Keepin’ on keepin’ on.
27/11/2024I realised this morning that if I didn't carve out some time, then 2024 would have gone down in history as the year with the fewest ever entries of 'Big Picture' blogs since records began 10 years ago. I couldn't allow that to happen - so it now looks like 2024 will tie with 2023 as having three entries, including this one. I wonder what on earth is going on that would keep me away from the...
Coming soon
12/04/2024Tempus 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 discussion of trouser legs can lead in myriad directions and sometimes to alternate realities. Well, it is at this point in the blog you're probably...
Shaping things.
29/02/2024Einstein'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 not be accurate, as I’m struggling to understand why it's only Thursday afternoon, when surely it should be Friday by now - so maybe Albert was right...
Just breathe
13/09/2023It'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 this morning in the welcome sunshine of a too-long delayed Adelaide spring, I feel as if I've literally just come up for air. The record for an...
Into the multiverse
16/05/2023There'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 will the heroes prevail, based on the decisions they are making in the present. Wouldn't that be a useful talent? Exploring the infinite avenues of...
Let’s have a chat …
08/02/2023Admit 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 outline for how one might go about creating a university for the future through the combination of two existing universities. File that one under 'could...
A rose by any other name…
08/12/2022Toy 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 way. Sequels can be great or not so great. ( c.f. Jaws: The Revenge ) Like difficult second albums - it takes real patience, inspiration and graft...
There’s got to be a better way…
26/08/2022The 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'. Huzzah! We are emerging from our winter of discontent. I've never encountered so many staff and peers who are feeling physically and emotionally tir...
Consistency is key.
12/04/2022I 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 have changed in the interim, I thought it appropriate that we should dust off our thinking - to see if we are consistent. As you'll be aware there is...
Calmly we walk through testing times.
01/03/2022I 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 time is passing at an excessive speed at the moment and have made a note to consult the keepers of the atomic clock, just to see if they're over-windi...
Ho Ho ho
15/12/2021With 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 usual?). From fending off cyber-attacks to rolling up sleeves for vaccination roll-outs, 2021 certainly wasn't a dull year. It's quite hard to fathom...
Let’s raise our gaze.
26/08/2021The 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). Notwithstanding the clear-cut health benefits, through the 'return to normal' lens, high vaccination rates will trigger the relaxation of restrictions,...
Going Boldly, Blue Skies
24/06/2021Imagine 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 UniSA:The Next Generation TM ? I doubt we'd get that trademark past Paramount though. And of course that sent me down the rabbit-hole of whether TNG...
On icebergs.
20/04/2021You 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 so many of us. From the microscopic menace that mercilessly disrupted our lives this past year to the wonder of wi-fi that allowed us to cope and not...
Retreating, not running away
10/03/2021Warning - 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 eyebrows in certain quarters. It shouldn't have, but it did. Perhaps that's a testament to an admirable commitment that people have to ensuring we st...
Let it go...
10/11/2020The 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 in this neck of the woods, but the advent of the holiday season manifest in this fashion gave me pause for thought that the year-that-shall-not-be-name...
Signs of normal life
01/10/2020There'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 that parchments have been pre-dispatched. Our COVID-friendly, hand sanitised, socially distanced arrangements have worked beautifully. They were put ...
Musing on Merging
09/08/2020I 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 - ending with 'you're gonna need a bigger boat' - to indicate that we had bigger times ahead of us here in UniSA. Prescient, as it turns out, but who...
‘P’ is for…
26/06/2020The 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 prudent is acting with or showing care and thought for the future. It's often used to describe an approach to the managing of finances. With good reason...
So what are we going to do about it?
17/04/2020'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 on the horizon, we are still trying to adjust to business as unusual. On the positive side of the ledger, it does look like the steps implemented...
Unstoppable
03/04/2020This 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 the first travel restrictions that saw 1200 of our students unable to return to Australia for their studies, and the tailored flexible solutions we put ...
Quiet achievers
14/02/2020It’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 and offer our heartfelt thanks to those who were on the front line as CFS volunteers and who worked so tirelessly to protect lives and properties under...
Change (n): an act or process through which something becomes different…
06/12/2019In 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 that this is the first VC blog in Australia to ever use that word in staff communications. While Rick Baker’s astonishing pre-CGI visual make-up effects...
What’s better – do it fast or do it properly?
09/08/2019Regardless 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 exactly what does this change mean for me . Against that backdrop, you could throw in the mix a local newspaper running a headline ‘UniSA's biggest...
Secret Sauce
30/04/2019‘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. I digress. It’s a triumphant expression uttered by the conquering heroes, who’ve undertaken a challenging task in uncharted territory, against the...
Behind closed doors...
