Transcript: Prof Merlin Crossley, DVC at UNSW 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, Studiosity's founder and President of Friends of Libraries Australia, Jack Goodman. 

 

Jack Goodman:
Well, I'm here today with Merlin Crossley, Deputy Vice-Chancellor at UNSW, and welcome, Merlin. It's great to see you. 

Prof Merlin Crossley:
 Great to see you, Jack. 

Jack Goodman:
 Yeah, look, we love to start these conversations off with giving our guests an opportunity to share some sort of an object or a memento that's related to their learning journey. I don't know, have you brought something along that, I can have a look at?

 Prof Merlin Crossley:
I have. I've brought this. Do you know what that is?

 Jack Goodman:
 It's a fancy shell of some sort.

Prof Merlin Crossley:
 It's a paper Nautilus. So I'm a biologist. So fundamentally, always I sort of got into all this stuff because I loved animals. And that is actually an eggshell from an octopus. So it looks like a nautilus. It looks like a nautilus. The octopus sits in there and shoots along across the ocean and has an air bubble there that keeps it buoyant. The females are quite big, the males absolutely tiny, and the octopus actually secretes it. To me, it's beautiful, but it's not what you would expect because it looks like it looks like a seashell.

But it's the octopus secretes it with its legs. It's one of the strangest things and I've always wanted one. I found this in a shop in Adelaide. You can find them on the coast. I've never found one on the coastline, but people find them on the coast. But just because it's so amazing and the natural world, you know, this connection with the natural world, animals, pets, urban wildlife, that's a sort of thing that I just that's the way I started. And so that's why I brought that along.

 Jack Goodman: 
Wow. Well, that's a fantastic starting point. I think I'm probably not alone in saying I don't know that much about octopuses, although like many people, we you may have watched that movie, my friend, the octopus or whatever it was called. Yeah, it was quite interesting. And we all learnt probably more about octopuses, those of us who are not not biologists or naturalists than we ever knew. Did you watch- did you see that movie? 

Prof Merlin Crossley:
 Yeah, I did. And you know, the thing that octopuses are really intelligent - octopodes. They're really intelligent, they're they're different, they have behaviours and it's sort of. Yeah, it makes you think that yeah, the world is still full of surprises. 

Jack Goodman:
 Yeah, it really is. That's absolutely right. Well, that's a great jumping off point to sort of get into your own personal learning journey. And, you know, I've read a little bit about it and there's there's a bit published on the Internet. You've got your own little Wikipedia page, which is always impressive. But but I thought you might just sort of share with us how you went from, I guess, suburban Melbourne to, you know, to to university and then on to bigger and bigger things overseas. And tell us a little bit about maybe what's sort of one of the key sort of moments in that or when you really discover your love of animals and biology. 

Prof Merlin Crossley:
Yes. So I'd always loved animals and biology, but I - so I went to. Yeah. I went to primary school, liked school, was good at maths. You know, if you're good at maths, a lot of doors open for you. But I was interested in writing and history and biology and everything, so I sort of enjoyed school. I mean, it was one of those ages where it was sort of okay to be fairly nerdy. And I enjoyed school, went to university when I was going to university, I originally, yeah, I didn't really know what to do, but I was going to do law and then people said, Why would you want to do law? And I thought, no, I really want to study biology.

So I studied biology, always sort of wondered what it would have been like to study law, because I've got so many good friends who are lawyers and it's sort of fun. I like arguing with people. But I studied... I do. I love it. And yeah, and I yeah. Gradually I found my way and I think I was like most 17 year olds. You don't know what you want to be. And in those days, I had sort of confidence that not that many people went to university. If you were serious about it, if you really enjoyed it, opportunities would open up. And that's exactly what happened to me. I think it's harder now. But those days there was it was still an era where you were fairly confident and you just threw yourself into it fairly optimistically.

Jack Goodman:
Okay. I'm not going to ask too personal of a question, but what year did you start university?

Prof Merlin Crossley:
Oh, so '82.

Jack Goodman:
1982. Okay. So that's pre -Dawkins reforms, and that was at Melbourne?

Prof Merlin Crossley:
 Yeah.

 Jack Goodman:
So how many students would have been at Melbourne back then?

 Prof Merlin Crossley:
Look they must have been....

Jack Goodman:
Undergrads, let's say.

 Prof Merlin Crossley:
 15,000, I would say. It was still a big university. The difference then was there weren't as many international students as there are now. 

Jack Goodman:
There would have been a fraction, yeah. 

Prof Merlin Crossley:
That was just beginning. There were some international students, but it was just beginning and it was before HECS. So, you know, we weren't paying for it. 

Jack Goodman:
 Yeah, free. Wow. So it was a totally different time. But you had to choose a choose a degree or a course, so you had to make that decision about biology or law. I don't know how many other people would have been tossing up those two options. Kind of unusual, but. But you had to make that decision before you enrolled. No? 

