASU). A charismatic and compelling speaker, he spoke about the approach they have taken at ASU to the ‘New American University’. He had a nice metaphor of conventional notions of university esteem being based on a “metal railroad of status” which require universities in front of you to pull over into a siding before you can improve your own position. From his standpoint this means defining universities in terms of who they keep out rather than who they include. He argues that for ASU it was much better to take a different route and they have sought to increase access and define themselves by who they include and by how well they work with industry. They have carved a distinctive niche for themselves and have made significant improvements in retention.

ASU’s approach to strategic planning and student focus were influential when we reviewed the CSU strategy in 2012. I visited ASU last January and know that using residences and socialising students well was a key part of their strategy. They also have an excellent at-risk monitoring system for their students which allows them to target support quite carefully. I know that Michael’s talk resonated with a lot of people, and many regional universities in particular felt that he spoke to the sense of mission that they share. I think it struck a chord generally with the concerns that universities may have begun to lose sight of their purpose and I suspect that we will see a lot more debate about if not a ‘New Australian University’, at least a renewed idea of the Australian university. Not before time in my view and I have already heard a number of Vice-Chancellors referring to Michael Crow’s vision in describing their own institutions.

Also at the conference, the Chief Scientist, Professor Ian Chubb, spoke and amongst his observations pointed out that there is a significant mismatch between the profile of the research done in Australian universities and that of the economy. Going back to the issue of higher education being a prestige economy, we do need to find ways to celebrate success in more than just international journal publications. Last year, the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE) proposed an Impact and Engagement for Australia index to complement the Excellence in Research Australia (ERA) exercise and the Australian Technology Network of universities also commissioned research on the impact trial in the ERA in 2011 as well as a report on how to improve the relationship between universities and industry which encourages current government initiatives like the Industry Growth Centres.

Talloires Network, Engagement and Global Rankings

Thanks to a suggestion from Jan Reid AC, formerly Vice-Chancellor at University of Western Sydney, I have been elected to the Steering Committee of the Talloires Network of universities dedicated to Civic Engagement. CSU has not previously been a member of this but we are in the process of joining. The Leaders Conference held in December 2014 in South Africa noted the tension between community engagement and the agenda that is being driven by research-focussed global rankings schemes.

I have noted in some of my commentary on the fee deregulation issue that I do not know what tangible outcomes arise from having a certain number of universities in the Top 100 or Top 50 of any of the rankings schemes. I also think that we seem to be placing far too much reliance on rankings, both in terms of their accuracy and in terms of what they represent. For example, in the Time Higher Education (THE) Rankings, University of Melbourne has been the top ranked University appearing between 2011 to 2015 at 45, 43, 39, 43 and 41. Now, universities are reasonably slow to change and the THE rankings are based significantly on reputation surveys so it’s not as if we are dealing with a precise scientific measurement. However, in some of the press commentary there was a bemoaning of the drop of Australian universities from 2013-14 and a celebration of the increase from 2014-15. It would seem much more likely to me that the rankings are only accurate to +/- 10% and we probably should be thinking about much longer-term trends. On top of that, in the particular case of the THE Rankings, the assessment of teaching quality is based on staff-student ratios. This is a meaningless and unhelpful measure of teaching quality in my view. For all of these reasons, we have decided not take part in the THE Rankings for now at least.

Federal Reforms and Federal Budget

In March we also saw Minister Pyne’s deregulation reforms defeated for a second time in the Senate. It is really not clear where the government will go from here although the Minister has said he will re-introduce the reform package again. The Government is sticking to the line that the reforms will pass, although I can find few people who believe this. Of course, keeping the reforms as proposed legislation allows the Government to count the savings they have proposed which includes the 20% cut to Commonwealth Support for Universities and this is part of their explanation as to how they will reduce the size of the deficit.

We have just had the 2015 Budget announcements and one of them is that the money to pay for the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Scheme will come from the Sustainable Research Excellence Fund (SRE). This is in fact a cut of future increased funds so the SRE money will not reduce, but it will not increase as fast as was planned. The SRE funds were to help support the indirect costs of research based on the Bradley and Lomax-Smith reviews which identified that universities were underfunded. Once again, when budgets get tight, government have little compunction about raiding university funding.

The Government also announced that the Office for Learning and Teaching would be abolished and its functions put out for tender to universities. I think this is a shame. The Australian Learning and Teaching Council was an independent national body through which academics could demonstrate that their work in teaching and learning was achieving national and international prominence. Moving this under the wing of the Department of Education as the Office for Learning and Teaching diminished this and spreading it across universities will diminish it further. Going back to the idea of higher education being a prestige economy, it is important that academics are able to claim appropriate kudos for their work.  I think the sector will need to ensure that we create structures which achieve the equivalent effect.

Vice-Chancellors and Chancellors Visit to Wagga Wagga

On 18th and 19th May we welcomed the Universities Australia Plenary meeting of Vice-Chancellors and the University Chancellors’ Committee meetings to the Wagga Wagga campus.  The Mayor, Rod Kendall, hosted a civic welcome at the Wagga Art Gallery.  Since Rod didn’t use it, I pinched one of his lines to say that Wagga is the centre of the universe because it’s halfway between Sydney and Melbourne, halfway between Auckland and Perth, and halfway between New York and London – if you fly the right way. I also reminded visitors that Wagga can also claim a critical cultural contribution as the (admittedly fictional) birthplace of Dame Edna Everage and the little known fact that the Eurythmics started in a Wagga hotel.

