Making Sense of University Business

I am a humanities academic, university exec and a woman. I am interested in the bigger financial picture for universities, and in encouraging academics—particularly women—to learn more about university business.

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A Long-Expected Party

Bilbo Baggins vanished on his eleventy-first birthday. That was a good thing, I thought, as I peered into the Bodleian exhibition cabinet to see the hand-scratched, one-page summary of the great story that Tolkien wanted to tell. Bilbo’s vanishing marked the transposition from The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings; a shift from a beloved children’s book to a world trilogy that we needed.

Tolkien took a lot of pages to tell us one of the simplest, and most powerful lessons you can learn. Let go. We needed all those pages, and we still do, because the message is so hard.

If you are ever fortunate to find an idea, then you must know that it will never be yours forever, or even for long. If you find more than one, then more so. Ideas only become good ones when people wrestle with them—even baulk at them—and then clothe themselves in them. It is in that wrestle, tussle, tumble, that ideas become good ones. The very best ones are those that everyone else thinks that they discovered.

Lots of people will say that the ANU flexible double degrees, the Admissions, Scholarships and Accommodation (ASA) project and Kambri are mine. They are not. They have always been legacies for the collective audacity, care, and investment of everyone who helped to make them what they are. Academics. Administrators. Staff from all levels and backgrounds from across the University.

When you let go, you make it possible for new ideas to happen, and for you to be different and to grow. You also make it possible for others to find and to shepherd new ideas, and to grow. You don’t vanish, you become different. Humans are much better than hobbits in that aspect.

Tolkien’s summary resonated with me not simply because of the story he wanted to tell. He had a big story that spilled into multiple volumes. He needed to tell it. All from a sketchy map and a one-page summary.

It rang a chord because the book that I thought I was writing to completion this year went from being a standalone statement to being part of a much bigger story about the relationship between my twin loves of history and philosophy. My interdisciplinary space is no safe harbour. People shoot one another in the name of history. Whole families have been wiped out because of history. Moreover, our digital world and selves are what they are perhaps because of histories that go without saying. Every algorithm builds a world from a past, and we need to be conscious of that to build a better and a fairer world.

So I am stepping down after seven years of service as DVCA at ANU at the end of 2018 to let new ideas happen and to grow. Those of you who follow me on twitter already know that book two of four—on how ethics can be found in the size and the scale of histories—is underway. I’ll blog my swansong to Kambri once more this year.

My blog will be back in a new form next year. I’ll be blogging my first thoughts on book three—historicizing artificial intelligence—from the ground up. I hope that you will all continue to baulk, tussle and tug at my ideas, and to help me to say what needs to be said about a potentially new world.

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The Other Food Pyramid

Ours is the age of the long goodbye for the food pyramid. What was food lore in the twentieth-century seems to have dissolved in the rapid tide of foods that are promoted and demoted in the news cycle. Chia one moment, paleo another, kombucha the next. Vegetables are still good for you, but you could be forgiven for feeling confused and a little harried about the rest.

Yet there is another experience of food that persists in this century from the last, and this one gets its structure from student poverty and staff time poverty. It is the heaped pile of skipped meals, late meals, substitute snacks, high calorie and low nutritional cheap eats and hunger that defines much of our experience of university life.

A decade of surveys by Universities Australia has revealed that anything from one in three to one in seven students are skipping a meal each day because they cannot afford to eat. Five dollars might not seem a lot to you and me, but that’s what you need to get even the most basic thing to eat, let alone a coffee or a tea. Skip meals over and over, and you are more likely to find work that takes you away from your studies, sometimes altogether. That’s the road to dropout, and it is avoidable.

Schools sometimes make the news for providing free breakfasts for struggling students, but this is a reality for universities too. Your university, like the one I work at, might also have a student- or staff-run food bank and emergency food vouchers.

Now add the tyranny of time for staff, and you have another group that isn’t eating regularly or always well. As Jennifer Jabs and Carol Devine have reinforced, lack of time influences food or eating choices, and time is seen as the greatest barrier to making healthy eating choices. The most accessible foods—those that are cheapest and quickest to get—are energy dense foods that are high in sugar and fat and they may be contributing to obesity in both children and adults. People also speed up meals by eating faster, grazing through the day, eating while at their desk or in a meeting, or not eating at all.