Prof Merlin Crossley:
Yeah. So I actually enrolled in Law Science, then dropped law on the first day. 

Jack Goodman:
Okay. So you went sort... 

Prof Merlin Crossley:
Which was sort of a weird thing to do. But, but it was because it was also because if you got the marks for something, you didn't want to waste them. Students still feel that way about their ATARS and things, and I was sort of caught up in that and then I thought, nuh, I'm just going to throw my - burn my bridges, go for biology. And I did. And that led me to molecular biology, which is something that I didn't even know about when I started. I mean, that's the other thing that you when you start. You don't know. You only know general things. That's why people are interested in pure science rather and applied things because they don't know. I didn't know about all about DNA and recombinant DNA and all that stuff, but that's what I ended up doing. 

Jack Goodman:
Well, it was all really just emerging back then in the mid eighties, right?

Prof Merlin Crossley: 
Yeah, it was, it was pretty clear that it was taking off. 

Jack Goodman:
 It was going to take off. But there was huge investments being made. But it hadn't you know, it was- you got in at the right time, too. 

Prof Merlin Crossley:
 That's right. That's absolutely right. There is a right time for everything and there's luck in there.

Jack Goodman:
 Yeah. I remember listening to a story once talking about was it was it a coincidence or was it just timing that all of these Silicon Valley billionaires were all almost exactly the same age? And it had to do with the confluence of what of growing up with access to personal computers at just the right time and just the right confluence of events that they could find themselves in those circumstances. So I think you happened to make the right choice. You could be a lawyer any time you want. But having the career that you've had as a microbiologist is a different story. Yeah. And you made that transition. You managed to score yourself a Rhodes without being a boxer or rower or some sort of a an elite athlete. How did you pull that off? 

Prof Merlin Crossley: 
That's a good question. So again, it sort of depends. It was it's to do with the context: right time, right place. So I think there had been so it was for start, it was in Melbourne and Melbourne was the least obsessed with being a boxer like Tony Abbott.

 Jack Goodman:
You picked that up! 

Prof Merlin Crossley:
There's a bit of a rejection of that sort of thing. So as long as you were sort of keen doing extracurricular stuff and that that sort of pervades the Rhodes community more now; there's a lot more diversity in things. I think that I was again at the time when they were shrugging off the sort of boxing, rugby playing macho sort of "me Tarzan" type stuff and looking for a slightly nerdier... Different type of people. And again, it's all in the timing. So, you know, and so I think, you know, I sort of fitted the mould of of someone who was, well, also a pretty nerdy intellectual, actually. And I think they quite liked that. 

Jack Goodman:
Yeah. Okay. And so so three years at Oxford doing a DPhil, I guess we'll call it. Yeah. Right. We get into the lingo. What did you think? What was that like? 

Prof Merlin Crossley:
 So that was, you know, so that was intense in terms of so I worked in a lab, I worked on a disease, haemophilia. That's the one Queen Victoria's family had - absolutely focused, absolutely intense. I admired. It's interesting this, sort of reading through the way you do these podcasts and thinking about what it was like. I had this sort of thing when I grew up. I used to hero worship a lot of people from history and the past and and then my contemporaries and seniors, I looked up to lots of people.

So, you know, I was in Oxford where Howard Florey did penicillin in that department, Florey and Chain, Edward Abrahams came up with the next class of antibiotics. You. I was very aware my supervisor had cloned the gene for cloning Factor nine. We were sort of really aware that this was, you expected to do world class stuff. You expected to think of it. I really admired the post-docs in the lab. I was a student studying. I had people with some from Australia. There were some very good Australian post-docs, some from all over the UK, Europe, other students, very intense and focused. And yeah, I loved it.

I mean, most of it was in the lab, most of it was professional learning to be a professional. I mean, I did other things, you know, I rowed for the graduate boats in college and I did all the the sort of things playing squash and, and riding around the countryside and going to pubs in the evening and talking about politics with all my fellow students, many of them were Marxists and, you know, all that stuff, reading all the literature, you know, talking about and reading all the history and stuff. But it was the absolute focus of science and realising how intensely committed these people of the past were. And that was pretty good.

 Jack Goodman:
Yeah. Did you stay on in the UK? I mean, then you spent some time at Harvard as well?

Prof Merlin Crossley:
 Only a year or so. Then I went over to the US.

 Jack Goodman:
And that was at Harvard? How long were you there? What did you think of - you spent some time at the, you know, these universities that are somewhere in the top three or five or eight, depending on which of these rankings you look at. I'd love to hear and I'm sure people would love to hear your perspective coming from Melbourne about what, what they're really like. The truth please Merlin.

