Deborah returns to Uni of Queensland, now as its leader

Deborah Terry’s six years as head of Curtin University ends this Friday. Next month she becomes vice-chancellor of the University of Queensland.

Professor Deborah Terry, who takes up the role of vice-chancellor of the University of Queensland in August.

When Deborah Terry walks out of Curtin University at the end of this week and leaves behind her six-year career as its vice-chancellor, she will retrace her steps to the University of Queensland to take up the role of vice-chancellor and president.

The ‘retracing’ alludes to the fact that UQ is where Professor Terry started her academic career in the School of Psychology in 1990; when she left more than two decades later, she was senior deputy vice-chancellor.

“I grew up academically there, and spent about half that time researching. It’s a great university, significant in Australia and ranked highly.”

UQ chancellor Peter Varghese said the university senate’s decision to appoint Professor Terry was unanimous. Professor Terry says she’s “honoured and delighted to lead UQ through its next phase of development and impact.”

She will be busily reacquainting herself with her alma mater while taking on another role she picked up in June. Federal Education Minister Dan Tehan picked her to join a small group of vice-chancellors to find a new model for supporting research after the collapse of international student fee revenue and funding changes.

Professor Terry, who chairs Universities Australia, was probably an obvious choice.

Meanwhile, she’s been wrapping up her role at Curtin, which is undergoing a sizeable rethink of its own revenue sources. Last year, 23 per cent of its international students came from China but that prospect has dimmed.

“Obviously, our borders to China closed early in February and we had 62 per cent of our students who hadn’t travelled to Australia, or about 850 students. What we’ve found is the students have largely stayed with us — they’ve been taking courses online and we’ve stayed in close contact with them.”

Nevertheless, Curtin’s 2020 revenue is 6.2 per cent down on forecasts, and $25m of that is lost student revenue.

“Our budgets are around $900m a year, so we’ve put in a hiring freeze,” she says. “We’re not shedding staff but there have been reductions in senior executive staff, travel and we’ve slowed down some capital spending.

“The impact of COVID has had a material impact but we are less exposed than some of our counterparts.”

One of those counterparts is the university she will next lead, although Professor Terry says UQ’s losses are “coming off a bigger base of $2.7 billion.”

She has always denied that universities are taking unreasonable financial risks by overexposure to the Chinese student market. She rejected criticism last year that seven top universities — Melbourne, ANU, Sydney, UNSW, UTS, Adelaide and Queensland — relied too heavily on international students for revenue and growth.

She notes that the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency has assessed the vast majority of Australia’s universities as being in a low-risk financial position.

So what state does she leave Curtin in? She cites its rise in global reputation during her six years, reflected in its ranking in the top one per cent of universities in the world (ARWU) and eighth nationally in the Nature Index 2019.

“We hover around 190-200th in the world, and that’s ninth in Australia,” she says. In June, the QS World University Rankings 2021 recorded Curtin University as on a steady upward trajectory from the 262nd position in 2018 to 217th position in the latest ranking.

Terry adds that Curtin is ranked number one for graduate employment in Western Australia. That may be no surprise when one considers the sheer number of enrolments, 58,000 students or 39,000 when measured as full-time equivalents. It is the most students of any of the state’s universities; the University of Western Australia has less than half that number.

Asked to identify some major milestones during her tenure, Professor Terry cites Curtin’s Medical School which opened in February 2017. She says the university identified a need for an undergraduate medical program, which didn’t exist in WA.

“Our focus is on attracting school leavers from outer metro areas, and regional areas and indigenous students. We’ve got three clinical schools in regions like Kalgoorlie, where medical students are based as they go through their medical training. We want to expose them as much as possible to primary health care as undergraduates.”

The latest Good Universities Guide ranks the medical school first in Australia for teaching quality, learning resources and student support.

But the school’s other notable feature is its dean Professor Sandra Eades, a leading public health academic and respected Noongar woman. “To have the first indigenous dean of a medical school in Australia is fantastic,” she says.

Professor Terry would nominate as a personal ambition her desire to elevate Curtin’s profile in indigenous engagement. It was the first university in Western Australia to sign a Statement of Reconciliation, and the first to publicly support the call for an indigenous voice enshrined in Australia’s constitution.

It now supports an indigenous bush campus at Nowanup, in the state’s southwest, where Nyoongar culture is taught ‘on country’ to academics and students.

Curtin is also the custodian of the extraordinary Herbert Mayer Collection Carrolup artworks. It contains hundreds of drawings by Aboriginal children who, cloistered in a 1950s native settlement school, were encouraged to draw pictures of landscape, country and kin in order to forget the heartache of family separation.

“We are custodians of Carrolup and we want to make them as available as possible.”

“As we’ve all looked in recent weeks on at what’s been happening in the United States with horror, we know there is more to do here in Closing the Gap in our own back yard.”

“We’ve put in place enabling programs for indigenous students in law, medicine and health sciences, and we’re seeing students getting into medicine. We set targets for each of the areas each year, like ‘how many indigenous staff or interns do you have in marketing’?”

Professor Terry describes Curtin as a global university; it has operated international campuses in Malaysia for 21 years, Singapore for 10, and Mauritius since 2017. Dubai has a new Curtin campus.

International students number around 14,000, with half studying in Australia, and half at the four overseas campuses. “We’d like to encourage our students here to spend a semester on one of our international campuses,” she says.

One major project that Professor Terry initiated will be completed next year. Called Exchange, it is a $500m industry-connected innovation precinct that will provide beds for nearly one thousand students, a boutique hotel, apartments and commercial space.

“There’ll be space for start-ups and industry partners,” she says. “When you go to Boston you don’t know where MIT begins and ends, and that’s the kind of model we’re after on our campus.”

The viability of Exchange’s student dormitory facilities is predicated on getting overseas students back on campus.

She says Curtin is well-placed to meet future national skills requirements, with its CISCO Innovation Centre focused on the internet of things, an Optus Curtin Centre of Excellence for Artificial Intelligence and Curtin’s Institute of Radio Astronomy.

“We have a major profile in space research and planetary science and astronomy. That’s been very significant for Western Australia and the nation.”

She says Curtin School of Mines works closely with industry partners, and QS World University Rankings have ranked it second in the world for mining and minerals research.

“There’s an adage that culture eats strategy for breakfast,” says Terry.

“I’ve been very focused on ensuring we strengthen the culture of this institution. I hope that continues.”