Transcript: Prof Barney Glover, Vice Chancellor & President at WSU on Reimagining HE 🎧

This is Reimagining The Future of Higher Education from Studiosity. Your go-to podcast with remarkable education leaders, sharing personal stories from their experience in and around the sector, including reflection and evidence for progress in the sector. With your host, Professor Judyth Sachs, former DVC Learning and Teaching at the University of Sydney, Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Provost Macquarie University and Special Advisor in Higher Education at KPMG and now Chief Academic Officer at Studiosity.

Prof Judyth Sachs:
Good afternoon, Professor Glover. Thank you for making time to talk to me this afternoon as part of the Studiosity podcast series. Before we start, Studiosity acknowledges the traditional Indigenous Custodians of Country throughout Australia and all of the lands where we work and recognises their continuing connection to land, waters and culture. We pay our respects to elders, past and present.

So welcome to the podcast, Barney, if I can be informal. You have had a very interesting academic career. You've worked in universities that have been challenging, both in terms of their location, but also aspirational. So your time at Charles Darwin University was characterised by transformation and change and really repositioning it. Your time at Newcastle as a DVC Research was also about repositioning and developing much more focussed research culture, and at Western Sydney well, I think that what you've done is brought together a really complex set of federated campuses to be unified but distinctive. So and you've also created a much greater presence within the community.

So you are a Vice-Chancellor who has reimagined higher education. And so part of our conversation today will be about reimagining higher education. But before we do that, I think people like to hear a little bit about the stories of Vice-Chancellors and the things that have shaped them as leaders, but also as as educators and really senior academics. So I asked you to bring an object that represented your journey as an education leader and scholar, but also that is part of who you are as an educator and scholar. So what, what did you consider bringing? 

Prof Barney Glover:
Thanks Judyth. It is it is great to have a chance to chat to you, we've known each other for way too long. So it's nice to... 

Prof Judyth Sachs:
We were young then. 

Prof Barney Glover:
And it's good to have a chance to talk to you about universities and education and and the challenges of our sector. A sector you've been involved with for as long as I have, I think, if not longer. So it's it's great to be with you. Look, I reflected a lot about the object. And because I started out my working life as a teacher in secondary schools in Victorian country Victoria, I thought a lot about a piece of chalk. Because it sort of reflected a little bit of where my teaching career began using to learning to to use a blackboard effectively as a, as a way of conveying information in a mathematics classroom in country Victoria in the early 1980s. So that meant something to me. And I still have fond memories, very fond memories, actually, of that period.

But in the end, I decided to think more about perhaps the latter 20 years of my educational journey and the role that technology has played in changing the shape of education and educators. So I chose my mobile phone as my object because I felt that if anything reflected what we the capacity we have now in a mobile phone is an extraordinary device when it comes to what it's capable of and as an educational tool, without doubt, we're just learning, I think, to to really understand its capabilities in so many ways, particularly coming out of a pandemic where we've relied so heavily on technology. And I know how many times I've used my mobile phone for a Zoom meeting, for example. So there's that dimension, but there's also the productivity dimension of mobile telephony, because for me as a Vice-Chancellor, I do a huge amount of work daily on a mobile phone.

"...for me as a Vice Chancellor, I do a huge amount of work daily on a mobile phone. So it now is a critical part of my life, my communication, and my working life."

So it now is a critical part of my life, my communication and my, my working life. And I know in many parts of the world, mobile telephony is a lot more accessible than other forms of media to influence education. So while we once talked about, you know, television as a means of communicating to remote communities, quite often actually they can get access to mobile telephony much more easily than they can to other forms of multimedia educational technology. So I chose the mobile phone as my object. 

Prof Judyth Sachs: 
And it's with you all the time. And it's interesting that you've chosen that because it means you're always on call. 