Prof Merlin Crossley:
 So that's really interesting. So when I got to Oxford I thought to myself, goodness, you know, the kids at Oxford have been had the tutorial system, they've had one on one tuition, they've been selected. I'm going to be so much out of my depth. It's not going to be funny. That was not the case. And it wasn't just me. There were other Australians. The reason the Australians were good is because we do three years and then an honours project for a full year and we were pretty practical and there was this sort of, you know, this pioneering thing of Australians being pretty much "can do" and practical and Australians and you know, on the sporting field too, you know, Australians always did quite well.

So in Oxford I was pleasantly surprised. And then when I got to Harvard. Harvard was interesting. Harvard was actually more intense than Oxford. People had come from all over the world. And yeah, on my first day, or as my supervisor at Harvard said to me, "You know, we've got quite a lot of money in the lab. You can do whatever you whatever ideas you have, you can follow any of them." And the pressure in that was absolutely intense because what that meant was that if you failed, you really had no one to blame but yourself. It was actually easier in a system where, well, I'd love to, you know, hop in this boat and discover America, but really, I can only afford half a boat. So perhaps I'll just map this shoreline, you know? Right.

Once you got to Harvard, you could do anything. 

Jack Goodman:
 Right.

Prof Merlin Crossley:
 And then we had this...

 Jack Goodman:
There's the risk of doing nothing at that point.

Prof Merlin Crossley:
 Yeah. So and there was massive pressure to take big risks and not just do little things. And I can remember there was a Work in Progress seminar where they'd get people from different labs to sort of form a community and everyone talk about what they were doing. Every single person who spoke had discovered something spectacular because if you hadn't discovered anything spectacular yet, you didn't speak yet. And there were plenty of people. So that was. It was really intense.

People worked hard. But, you know, again, we had in our mind that if you wanted to stay there, it was going to be like that forever. But you didn't have to stay there. There were all sorts of other places in the world. You saw the Harvard system. I don't know if that's true, but approximately only one out of 100 assistant professors got tenure. So 99% of them didn't get tenure and went on to being professors somewhere else. That was the system. We all knew that was the system. There was no shame in that. So it was good.

The friends that I made there are my life time friends and they were hugely efficient. That was the real thing I learnt from America. I didn't even know what the word efficiency meant. I sort of thought 'what's efficiency meant?' And what it meant was spending - if a job should take one minute, you do it in one minute. You get on to the next job. You're constantly moving. You're constantly being judged by what have you done today, not what you've done over your career, not what mark you got in finals or what mark you got in the HSC, but what have you done in the last six months? Highly competitive, but hugely collaborative, and they continue to be really good like this. The sky's the limit. You know, it's a great it's a great place. But it's you know, it never sleeps.

 Jack Goodman:
 Yeah. And were you just doing postdoctoral research there? Were you teaching at all?

Prof Merlin Crossley:
 No, I was only I was just doing postdoc for four years in a lab with 20 post-docs in Harvard Medical School. So. So I never really took the the path that people take of, I didn't stay on.

 Jack Goodman:
 Right. Yeah. Wow. Well, and I guess. And then. Is that the point at which you came back to Australia?

 Prof Merlin Crossley:
 Yeah, I came back to Sydney University to a lectureship in biochemistry. It was it was a fixed term position. And then I got converted to a continuing position and worked my way up the ranks to Sydney University as a very conventional teaching and research academic.

Jack Goodman:
Yeah, the 40, 40, 20 thing.

 Prof Merlin Crossley:
 Yeah, absolutely.

 Jack Goodman:
Yeah. Does that how did that work for you? Were you able to you feel like you were able to do both jobs? As in being a teacher and a researcher, or was it always a struggle to do it? Did you feel like you were torn between them? 

Prof Merlin Crossley:
That's the absolutely key question. So when I came back, I taught around a lot of places looking for a job in Australia and I was told really clearly by people that I, you know, I told you I've got a lot of heroes, people I really admire said don't go to a university department, you'll get too much teaching. You won't be able to compete internationally and you won't have the critical mass of colleagues to support your work and technologies. So your research will fade. And. I think that that's been true of a lot of people. It didn't happen to me. I wanted to teach. I wanted - I like theatre. I like the perpetual youth of universities. I like the optimism of young people. I like the completely open horizons.

If you go to a research institute, you know, it might be the Heart Research Institute or Cancer Research Institute or Genetics Research Institute, whatever they are, they tend to have one focus, whereas a university department, you really have that completely open horizon. In theory. In practise, you can only do research if it gets funded, so you're constrained by what can be funded, but it's pretty open. And I like the academic community and I liked, I wanted to be connected to people in other disciplines and things like that.

So I always wanted to go to a teaching department, so I went to a teaching department. But, you know, I have to be honest about this, Jack. I wasn't 20, 40, 40. I was 90% research, 10% teaching and 10% administration. I absolutely focussed on the research and did my teaching. I got it down pat. I loved doing it, but absolutely I was in and out and back to the lab for the first ten years as an academic and the systems.

