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VC’ S CORNER focused on international students. We now take domestic students at those campuses. We then opened a centre in Adelaide, which is mainly a research campus, but we do run some of our programs there.
Cairns and Townsville obviously are not in central Queensland but those communities were keen for us to set up full campuses. Perth was a natural extension. We’ ve been operating in regional Western Australia for years – in Geraldton and Karratha, for example – and next year we’ ll be opening a large campus in Perth, alongside new study centres in Busselton and Broome.
We’ ll be offering opportunities to students who can’ t, for one reason or another, go to the universities that are already in the west. We will also be looking to increase international student numbers in Perth. There will be competition in Perth, as there is in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Cairns and Townsville. That’ s how we operate.
This will be a continuation of our growth into a truly national university – offering our courses and research right across the nation. We’ ve got students right across the country and campuses in every state except Tasmania.
We have even thought about rebranding but it’ s difficult to do that for a university. We tend to brand under the name CQUniversity, and we’ ve always taken much inspiration from the Bendigo Bank, which is national but community focused.
One of the things I have been pleased with this year is that we have been included in the Times Higher Education top 500 universities in the world.
Through all this, our heart remains in central Queensland, at our bases in Rockhampton, Mackay, Gladstone, Bundaberg and Emerald. We like to think we’ re exporting the power of this place. The courses we offer are proving quite popular across the country. Some of our campuses are in incredibly big cities, so what we have tried to do is devolve the direction of those sites as much as possible to associate vice-chancellors, who are the heads of those campuses, and very much involved with community engagement in those areas.
Those associate VCs will find out what those communities want and then come back to the mothership and make an argument as to why we should be delivering that. Each of the campuses has its own distinct feel, which in some ways is driven by the associate VCs, but there is also a CQUniversity feel about those campuses.
Through 2016, there have been some seismic shifts in vocational education, and we have been challenged in three distinct ways. We have seen the emergence of some big private providers, so there is a tremendous amount of competition in that area. We saw the rise and fall of VET FEE-HELP, and some of the abuses around VET FEE-HELP by unscrupulous providers, and we’ ve been caught up in that almost unfair competition. We are in a mining heartland and we’ ve seen many companies, because of the decline in resources, not doing as much training and not taking on as many apprentices. There has also been the challenge of merging with the TAFE. You can’ t underestimate the difficulties of bringing two organisations together: putting in new systems, combining staff and blending two cultures together.
When I came here nine years ago, the university almost needed to reinvent itself. We put in place a renewal plan, to be built completely around engagement, and set the goal to be Australia’ s most engaged university. That was going to take us from where we were to being a great university.
We stopped talking about research and teaching and we started talking about‘ engaged research’ and‘ engaged teaching’. We basically said that we wouldn’ t do anything in the university unless it was engaged with our communities, and that engagement was going be about forming partnerships. We looked at what our communities’ aspirations were and then we would partner with them to help them meet those aspirations.
Much of it was about building sustainable communities. That has been incredibly successful and that’ s why we have gone national to the extent that we have, because communities have seen what we’ ve been doing, and have wanted CQUniversity to come into their communities.
As part of this engagement agenda, we’ ve said that nobody in the university would be promoted unless they were engaged with their communities. Now when someone comes along to their promotion interview, they have to bring evidence of their teaching and learning, evidence of their research, but also evidence of their community engagement, and we have got quite a sophisticated database where people record all of those endeavours.
We also decided that we wanted to be a university that gives back to the communities we serve, and we’ re the only university in the country channelling at least 1 per cent of our turnover back to the community.
That’ s when we started to get much more involved with various initiatives, injecting cash into local organisations. A good example was reviving the Cairns Taipans basketball academy, which works with people on Cape York, many of them Indigenous. We sponsor that academy and have now become the naming rights sponsor, so it’ s the CQUniversity Cairns Taipans.
Then we got thinking,‘ Well that’ s all well and good – we’ re giving back to these Australian communities – but a lot of the wealth of this university comes from outside of Australia, particularly India and Nepal.’ We have a lot of students from the subcontinent, and I wasn’ t convinced that it was a good story that we had students from one of the poorest countries in the world paying fees to cross-subsidise students from one of the richest countries.
I asked myself,“ How do we give back to those overseas communities?” That’ s when we started entering into a relationship with Salaam Baalak in India, which rescues kids off the streets of Delhi, and gives them a home and a basic education. We now put 30 of their kids a year through university in India. Kids who a few years ago were living on the streets of Delhi are now qualifying as engineers, doctors and fashion designers.
Engaging money in the community is one thing but it is not our biggest resource. That is our students. How do we engage our students? I started thinking about involving them in social innovation. Now we send hundreds of students every year over to India to Salaam Baalak, to work with those kids in the orphanage. We have students heading over to Nepal to run health clinics. We are building a social innovation agenda that engages our students and our staff.
We went from engagement, to giving back, to social innovation, and this social innovation agenda is now right at the heart of the university, shaping our values and driving the university forward. ■
Scott Bowman is vice-chancellor of Central Queensland University.
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