Prof Barney Glover: 
Yeah, there is an element of that. Actually, the the way it is ingratiated itself into our lives and our reliance upon it. If it's reassuring, it's it's never in my bedroom when I go to sleep at night. But the alarm can go off at various times if something particularly urgent comes through. But it is it is an extraordinary part of our lives. And I welcome the productivity benefit of a mobile phone. And I think it's made a huge difference. You can carry this at the end of the day, no briefcase, no other documentation necessary. And and you can have a video conference, you can have a teleconference, you can access some pretty sophisticated software. You can log into some systems. You can be searching the Internet, you can be interacting in a whole range of ways online. It is a remarkable device, a smart phone, as it is in 2022. So you know I do think it's an incredible - it makes an incredible contribution to our lives.

I know the downsides are there, but the upsides are significant. Interesting in New South Wales is more and more people are talking about banning mobile phones from classrooms in schools and I have some sympathy for that and I understand where that's coming from. And as a former mathematics teacher in secondary schools, I can imagine, one, how I would use this device, because you can get some very sophisticated mathematical software on it. I have some of that to do, some quite extraordinary analysis on the phone. But equally you need to keep people focussed and attentive and on task in a world where, you know, one of the again, the downsides of technology is for many people, their lives are broken up into pretty small amounts of time, focussed on something before they flick to something else. So I can understand it. 

Prof Judyth Sachs: 
So you mentioned that you were teaching in the early eighties, so that means that you went to university in the late seventies. What was your undergraduate student experience like?

Prof Barney Glover :
Well, I loved my undergraduate student experience at Melbourne Uni in starting in 1977 as a science student there, having finished in year 12 and or "Form six" as it was called in Victoria then in 1976. And I thoroughly enjoyed it. I enjoyed lectures, I enjoyed being in a lecture theatre with a great lecturer, a Professor, teaching me mathematics and absolutely loving that experience. Or in chemistry or in physics. It was a I enjoyed that because as you know, I was a pretty good student, so I soaked things up pretty quickly in those areas I was particularly interested in. So for me, that experience that the learning part of university was was great. I lived in a residential college, so I had a residential college experience and you know, that has enduring impact on people's lives. 

Prof Judyth Sachs:
Their livers, you mean. 

Prof Barney Glover: 
The...? 

Prof Judyth Sachs: 
Their liver. 

Prof Barney Glover:
Yeah well there's that sort of dimension to it. Absolutely. But it's also the relationships, the networks, the lifetime friendships that you make from that experience. And then Melbourne Uni in that period of time was an exciting place, lots of things happening on a daily basis. So yeah, no, I enjoyed my experience. I did my undergraduate degree at Melbourne, I did my Honours year at Melbourne, I went and did a Masters in Melbourne. I was, I was in what was called a bonded studentship holder. So I was, that's what enabled me to go to university to be paid by the, by the Victorian Education Department to go to uni. And then eventually they wanted me to pay back that bond and go and teach and I came back to my PhD later. 

Prof Judyth Sachs: 
Right. 

Prof Barney Glover: 
Rather than, so I went teaching for seven years in, in country Victoria. So I that entire period at the University of Melbourne is one that's that's a great memories and, and very precious to me. 

Prof Judyth Sachs: 
So when you think back on your experience and students' experiences today, very different in all sorts of, in all sorts of contexts and reasons. But what are the most stark? What are the starkest contrasts that you you actually remember between then and now? 

Prof Barney Glover: 
It's a good point. There are very dramatic differences and there are very significant pressures on students in 2022 that weren't the same in the 1970s. My experience of it. We were going through that period where higher education was free. After the election of the Whitlam government between '72 and '75, so that changed the nature of going to university; it was the first wave of mass or one of the first waves of mass-ification of higher education in Australia, but still had a long way to go to what would happen in the nineties with the introduction of the Higher Education Contribution Scheme and then go forward another more than a decade in in the context of the Bradley reforms.