The visit was a great opportunity to showcase the facilities at Wagga including the National Life Sciences Hub, the Veterinary Clinic and Equine Facilities and the Animation Laboratories.  From the feedback we got people really enjoyed it.  For the visitors, the end was marred slightly by an enormous thunderstorm but the locals were just glad of the rain.

So, getting towards the end of February and time for another blog update.

Welcome to New Students

This week we have ‘O’ week and get to welcome a new crop of students to the University.  I met the new students in residences at a welcome ceremony on Saturday.  One particularly nice aspect was to meet a pair of our alumni who are Mitchell College graduates and married after meeting here.  Their daughter is now starting to study with us so we hope it continues on through the generations.

Federal Reform Process

I thought I’d start with where the Government’s higher education reform proposals are up to.  It is a little hard to tell but, despite Minister Pyne’s dedication, it looks pretty unlikely that the reform package will get through in anything like its current form.  I’m basing this on what I can tell coming out of Canberra and the public statements of cross-benchers.  Many people will heave a sigh of relief about this, but I seriously doubt that it means we will simply continue with the status quo.  The Minister has indicated that funding for the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Scheme and Future Fellows is in doubt and it is not clear whether the government has a Plan B.  It is also not clear what policies the Labor party is intending to advance.  I hope that we will get some clarity about this in the not too distant future so that we can plan with some certainty and provide advice to students.

Service Improvement Project

We have been looking at ways of finding efficiency within our operations and this has been split into two streams.  One of these is looking at how we organise administrative support across the Faculties and the Divisions.  In this, we really need structures which allow us to concentrate on improving our service to students and academics.  This work will continue through the year.  The second stream looked at a number of services which other universities have outsourced and has tested whether external providers could deliver them more cost-effectively.  Staff were advised on Friday about the outcomes of this.  I am pleased that, for the most part, we are delivering services at a cost that matches or betters external providers.  I also want to thank staff who identified additional efficiencies through the process that will provide significant savings, all of which help to balance the budget and reinvest in academic outcomes.

Strategy Reload

As mentioned in the last post, we are finalising the sub-plans in the 2015-16 Strategy document.  Members of the Senior Executive are working to ensure that we understand all the cross-linkages between the plans.  These documents will be the structure in which our activities are conducted, and budget is allocated over the next two years.  These are the critical priorities we need to attend to if we are to be successful.  Once the plans are completed, we will move on to look at critical measures associated with the plans so we can monitor our success.

Wellness and Wellbeing Expo

Coming up over the next month or so is the Charles Sturt University Wellness and Wellbeing Expo.  The health of staff and students is really important to us and there is lots of information and stalls to help people think about how to pursue a healthy lifestyle.  I attended the Bathurst expo last year and met a range of really interesting people – I would encourage everyone to go along.

Welcome Back

This is the first blog post for 2015 and a very warm welcome back to the New Year. Of course, the first month of 2015 is nearly over and it already feels like a lot has happened. With graduation week, the end of 2014 got very busy and I didn’t manage to get a blog post up so I wanted to begin by closing off a few 2014 issues and celebrating some aspects of that.

2014 Retrospective

First, in December we appointed our new Chancellor Dr Michele Allan. Michele has a significant background in agribusiness, rural and regional industry and engagement with Indigenous issues all of which are an excellent fit for the interests of Charles Sturt University. She also has extensive board and governance experience which will be of enormous benefit to the University given the changeable external environment, on which more later. We also farewelled the outgoing Chancellor Dr Lawrie Willett, AO in December after 12 years service. During Lawrie’s tenure the university grew substantially and he was a tireless advocate for CSU’s interests. I owe a particular debt to Lawrie, first for chairing the selection panel that appointed me but also for mentoring me through my first three years as Vice-Chancellor. I will really miss Lawrie, but equally am very much looking forward to working with Michele. Michele chaired her first University Council meeting in December at which we reviewed performance for the year. We have achieved a lot. Particular highlights that I raised were:

• We turned 25 years old as a university.
• Figures released in 2014 showed that in 2013 CSU had the largest number of Indigenous higher education enrolments in Australia and also the largest number of completions, overtaking the University of Newcastle which has traditionally held this spot.
• The Kajulu advertising students team won the national competition for the sixth straight year.
• The Centre for Customs and Excise Studies came on board which means that CSU is apparently now the largest provider of policing and security higher education in the world.
• Chris Blanchard gained $2.15M in funding for the Industrial Transformation Training Centre on Functional Grains.
• The Institute for Land, Water and Society was successful in winning $6.9M of funding over five years to monitor water flows in the Murray-Darling.
• We won four Office of Learning and Teaching Citations and an OLT Program award for the School of Community Health Overseas Workplace Learning Program.
• Thanks to the success of the NSW Country Eagles Rugby team which we sponsored, and the sporting nature of my fellow Vice-Chancellors, the CSU flag flew over the University of Sydney, Bond University, Southern Cross and Macquarie. We were lucky only to be beaten by Melbourne’s team and (oddly) Melbourne doesn’t have a university flag.