The answer to our experience of going without food lies with the creation and maintenance of another food pyramid, one that prioritises time, affordability and provision, and variety. It has to recognise and to work with financial and time poverty, and to provide people with access to a variety of foods without guilt.

This is the new approach to food that we have taken into the development Kambri. The result is a food pyramid that has a broad base of affordable or free foods through to a tiny tip of fine dining.

We got there by setting the pyramid as a goal, and by ensuring that students have a voice in retail leasing decisions. Retail food options are checked against the pyramid for price, for variety, and for time. The result is a mix of slow dining through to cheap eats that come in all shapes and sizes. There’s a small supermarket in the mix to ensure that basics like fruit, bread and milk are available, but we have also tried to listen to student and staff feedback on the kinds of foods that they would like to be able to access for free through our student associations and that they can and will pay for in money and in time. That’s a smart investment in good health and retention.

This blog’s shout out is for Future Food, who helped us to build our new food pyramid.

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Bookish

My Grandad retrieved books out of skips. Warped, torn, dusty cast offs with borrower stamp tattoos, dislocated quires and fractured spines that were carried via a cradle of ocky strap and bike that saw them safely home. Once there, they earned their keep, taking you on a journey far beyond the breeze block municipal library.

Grandad ran a circulating library of rejects, and I am not even sure how much he could read. Books will do that to you.

Bookish. That’s the word for it. It describes hands that know the weight and feel of paper and how to cradle quires for hours. Eyes that miss the trees for the print. Ears that hear pages separate for the first time; a nose that knows how long a text has been warehoused and whether mould is on the march. And a heart and a mind that that see the person in every volume, wincing at the word remainder and the first signs of paper foxing.

Our physical interaction with books is not just the stubborn, straight backed chair that seated Canute against the tide. Physical books and bookstores are making a comeback, carried by those who take delight in sharing the experience of books with other people. We may read silently these days, but nothing seems to beat buying books in company, browsing, and asking a bookseller for recommendations.

Bookstores also host reading groups, poetry slams, trivia nights, political talks and workshops, as well as—of course—book launches. The ancillary love of browsing for stationery seals the deal.

I understand it: I am a person of the book with thanks to Grandad and to other people that taught me that books are social webs that stick like glue. Great book stores build bonds between people, even when they read quietly. I didn’t need the Harvard Business School to tell me that, but if you need a little more convincing about how bookstores resonate as social centres, take a look at Ryan Raffaelli’s article on the comeback of independent bookstores.

I am not suggesting that physical bookstores are not mutually exclusive with online bookselling. You can buy books online from physical booksellers, and you can buy books from physical and online sellers in tandem. This form of coexistence works well, and we ought to encourage it.

We are. This week, I am delighted to announce that a new, independent bookseller will join us in Kambri by the start of 2019. I can barely contain my joy. We’ve had a sad year for books—the lapping echo of our drowned library lingers—and the thought of a rush of new shelves and stock makes the slow rebuild all the more bearable.

Harry Hartog is a much-loved Canberra local that is now insinuating its way into Sydney and Newcastle through its mixture of highbrow tomes and out and out fun. Hartog’s shelves are stuffed, and featured title tables serve as reading richochets. All of these reading and browsing waystations sit under a sky of miniature hot air balloons. They soar, taking us beyond ourselves in ways that my Grandad, and the bookish that you know, have always understood.

This blog’s shout out is for Harry Hartog and for the bookish.

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Retail Formwork

Clink, pour, clink. The builder’s clock of formwork—building, pouring into and removing construction moulds—urges hurry on. Buildings stretch up, ever accelerating, then top out. Moulds are removed, then nothing appears to happen to the distant eye.

As one kind of formwork crescendos and disappears, another gains momentum. This is the formwork that guides and helps retailers to open business with the best possible chance of success in a tough commercial work.