So it was, we're beginning to see more students having access to higher education. There was no doubt about it. But go forward to 2022. The pressures are enormous. It's not all of them driven by the pandemic. It's driven by the nature and the frenetic nature of of our lives now and the pressures on students. I know our students at Western Sydney of course, have got a great deal of pressure on them. They're almost all working part time and and I didn't need to work too much part time when I went to university. I did a few hours a week at the Village Cinemas in Geelong actually. But anyway, that's a different story. So those pressures are there.

So students tend to be studying less intensively because they're working and they've got family pressures, lifestyle pressures. They come on to campus in a different way if they come on at all. By the way, we've flipped the classroom to accommodate different styles of learning, to focus in a much more collaborative style of learning. That's meant that students, you know, they can download a lot of material, very high quality material, before they need to step into a face to face environment with a with a tutor or a lecturer with their fellow students in projects or in a collaborative learning space; what we might have called a tutorial or a seminar room.

So we've changed the nature of it quite dramatically, and that's changed the campus experience quite significantly as well. I think there are still elements of that experience at some of our Go8 universities like Sydney and Melbourne who are essentially single-campus universities. Macquarie University you certainly had an association with might be similar as well. UTS in the heart of Sydney.

"...the fundamental educational ethos of our universities is being questioned for a utilitarian purpose, in a sense."

But for universities, multi-campus universities, regional universities, newer universities in the system, that student experience is is very different to what it was. And of course we get now a great deal of conversation going around about the expectations being placed on universities to ensure our students are job ready, are career ready. So the sort of the fundamental educational ethos of our universities is being questioned for a utilitarian purpose in a sense. 

Prof Judyth Sachs: 
And I guess... 

Prof Barney Glover: 
A lot of discussion about how we can actually segment education in a way that allows students to come in and out more in that educational journey, use their skills when they need them, come back when they need to, to get more. So it's a very different context in 2022. 

Prof Judyth Sachs: 
And that means then the government performance indicators will have to change. So length of time to completion, if it's that sort of logic coming in and coming out, upgrading skills and things like that, could mean that completion rates within the shortest time is a measure of a university's success. 

Prof Barney Glover: 
It depends on, again, how you might define completion, because in a micro-credential...

Prof Judyth Sachs:
Graduation. 

Prof Barney Glover: 
...very flexible world, they might in fact be exiting with a with a micro-credential, which is exactly what they need. They might be doing this out of an undergraduate degree, not just a postgraduate degree, because that micro-credential, that three month programme, six month programme, whatever it might be, might be just what they need in the context of the career path they've chosen, in the employment context that they're in. So that might count as something of a completion. So we might have to I think this is one of the things we're going to have to talk about in the sector, Judyth, over the coming months, let alone the next few years.

We've got to think a little bit about the way we credential higher education into the future. You know, what is. How much structure do we need to put around micro credentials and alternative credentials? And how can we ensure the coherency of the educational experience when we begin to stratify it in a way, particularly at undergraduate level, that might serve a purpose from an industry perspective to the sorts of skills and training mix they need for their workforce.

"How much structure do we need to put around micro credentials and alternative credentials? And how can we ensure the coherency of the educational experience...?"

But what does that mean in the broader context of an educated and civil society? These are really interesting questions that we're going to have to to ask, and I think universities are now being examined in that context about our modus operandi, if you like, in the way we engage in the educational experience and whether or not we're prepared to be even more entrepreneurial. They're really big questions facing the sector, I think. 

Prof Judyth Sachs: 
So what I'm hearing you in terms of the context of this conversation about reimagining higher education; does reimagining higher education have at its core flexibility? And flexibility of programmes, flexibility of- Sydney University serves a different community than, say, Western Sydney University compared to Southern Cross University. So so do we have to sort of reinforce and re redesign and rethink what's the purpose of the university? How does it fit in the community, as you referred to when you were talking about the civic purpose of universities? 

