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Professor Rufus Black. Photo: UTAS
A sense of place
The unique challenges facing
Tasmania’s sole university.
By Rufus Black
T
he University of Tasmania was
founded to serve an entire state and
its people, and we remain the only
university specifically for our society.
Against that backdrop, place takes on
particular importance. It was the theme of
being ‘place-based and globally connected’
that emerged as central to our staff
conversations, which informed our new
Strategic Plan, released just last month.
In a regional setting as distinctive as
Tasmania, place shapes a university’s
mission and its delivery. But being place-
based can be part of our approach to
education, rather than something we
do for Tasmania alone. We can apply it
wherever we operate. Critically, it means
attending to the needs of the communities
and people that we are working with, and
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asking how the place we are working in
shapes what we do.
Today, education, knowledge and
creative endeavour are critical to future
social and economic wellbeing, and even
more so in a regional island setting with
a small population. In a world where
globalisation favours large, globally
connected metropolitan areas, regional
economies will always have to work harder
to find the distinctive sources of advantage
that are needed to generate the wealth,
services and infrastructure required to
support a decent quality of life.
Regional areas such as Tasmania have to
deal with the challenges of complex social
disadvantage left by the disruptive impact
of the global economy, which has seen
work and opportunity leave the state to
locations with lower labour or input costs,
and greater economies of scale.
While for some in Tasmania these are
relatively buoyant times, the university’s
task is to look to these considerable
long-term challenges. Our population is
ageing. In many parts of our community
we have poor social and health indicators.
We have challenges with our underlying
measures of economic competitiveness,
such as productivity.
Central to our place-based mission is
the ability to work in partnership with the
community, industry and government
to solve the complex problems
underlying these issues and to create a
prosperous, inclusive and sustainable
future for Tasmania, providing a global
model for communities with similar
challenges elsewhere.
Teaching, researching and partnering in
a place-based way
We have enormous capacity across a
generation through our teaching, our
research, the creative output we produce
and the partnerships we form.
The university educates a great
proportion of the state’s population, from
teachers and nurses to engineers and
artists. How well we equip our students
for Tasmania’s future will in turn shape
how well educated our children are, how