Successful retail does not happen by accident, particularly at a time when operating conditions are shifting in ways that mean the unbundling and re-formation of work and social experiences. While some of those changes are dramatic, one thing remains relatively constant: upwards of 97% of businesses worldwide are small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

When you work in a large enterprise—universities are big operations—it can be hard to get your head around what it is like to run or to work in an SME. It can be tempting to preach on the basis of familiarity with startups in some economic segments, or to theorise the leadership capability needed to make a business work, let alone thrive. These dispositions seem a long way away from the realities of paying rent, keeping up with the competition and regulatory requirements, and experiencing any kind of upskilling or reskilling. We have a tendency to think we know everything, and you know what? We don’t.

Then you meet the reality, and you know that the right kind of retail leasing strategy formwork makes all the difference in helping businesses to spill out with success like a street café. At minimum, retail formwork is the provision of scope of works schedules. These are lists of all the features included in a space when it is purchased or leased, and the cost of providing extra services. A mobile phone repairer, for example, won’t need the same hydraulic, ventilation or utilities provisions as a café. A dentist doesn’t have the same equipment needs as a physiotherapist, and so on.

Retail formwork, however, is much more than that. It is relationship and ethos building that helps retailers to express and to tease out the value of their businesses in a new place through the built form, interior fitouts, signage, uniforms and schedules of offerings. As a team, you owe it to businesses to tell them about the conversations you have had with people across multiple years about the meaning and potential of a place. You outline the generosity of the local Aboriginal organisations in helping you to see place as being about learning. You talk about all the people you want to welcome in, how the spaces will be managed and events ‘cultivated’.

You then listen as the retailer talks about their own journey, the value of what they do, and what they may bring to a place to help to grow its identity. Multiply that series of conversations by up to 40 retail spaces, and you learn a lot about the world according to SMEs.

That world spills out beyond the scaffold of those conversations. It permeates signage. You see it run in flooring choices; in chair types; in ceiling features. Your words, their words, moulded, selected, suspended, mounted, put out and packed away. The joinery of beliefs that if we make something good together, then they will not only be able to pay the bills and to feed their families; we might just help people to feel a little less lonely, to feel happy, and to associate a place with joy.

Work with one business, and you have a bilateral conversation. Talk with 40 SMEs and you live with diversity. Diversity, we have been told over and over again, is a powerful driver in company board success. Well, there is another kind of diversity out there: a 97% diversity that can also contribute to the success of a large organisation like a university. It’s our SME economy. Acknowledge it, scaffold its success.

This blog’s shout out is for the 38 retail holdings at Kambri. Welcome to our community.

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Façade

One day it was a weatherboard dump, the next day it was a faux brick Tudor-style house. In some ways the suburban Australia of my childhood rivalled The Magic Faraway Tree, including the longevity of its effects. One minute a building appeared in enticing guise, the next minute the illusion crumbled. Literally.

It’s hard not to talk about building façades without a seeping sense of cynicism like concrete cancer.

Leading a multi-building development project has been a re-education for me. My love of wood construction has grown, but I have also learned—among other things—that tendon cables mean less concrete in slabs, wood frames are needed in high-corrosion environments like pool facilities, and that 3D models can be built for tree root systems as well as services duct planning. Moreover, I have loved hearing from the construction team how much they have enjoyed honing their skills on the two new wood buildings.

I have also had to admit that my view of façades was wrong, or at least very out of date.

People tend not to think of construction as an innovative business. It is. This is not simply because clients ask for it. As journals like Construction Innovation emphasize, teams drive innovation to, for example, meet environmental targets; to better coordinate procurement and delivery of materials; to reduce cost or to improve structure longevity; and to adapt to regulatory change.

Innovation also arises as a result of workforce shortages. Try finding a bricklayer these days, or a plumber or plasterer. All of these trades are on the national skills shortage list and hiring costs have escalated, sometimes prohibitively. Some people would wryly observe that you reap what you sow when you do not value vocational education, or the people that engage with it. They are partly right. Every building completion reflects a struggle to secure, retain, recognise and reward skilled workers. It’s a façade that glosses the treatment of the vocational sector as the poor cousin of university education, and the presumption that some skills are future and others are past.

