VC ’ s corner campusreview . com . au
Creating a future for all
Griffith University VC and Chair of the Innovative Research Universities , Professor Carolyn Evans . Photo : Mark Cranitch
The challenges and successes of leading a university through enormous change .
Carolyn Evans interviewed by Martin Betts
Professor Carolyn Evans , VC of Griffith University and Chair of the Innovative Research Universities ( IRU ) group , reflects on how having a new strategy coming into 2020 served her well in providing a true north to navigate the challenges and disruptions of a pandemic .
And as the IRU reflects on its distinctiveness as a group of universities , she discusses how innovation has been made the necessity of the hour , and a means of guiding engaged staff in our universities through the cultural challenges of the current period to serve a critically important broader community purpose .
MB : You joined Griffith in February 2019 and developed a new strategy in your first six months . Three years later , how fit for purpose is your strategy for the times that we are now in ? CE : It ’ s certainly been a complex three years . 2019 was full of optimism and hope and really planning about the future . And we took a good period of time to really get the strategy nailed down . Of course , everything changed within a few months , but on reflection I ’ m actually really pleased that we did have the strategy and we ’ d had time to think through the strategy when we weren ’ t completely overwhelmed by COVID and all of its implications .
We had to revisit it , both at a council and executive group level . But the strategy is a long term document and is based on six core pillars . None of those had changed . And a number of key aspirations , and they hadn ’ t changed either . In fact , in some ways , they had become more important .
There were things that we wanted to do about online and digital learning . Well , that timeline really became feasible much earlier . And there were some things that we were able to make really good strides on , despite all of the difficulties . For example , around the employment of women at senior levels , the employment and admission into study of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students at all levels .
While we had to change our timelines , and we had to trim back some of our aspirations , particularly around capital , and we had to be patient with ourselves and with our staff , the core commitments remained . And it was very helpful for us when we were thinking about , sadly like many universities , trimming back on costs or prioritising certain actions with staff , to have that strategy , to know what ‘ true north ’ was .
What ’ s the Griffith strategy called , what in essence is different about it ? The strategy is called Creating a Future For All ; and we were very deliberate about that title . We really wanted to position this very deliberately , and each word in that title was chosen with care .
In research , we were keen to have big and ambitious research goals . Griffith was built as an interdisciplinary university , and there was a lot of commitment from staff to that , but there wasn ’ t a structure around it , so we created the Griffith Beacons . We ’ ve got beacons now in areas like climate change action , reimagining disabilities , preventing violence or disrupting violence . And spotlights bringing together some really interesting groups , like indigenous archaeologists and digital specialists , for example , looking at digitising rock art collections , or other colleagues working on space and satellite launching .
22