policy & reform
Donning the business hat
Universities are billion-dollar enterprises today, so the leaders need training in financial practice or an understanding of it. By Louis White
Phil Dolan may just be the role model for the academic of the future. The professor, who is dean of the University of Western Australia’ s business school, has an impressive academic and professional background. Not only does Dolan have an MBA from the Australian Graduate School of Management( University of NSW) and a PhD from Stanford University, he spent 13 years at Macquarie Bank in the positions of associate director, division director, and head of investment research and development in the asset management division.
He also spent six years at Macquarie University as the director of the applied finance centre.
As the top Australian universities deal with turnovers of about $ 1 billion each, and other institutions approach this figure, the role of leading academics has to include financial accountability. Some department’ s finances alone exceed $ 100 million annually.
Real world experience too will become of paramount importance with multimilliondollar budgets to handle. That’ s not to say the principal ethos of a university – to provide an environment focused on learning, educating, researching and preparing students for the reality of the world outside its doors – has gone, but the reality of being accountable for budgets will increasingly grow as federal government funding decreases in the future.
“ The reality is that we need to utilise successful people in industry for the benefit of universities,” Dolan says.“ I still believe that you need a PhD to be in academia but obtaining information and resources from people who have forged successful careers in their respective field of work will benefit students.”
“ Not all business people will want to be academics and I believe that you need to study and work in an academic institution to understand all the nuances associated with it. Saying that, however, I think the best value can be obtained by leaders in industry imparting their real world knowledge into the classroom.
“ Academics need commercial acumen because the reality of universities in the present and the future is that the federal government is expecting universities around Australia to become more self-sufficient.”