So you've got to remember we talked about timing and actually this is a really key theme, knowing what's right for the time. So I remember when Web of science put out H indices and citation scores and impact factors. None of them existed when I was an undergraduate, but they all appeared and took over while I was a junior lecturer. And I looked at them and I thought, Wow, I've got to pay attention to those things. And so I put a huge amount of effort into H indices, impact factors.

 Jack Goodman:
That's the scorecard.

 Prof Merlin Crossley:
All the scorecard. Now. That's an interesting thing. I cared about teaching because I had my pride and I enjoyed it. So I cared and I made it as fun and as good as I could be. But I did not spend 40% of my time on that.

 Jack Goodman:
Right. Yeah, it's an interesting it's an interesting question. And you obviously would have seen and some some really talented teachers, lecturers at Melbourne, Oxford, Harvard. But you probably also saw people who weren't so great. And maybe there was not necessarily a correlation. I don't know. Was there a correlation between the ability to teach and reputation, or was it was the reputation that you saw primarily about those people who made those big discoveries?

 Prof Merlin Crossley:
Look, there's a correlation. The top researchers were always extremely inspiring. And so some of those top people that I saw around the world were inspiring, even if they weren't necessarily the most organised and the best people to teach you how to fold your parachute. So. But I also saw the other thing, which was at the place I started, there were a couple of absolutely inspiring level A and level B, haven't necessarily even got a doctorate, teachers who were absolutely superb and were the lifeblood of the department and were loved by the students and organised everything that weren't being promoted or recognised in the system. And my career really depended on those people because they brought in a great cohort of students that ended up being PhD students with me.

And so one of the things I've really tried to do is to create a scoreboard for good teachers so they can be promoted to professor. And we really are doing that at UNSW with education-focused staff that - you've got to have a scoreboard and once you have the scoreboard you can recognise and reward great teaching. Now some people don't like it because scoreboards can be pernicious as well, but I think it's critically important and we are doing it now. 

Jack Goodman:
Yeah, but it's a good transition. I've got to ask, I mean, having had that, the academic trajectory that you've had, what made you want to... I'm not going to say give that up because I gather you still do some some research, but really sacrifice it to go into university administration? Like when did that happen? 

Prof Merlin Crossley:
Yes. So that happened completely by accident. And no, I've kept it going. So we're still going as strongly as we ever have. And that's because I've got a team of people who work with me and I try to create it so it's a win-win. And largely it has been for my career and their careers. I really. I went into academic admin completely by accident. I applied for a job, a professorship, I didn't get it. They needed an acting Dean at Sydney. I was asked to do it. I - like any sort of male does, I said, Sure, I'll give it a go. I turned out to be a good manager for the surprising reason that I did so little managing that that at a university everyone is so smart, it really is the less you do, the better. And always I've believed that. You have to make sure the boat doesn't tip over, but, you know, other people know best.

"I turned out to be a good manager for the surprising reason that I did so little managing. At a university everyone is so smart, it really is the less you do, the better. You have to make sure the boat doesn't tip over, but, you know, other people know best."

So I've always and I think it's actually good. The other thing is that I've sort of got. My drive and things I still put into my research and teaching and in administration I let other people. Other people push it as much as possible. So. Yeah. I've been quite an accidental manager. Uh, so I was Acting Dean of Science for a year at Sydney. Then I was acting DVC Research for three years. Then I came to UNSW, was Dean of Science, but a Dean of Science. You'll see, of all the Deans, they tend to maintain their research. If you look across the sector.

So I did. And then I thought about what I wanted to do next if I wanted to keep going. And I went into DVC Academic because I really felt everything was out of kilter. Research had taken over too much. Yeah, we could boost teaching without doing any harm for research, and I really think that's what I'm trying to do and we are trying to do that.

Jack Goodman:
Well, and I think that's it is very interesting to me. You're now the DVC. Well, I guess the role is being split, is that right? So you're the.... 

Prof Merlin Crossley:
So I'm Academic Quality now. So I think that which is, you know, they want to bring it. So UNSW really recognises that it needs to increase, improve the student experience. So they want to bring in a new person to do that and to to push new technologies and new opportunities in teaching. And I think that's right. I can't do it all. And so the portfolio was big. So it's fine. Yeah. 

Jack Goodman:
Yeah. Okay. I mean, if I think about what the university you are one of the academic leaders of right now, at UNSW, and compare it to in 2022, I guess you've been in some form of that DVC role since, what, 2016? Yeah. So in the last six years. But what, what that university is like just in terms of scale and scope compared to, let's say, University of Melbourne in 1982 or 83. It's really quite a transformative, isn't it? I mean it would be easily four or five times bigger than Melbourne was back then. And now all of the big universities have become that sort of size and and huge numbers of international students as well. So it's an entirely different kind of a place, right.