A very significant achievement is that we controlled costs really well in 2014 – not without pain – and actually underspent the budget slightly for the year. This is a terrific result and the University Council specifically asked me to thank everyone for the effort that went into this.

Graduation week was very enjoyable – when I officiate I really enjoy meeting the students as they cross the stage and the families afterwards.  Someone floated the idea of ‘Gumption Awards’ for students and alumni who have created significant change and I wanted to give a couple of special mentions on this from last year. The first was to Daniella Greenwood who spoke at our Bathurst Arts graduation. She has made some real innovations in Aged Care and my favourite quote from Daniella “I’m still waiting for someone to tap me on the shoulder and say ‘what the hell do you think you’re doing?’” The second was to our Veterinary Science student Cassandra MacDonald who helped to bring Coles to account on milk pricing.

I started writing this blog post a couple of weeks ago whilst on leave. I was reading the Australian news while overseas and saw that Minister Pyne, in introducing the Higher Education Reform legislation into Parliament, described it as “some of the greatest higher education and research reforms of our time”. I would agree that the proposals are the most significant, whether they are the greatest or not remains to be seen.

The proposals are now in Senate Committee and I thought it was worth setting out a few thoughts as the process of putting these proposals through the Parliament begins, as well as giving my view on what should happen.

If you read the history of Higher Education, one almost constant theme is that of a sense of crisis so I don’t want to overuse that word. However, we really do have a fork in the road in front of us with the proposal to deregulate fees. I would like to highlight a number of themes from the proposals and work through each of them:

• Cost sharing between government and students
• Fee deregulation and price competition
• HELP Interest Rates
• The Commonwealth Scholarships fund proposals
• Market imperfections and how to address them

Cost sharing between government and students

I commented in a previous post on whether the proposed level of cost sharing was fair and I won’t rehash that again. A major point of debate has been whether increasing student fees is likely to deter people from Higher Education. The Minister has referred to the UK experience to suggest that it will not. The European Commission recently released a report on cost sharing:

http://ec.europa.eu/education/news/2014/20140623-cost-sharing_en.htm

I would recommend everyone to read this because it is a very thoughtful analysis of long-run responses to cost shifting to students. It does suggest that in the long run, it’s difficult to put students off higher education and that a well targeted loan scheme takes a lot of the sting out of it. However, the UK experience is still very fresh – graduates, with their larger debts, are only just emerging. I understand from UK sources that the impact on graduates’ ability to borrow is already being felt and that will feed back into student decision making. Also, there has been a large drop-off in part-time and mature age students (around 50%). There may be more than one explanation for this but we know in Australia that these students are more cost conscious than school leavers. This has not been talked about very much, but for graduates the effect of these changes will be tantamount to a significant tax slug until they pay off the additional costs of their study. For students already working they may well feel it immediately. We might expect that this will affect CSU more than others as we have a high proportion of mature age students. Given the importance of these students to maintaining viability for regional institutions, this could be a very big problem indeed.

Having said all that, it is very plain from talking to people in Canberra that if we do not have students accepting a greater share of the cost burden, the only politically realistic alternative is ongoing cuts and/or putting caps back on the sector. I don’t think either of those is a good solution. That is why I grudgingly accept that some modified form of this package is probably the most sensible way forward.

Fee deregulation and price competition

You only need to read the media, and see which Vice-Chancellors are pushing hardest for this, to understand who are going to be the big winners. It will undoubtedly be the Group of Eight universities because they on average have the wealthiest students and the most elite brand value based (wrongly in my view) on research intensivity. The Minister has asserted that price competition will keep fees down. For most products, given equal quality, consumers will choose the cheaper option. So far, I have been able to find zero instances in the literature where students choose a higher educational option because it’s cheaper. They may choose less expensive options because that’s all they can afford but this is not the same thing. As far as I can tell, education is a Veblen good where the more expensive it is, the more attractive it is. You only have to look at the behaviour around chasing ATAR scores to see the truth of this – this is the biggest price that school students pay in terms of their time and a very real one at that. We know that students ‘ATAR shop’ for courses based on the most prestigious course they can get into, not necessarily what they really want to do. I think it is unfortunate that in higher education we have created a lot of this ourselves through our obsession with research esteem. I think it is up to universities such as ours to make a different case around educational value-add. I think this is one of the potential benefits of fee deregulation – we can stop talking about why everything is the same and start to celebrate difference.

The opportunity to think about something other than equivalence may be particularly useful in relation to blended and distance learning. Most of the discussion we have had up to now has been about whether distance education is as good as face-to-face teaching. We have also tended to see any increase in staff-student ratio as a bad thing. It seems to me this has unnecessarily restricted our thinking and has made it difficult to talk about innovation. Most other industries have used technology to improve the customer experience whilst reducing the human labour required. We have in fact used technology to increase work for staff whilst delivering a better service for students. Noting the point above that society is not willing to fund ever-increasing costs for higher education, this is not sustainable. Therefore I believe we have to start examining how we can use technology to improve outcomes for students whilst reducing the amount of effort required from university staff. Universities have done this brilliantly in research where we doubled productivity over about 15 years and I believe this was largely due to effective use of technology for literature searching, data analysis and publishing. We have not bemoaned this as a loss of quality and we have to get into the same mindset around teaching.