06/02/2019What 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 without having to live with the consequence of doing all the work. Actually, in our case specifically, you shouldn’t. Shouldn’t be excused and shouldn’t ta...
Blink and you'll miss it
03/12/2018In 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 while he dozed, including the birth of a nation through revolution. Now, while I sometimes feel like I could sleep for a year, (usually on Thursdays), ...
Enterprise25
29/10/2018It 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 three vultures are sitting on a tree wondering what they’re going to do next. Always makes me smile. I’ve found myself on the receiving end of the...
So what’s next?
19/10/2018Sometimes 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. Sometimes at the expense of the now. As an aside, Google ‘Yoda Seagulls’. See, I did it again. While we are busy being awesome, and doing a great job of i...
Warp factor 9!
22/08/2018Universities 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 doubled our international student numbers through merging and we haven’t turned Magill into a retirement village. I do stand by my comments around ATARs...
Sliding doors
30/06/2018Sliding 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 paragraphs. I’ll resist that urge. The beauty about time is that it is linear. One thing happens after another after another. The difficulty with people is...
The Senior Staff Retreat
26/02/2018Whenever 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 historical references – time can be so cruel. The Senior Staff (a group that comes with capital S’s) ran awa.. sorry, retreated last week. To the corpora...
What’s your strategy going forward?
12/10/2017That’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 has been doing well and they know that after five years of successful delivery against the objectives we set ourselves in Crossing the Horizon that a...
Our Survey Says....
06/07/2017Family 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-inappropriate-but-hilarious responses to seemingly innocent questions, the play-at-home guessing what would be the top score… It made for good TV and I...
The big business of education
06/06/2017Even 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 opportunity a few weeks ago to put our case before the Education and Training Minister Senator Simon Birmingham. I’d like to share with you what I told him in ...
The rewards of patience
06/04/2017Penfolds 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 context of what it means to have well marketed products of great quality) but the rewards of patience. How sometimes it takes a while for a seed to...
We're in for a great ride
23/01/2017Welcome 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 back’ blog for the first Big Picture instalment of 2017 – but then decided that instead I would share the brief address I gave to those present at our...
Great things come to those who wait…
31/10/2016It’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 it) and, most worryingly, the trappings of holiday season appear ever earlier in the shops, I’m taking a moment to reflect. Only a moment though,...
UNIJAM: Shaping the Enterprise
03/06/2016Well, 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 the 10 th June). The statistics tell us that 85% of our staff registered, a major group within the near 5,000 registrants of staff, students, alumni a...
The Red Heart
14/04/2016Forty-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 and Torres Strait Islander students. The Aboriginal Task Force was formed at SAIT and after that everything began to change – for the better – across th...
An outbreak of common sense – Watt?
17/02/2016I 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 research funding. For the loyal readers of this blog I enclose the blog in full, a director’s cut. I mentioned previously that we live in turbulent high...
New traditions have to start somewhere
03/11/2015I 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 write itself. Last week alone was filled with sufficient highlights to outshine almost everything else that’s gone on since I last penned one of these...
Above and beyond the call...
18/08/2015Another 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 was open day. Or Open Day to give it its official capitalisation. More on that later. Last week was a pretty good week, all in all. In fact, as spring i...
Halfway through the year...
26/06/2015The 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 offshore to celebrate graduations. We've been to Malaysia and Singapore and next up is Hong Kong. The trip affords a little time to reflect and to pen this...
In other news...
13/05/2015While 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, last night's budget. In summary, higher education is to be affected in the following ways - The measures introduced in last year's budget to reduce...
Takers, sometimes makers
12/05/2015In 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 view that we are primarily the former, and have to work very, very hard to be the latter. I've made my own position clear on the issue of funding - the...
A week is a long time in politics
20/03/2015Spoiler 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 poker played out in Canberra during this past week. The climax, if one can use that word, the endgame if not, was the defeat of the government's...
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
09/12/2014Last 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 also coming off the disappointment of our not securing the dental tender, and the coincidence of significant efforts unrewarded had cast a little clo...
Stop and smell the roses
03/11/2014I 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 was beginning to think I was prevaricating – putting off a blog session for some unknown subconscious reason. But, on thinking about it – I was simply...
Are we there yet?
14/08/2014Hello 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 it really jumps out for me as I look back on the past twelve months in the context of our strategic action plan and all that has come to pass since we...
Now the rubber hits the road
28/07/2014I’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 hits the road. A lot of carefully analysed water has passed under the bridge in the past eighteen months or so and we are steadily making changes in...
Through The Big Picture, I hope that our whole community gains a greater and current appreciation of what is going on, how it fits together and how our activities connect and reinforce each other at a whole of enterprise level.
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