Prof Barney Glover: 
Flexibility will be a part of it. You know, we still have a large number of programmes which are professionally accredited, and so we need to think carefully about our medical graduates, our architecture graduates, our graduates in law or in engineering, and to ensure that, you know, we do have a workforce that is skilled and competent in those professional areas and so many others. So flexibility is going to be part of it because I think there is in areas it might be in, for example, in I.T., there might be areas of health care where we might see a much more flexible, perhaps business degrees might become much more flexible than they are now. So I think there'll be an element of flexibility. 

Prof Judyth Sachs: 
And what other elements?

Prof Barney Glover: 
Just on that point though Judyth, I think the history of Australian reform of higher education has a very slow history in many ways. So we don't bring about, as you know, we don't bring about dramatic change to the basic structure of our programmes very quickly. And in fact, quite rightly, we we hold dear the quality of our education as it's reflected through the quality of our graduates, the regulatory frameworks we operate within through TEQSA, and the international comparisons that we can draw from from our graduates as they're working all around the world. So we've got to tread carefully as we move forward in major reform. That's why I say it's part, I think of of what what we're going to see, but it's not the whole story. 

Prof Judyth Sachs: 
So what else should be there? As part of the redesign, the rethinking, reimagining. 

Prof Barney Glover: 
Well, I think the credentialing is an important part of it. Flexibility, credentialing are, you know, go hand in hand. We need to be, I think, conscious of the fact that people, you know, you we've both read a lot about, I'm sure, the changing intensity of learning over a lifetime. And, you know, not that long ago, the vast majority of learning in a lifetime occurred in that period up to and including the end of undergraduate study. And then after that, the proportion.

There was a continuing educational element, but it was much less intensive than that first period of life. Now that's changing. In fact, the shift is much more dramatic to lifelong learning. I think there's much more of an indication that throughout the careers that people will have after perhaps an initial higher education qualification, those those lifelong experiences are going to continue and be more intense and possibly more intense than the initial higher education experience.

So we've got to be adjusting and reimagining higher education in a in a less compartmentalised way in the context of of a person's life, both at the undergrad and the post-grad level. So that brings about a certain amount of flexibility, without a doubt, certainly an amount of modularity in what we're doing, but also remaining able to upskill and and bring new knowledge and and new learning to the educational experience. And universities will have to adapt to that lifelong learning mantra in a much more dramatic way, not just for our alumni. And we're all thinking about ways to tap into our the lifelong relationship with our alumni, but it's also to attract new students into our programmes, whether they're short courses, intensives, seminar programmes or more substantial accumulations of credentials that might make up an accredited programme. So I think we're going to see that being a key part of re-imagining higher education.

"And universities will have to adapt to that lifelong learning mantra in a much more dramatic way, not just for our alumni."

I think the other element that is going to be much, much more significant than and it's been a feature without a doubt of higher education for decades, but the involvement and the engagement between higher education, business and industry - and industry, I mean, broadly here, not just, you know, the industrial context of that sector, but importantly the not-for-profit sector, the non-government sector, government agencies, businesses and so on. A much deeper involvement between business - I think if universities don't successfully navigate and and successfully navigate the relationship with business and industry in that broad sense, then they are going to struggle to be relevant in the broader context of the economic future of Australia or anywhere else in the world. It still comes back to your civic purpose question.

And how do we ensure that we can still provide opportunities for people to explore new ideas in an environment which is rich with challenge and we're not constrained to. You're going to be an engineer, so there's a curriculum you have to follow. We need historians and philosophers. We need anthropologists. We need people deeply immersed in the humanities. Because as a society, we can't develop without that. So we've got to ensure that as we navigate our way through these changes, we still provide those opportunities to maintain and in fact allow to flourish, the humanities, the arts, the social sciences more broadly. That's that's another one of the big challenges. 

"We need historians and philosophers. We need anthropologists. We need people deeply immersed in the humanities. Because as a society, we can't develop without that. So we've got to ensure that as we navigate our way through these changes, we still provide those opportunities to maintain and in fact allow to flourish, the humanities, the arts, the social sciences more broadly."

