From the Vice Chancellor
INSIDE UNISAIt’s March. Sneaks up on you. Could be my favorite month. Students are back on campus, the new ones anxiously studying wayfinding signs, the returning ones just getting back down to business. Young, mature aged, local and international, bringing the whole place alive again and giving us all a renewed sense of who we are and what we’re doing here.
It has been two years since we’ve all been together like this and I really hope it stays that way. Much has changed in those two years. Being Australia’s University of Enterprise has sharpened our focus on delivering world class programs that equip our graduates to start and maintain successful careers. We have brought together our teaching and research expertise and, informed by what our industry and professional partners tell us, we know we’re delivering contemporary degrees that you just don’t find anywhere else. It’s what makes us South Australia’s number 1 university for student satisfaction; number 1 for graduate careers; and number 1 for graduate employability. A nice trifecta.
And there’s more. We have also educated so many Australian chief executive officers that we’re ranked number 4 in Australia by MBA News.
UniSA is definitely the place to bring your ambitions; we’ll bolster them, sharpen them and launch you into the world as a globally competent career professional.
But we do more than that. We are a good citizen of the community and the people who come within our orbit are also good community citizens.
When we became a university 31 years ago, we were tasked with providing educational programs to enhance the diverse cultural life of the wider community. In essence we were to welcome everyone, no matter where they came from. All that mattered was where they were going – our job was one of enabling success. And that’s one of our greatest strengths. The diversity of our student and staff population is what’s important. It’s shocking that women were not even allowed to go to university until the University of London ‘allowed’ them to attend in 1868. Last week UniSA, along with the rest of the world, celebrated International Women’s Day. UniSA celebrated as a university run equally with gender parity on our Enterprise Leadership team, a female Chancellor and gender equity policies and practices embedded into all our operations.
As a university we are committed to using education to help overcome disadvantage. We do a really good job of it but there is still much to do. One of the greatest barriers facing First Nations Peoples and preventing them from achieving the success they seek is racism and cultural insensitivity. Universities Australia has just launched its Indigenous Strategy that moves beyond commitment and aspiration to implementation and outcomes.
It’s a commitment by all Australian universities to work harder to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students to complete their degrees and move into positive post-study outcomes. It commits us to strengthen pathways for staff career advancement and representation at all levels of our institutions. It systematically measures universities’ efforts to identify both successes and areas where more work is needed. It mandates universities to improve cultural safety and take action on racism against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people by implementing Indigenous-specific anti-racism strategies and it recognises the value Indigenous people and knowledges bring to universities and embeds Indigenous value systems and knowledges in teaching and research.
It will need your help, but you know we’ll make it happen. Ignore words like ‘elitist’ when it comes to describing the university sector – they really don’t apply in this day and age. What we’re doing is bringing about change and offering new opportunities for a much wider group of people than ever before. Above all, that’s what a University of Enterprise does.
Professor David Lloyd
Vice Chancellor and President
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