 Prof Merlin Crossley:
 So it's the same but different. So the real difference is, is that there's a really big business school and there's a really big Masters coursework cohort in business and in engineering at UNSW and those things were not there in the eighties. 

Jack Goodman:
Right. 

Prof Merlin Crossley:
But it's not so different. Beyond that, I mean, the scale of dollars spent on research is bigger, but it was cutting edge research back when I was doing it and you know, in Melbourne when I was an Honours student and it's still the same. Now the medical research institutes are much bigger than they were and in Melbourne they're really world class and dominant and we've got some good ones too, but really the only difference. So the difference is, yeah, there's a scale difference.

"...once you increase the scale of students, you increase the diversity of preparedness to study and the diversity of affluence, which also means preparedness to study."

And there's a post-graduate difference and they have two impacts. So the the scale of students, once you increase the scale of students, you increase the diversity of preparedness to study and the diversity of affluence, which also means preparedness to study. There are a lot more students who are working part time. That's a big difference. And then the coursework cohort, that's a completely different beast, but it's largely confined to the business faculty and the engineering faculty. 

Jack Goodman:
Right. But you did you did refer there to the widening participation agenda. Yes. And that the really dramatic increase in the percentage of people we would like to see holding a Bachelor's qualification. And that all came out of the Bradley Review in 2007 or eight. But and that really did transform in somewhat many ways the student body at a place like UNSW. Yeah? 

Prof Merlin Crossley:
Yeah. So that's right. I think that's yeah. If we talk about what's happened during our, our sort of time your time and my time it is this: that University was a Good Thing, so let's make it available to as many people as possible. And that has been a massive success. But the costs have been that it's a little bit less personal and it's a little bit more challenging because the students are lost, but also the staff are struggling to to support such a wide range of students.

"University was a Good Thing, so let's make it available to as many people as possible. And that has been a massive success. But the costs have been that it's a little bit less personal and it's a little bit more challenging because the students are lost, but also the staff are struggling to to support such a wide range of students."

Jack Goodman:
Right. Yeah. Well, I mean, and I'll tell you where where I'm coming from, I'm struggling with these questions around is there a is there a right size for a university? This is a question Glyn Davis has asked. Right. And a lot of people have asked this, you know, how big should universities be and did we lose some diverse, a lot of diversity in the Dawkins Reviews?

And we now have these 40 effectively very, very large, relatively similar institutions. And and they do certain things great. Like obviously research has been I mean if we were to say. Much like the academics are meant to be 40, 40, 20: research, teaching, administration; does a univers- does UNSW put 40% of its effort into research and 40% of its effort into teaching and 20% into admin? Or is there a is there a skew there as well institutionally? 

Prof Merlin Crossley: 
Yeah. So there's a couple of different questions there. First of all, and they're both important questions the size of universities. So I agree with you that Glyn Davis has talked about this. He's right. Australian universities are very big. I think they are too big. But I'll tell you what I think the answer to that is. So if you look at the way a university like Oxford grew, it grew one college at a time. Yeah, it's totally different. 

Jack Goodman:
It also grew over 1100 years.

Prof Merlin Crossley:
Yeah. And growing one college at a time means that it doesn't ever seem so big because people are connected to a college. And, you know, even if you look at, you know, Harry Potter; it was Gryffindor and Slytherin, you know, why is it divided into houses? It's houses because if it gets too big, people start to lose their identity and their sense of belonging. And but if you talk to anyone, they say, you know, why did universities grow? So in Glyn Davis's book he points out that the regulation of universities in Australia is such it's hard to form new ones. So as the education was made available to more, the existing ones grew. And that's part of it.

The other part of it is that Australia's never funded research costs properly. That. As you go into when I started, we used a little tiny centrifuge in a gel box. Now you need a sort of supercollider or a Hubble space telescope. The only way you do that is through economies of scale of student teaching. And so universities have been absolutely hungry for international enrolments, particularly the Group of Eight, where the research costs are very heavy. And so we've got those two reasons have caused, the- so if you think of a university like a balloon, we just keep blowing up this balloon. Well, that's not a good strategy. 

It would be better if you had a bunch of different balloons. So segmenting universities to a certain extent into cohorts. So you see all these boutique degrees like, you know, little degrees in sort of, you know, biotechnology or medicinal chemistry or even advanced science. These are all attempts to give students a little bit of identity. It's okay with law or something or vet science, you know, veterinary science. So there are all sorts of ways to give people a community within a larger community. And you see it with Sydney, the city of villages and things like that. You get these little communities. I think that's the way the world is. I'm not an expert on history and things, but it is like parish churches, you know, that you don't try to control everything. So Rome, you have all these little parish churches which replicate the feeling.

"You get these little communities. I think that's the way the world is.... I think humans need these little communities."