HELP Interest Rates

The proposal to impose real interest rates on HELP debt seems to be the one that has the psychologically biggest impact because of the idea of debt that just keeps getting bigger. I think there is general acceptance that we need compromise on this, and I don’t think we should accept the reform package unless we get it. As noted above, I am concerned that education markets do not work like other markets, particularly where there are loan schemes to support the costs. I believe a progressive interest rate above a threshold provides the best mechanism to retain pressure on costs whilst also being equitable for lower income graduates.

Commonwealth Scholarships

Again, I covered my objections to this scheme in an earlier post. I can see the political necessity for this fund because the selective research-intensive institutions are often accused of social as well as educational elitism and there need to be mechanisms to address this. However, I do believe that if the scheme is implemented as proposed it will impose an immediate market distortion by forcing the most selective urban institutions to chase students they would not otherwise try to recruit. On modelling we have done, and using low SES as a proxy, on quite modest fee increases the Group of Eight could end up with at least 10 times as much money per equity students as regional institutions. I believe it would be more appropriate to make the proportion of money that institutions have to set aside proportional to the number of equity students they currently recruit with perhaps a cap and a floor. This would avoid any immediate market distortions but still provide a mechanism by which institutions can support equity students as they grow their numbers, if that is what they choose to do.

Market Imperfections

Overall, as the Minister has pointed out, this scheme shifts costs to students and the Minister has linked this to the ability of universities to compete in the global research rankings. Clearly then, universities’ ability to compete is going to have far more to do with the ability of their students to pay than the relevance of their mission to their communities or even their competence in research. Given the spread of wealth across the regions, this is likely to undermine the ability of regionally based institutions to support their communities. This is a perverse outcome and I think it is essential that there is a source of funds which redresses this imbalance.

We will continue to work with the Government, Universities Australia, the opposition parties and the independents to get appropriate modifications to the Government’s proposals. I think it is essential that we develop policy settings which are reasonable and which can last into the longer term. In our strategic risk assessment last year we identified government policy change as our most significant risk which we could not mitigate effectively and so it has proved. We have a clear plan for how we would like to develop the university and we know what we want to achieve for our communities and our students. I would love to have a period of policy stability when we could actually get on and do the work we want to do. This in fact is the ‘masterly inactivity’ that Tony Abbott suggested would be the best approach when he spoke to the Universities Australia conference in 2013. Clearly, we have not had that but even so we must push on with trying to do the best job for our communities and our students irrespective of government policy.

I have made the comment to a few meetings that the period following the Federal Budget has felt a bit like starting a new job – weeks seem to have lasted for months and there has been a lot crammed into a short space of time. What has not been crammed in has been an update through this blog, although there have been a couple of all-staff e-mails about how we are handling the expected fallout from the reforms. If you have been following the press, you will have seen that the Government appears ready to compromise on the reforms, particularly on the interest rate on the debt. However, we also hope for compromise on the level of cuts to government support which will force fees up significantly if they go ahead as planned. Stay tuned on this as we have a Universities Australia plenary meeting this week at which the Minister is speaking so I hope to get an update there.

For this blog I wanted to concentrate on some positives in the last month or two. Firstly, and very importantly, we have announced that the next Chancellor of Charles Sturt University will be Dr Michele Allan. Dr Allan has a long background in rural and regional industries and in education, and has significant experience with boards. She will take up her appointment in December following the retirement of our current Chancellor, Lawrie Willett AO. I am really looking forward to working with Michele but will be equally sorry to lose Lawrie who has guided and supported me during my first two and a half years as Vice-Chancellor. We will have the opportunity to say farewell to Lawrie and to welcome Michele later in the year.

To continue that theme, we also inducted new Council members over the last month. This includes Associate Professor Lyn Angel as the newly elected academic staff representative, replacing Dr Sue Wood, and Rowan Alden as the newly elected student representative, replacing Saba Nabi. This blog post is a good opportunity to acknowledge the work of both former and current Council members. The University Council has overall responsibility for the direction and governance of the University. This means that it approves the University’s strategy and major decisions and policies about our activities and locations. The Council also monitors how well we are doing academically, financially, culturally and in our service to our communities. As well as elected representatives, the Council includes members appointed by the NSW Government, and members appointed by the Council including graduates of the University or its forerunner institutions. We have a great range of experience on the Council from business and education, and Council plays an extremely important role in supporting University management in navigating challenging times.

I also wanted to note the Staff Excellence Awards which started two weeks ago in Bathurst, continued in Dubbo last week and will finish in Wagga Wagga in early September. These are an opportunity to recognise the efforts of staff across the institution and it is a very rewarding process to understand the great work that people are doing. Chika Anyanwu, Head of School of Communication and Creative Industries, did an outstanding job of MC-ing the Bathurst awards and, as I noted at the time, I reckon a gig MC-ing the Oscars beckons for him.

