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healthy our community is, how well we run
our farms, and so on. We don’t just prepare
students for careers, but increasingly we
support their reskilling, upskilling and
preparedness to engage successfully in a
global society throughout their lives.
The more we understand how and what
we teach contributes to Tasmania – and, as
a result, similar communities elsewhere –
the greater the impact we will have.
In Tasmania, tailoring education in
distinctive ways for our place and its
people is key. We need to be accessible to
more people in more places by operating
a regionally networked model; to build
an endowment fund to ensure that cost
is not a barrier to higher education for
any Tasmanian; to broaden our offering
by continuing to develop a suite of
pathways tailored to people’s needs, such
as short-courses and associate degrees;
and to deliver those more flexibly to
accommodate the fact that, already,
more than half our students are not
school-leavers.
Our research can shape the state,
with the ability to offer insights and
creative productions that change
our understanding of the nature of
Tasmania itself. Virtually every part of the
university can contribute to those new
and evolving understandings, from our
historians, sociologists and lawyers to our
economists, climatologists, ecologists and
epidemiologists.
Our place-based focus insists that we
remember that many of Tasmania’s social
difficulties are grounded in economic
disadvantage. We must, therefore, work
both to support the creation of quality
jobs and to provide the education to make
them accessible.
As we think about these social
challenges, we have the capacity for our
research to discover innovative solutions to
deliver public and community services and,
critically, to build capability in communities
to lead the solutions themselves.
We will forge place-based partnerships
to tackle complex social and economic
challenges in an integrated way, providing
the education students need to participate
in and help create those parts of the
economy that provide good incomes and
secure employment. We need to create
regional competitive advantage for key
sectors and new businesses through
the industry problems we solve, and by
fostering a start-up community to develop
a pipeline of new, rapidly growing, globally
competitive but locally based enterprises.
As Tasmania’s sole university, we have
a unique ability to work in partnership
with government and community to
deliver public services such as health and
education. These university partnerships
should be characterised by both a
commitment to collaborative work and the
essential preservation of a truly evidence-
based and independent perspective.
Being place-based and contributing
from Tasmania
If part of our place-based mission is to
be the university for Tasmania, we are
strategically placed in the world to do
vital things from Tasmania. Many of the
university’s research strengths are built
on our rich and complex history, our
remarkable location – with its proximity to
the Southern Ocean and Antarctica – and
our wondrous natural environment.
In terms of global impact, the university
has done very well in producing a
significant body of important research over
an extended period. We aim to strengthen
and build on that, focusing on areas of
research where we have a defensibly
distinctive advantage, which largely comes
from where our history of excellence and
place converge. The ability to make a
contribution of that scale has been built
upon the relationships and resources that
come from being part of larger research
or government and industry ecosystems in
fields such as agriculture, Antarctic science,
fisheries, forestry, maritime engineering
and training, medical research, and in
minerals discovery and processing.
Being placed-based and sustainable
The finite qualities of islands remind us
that ecologically and socially we need
to be a sustainable place; we must work
with ecosystems, not against them, and
the definition of a community provided
by our island’s watery boundaries reminds
us that we must work together. Tasmania
has environmental values that are of global
significance and, as islanders, we have
obligations of stewardship. As we think
about that stewardship and the broader
task of being sustainable, we are guided
in our thinking by the United Nations
Sustainable Development Goals and the
recognition that our job is to find our
way to create a model where prosperity,
inclusivity, the environment and social and
technological progress advance together,
not in tension.
We are fortunate in having great defining
strengths as a university. However, our
challenges to deliver our mission are very
real, and perhaps our greatest challenge
is time.
The state has a rapidly aging population,
which within 10 years will see Tasmania in
negative natural population growth with
shrinking regional towns, fewer young
people, and a growing dependency ratio
with a high burden of chronic disease.
Unless Tasmania is on a very different
trajectory within that time, demographics
will become destiny.
Sustainability is a challenge for our
university too. The population of Tasmania
is too small to sustain a university of the
breadth and excellence that the state needs.
In response to the need for scale, we
have grown international student numbers
very strongly in a few areas, but we need
diversity to better meet our educational
objectives in having international
students and to avoid the risk of high
concentrations from particular countries
and in particular courses.
Being economically sustainable is no
easy task. Our mission is an intrinsically
high-cost one as we support a model of
regional delivery, a broad quality offering
and pathways to higher education for the
whole population.
Central to being sustainable is to
have the right size and shape of student
profile and to have an economically
sustainable way of operating. It also is
about fundamentally changing the way we
operate, using the principles of Lean to free
up our people to do the work that supports
our mission, and eliminating the frustrating
process and procedure that distracts
them from it.
While there are great challenges, they
are inspiring a boldness in us. We look
around the world at other small societies
like Scandinavia, Switzerland and Iceland,
and we see places were the measures that
really matter – from wellbeing to inclusivity
– lead the world. We aspire to be an integral
part of creating the next model for that
sort of society. So, it is our mission to see
Tasmania as a place that is a model for the
world of a sustainable, prosperous and
inclusive society where people live well. n
Professor Rufus Black is vice-chancellor
of the University of Tasmania.
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