So I think humans need these little communities. I think it has been challenging during the period of huge growth. But we had a growth stall with COVID and now people are coming back. We got a little bit of a pause and I think it's important that we compartmentalise a bit. There's also a feeling... People are in love with sort of interdisciplinary connections and and making things bigger and global ideas and all this sort of thing. But I think little local communities are what I try to fashion as much as I can. 

Jack Goodman: 
Yeah, that's really interesting. And that metaphor of the balloon being blown up, I mean, I hope we're not getting to the point where where the inevitable happens and it pops. But, you know, there's some interesting thoughts there that you've suggested or hinted at about ways we might be able to divide the balloon into multiple balloons.

Yeah, but that question about, that I asked and it just sort of had occurred to me, which was does does- should the university, whether it's UNSW, or you know, any Australian university, but should it seek to replicate in its own investment some reflection of that "40, 40, 20" rule that it seeks? And acknowledging that, you know, in the sciences, which is where the big rankings reside, generally speaking, have become incredibly expensive. You need Hubble telescopes, as you say, and those don't just come off the shelf at Bunnings. But but have we have we have we misbalanced our investment on the the teaching and learning side relative to the research side? 

Prof Merlin Crossley: 
Yeah, you're right to come back to that question because I didn't get to it. Look, I think. I think Jack the question's right. But I don't think it was all to do with people devaluing that. It was, again, I think because we didn't have the right scoreboards for measuring that. 

Jack Goodman:
Right. 

"So people say if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. And I don't know that's true. It's a useful phrase. I say if you can't measure it, you can't sustain investment in it."

Prof Merlin Crossley: 
So people say if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. And I don't know that's true. It's a useful phrase. I say if you can't - if you can't measure it, you can't sustain investment in it. You need some comfort. You need some sort of recognition and accountability that your investment is working.

So and I get into a bit of trouble for this, but I'm a great fan of student experience surveys and the QILT because I think that imperfect and even as misleading as those data can be if interpreted, if they're not interpreted properly, they give people comfort that things are working and they allow people to invest their whole careers in them. So, you know, and what we're trying to do at UNSW and I don't want this to be an advert for UNSW, but we really have said... 

Jack Goodman:
Oh, don't worry, it won't be.

Prof Merlin Crossley:
Yeah- that we've got you know, we've got batters, bowlers and all-rounders and we need some people who are in their DNA is to be a researcher and they just focus on research. Some people who are all rounders, I think I was an all rounder and other people who are teachers. And but all of those people need a scoreboard and they need to build to demonstrate, hey, they're really valuable for the team. And then we need to invest in them. And I think the international league tables... People think they're really important for attracting international students. I think they are and they aren't. You know, my own view is the league tables are sort of steady now and they don't change very much.

So I think if we I think the student experience in quality and investing in that's important as well. And we're trying to invest in that and we will do it by investing in education-focused staff who provide a good experience and we'll do it by supporting Student Life as well and then we'll keep investing in the research which is inspirational and part of a first rate education to have the research there as well. So I think we have got the balance slightly wrong, but we need a scoreboard to help fix that. 

Jack Goodman:
Well, I'm glad you brought up QILT, because I've got my copy right here, and I'm sure you have your copy somewhere. Yeah, on the wall. And you did mention that concept of belonging, which I think is is super important and people feeling part of a community and that and I just have spent a fair amount of time going through just that, just the public parts of QILT.

I haven't seen the level of the data that no doubt you and each university have access to, because something like 200,000 people responded to the to the survey out of about 600,000 requests. And I think you had about a 41% response rate at UNSW. But that belonging concept which is so critical for people, and it's all tied up in the QILT which really does provide a scorecard about that. It's all tied up in that learning engagement data. That's really where the good the QILT brings that out.

And when you look at that learner engagement data right across the whole sector, it's the weakest performing part of the QILT data going all the way back to 2012. This is not pandemic-related. This is, you know, high fifties learner engagement across the university sector from 2012 and then, of course, collapsing at during the pandemic to, you know, well under 50% and still remaining in that sort of range. That's a pretty good scorecard, isn't it? For the sector to be thinking about? And you can look at each university as well. But but that that does that does provide us a benchmark. 

Prof Merlin Crossley: 
So. The particular one. The learner engagement one is a complicated measure of five different questions. So when you look at the five different questions and drill down at which universities are doing well and which universities aren't on those five different questions, you get some surprises actually. It's quite difficult to really be sure what that number is measuring. At face value it looks dreadful. It looks like 'hey, our students don't have a sense of belonging. Hey, we should fix that'.

I actually think it's a little bit more complicated. And if you look at the questions, yeah, I think that I think that there is there's a little bit of danger in this thinking 'there's the problem. I see the problem. We can fix that'. I'm going through reading the comments of the students at the moment and it's really amazing. So the students have a very, their experience is largely dependent on the lecturers they had that term. They comment on, whether they had a great time, whether they didn't, and then they'd comment on on whether they were overwhelmed or not. 