We have been discussing, along with the rest of the University, what we can do at the SEC level to improve communication in response to the Voice Survey. My intention is to write more frequent blog pieces as part of this. I have also been learning to use Adobe Connect with the help of Milena Dunn and I am looking to run a session for as much of the whole university as wants to take part in the next month to explain what’s happening with the Strategy refresh. We are trialling this with Vice-Chancellor’s Forum participants first.  As per my comments at the start, I’m hoping we will get a clearer sense of where the Government’s reform proposals are likely to land in the closing part of this year so I will write updates as that information becomes available.

The big news for the last week has of course been the Federal Government’s budget proposals for Higher Education. I will come to these a bit further down but wanted to deal with some good news stories first.

The first thing I wanted to note was the changeover in Presiding Officer for Academic Senate. Professor Ben Bradley has now been replaced by Professor Jo-Anne Reid. Senate is a very important feature of a university because it is the mechanism through which the voice of the academy – separate to the corporate considerations of running the University as an organisation – can be distilled and articulated. This in fact is legislated as part of the Charles Sturt University Act. Senate achieved a lot in the period in which Ben was the Presiding Officer and Jo-Anne served as the Deputy and I want to thank them both for their contribution to the University through that. Naturally, I would also like to thank Jo and indeed all the members of Senate for continuing to perform this important work for the University.

Second, congratulations to Residence Life for winning the 2014 College/University Housing Operation of the Year. This is a terrific achievement and a testament to the hard work done by the staff in Residence Life. We count the students who are employed as Resident Advisers as part of that staff and having attended their training sessions for the last three years I have been really impressed with their enthusiasm and commitment. All the staff should be (and are) very proud of this and at a time when more than ever we need to focus on providing excellent services to students this is a great affirmation of what we do.

Third, congratulations to Charles Sturt Campus Services at Orange who achieved 1000 days without a lost time injury. This again is a terrific achievement – I have been very keen to encourage everyone to be vigilant about workplace health and safety and it is really good to see areas celebrating their achievements.

Fourth, I wanted to give a plug to the CSU Academic Women’s Association which is providing mentoring and support for academic women across the University. In common with most universities, women are under-represented at senior academic levels and one of the targets in our strategy is to improve this. I hope this will complement other initiatives to assist women to build their careers.

I would also like to note that this week is National Reconciliation Week. I think this has been rather overshadowed by the discussion of the Federal Budget. Having just written an acquittal of the University’s performance, one area where we have clearly been successful is in increasing Indigenous enrolments and Indigenous staff numbers. That I hope is making a continuing contribution to reconciliation.

So now to turn to the Federal Budget.

Here are my thoughts on the government’s proposals on fee deregulation, which are quite lengthy, but this is a critical set of reforms for the sector and for us.

Let me start by saying I do not argue that we need to balance the Federal budget over the longer term. I would also agree that we have probably been too generous in terms of personal tax cuts and tax relief. However, personally I would have preferred us to have had a decent conversation about the balance of taxation and welfare before the last election which would have allowed the electorate to make a more informed decision. This is not a particular criticism of the Government as neither Labor nor the Coalition really facilitated this conversation. In any case despite that we now have proposals which are acknowledged by the Minister to be the biggest reform in 30 years and I do not think he is exaggerating. What do they mean, what are the advantages and what are the potential problems?

The major aspects for me are:

1)   A deregulated fee market – universities are free to charge any amount for domestic tuition as long as it does not exceed international fees. My presumption is that this means that domestic fees at a university cannot exceed the international fees at that university.

2)   An average across-the-board reduction by 20% of government support for student tuition. This will shift the balance of average student contribution from 41% to about 52%. Note that because students were paying less, this means that the proportional increase for students is more like 27% – assuming the overall cost of education doesn’t change.

3)   HECS debt to carry a real rate of interest equivalent to the 10-year government bond rate capped at a maximum of 6%. This is an increase of something like 1.5% and means that, unlike now, if students are not paying off their debt it will be growing in real terms (assuming that inflation stays below 6%).

4)   If universities raise their fees beyond the amount required to replace lost government support, they will be required to put 20% of the money raised into a scholarship fund which will be available for use at that university.

5)   Sub-degree places will now be uncapped and covered by commonwealth support.

6)   Private providers and TAFE will also have access to commonwealth support. The government sees this as contributing to competition (the Minister talked about an ‘adrenaline jolt of competition’) in the sector.

7)   PhD students will also be required to pay a part of their tuition costs, which will also be supported via a HECS loan.

8)   Any student who enrolled after the date of the budget (13 May) will move onto the new fee arrangements from 2016. Anyone who enrolled before that date will stick with the existing fee arrangements until the end of their course, until they change course, or until 2020 whichever is the earlier of the three.

9)   The government has committed to an additional year of NCRIS (National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Scheme) funding and to fund Future Fellows for the foreseeable future.

A point of detail to note, there was early concern that there was a threat to our Dental school because of the budget changes. We did lose $15m that had been pledged by the previous government to build additional dentistry clinics in Taree, Kempsey and Port Macquarie. This would have allowed us to expand clinical placements and hence student numbers as well as working to reduce the public dental waiting lists in that area. The loss of this funding does not affect our existing operations but as noted will prevent any expansion of Dentistry or Oral Health on the Mid-North Coast.

