Tempus fugit. So the saying goes, less so about the speed of passage and more about the irretrievable nature of what's passed. Like Prufrock, I lately find myself contemplating the style of my trouser legs. Those who know me well know that any...
Einstein's observations about how time is relative to the observer may not be entirely accurate. I've not experienced any slowing of time despite moving at great speed since the start of this year. But even as I type this, I realise that I too may...
It's highly unlikely given my manifestation of irrational selective galeophobia (which is largely focused on one particular species*) that I would ever undertake the sport of free diving. But recent events have conjured up some parallels. Sitting...
There's a really important bit in Avengers: Infinity War when Dr Stephen Strange astrally projects himself into 14,000,605 alternate futures to see how events will play out in each case - and determines that in only one of those possible futures...
Admit it. You've been curious. Wanted to know what all the fuss is about. I admit that I was. So, I thought that I may as well have a go. In answer to the first question that popped into my head, ChatGPT responded by producing a very feasible...
Toy Story 2... LOTR: The Two Towers... The Dark Knight... Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan... Aliens... Mad Max: Fury Road... And of course…. You'll either answer The Godfather part 2 or Empire , and each to their own in that regard. It's Empire by...
The first daffodils of spring are emerging (which I admit still messes with my northern hemisphere brain, 10 years later) and apparently the sun will shine this coming weekend, bringing with it double digit temperature figures beginning with a '2'...
I believe that it pays in life to be consistent. So perhaps I'll start with sending you off to read this before you read any further here. Come back when you're done. Are you back? Good. That’s where we were 2 years ago and given that a few things...
I started writing this blog on the 22 nd Feb. I thought it'd be cool if I managed to post it at 22 minutes past ten pm. 22.22.22.2.22. The fact that you're only reading it now means I obviously didn't get it finished in time. I'm pretty sure that...
With a week or so to go before the Christmas closedown, I wanted to send a brief note of thanks to you all for everything you've done to keep the show on the road in what can only be described as another very unusual year - (doesn't that make it...
The expansion of the vaccination roll-out (roll-up?) in SA to include everyone over the age of 16 is a hugely positive step in our collectively charting a return to something akin to normal life (whatever that is - answers on a postcard please)....
Imagine my utter geeky delight when I discovered recently that one widely accepted definition of a 'generation' is thirty years. Think about it. Australia's University of Enterprise . Thirty years old. Wouldn't that mean we are now gearing up for...
You hear it often said that 90% of an iceberg lies beneath the surface. Unseen. But present. That's a fact of physics and the relative densities of ice and salt water. It's hard to imagine the unseen - but so much of life, and work, is unseen to s...
Warning - this blog contains some very long sentences*... Last week we took our senior staff offsite for two days for a planning retreat. Ordinarily that wouldn't be a particularly newsworthy event, but in these prudent times it caused some raised...
The sight of Christmas trees on display in David Jones this week startled me. I should clarify, I don't suffer from dendrophobia and I have, eight years in, made some appropriate mental adjustment to the fact that Christmas happens in summertime i...
There's something strangely comforting about us hosting graduation ceremonies again. It heralds a return to something akin to normal. It doesn't matter that the graduates are seated at 2m intervals from one another, that there are no handshakes or...
I reckon it's about four years now since I used a Jaws quote. (Surprising, given it's my all-time favourite film and the reason I still don't go in the water). During our 25 th Birthday celebrations I wove a few into my speech for the gala dinner ...
The definition of prudence is one of those circular ones - it's the quality of being prudent - so to find out what it really means you've got to look up another word. Life's like that quite often. Like the committee to abolish committees. Being...
'It's not the years...it's the mileage.' We could probably all make use of Indiana Jones' off-the-cuff quote these days. Institutionally, collectively and individually, we've taken a buffeting over the last few weeks and with continued uncertainty...
This isn't another COVID-19 update with more changes arising that we need to implement at the drop of a hat. I'm reasonably sure that it's safe to continue reading. What an extraordinary couple of months we have been through. Since 1 st Feb and th...