Prof Judyth Sachs: 
So you as part of the value proposition for Western and it's one that I think is very compelling. It's a university for the West of Sydney. So can you elaborate on that? And that's to me is probably another. And it links in with the civic purpose of universities. But but how do you. How do you enact that proposition so that people see the value of it? 

Prof Barney Glover: 
And it goes beyond the concept of place to a certain extent, because, of course we are the university of this region. This is a very fast-growing region because of the investment that's going into western Sydney around the Nancy-Bird Walton International Airport and all of the other extraordinary investments being made into health infrastructure and transport infrastructure and the arts, the Powerhouse as an example in Parramatta. So this is a transformational period for our region. But notwithstanding that Western Sydney University and all of its previous incarnations, whether it's colleges of advanced education that came together to form the University of Western Sydney in 1989, or the Hawkesbury Agricultural College, dating back to 1891. We've had a long connection with tertiary education in the region, so it's natural that Western Sydney University is a region, is a university for our region. But it's in understanding the characteristics of our region that that comes to life.

You know, we are a region with a with a very successful multicultural milieu in this region. We have 170 different ethnic communities interwoven into this region and remarkably successfully, I might add, we still have very significant pockets of educational disadvantage here by virtue of the nature of the way in which Western Sydney developed. These new investments will change the socio economic context of the region, which is great because we need social mobility, we need that those economic in those economic circumstances to actually drive social mobility. And that's very, very important. It's a delicate balance, but the university provides the graduates that help to enable that success in our region. And so many of our graduates remain very much in our region.

So it's not simply about place, but it's also about the type of community that we serve and communities that we serve. Because Western Sydney is not a homogenous part of Australia, it's a very heterogeneous part of Australia. The north west is very different to the south west and western Sydney and so on. So it's made of smaller cities that come together to form this region.

And so understanding that multi campus context we operate in is a really important part of saying we're here to support educational advantage, educational opportunity, we're here to recognise it's still 65% of our students are first in family to go to university. Just today I've had I've been at two graduation ceremonies and they're always wonderful events because we understand that so many of those students walking, graduates walking across the stage are the first in their family to go to university. 

So it's not just a life changing moment for them, but their entire family is seeing for the first time what higher education, how important it is, how transformative it is. And if we're still having 65% of our students first in family, we still have a long way to go in this region to continue to lift aspirations around access and participation in higher education and success in higher education.

"if we're still having 65% of our students first in family, we still have a long way to go in this region to continue to lift aspirations around access and participation in higher education and success in higher education."

So the reason I wanted to start by being not just about places because those elements are really important to our university and they're replicated wherever we're involved in teaching and learning around the world. And and that's the nature of Australian higher ed is that we're internationalised, but that ethos of our institution, the values we bring are reflected in all of our activities and, and reflect, I think our success in the  Times Higher Education impact rankings this year. 

Prof Judyth Sachs: 
Can I revert the attention back to you? And you've already articulated this, but what's important to you as an educator and were there specific opportunities that you took advantage of that were fundamental to the ideas that you've enacted in your professional career? 

Prof Barney Glover: 
Look, I was very fortunate to be able to grow up in a period in Australia. Not an easy period by any means, but a period where, although many, many of my my friends at high school never went on to university because it was a working class high school in Geelong. We'd refer to it that way at the time. I grew up in a in a working class area, housing commission area of Geelong, which meant, you know, it was a, it was a challenging childhood, but I had a great childhood and my parents were very committed to education for all of the children in the family. And so my sister went to university. I wasn't the first in family to go to university. My sister went to Melbourne University the two years before I did and I followed her the year after. My brothers after that did not go on to university, they went into other forms of trade qualifications and other things.

So I was fortunate to have that opportunity at that time to go to university. So I appreciated this was not something that everyone is able to take advantage of. And that sense of providing purpose in whatever I did in life has been important to me. And you mentioned the some of the universities that I've had an opportunity to to work in, and that began at what was the University of Ballarat, Ballarat University College. So it was a regional, small regional university in Victoria serving a very interesting community in the western part of Victoria. From there to Curtin University. And again Curtin is a, is a university supporting a very important community around its Bentley campus, then to Newcastle in the Hunter and the Upper Hunter and the Central Coast with really beginning to see significant educational disadvantage and needing to be creative and innovative as a university to address that educational disadvantage.