The government’s view is that the suite of proposals provides a fair balance of costs between the private benefits that students receive and the benefit that the nation receives from higher education. Whilst many people have drawn comparisons to decades past where higher education was free, or substantially cheaper, that was a very different world. A very small proportion of the population attended university, there was very much less gender equity and very much less social equity. I do not think it is realistic to expect that we could make higher education free with the participation rates that we have now. That is unless we are prepared to pay a lot more income tax, which it seems we aren’t. So I don’t think we should be debating whether students and graduates should bear some of the cost, what we need to debate is whether policy settings will drive the kinds of social and economic outcomes we are looking for.

Good things in these proposals are that the demand driven system is retained, that sub-degree places are included and that the Government has committed support for NCRIS and the Future Fellows scheme. I think it is reasonable also that private providers be brought into the system, provided we retain some means of funding the social good part of public universities’ missions. I will talk more about the possible problems with fee deregulation below, but it has to be said that an unregulated market in the international space released a lot of creativity and entrepreneurialism from universities and grew international education substantially. Of course, that was bringing new money into the country, not redistributing existing money within the country.

So what’s likely to happen? The Minister has suggested some fees might go down. According to our calculations Mathematics and Humanities will be receiving more government support than they currently do and, if substituting commonwealth money with student fees is all we do, that would allow a reduction. Fees in all other areas would have to rise, simply to replace the money removed by the government. For CSU we calculate this to be an average of 23.5% across the board. Some areas would need to rise substantially. Science fees would need to be increased by 62%, Agriculture by 48% and Environmental Studies by 114%. Is it going to be as simple as this? I don’t think so because we will need to consider the totality of the fees we set so that we can do the best job for our communities and we will have to see how the market behaves, and what happens to student demand, when it starts operating in 2016. I will have a bit more to say about how fees might play out below.

So what are the potential concerns? My first concern is with the pretexts on which this is being pursued. The first pretext is that we don’t have enough diversity in the sector and that diversity is a good thing. I agree with the second proposition but not the first. Early last year I attended a workshop on the U-Multirank tool run by the LH Martin Institute. The conclusion of this workshop was that in fact the sector is already very diverse. Charles Sturt University is nothing like University of Sydney, nor does it wish to be anything like it. We have very different missions, cater for very different student demographics, have different levels of research intensivity and we employ different kinds of staff. We teach more than half of our students by distance education and USyd teaches almost all of theirs by face to face. I think what people from Group of Eight universities mean when they say ‘we don’t have enough diversity’ is ‘we don’t have teaching-only universities, and therefore we have to share our research money with universities that shouldn’t have it.’ This to me is not a good reason for seeking more diversity. I did my first degree at what was then Trent Polytechnic. The staff were mostly professional engineers with a couple of researchers thrown in. They took their teaching very seriously and they did a very good job. However, there was a bit of intellectual spice missing from the education and at the end I did feel a little bit like I’d had the creativity beaten out of me. That was probably OK in 1989 but given the way the world is changing I think we need more flexibility of thinking, not less and I think the inclusion of some research in the culture is important to that end. In both Australia and the UK the binary divide was abolished for a reason and we are better for it.

The second pretext is that fee deregulation will allow Australian universities to climb up the global university rankings. Noting that these are almost exclusively research rankings, I remain to be convinced that requiring students to provide increased funds is going to do the job. On the Times Higher Education rankings, our highest performer in 2014 is the University of Melbourne at 43. To make it into the Top 20 it would need to more than double its score to 14.9, and this at a time when particularly Chinese universities (from a country of one billion people, let’s note) are having mind-boggling quantities of funds injected by their government. On the ARWU rankings, Melbourne again is our highest performer at 54 with a score of 30.2. To lift itself into the top 20 on the ARWU, it needs to improve this score by about 50% and go past University College London and Imperial College as well as the Universities of Illinois, Toronto and New York. If the Go8 are serious about shrinking their student numbers to get more focussed, their undergraduates are going to be paying a very high price indeed for this kind of ambition. I have previously suggested we might be able to pull this off by merging Melbourne and Monash or Sydney and UNSW, selling one of each of their campuses and investing the proceeds in research. I hate to be a grouch, but personally I’m not even sure what, apart from national bragging rights, would be the advantage of having two universities in the Top 20 as opposed to six in the Top 100? What would be the benefit to the economy or community?

The second concern I have is with the impacts on workforce supply. In the existing system we have been able to boost the supply of skilled professionals in regional areas. I worry that this may be undermined by these changes as regional students are put off studying. It would appear that the current higher education market has saturated – that is that the demand for higher education at its current price has plateaued. Assuming that the higher education market operates like any other, we are now looking at a substantial increase in price and we would therefore have to assume that some students will decide not to come. Universities have many fixed and semi-fixed costs which, even if staff were shed to match the fall in students, would not scale down at the same rate. On top of this, note that the Minister’s intention is for universities to be better resourced as a result of these changes “education institutions themselves will be able to grow, to employ more people and invest more back into their local communities.” http://budget.gov.au/2014-15/content/glossy/education/html/index.htm Both of these would suggest that fees will need to rise more than the simple replacement value. On top of this, it should be noted that in previous fee deregulations around the world, fees have risen. The most recent example of this is in the UK where fees tripled – almost all of them up to the cap. I find it very difficult to believe therefore that fees will not rise beyond the simple replacement value which is likely to deter even more people. The minister may be counting on private providers and TAFEs to provide enough competition to restrain price rises and to expand supply. However, if this does happen note that even if it’s good for students it will go against the idea that universities will be able to grow and invest more into their communities as suggested in the budget material above.

