![]() Next year we move to a partially deregulated system – from 2012 an uncapped student demand-driven system will be introduced. Higher education in Australia is in some kind of transition. Talk to us about the climate in Australian higher education at the moment? Can you relate to any of the reforms happening in the UK? I am passionate about higher education, about the future of our students and I try to keep that passion burning throughout the interminable meetings. I didn't start life thinking "when I grow up I want to be a vice-chancellor", but someone has to run universities and it's good if that someone is passionate about teaching, research, education, scholarship, and putting it all in the mix to create an innovative university environment. I don't think my path was necessarily unconventional. My first job as vice-chancellor was at Murdoch University in Western Australia, then Brunel in London and now Macquarie. Like many research academics, I managed to studiously avoid administrative duties until, after a sudden shift in power, I landed up as a head of department, then, in quick succession, dean of medicine and vice-chancellor. My field was psychiatry, however my research spanned clinical psychology, psychiatry, public health and medical decision making. As a newly minted PhD, I worked at universities in Illinois, Texas, Western Australia and Queensland. Next came graduate school at Syracuse, a university that offered good football for the alumni and good times for the students. I was born in New York and began my undergraduate studies in 1963 – at Brooklyn college of the City University of New York. What about your career? How did you get into academia? There is only one requirement for success: the leader must never drop the bowl. The leader can take many different routes through the maze – the route makes no difference. The institution's leader is entrusted with the bowl for a period of time and is given the task of carrying it through a maze of slippery corridors. Someone once said that a university is a rare, delicate, antique crystal bowl. ![]() Then after the meetings, there is all the problem solving, report writing, dealing with the administration of a large university. On a daily level it would go: meeting, another meeting, another meeting, and then another meeting. This represented an outstanding result for science at Macquarie, particularly in biology, environment and ecology. Macquarie ranked fourth in Australia in terms of its number of research centres at the highest level ("outstanding performance well above world standard") in the most recent Excellence in Research for Australia exercise performed by the Australian government. In June the Times Higher Education ranked Macquarie University as the top university in Australia and the 14th in the world for research in environmental science and ecology as measured by citations for each researcher. Macquarie moved up nine places in the QS rankings from last year, with international students, employer reputation and international faculty all rated particularly highly. We have moved up the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) for the fifth consecutive year. We have restructured our faculties and curriculum to be more responsive to student needs and we have spent around A$1 billion (£633m) on significant improvements and facilities on campus including a new library, a Macquarie private hospital and clinic, cochlear headquarters and hearing hub, plus numerous refurbishments. Strategically, our goal has been to turn Macquarie into an internationally recognised research university.
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