The Brailsford plan is forging a solid Bond

Tim Brailsford fell into an academic life but as vice-chancellor he has clear goals for Bond University.

‘Quite a lot of sharing happens within our existing programs and that is going to increase. That’s a strength for us,’ Bond’s Tim Brailsford says. Picture: Ata Taefi

Tim Brailsford’s career, carried by a tide of chance and coincidence, washed him all the way to the vice-chancellorship of Bond Univer­sity, itself “an accident of history”.

Acquitting him of false modesty, surely the clue to this low-key self-assessment must lie in the dark art he practised so successfully — economics. In his view, the data compels an honest appraisal about how and when opportun­ities arise in life.

“I sort of fell into economics,” Brailsford says of his undergraduate degree. “It was a combination of the numbers — I did a lot of science and maths subjects at school — but it was also the fact that economics seemed to be so important to people’s lives and I wanted to understand more about it.”

Likewise, he “sort of fell into academic life”, shuttling between finance jobs and Monash University while completing his masters and his PhD. Can someone really “fall” into doctoral studies? “Put it this way, I just always felt that there was a bit of unfinished business, and the more you learn you understand the less you know.”

Then, making the transition into faculty leadership, at the Australian National University, he was at first an elected dean. When Ian Chubb arrived in the vice-chancellor’s office, announcing a review of all positions and beginning an appointment process, Brailsford fully expected to return to a “normal” academic life.

“I was waiting for the phone call. Nothing. A year passed.” Sometime later, when chatting to Chubb, he offered to step down, but the VC replied: “Why would you want to do that? You’ve been doing a good job.”

Finally, he was standing on the railway platform in the Dutch city of Groningen when he decided to pick up a call from an unknown number he had been ignoring for weeks. It was the executive search firm charged with finding a successor to Bond University vice-chancellor Robert Stable, wanting to know if he would consider a move from the University of Queensland.

None of this diffidence means Brailsford lacks ambition, drive or confidence, for himself or for the university, which turns 30 today. “When I finish here, what I’d like to have achieved is that when people talk about the sector, they’ll talk about ‘Australian universities’, and then they’ll say ‘and then there’s Bond’,” he says.

Unique in Australia as a private and independent university, Bond can celebrate survival among its achievements. That and producing 26,000 alumni and educating a current cohort of 4500, with 1000 staff and many state-of-the-art facilities including the new 4500sq m health sciences and medicine building.

Bond is 17th in the Times Higher Education rankings for small universities; first in The Good Universities Guide for student experience; and in January topped a federal government survey (published on its quality indicators of learning and teaching website) of more than 5300 employers, measuring their satisfaction with the technical and generic skills and work-readiness of recent Australian graduates.

It hasn’t all been plain sailing: Bond had a high rate of sexual harassment — 38 per cent — reported by the Australian Human Rights Commission in 2017 following a survey the year before.

“We won’t shy away from the fact that we have some issues and we have been undertaking a significant overhaul of everything we do all the way from orientation, through to curricula, through to security, and that’s all documented,” Brailsford says.

“If you take a few thousand students and put them in an environment where they study together, eat together and live together, and you overlay that with Bond’s academic calendar — our students are together for 48 weeks of the year — there’s a downside to that.”

The upside is what he calls esprit de corps, evident in staff as well as students, he says. “We can do things pretty quickly. People are accepting of the idea we’ve got to innovate, try new things. It probably took me a year into the job to fully appreciate exactly what it means to be a university which is independent and private and has to forge its own way in life. It’s quite invigorating and it’s very empowering.”

He estimates student numbers will be about 5000 in five years, in accordance with his firm belief in “controlled and modest growth”.

Other goals are not so straightforward: the push towards transdisciplinary studies means, for example, there are new courses he is not yet sure how to classify into faculties. Bond has four: society and design (40 per cent of students), health sciences and medicine (25 per cent), business (19 per cent) and law (16 per cent).

He says of new courses in actuarial science, informatics and data analytics: “I don’t think they belong in any one, single faculty because they are transdisciplinary by nature. So then the question becomes how does an organisation administer these degrees and how do you have an organisational structure that allows you to teach them? That’s a huge challenge for every university going forward.

“One of our advantages, because we’re a small institution, is that we don’t have strong silos between faculty. Quite a lot of sharing happens within our existing programs and that is going to increase. That’s a strength for us.”

Another strength is the university’s diverse cohort, which divides into international students (46 per cent), students from southeast Queensland (36 per cent) and those from the rest of Australia (18 per cent).

The largest representation of international students comes from North America. For Brailsford, the key is maximising the diversity: “We want to have a representative body here which is close to what the world looks like.”

He also acknowledges that being one of a kind has carried with it a particular frustration. “We have a natural differentiator but the challenge of that is that we’re not necessarily on the radar when it comes to policy, decision-making or public commentary.”

He cites the debate about freedom of speech on campuses and whether a university should have the ability to restrict who comes on a campus to speak.

“We’re a private university, a private institution, a private company and a private landowner. So before you even get to the freedom of speech issue, there’s a fundamental issue — as a private landowner you have an ability to say who can and cannot come on to land.”

Admittedly, in his seven years at the university, Brailsford can’t recall having had an issue on the campus.

A telling example dates from when the government introduced targets aimed to broaden access to and participation in higher education by disadvantaged students. “Unlike other universities, Bond received none of the funding attached to this but was forced to pay the compliance costs of adhering to reporting requirements,” he says.

“I have no problem with that. Actually, Bond’s indigenous participation sits well above the national average. And our completion statistics for our indigenous population are a badge of honour for us.”

That’s as close as it comes to hubris. Asked how Bond is travelling after seven years at the helm, he says: “It’s up to other people to make those observations and judgements. I think by and large we’re doing OK.”