The third concern I have is with the scholarship fund. As currently planned, this requires 20% of the additional dollars raised above the replacement level to be put into a fund in each university for scholarships. Quite clearly, the most elite universities will be able to charge the highest prices and will therefore have the largest scholarship funds. Currently, these universities have the lowest level of low SES students. This therefore runs the risk that they will be incentivised to recruit students from regional Australia and if, as the Minister intends, competition restrains fees elsewhere in the market, the universities who currently support the most low SES students will be least able to do so. This is a fundamentally regressive proposal which in my view needs to be changed.

Other concerns follow for me, including knock-on macroeconomic effects like graduate wage inflation and the possibility that if the sector raises fees too enthusiastically there might be some rapid re-regulation. I mentioned regional work force above, there is also the possibility that the prices we set (because of the costs of programs like agriculture, veterinary science or engineering) are out of whack with student demand and we end up with even worse labour market shortages in regional areas than we already have.

What does it mean for Charles Sturt University and other regionally-based universities? It’s really hard to say. It seems almost certain to me that we will lose some students who have the least financial resources. We already know that some students struggle to attend university and this may be enough to deter them. It is possible that some students currently moving to capital cities to study may decide to stay in their regions instead. Perhaps it will increase the trend of some students studying for a year or two before moving to the city to finish their degree off and vary their experience. It is possible that more students may decide to move from metropolitan areas to regional areas to study. It is really difficult to do more than guess what the combined impacts may be. We have a great reputation for being entrepreneurial but I think we would be foolish to think that Charles Sturt University will be unscathed or significantly better off. I suspect we would at the very least be significantly different. It will take quite some time to fully work this through. I am hoping that compromise can be reached on the proposals as the budget makes its way through the Senate. Certainly at the moment Labor, The Greens and the Palmer United Party have said they are against it. We will begin to do contingency planning and work out how we will walk the path through the next few years as things unfold. I think this will amplify the existing trends of competition and privilege, much of which is based on history, in the sector.

As a final point, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) produces a regular report called ‘Education at a Glance’. One of the sets of tables in this gives a calculation of the private and public benefits of tertiary education. For Australia, the private rate of return is approximately 9% whereas the public rate of return is approximately 13%. I don’t know what difference these proposals might make to this (perhaps any economists reading can) but I think it does indicate that simply making the tuition costs 50-50 between students and the state does not necessarily give the full picture on the full benefits. My concern is that we do not unintentionally shrink the system and therefore undermine the benefits both to individuals and to our communities.

Finally, the changes in higher education policy are a very important step for our nation. I think our local Members of Parliament need to hear your opinions on this as they decide what to do about steering the budget through the Senate. The government has indicated it is willing to make compromises and it is important that they are informed about community opinion. You may be in favour of these changes, ambivalent, or dead against them and I would be very relieved to discover that none of our students is worried by these proposals. However, I think democracy would be served by sending an e-mail to your local Federal Member of Parliament to let them know your thoughts. They do take community feedback very seriously and it will help them to understand your perspectives and therefore hopefully make wise decisions.

For my part, I look forward to hearing your thoughts through the comments, or to vc@csu.edu.au if you don’t want to express them publicly.

It’s now the start of the third month of 2014 and the start of a new academic year and here are some thoughts to kick it off.

Arizona

In January I visited Arizona State University (ASU) and the University of Arizona.  Both institutions are ‘Land Grant’ universities which means they were established primarily to benefit their communities.  ASU is widely recognised as a leader in strategy, information management and improving retention outcomes for its students.  ASU has a very similar student demographic to CSU and has a very sophisticated system for identifying students who may be at risk based on their academic performance.  It transpired that one of their key initiatives to improve retention has been to build residences and work on community formation – both themes which have been important to us at CSU.  ASU also has a commitment to achieve carbon neutrality and it was interesting to see solar panels everywhere – including covering the car parks and as shade structures around the campus in Tempe.

University of Arizona has a Native Nations Institute and, through its College of Law, an Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program (IPLP). Professor Miriam Jorgensen from the Native Nations Institute has been involved with CSU and other Australian universities on a collaborative research project to explore nation building for Indigenous Australian communities.  Several of our staff and members of the Wiradjuri nation had visited Arizona in 2013 to attend the IPLP.  The visit was a very interesting experience; there are significant differences between the context for American Indian communities in the US and Indigenous communities here but there are also strong parallels. In particular, they have focussed on establishing good governance structures and practices in communities to assist community and economic development.