Yet skill shortages also drive changes, and those changes may provide opportunities for the development and application of new skills. The façades of Kambri express that opportunity, and in particular the façade of our new student accommodation block. This takes me back to the case of bricklayers, and to façades.

Our warm-boned wood buildings have brick or stone skins. Not skins in the sense of bricks laid one at a time with strings and mortar-scraping trowels in stretcher, header, shiner, rowlock, soldier or sailor fashion. No need for prolonged work at dangerous heights. These are real bricks cut in two and mounted with windows in a steel frame that is tied back to the structural frame. All up, they weigh about two tonnes each.

This novel solution to façade construction and mounting has multiple advantages. One storey of façade—made of panels that are sometimes up to nine metres long—can be mounted on the wood frame of our student accommodation in two days. Three weeks would be needed for conventional bricklaying approaches. That means fewer people working at dangerous heights.

The half width of the bricks and the manufacture of the frames locally in Port Kembla means less carbon capture in the production process, and their backing with waterproofing membranes and insulation helps to regulate building temperatures. That, again, means reduced heating and cooling costs.

While some people are waiting for skilled tradespeople to materialise in Australia a faraway miracle, construction teams are getting on with it. They have to. They are not, however, just making do. Shortages drive innovation and should be formally recognised as part of the innovation cycle.

This blog’s shout out is for Ben Owen and the LendLease team

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Taboo: Fat Burgs

Some topics are unspeakable. Unpleasant, rancid, pungent. They taint your senses and give you the shudders, leaving you to shake out your memories like a dog that has just lolloped out of a slimy lake. Call to mind the smell of bins on a summer’s day, a cockroach luxuriating in your sink, and fat burgs.

Yup. Fat burgs. Not talking about them doesn’t make them go away, folks. The secret of a good taboo—a wonderful word gifted us by peoples of the Pacific—is that revulsion can stop you doing something in the first place. But it can also lead you to suppress acknowledgement and the need to talk about something, and to do something about it.

We need to talk about fat burgs and rancid rubbish bins. Fat poured down a sink solidifies, and some poor person has to clear the lumps of fat out of the water infrastructure. If it breaks free, it travels into the waterways. Leave a bin too long and it not only overflows; the contents go rancid and someone needs to wash it out.

Waste management is one of those hush hush, have to have things. It needn’t be. Done well, it reflects emerging research in engineering and logistics.

It has been a privilege to invest in emerging waste technologies, and to give a lot of thought to waste logistics in developing the Kambri precinct. Grease trap management and waste management logistics are two highlights of a group of actions designed to minimise waste in the first place, and then to manage it as efficiently and effectively as possible. Our goal: no fat burgs and rancid bins.

Grease traps have changed very little over a long time. Nathaniel Whiting gained the first patent for a grease trap in 1884.

Whiting’s grease trap works on the basic principle of solid waste sinking, grease floating, and water flowing through a twisted course. It is hard, however, to build traditional grease traps that can cope with the high-volume flows of retail areas. Fat can build up quickly—meaning you have to clean the trap out very frequently—and a build-up of rotting food waste can generate toxic gases and sulphur dioxide.

Enter the Dissolved Air Flotation (DAF) grease trap. As researchers like James Edzwald and Anastasios Zouboulis and Antonis Avranas have explained, with DAF, air is dissolved in water under pressure and then released into the trap. The water cannot hold the air under normal pressure, and it forms tiny bubbles. Those bubbles float to the top of the tank and take grease with them, where it is removed with a skimmer. When you combine DAF design with a traditional first step grease trap, you can build a system that is smaller and cheaper to run than either traditional or DAF grease traps. That’s good news for the environment, for retail lease holders, and for the folks who have to remove fat burgs.

So too, waste logistics is well worth thinking about. Researchers like Katja Buhrkal, Allan Larson and Stefan Ropke work on algorithms to optimise the size, location, movement and emptying of rubbish and recycling bins that flow down to precinct waste management plans like ours.

The aim is to minimise bin and truck movement while at the same time providing adequate bins that match community numbers. It starts with recycling bins designed to minimise landfill, and continues with waste collection times that do not block thoroughfares when lots of people are about.