And then I had the opportunity, an incredible opportunity to be the Vice-Chancellor at a university like Charles Darwin University in the Northern Territory, which I think is such an important university. 29% of its students are Indigenous Australians more than any other university, by an order of magnitude, many of them in vocational training. It's a dual sector university, but it's a university that is embedded in the fabric of the Northern Territory and in very, very challenging circumstances to address educational disadvantage.

But I know from the experiences there that higher education or tertiary education, I have wonderful memories of the graduation ceremonies at CDU where you're not only seeing PhDs graduate in tropical medicine through the Menzies School of Health Research, or you're seeing some of the most extraordinary environmental scientists that are coming through, or people working in social policy in northern Australia, getting a PhD. But you're also seeing students from remote communities who have done a Cert I in Rural Operations or Essential Services, and they're also graduating in the same ceremony.

And to talk to them about this opportunity to succeed and the difference it can make to their life and to their circumstance. That's a powerful driver, I think for anyone who has a privilege to lead an Australian university. So when the opportunity came to to see if I'd be successful with Western Sydney University, University of Western Sydney as it was at the time, again this resonated because of the work of my predecessor Jan Reid and the Vice Chancellors before her that appreciated just how extraordinary Western Sydney was and the great responsibility we carried to ensure our university was as open to that community and as uplifting as it could be.

So from my perspective, that continued purpose, the transformative nature of education, something I believe deeply in, has driven me throughout my career and has, if you like, guided me to the institutions that I've wanted to work in and contribute to and to the sector more broadly. So I'm not sure if that exactly answers your question. 

Prof Judyth Sachs:
No it does. 

Prof Barney Glover: 
That's my sort of connection to education. So it does start with your early experiences in life and the friendships you make. And in my case, in a, in a struggling part of, of industrial Geelong through to, you know, what we can do in this period of transformation in Western Sydney. 

Prof Judyth Sachs: 
So as I'm hearing your talk, I hear passion, I hear commitment, and I hear grit. What sustains you? Because the job of a Vice Chancellor in the current environment is particularly challenging because of the uncertainties and the ambiguities of government policy. So what sustains you? What what makes you get up every morning and come into the office? 

Prof Barney Glover: 
Well, the job's undone. I think it's very interesting that Jason Clare's first speech as the new Minister for Education at the major speech at the UA Conference in June, everyone saw that as a very important moment. It was a powerful speech to that room. Hundreds of people wanting to hear from the new minister about his priorities. And he touched on a number of things. But but the core for the new minister was the work that he felt still needed to be done to ensure that that the equity and the diversity of our sector is something that we embrace and that we ensure everyone has that opportunity, who has the capacity to come and study in higher education, has the opportunity to do so, irrespective of their postcode or their educational background. We need to provide pathways. And his commitment to continuing the work that Denise Bradley did, and in producing her quite extraordinary report around low-SES students and the failure of our sector to really provide the educational opportunities that low-SES students deserve and expect, and that we needed to do more to address in the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd period.

And to hear the Minister talk passionately about that and say there is more here to be done. You know, when we get up in the morning, to use your phrase, then we're thinking there is still more to be done here. There are still opportunities that are not being met that I think universities play a crucial role in in delivering against. That's only in the context of the teaching and learning component of it. And I think one of the other great joys and privileges any Vice Chancellor has is to nurture research in our institutions and for a lot of it, research that is at that nexus with teaching and learning.

So we get the great benefits of the cross-fertilisation of teaching and research, but also some of the great curiosity-driven fundamental research in our institutions and then some of this incredibly important applied research going on. I know we have it here as every university has outstanding research capability. That, again, is a great privilege to see, well, how can we ensure in the public good we can advance the knowledge and the dissemination of knowledge, not just through our graduates, but through our research output? And where appropriate and where the opportunity exists how can we commercialise that for the benefit of the country?