Jack Goodman:
There's a recency bias, of course, with a survey like that.

Prof Merlin Crossley:
 Yeah. And it's sort of interesting because, you know, we're not one of the leading universities. We're at the tail end. But it's remarkable how many students have a great time. And then some of them say, you know, I was overwhelmed and I didn't get the help that I needed. And so it's this patchwork. And I think that I really like the data. I think the data is valid and we should respond to it. But the devil is in the detail. And so I sort of am farming out analysis of this data across the university and trying to work out what we need to do and celebrating the good parts. So that's what I think we should all do.

And that's actually what happens at research. We celebrate Rosalind Franklin and Watson and Crick. Right. We celebrate Howard Florey. We celebrate Michelle Simmons and her quantum computer. You know, we celebrate the great stuff. And that's what we need to do with the teaching, you know, because if I tell you, you know the sector quite well, you've got a bit of a feel for some of the people who are inspirational teachers to their students. I want those people to be as famous as, you know, instrumental researchers are. 

Jack Goodman: 
But we have to acknowledge also, right, that the vast, vast, vast majority of the however many tens of thousands, 60, 70,000 students at UNSW are not at UNSW to become world class researchers. They're absolutely there for some aspect of career progression and trajectory or opportunity. There is a real, you know, your your academic career is you know, is a very small sliver, isn't it, of what most people of the whole cohort of undergraduates, let's say at UNSW who are mostly there to you know, there is there is a strong, you know, vocational urgency that people feel related to their study. 

Prof Merlin Crossley: 
Yeah. I mean, that's a. That's a profoundly important point. I still would sort of say that if you idolise Pelé or something, it means you, you're probably going to enjoy playing football for your local team more, you know? 

Jack Goodman:
I agree. Looking, seeing excellence anywhere is admirable. Even if, you know, I saw some incredible academics in my limited academic career and they were marvels to watch, even though I knew I had no hope of ever replicating that and seeing it in any sort of a field is amazing. Seeing anyone put on a tour de force of a lecture is a remarkable, remarkable thing. But I just I don't know what your sense is.

Well, here's a question for you, Merlin. I mean, you're reading all of these student comments. And, you know, I read I read thousands of student comments every week as well, you know, just in my day job. And you can see when people have a good experience and you can see when they have a not so good experience. And you can dig into that a bit and you can try and understand it.

But one of the thoughts that occurred to me as I was preparing for this interview was to think, do people in the administration, at our universities, do they ever 'mystery shop'? Do you ever go and sit in on lectures or just sort of wander around the campus, maybe with a little disguise, maybe fake glasses and a hat on so that no one knows who you are and just sort of see, you know, what's it like being a student or what is it like in in this lecture hall or how are people interacting? Does that ever happen? 

Prof Merlin Crossley:
Yeah, so it has. So Richard Buckland, a good friend of mine, professor in computer science, he he did it with the Vice Chancellor. He did 'student for a day' and took the former Vice Chancellor Ian Jacobs to 'mystery shop' to do exactly that, to get dressed as a student and turn up to lectures. So we do do it a little bit. I think we we could do it more. We do it a little bit with our student support as well. So we do some of that. I mean, that's a sort of fairly standard approach to take. Yeah, we could do, we should do more of it. 

Jack Goodman: 
Yeah, yeah. Just coming back to that. Sorry just coming back to the QILT data one more time. Just for our listeners that learner engagement stuff. I just so people know, those questions that you were referring to and the fact that it's kind of a little bit of a mixed bag. The first question is about whether the students felt prepared for their study. The next question is specifically, "do you have a sense of belonging at your university?" And then there's a series of, I think, another four questions about the amount or whether you participated in any discussions online or face to face with other students in your course or just more broadly at the uni, and also specifically with local students, which I guess would be more directed at international students.

So that's what it's trying to measure. And there's no doubt there's some amalgamation of several different ideas, but a lot of it does come back, I think, doesn't it, to that idea that we don't necessarily interact well as humans once we end up in a group of, you know, hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of students. Yeah. 

Prof Merlin Crossley:
Yeah, I think that's a shame and Covid's made it worse. And the other thing that has challenged us is... The big difference from my day, you know, when I was a student, I worked a bit as a dishwasher, but not like students work now. I worked, you know, one night a week for part of my degree, but not for the whole degree. I did some summer jobs. I had a couple of summer jobs. But these days it's like 70% of our students are working so much that it's a totally different thing where students are working to survive. And I think that's a profound difference.

We, you know, people are surprised at this, but the trimester calendar actually makes it easier to be a part time student because you can just do one course or two courses each term. So you get more flexibility at doing that. But this makes it very difficult when students are living two lives. It's a big difference from the English system where if you're getting a grant to go to university, or at least when I was there, it used to be, you know, you had to go to university, not be working all the time. 