It’s so clever, that is worth talking about. And talk about it we must, because the extension of China’s recyclable import ban means that we all have to take local responsibility for minimising and managing our waste. Time to shake off the shudders and to be proud of the community changes and research that deliver cleaner environments and smaller environmental impacts.

This blog’s shout out is for Phil and Steve Hubbard, and for the dare of writing this.

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National Admissions for the National University

Democracy means decision by the people, and it is the purpose of education to help people to make the best possible decisions that they can about their country. This principle sits at the heart of John Dedman’s words of introduction to the 1946 legislation which created the Australian National University.

Being the National University means giving students support and encouragement from their very first encounter with tertiary education: admissions.

It was the generosity of Graham and Louise Tuckwell that helped us to see how we might change university admissions for the better. Five years, and over 3400 Tuckwell Scholarship applications later, we have taken a deep dive into the experiences, achievements and hopes of students and schools from across the country.

There are brilliant students everywhere, and they have given freely of their advice about how we might make the transition to university simpler, more welcoming, merit based and transparent, and national. It is with thanks to them and to their communities that we will transform admissions at ANU from next year.

Admission to ANU will be simpler. We have created a single, free platform that allows students to apply for a place and on campus accommodation, and to be considered for hundreds of scholarships. Students will get an answer in July before the next university year, helping them to plan for the transition from home. Our experience with the Tuckwell scholarships has also shown us that helping year twelve students to know where they stand with their university application before final exams has a positive impact on wellbeing and does not diminish academic performance.

Admission to ANU will reaffirm the value of the highest possible academic standards, as seen in our continuing use of transparently published ATARs and in the requirement from 2023 that all new undergraduates will have studied maths and English at senior secondary level. But we will also signal our recognition of the value of what students learn outside of the classroom, by asking students to tell us about their contribution to family, school or community. That will be done through a published, minimum threshold co-curriculum schedule that recognises what schools have known for a long time: that generosity, leadership and service contribute to individual and community wellbeing and further improve graduate employability. ANU is currently 21 in the world for employability, and that ranking reflects the generosity of our students both inside and outside of the classroom.

Admission to ANU will be friendlier, with alumni making welcome calls to all of our new undergraduates. Those calls, a pilot has shown us this year, can make a big difference in working through all the niggles and worries that can add up to a daunting life transition.

And admission to ANU will be national. In a world first, we will reach out to the top students in every school in Australia who meet our minimum admissions standards. That, to be clear, is the vast majority of Australia’s most gifted students. Not all students will want to study with us, but it is the role of the National University to affirm the value of tertiary education—vocational and university—whether it is with a local institution or one far away.

Dedman was right. Education is pivotal to democracy. It is the means by which communities, big and small, near or far, can become even stronger. We need to be a strong voice for that, and to show by our actions that students and their families are a key part in building a stronger Australia.

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Holding On

Silence shapes talk. All of us have the experience of holding back words to let others speak, or because we want to draw boundaries between our private worlds and those of work and study. Sometimes we hold on to ideas because we worry about what others will think of us or even that they might hurt us or the people we love.

Silence is a protective barrier for more people than we probably acknowledge.

Freedom of speech measures are not necessarily a panacea for this. Speakers need listeners, and life does not hand the baton from one to the other evenly or fairly. Understandably, those who feel circumscribed by silence may feel that freedom of speech measures can serve to simply amplify those who already have a strong voice. Those who were silent before remain silent while familiar paths of argument are cemented.

Ruth Wajnryb noticed this dynamic at play in the families of Holocaust survivors. Children of survivors tiptoe through the shards of silence that mark the obliteration of whole communities. Meanwhile deniers re-wound with words whilst claiming the protection of freedom of expression.

Switching from silence to speech is a social, and not just an individual act. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann holds that we spiral in and out of silence when we think we have the numbers on our side. She is intuitively right: we are more likely to speak up when others will back us up and when the environment signals support for us.

This is as much true of the built environment as the policies we pen and the words we speak. Places can acknowledge and give people the confidence to be who they want to be, and to bring the best of their experiences and expertise to work and to study.