What was really refreshing about both institutions was that they were genuine in thinking first about what their communities need and as a distant second about how this might play out in terms of esteem through global rankings.  As far as I could tell, this applied at all levels and was a significant change to the level of perpetual angst over rankings we seem to have in Australia.  I hope we will be able to continue the relationship with both universities.

Australian Federal Government Priorities

In the next few weeks we expect to get some information about the outcomes of the Federal Government’s Commission of Audit and Review of the Demand Driven System.  Needless to say, the whole sector is hanging on this because the impacts could be anything from negligible through to significant.  The Federal Minister for Education, Christopher Pyne, addressed Vice-Chancellors at a dinner last week but it has to be said we ended up much better informed about the Minister’s views on the values of higher education (and the contribution of Sir Robert Menzies to it) than on any future policy directions.  Sadly, the Minister did confirm the Government’s commitment to imposing the efficiency dividend on the sector which was announced by the previous Labor government.  When Labor announced it, the Coalition condemned it and bizarrely now that the Coalition is enforcing it in government, Labor is opposing it.  Go figure.

O Week and Start of Academic Year

Last week, we also held O Week events and commencement celebrations on our campuses.  I was able to take part in the ceremony in Bathurst and in a welcome to students living in Residences.  In addition to new and replacement capacity in Wagga Wagga and Orange, there has been very significant refurbishment of residences on the Bathurst campus.  A very strong theme for us has been the value of residences in helping students to grow socially and succeed at their studies (this is similar to the experience at Arizona State University).  We know that it is more difficult to create a good community in a poor environment and we are hoping that the investment in facilities is going to pay off in better outcomes for students.  However, there is also the need for strong support mechanisms and with Paul Dowler and Ken Dillon I took part in the training sessions for the Resident Assistants (RAs) in the second week of February.  I have done this each year since I took on the VC’s role and I have thoroughly enjoyed it on every occasion.  They are a great bunch of very motivated people and it is always great to get a student’s eye view of the organisation.

Universities Australia Conference and MOOCs

As mentioned earlier, last week we had the Universities Australia Conference – at which I once again tried my hand at live tweeting and also ran a panel session on MOOCs.  The MOOCs discussion was an interesting exercise; as participants I had Professor Jane den Hollander, Vice-Chancellor at Deakin University, Professor Gregor Kennedy from the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at Melbourne University, Sally-Ann Williams from Google and Professor George Siemens, now at University of Texas but who started the whole MOOC thing at Athabasca University along with Stephen Downes.  I was very pleased to meet George personally for the first time.  I encouraged pre-discussion via our new Blackboard Course Site and also via Twitter.

In the discussion at the conference itself, it was plain that much of the hype that has been attached to the ‘MOOC’ label was a symptom of the wider change that is happening in higher education.  In particular, the internet and broadband connectivity has made it easier to consume information for all learners and easier to deliver education for all providers – everyone is a publisher now.  It is not a new theme but this does challenge us to focus on what distinctive value we can offer as universities because no-one now needs us merely to access information.  It is also clear that universities have embraced technology and are making dramatic changes in the way they deliver courses.  However, for many they are not yet skillfully using technology to reduce workload for both students and staff and we will need to solve that if we are to thrive into the future.  One point that should not be overlooked is that MOOCs have attracted those who are learning purely for interest and the love of it.  It is pretty hard to be critical of something that attracted most of us to work in higher education in the first place. However, there was a consensus that perhaps it was time to ditch the term and get back to talking about education more generally.

Finally, it’s worth saying something about themes that emerged in the online pre-discussion but less so at the conference. Some of my twitter correspondents mused on the cultural imperialism aspects of MOOCs.  Is there the risk that our intellectual life will become homogenised – and Americanised – as much as our suburbs have?  In one of his movies, Wim Wenders said “the Yanks have colonised our subconscious”.  There is now a global interest in MOOCs from developing countries but we should also be interested in this in smaller countries in the developed world.  That is, we should if we value our cultural identity. Another very interesting point raised in the online conversation was the relationship between the use of technology to facilitate teaching and casualisation in higher education.  Casualisation was almost unmentioned at the conference and yet it is a topic of intense concern to staff, both for that section of the casual workforce looking for a permanent position and for existing staff who are managing the workload associated with managing teams of casuals.

Student Demand and Challenges for 2014

We are still counting the enrolments for the first session of 2014.  Indications at this stage are that we will meet our budget target for load, which is good.  However, it seems plain from State and National data that the demand driven system is topping out and student demand is plateauing.  It is also plain that all universities are getting very much more competitive for students and that students are recognising they have more power and more choice.  On top of this, the ease with which distance education can be delivered via the internet means that there are many more players entering the market.  So, a lot more choice for students but no university can afford to be complacent.  We need to ensure we have courses that are relevant, engaging, that teach students well and deliver graduates who are highly employable as well as being well-grounded, decent human beings.  We also need to provide a great student experience and ensure that all interactions with the university work smoothly.  So, not much to ask for but this is what our Strategy sets out for us to do over the next two years.  2014, then, is a year of delivering on our strategy.  Some of this is going to be exciting and innovative, but much of it will be unglamorous with a fair bit of graft.  To use the words from our Strategy though, we need to have the gumption and the soul to tackle the task.