It’s been quite the start to 2020. A little over six weeks into the year and already we have seen fires, floods, a global health emergency… Throughout the bushfire crisis UniSA staff were responding and contributing across the board. We applaud an...
In a slide deck for a senior staff retreat I had an image, a screenshot, from An American Werewolf in London. In the image, the hero, David, (what a great name for a hero) is changing from human form to lycanthrope. As an aside I’m going to bet th...
Regardless of whether a change is large or small in terms of actual impact or scope, the prospect of change can cause uncertainty, speculation and worry – as everyone involved (and usually everyone who’s not involved too), naturally, wants to know...
‘We came, we saw, we kicked its…’ has always been one of my favourite lines from Ghostbusters. The original one. Not the Real Ghostbusters though, that was a cartoon spin-off in the late 1980s and they didn’t say that kind of thing on primetime TV...
What did you really talk about? It’s all decided isn’t it? You could be excused for taking a cynical view of senior staff retreats. The *managers*, wearing casual clothes, bonding and hugging (yes that does happen) and determining our future witho...
In the famous short story by Washington Irving (coming up now for 200 years old - so not exactly pop culture - it doesn’t even have a DeLorean in it) Rip Van Winkle lay down and slept for twenty years. He missed a whole chunk of American history...
It seems blogs are like buses. You wait for ages and then two turn up at once. I figured that a week was a reasonable amount of time to wait though. There’s a nice little scene near the end of the Jungle Book (the original animated version) where...
Sometimes my mind wanders. Well actually, more than sometimes. I tend to suffer from the same issue that caused Yoda to poke Luke with a stick in Empire. (I still can’t believe that was 38 years ago :o) Looking to the future, to the horizon....
Universities don’t often make the front page of the paper. But then headlines, it seems, behave like buses. You wait and wait for ages and then two come along at once. Don’t believe everything you read in the press though. We haven’t instantly...
Sliding doors, the trousers of time, mirror universes, alternate realities…. There are so many science fiction parallels to the state of strategic quantum flux in which we find ourselves that I could geek out writing about them for several...
Whenever I think about ‘retreats’ my mind instantly goes to Monty Python and The Holy Grail. ‘Run away, run away’. In typing that I realise that what I view as my popular culture references are now firmly in danger of becoming popular ancient...
That’s a question I’ve been hearing more and more of late. I sometimes respond with ‘keep scoring goals’ the Brazilian football team’s strategy from the late 70s and early 80s, but I worry about its currency. In reality, everyone knows that UniSA...
Family Feud (or Family Fortunes as it was known in my neck of the woods) was one of my favourite shows when I was growing up. The battle to be the first to the buzzer to win the right to answer the questions, the occasional unintentional-wholly-in...
Even as we huddle together for warmth this winter – and I’m now Australian-enough to complain about the cold this side of the Equator – I wanted to update you on our response to the Federal Government’s higher education reforms. I had an opportuni...
Penfolds has a book about the production of their flagship Grange wine which is called The Rewards of Patience . That’s something I think about from time to time. Not Grange, (well not all the time, I do think about Grange from time to time in the...
Welcome to 2017! This month marks the beginning of my fifth year as VC of UniSA and work really took off this past week with the Tour Down Under – a perennial highpoint and a great way to start the year. I’d originally intended to pen a ‘welcome...
It’s been quite a year. As Spring is finally sprung and weather assumes some semblance of normality following its celebration of Winnie the Pooh’s 90 th birthday (that’s a very oblique cultural reference- points will be awarded to those that get...
Well, we came, we saw, we jammed and jammed and jammed for 30 hours straight. And then we slept and suffered through withdrawal. Some of us sneaked back online to read and re-read the jammy content (the site is still live, in read-only form until...
Forty-three years ago, the South Australian Institute of Technology – SAIT – an antecedent institute of the University of South Australia was the trailblazing institution in Australia for the provision of opportunity and education to Aboriginal an...
I have been asked by Times Higher Education to contribute a regular blog on the tertiary education sector in Australia and how changes within it might impact on universities elsewhere. This month I’ve taken a close look at the Watt Review into...