Jack Goodman: 
Right. You got some living expenses as well.

 Prof Merlin Crossley:
Yeah, now it wasn't much, but that is profoundly different.

Jack Goodman: 
Yeah, I was going to ask that question. If you could change something for students now, what would it be? But it sounds like maybe it would be that you'd like to give every student some living expenses money so that they don't have to work so much. Or is there something else you'd like to change? 

Prof Merlin Crossley:
That would be terrific if they didn't have to work so much. That would be terrific. But the other thing I'd like to do is free them up from assessment for a period of their study so that they could they could feel they could fail without- I'm sort of worried about people having every thing they attempt indelibly on the scorecard. I just would say let people explore, you know, if they want to play full forward, give them a try. If that doesn't work, let them go on the wing. If that doesn't work, perhaps they'd be better in the back pocket. But. But don't have this indelible mark that they're constantly being assessed relative to their peers every single moment of the day. And I think that inhibits students from exploring.

"That would be terrific if [students] didn't have to work so much. But the other thing I'd like to do is free them up from assessment for a period of their study ... don't have this indelible mark that they're constantly being assessed relative to their peers every single moment of the day. I think that inhibits students from exploring."

Jack Goodman:
That's an interesting point, because I think we have also heard, you know, we do a lot of surveying of students as well. And and there is a substantial cohort of students who are very much of the mindset that "Ps get degrees". They aren't necessarily so concerned about the marks. I mean, there is definitely some component and depending on the degree where students want to get distinctions and high distinctions. But it's not everybody. And as far as exploring goes, I meant that's an interesting idea. Is there that much exploring that goes on within a within a course of study that a student is doing? I mean, it's pretty specialised already, isn't it? 

Prof Merlin Crossley:
Yeah I think that's true. I think, you know, in the big ones, Bachelor of Science, Arts, Commerce, those sort of ones, you can do a fair bit of exploring, but if you're doing mechanical engineering or something. Yeah, that's what you do. 

Jack Goodman:
Look we're getting, we've been running over time here, we're going get in trouble with the powers of podcast land. But I do have one more question for you, if that's okay, Merlin, before I let you go. And it's a little bit of a bit of an introspective question, and I hope it doesn't cause you to think too much about any regrets. We all have regrets in our lives. But. But if you could give your younger self some advice, what would that be now? And what would you say to anyone who's an aspiring senior leader in the sector? 

Prof Merlin Crossley: 
Yeah. So the only thing that I think that I should have done- so I've benefited a lot from joining the establishment. When I was young, I was fairly anti-establishment. Like most young people are, I sort of thought, the establishment's full of old fuddy duddies. Everything's wrong, they'll never change the world. You have to do everything independently. And I did, most of the things I did when I was young, I did independently with small groups of friends. It was fine, but I never really joined clubs, societies, establishment things.

As I got older, I just sort of realised if you can't beat them, join them. And I joined the establishment again and again, and I don't know whether I just got seduced and have become an old fuddy duddy, but I really think you can change things from the inside. I think, you know, Gorbachev changed things from the inside, de Klerk changed things from the inside. You don't- you can change things from the inside. And often that's the most powerful way of changing something. So, you know, it is a strange thing to say, but I would say, yeah. Get involved and try to change things from the inside because and I think in Australia we do that reasonably well, you know, because our establishment's not quite as remote as it is in some countries. 

Jack Goodman:
Yeah. Well I would say, you know, I would say those are interesting comparisons and really thought we might possibly talk about the recently deceased ultimate Soviet leader, who, I guess you could say changed things from the inside. But you could also say that he blew up the balloon to the point where it finally exploded and left and broke up the entire operation of the Soviet Union into whatever 13 different nations and de Klerk, I mean, at some point didn't have a choice in South Africa. Right. And there was just overwhelming global condemnation and isolation and there just needed to be some way of making peace.

But yeah, that's an interesting perspective on change from the inside. Look, I think this has been a great conversation and it's there's I feel like we should do this again because there's probably about 25 more questions that are going to occur to me and probably listeners as well that we may hear from at some point. So I hope you'll perhaps come back and and we'll do this again. This has been a lot of fun. 

Prof Merlin Crossley: 
So, look, I've loved it. Any time. And a final thing I'd say is that the other way I think universities have changed is that they used to all be about learning. All about learning. And we don't talk about that enough. And even in this podcast we haven't talked about that much. You know that and I think you're right because they have become about jobs and and that's fine. And I understand people need jobs. Absolutely. But I think that's the biggest change during my time. And, you know, it's great. So it's great talking to you. I've enjoyed it and. Yeah. So any time Jack. 

Jack Goodman:
That's fantastic. Thank you so much, Merlin.

Prof Merlin Crossley:
Thank you.

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