New University of Adelaide Vice-Chancellor Peter Rathjen’s vision for the city
HE’S been described as a “force of nature” and credited with driving an education-led overhaul of the Tasmanian economy. Can new University of Adelaide Vice-Chancellor Peter Rathjen have the same impact on his home town?
PETER Rathjen insists on living walking distance from work, so he can strike up conversations with at least five random people before he reaches his office.
That’s how he became an instant expert on campus security within two days of starting his new job, yakking with security staff over a morning coffee.
The habit says something of the drive and intellectual curiosity that helped him become a key player in Tasmania’s push for economic revitalisation.
He’s hoping to build similar partnerships between the university sector and State Government here, but that’s far from the only thing on his agenda. Helping to lure corporate research giants to the old Royal Adelaide Hospital site, new entry standards for students, lobbying for the flexibility to offer shorter, more job-focused degrees, and debating the need to become a world top 100 university, are all on the to-do list of the University of Adelaide’s 22nd vice-chancellor.
In his previous role running the University of Tasmania, Rathjen led a revolution of uni-state relations, resulting in a joint 10-year plan with an array of education and economic targets on which progress is reportedly annually by the premier and vice-chancellor.
It was based on the belief that research-led universities were the best-placed enterprises for channelling critical economic investment in “human capital”, innovation and “global connectivity”.
“From that came the concept that the university had to stop sitting to the side of the community, and to embed itself in the community and for the community, because it was going to be the most important driver for the future of Tasmania,” he said.
“It wasn’t built on one-off projects. It was built on the idea that we had to build the university into the fabric of the state itself.”
While South Australia faces different challenges and priorities, he hoped a similar link might be forged between the SA Government and the university sector.
“I’d very much like to talk to the State Government and the public service. They need to be in on it together because if you’re going to do these things they’re long term, so they transcend (terms of) governments. But we realise we might have to articulate where the benefits might come before it’s possible.”
Prof Rathjen said Adelaide, Flinders and UniSA could all benefit from adopting a similar philosophy, “potentially playing different parts of the role that’s required for the state” by co-operating more and reducing wasteful duplication of resources.
However he stopped short of recommending mergers.
A stem cell expert who gained his science degree from the University of Adelaide in the 1980s, he won a Rhodes Scholarship to study biochemistry at Oxford, then returned as an academic in the ’90s.
He said the development of the neighbouring old RAH site, where the uni is already locked in as a tenant to run an artificial intelligence centre, would “influence the future of Adelaide for the next hundred years”.
Prof Rathjen cited luring the first IBM research and development centre in the southern hemisphere to Melbourne in 2010, when he was deputy vice-chancellor (research) at the University of Melbourne, as a prime example of what could be achieved through uni-government partnerships.
He said the co-locating of corporate research giants alongside universities was common practice in the United States and Asia but not in Australia, and they should be targeted for the old RAH site.
He also said:
UNIVERSITIES must develop “more sophisticated” entry criteria than the Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank, which “comes from those days when almost no one went to university other than elite people with elite preparation”.
THEY should be allowed to offer two-year degrees under the federally subsidised system, as modelling showed that could boost the accessibility of higher education, while reducing costs and better matching workforce needs.
AUSTRALIA’S “great weakness” in higher education was the legislative framework that “forces us (all unis) into offering more or less the same things to the same people”, so the nation lagged behind the rest of the world in course innovation.
SA’S NEED for a world top-100 ranked uni must be debated, as “there are some countries in the world and some universities that will not partner with universities that are outside the top 100”. The University of Adelaide is consistently ranked about 130th.
IT WAS “far too early” to say if he would proceed with the grand infrastructure masterplan the university unveiled in 2016.
GRADUATES should be encouraged to head interstate or overseas, as long as South Australia met the challenge of producing enough high-skilled jobs to lure them and their new skills home later.