So those things force you to get up in the morning and say, "Yeah, look, my job is not done yet". And, you know, Vice Chancellors, Judyth, are always in that uniquely privileged position of having access to government in various ways to try and influence policy. So we all have a view about what's what needs reform, and we have views on what would make a better, fairer, more equitable system of higher education in this country, and to be able to try and influence the politicians and the policymakers around that. That's another driver to think, okay, this is a unique moment. And if I have access and if the idea is evidence based and compelling enough, then there's an obligation to put them before governments, state and federal, and try and move them towards better policy. So that's another reason I think we all feel. There's there's a lot of work to be done. 

Prof Judyth Sachs: 
And just in closing, Barney, what advice would you give to your younger self and what would you say to inspiring senior leaders in the sector? So two questions. 

Prof Barney Glover: 
To my younger self... I'm not sure that I have anything profound. I'd say to the younger Barney... Maybe I'd say to him. You know, you really you know, Barney, you don't need to spend quite as much time studying and you're still going to do okay, maybe in some of those moments where you enjoyed those lectures so much. Maybe when you're younger, you need to take advantage of every opportunity that presents itself. And I think that might have been a message. I think my pathway, I hope, would have been the same for a whole raft of reasons. You know, the family I have is wonderful and grandchildren are wonderful. And I love having been in higher education now....well, I've been in education since 1964.

So I was reflecting this morning before coming on to do the podcast, I was thinking, goodness gracious, if we were doing this with Judyth in 2024, I'll be 60 years in education. I was very obviously very young at the beginning, but that's a lifetime in education. And and I don't regret that for a minute. And I hope the pathway would be the same. In terms of the leaders of the sector. I think there's one thing I a message I often want to send to my colleagues in the sector.

And that is, we need to do more in leadership development, in higher education, in my view Judyth. I know you've been a great contributor to this yourself. You've been one of those leaders who appreciated that we don't naturally come into these senior roles with the skills and the knowledge that we need to be as successful as we'd like to be, or as we need to be as we should be.

And I think we're often reluctant, for whatever reason, to engage in really high quality leadership development in higher education. And the LH Martin and various other organisations have done great things and continue to great things, but it's not at the scale I think that's necessary for the benefit of higher education. So I'd say to Universities Australia and to the University Chancellors Council, I'd say we need to do better on providing professional development and educational opportunities and leadership opportunities for those in senior positions in universities, including Vice Chancellors early in their careers, so that they might learn a little more from each other and from those more experienced in the sector about leadership and the challenges it brings.

A few years ago, I had the privilege as Chair of UA to attend the the annual Presidents - new Presidents meeting in Canada for Universities Canada. And I went along and this is held every year. It was in January in Montreal. So it was you weren't going outside. So you're inside a hotel in Montreal. And they're about because of the size of the Canadian system, you know, they had about 15 to 20 new Presidents who'd been in higher education between, some of them were coming up to the beginning of their first term, some had been there for a year or so.

They came together and over the course of two days, a number of people came and spoke to them about the challenges of leadership in education. And I found it was a very valuable experience. I spoke about Australian higher education and some of the challenges we have. I think there's an area that needs attention Judyth so I would hope that as a sector we can start to do more. The masterclasses that are at UA meetings, UA conferences are an interesting step, but I think there's more we can do. 

Prof Judyth Sachs: 
On that really positive note and that sort of reimagining note, thank you, Barney, for giving me 40 minutes of your time today. I've enjoyed it. I hope you've enjoyed it. 

Prof Barney Glover: 
I have Judyth. Good to talk to you. Really enjoyed it. 

Prof Judyth Sachs: 
Likewise. Okay. Enjoy your more graduations. Bye. 

Prof Barney Glover: 
OK. See you later. 

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