I now have an almost Pavlovian response on long haul flights. Unfortunately it has nothing to do with fluffy meringue. After I sort out my inbox and have a bite to eat, I find myself writing another ‘Big Picture’ blog entry. This one might just...
Another plane journey, another blog. I'm on a flight to Singapore, where a flurry of activity including a State dinner with President Tan and the announcement of a strategic partnership with Embry Riddle Aeronautical University await me. Sunday wa...
The year has turned its corner, the days are getting longer and midwinter has passed. It's pretty easy for me to type that, sitting as I am in Singapore in 32 degrees of sunshine (with 65% humidity though - it's not all a bed of roses). I'm offsho...
While yesterday's blog post touched on some hypothetical self-defeating strategies we might employ to simply rise higher in the rankings - more money/ fewer students (not on our watch) - today's is reserved for more immediate matters. Specifically...
In the throes of the political debate on fee deregulation (12 months old with this budget tonight) I often found myself thinking about whether we were just legislation takers, or could we be influencers, makers. Little has happened to change my vi...
Spoiler alert - (overly) very detailed political blog follows... They say a week is a long time in politics and they're not wrong. We have seen decisions, revisions, reversals and new submissions in a flurry of higher education-related high stakes...
Last Tuesday evening I was in Canberra as the Higher Education and Research Reform Amendment Bill was voted down in the Senate. I wasn't there for the politics, rather I was attending the launch of the New Colombo Plan scholarships for 2015. I was...
I can’t count the number of times I’ve sat down at the desk, determined to write up a piece for this blog, only to find myself pulled in another direction, into a meeting or dealing with something or other that has conspired to stop me writing. I...
Hello all, I’m sitting at my PC on what is the eve of the first anniversary of the launch of Crossing the Horizon and thinking – wow, what just happened to the last year? It’s a familiar state of mind to us all whenever we pause to reflect, but i...
I’ve made more than a few statements about change on this blog site over the past months – signalling it, heralding its inevitability, highlighting the need. Now past the midpoint of the transition year, we’re getting to the point where the rubber...
There, and back again…. It’s now been a month since the budget. And it’s been a busy four weeks. I made my views on the budget and what it means for students fairly clear in my last posting, and with a certain degree of oscillation (vacillation?)...
Isn’t it strange how sometimes you know the news you are about to receive is going to be bad, but you still hope against hope that it won’t be? Perhaps that says more about the eternal optimism of humanity than it does about our ability for ration...
The Kemp Norton review of the demand driven system makes interesting and sometimes intriguing reading. It presents a fairly pragmatic proposed solution for a seemingly insoluble conundrum. How do you sustain a government funded demand driven syste...
Since my last posting we've enjoyed back to back long weekends, but that hasn't impacted on the momentum of UniSA or indeed the external drivers of the sector. What a couple of weeks it has been. We've had the release of the Kemp Norton review of...
As I sat down to type this, almost at the exactly the same time, I received notification of the outcome of the staff vote on the new Enterprise Agreement. I am truly pleased that we have been able to advance an agreement that has had such resoundi...
The common denominator in everything I’m talking about here is, of course, change. Change (like other stuff) happens. It’s not intended to make things worse – most people don’t mind change, as long as they’re not being changed. My view is that we...
Once you understand that our core ‘Enterprise’ comprises Teaching and Research, it is clear that the Provost’s review, the DVC-RI’s review and the Global Engagement framework set out what we need to do at a macro level for core business. These...
The Provost & Chief Academic Officer, Allan Evans, has an ongoing Curriculum Innovation Process – looking at what we’re doing well, where we could do better and how best to ensure we capitalise on the opportunities afforded to us by new technologi...
I have to admit to being hugely influenced by the NASA approach to big challenges. The whole organisation unites to deliver – making, as NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden said in Unijam, ‘the impossible possible’. We have no designs on taking on t...
I’m now 16 Months into the role of Vice Chancellor and our ongoing achievements as a dynamic, relevant university and our huge potential for the future continues to inspire me on a daily basis. Getting to grips with communicating not only our...