You might not think a lot about public bathrooms, but I do now thanks to Kambri.

The paper appeared in my inbox one morning. Ari and the ANU Queer* Department had nailed it. By all the measures we might use to appraise a university committee paper, it was outstanding. Concise. Clear. Powered by a simple, clear argument and the suggestion of solutions. Evidence based. Logical, helpful, and compelling.

Going to the bathroom, it argued, is more complicated than it needs to be. Signs and structures offer a choice between male and female that inscribe and reinscribe the message that intersex, transgender and non-binary peoples, to name a few examples, are not welcome, or that they have to make choices that they find confusing or confronting. Going to the bathroom can be so embarrassing that some people hold on or avoid classes, meetings or social events.

Unisex toilets would be welcome relief, but not those with the customary icon of a male and female figures divided by a line. Call it what it is, a toilet.

So we did it. Unisex toilets in the Pop Up and popped into the drawings for the new precinct. A to and fro with the building code and icons sent back to the drawing board. And all the while public policy change on same sex marriage crept along, finally gathering the momentum to award respect where respect is due. More and more people spoke up, driven by an unquenchable love for partners, siblings, children, families and friends. Decades of silence overturned by the delight of our ability to care for one another, and a desire to acknowledge the darkest moments recounted in reports such as Respect. Now. Always. and Trans Pathways.

Inclusive bathrooms are a simple element in a wider landscape of words, wood and stone that welcomes. They remind us that the freest of speech comes when we choose to stop talking, to listen, and then act.

This blog’s shout out is for Ari and the ANU Queer* Department.

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Superfloor

The world of learning space design is flat. Beautiful, flat floor spaces in which the energy of student and staff interactions curls around group tables and wisps through glass walls and the spaces where doors used to be.

Flat worlds have edges, limits of a known world. Beyond them, the unknown lurks. In the world of learning spaces, those edges are defined by scale. Parse showcase sites and studies of contemporary classroom design and one theme prevails: learning innovation takes place in small spaces. Informal spaces for ‘in between learning’ can be large, but classrooms are small enough for fifty or fewer students. Beautiful boutique spaces reflecting the belief that exploring, debating and contesting knowledge with a group of students small enough that you can name is good.

It is good, and desirable, and worth aiming for. But it does not reflect the world of all university teachers today, permanent or casual. Teachers of larger classes might look at learning space studies and think that new spaces are not for them, or that their invitation to be part of education innovation will not be forthcoming. That message can be reinforced by building and renovation works that focus in on smaller spaces, passing over larger spaces with only a thin coat of paint and a new batch of heavy duty carpet.

Moreover, just as contemporary learning spaces design shouts one theme—small—so large learning spaces have theirs: tiers. Large spaces are lecture theatres. You can dress them up with low incline tiers, group tables, swivel chairs and bright colours, but they are still lecture theatres.

Design shapes experience. Put a lectern in a room and people will stand behind it and talk. Cables and flat radio microphone batteries curtail movement, along with the inaccessibility of stairs. Some educators break the boundaries that you set up, but not all have the confidence or the experience to do so. Encouraging spaces can support the development of that confidence and experience.

In the early days of this blog, I wrote about declining attendance at lectures over the course of teaching periods. The data has not changed. Teaching staff can be engaging, break up lectures with interactive activities, and find themselves in a newer lecture theatre. But attendance still declines, despite their innovations and hard work. Yet it is not enough to point out an emptying lecture theatre; it is also important to address it by understanding what that must feel like for teachers, and to help and support them to find more positive experiences for them and their students.

Signalling support for change is important. Nationally and internationally, a range of studies have suggested that the use of technologies such as slide annotation, polling, and diagnostic testing can help personalise large classes. But personalisation is not a technology-only endeavour. Providing spaces that support change, and teams that support teaching change are critical. There is no future for learning without a future for teachers and their spaces.

For all these reasons, I am very pleased that one of our new wood-frame buildings for Kambri will provide a flat-floor space for teachers and up to 300 students to explore interactive and personalised learning. Our ‘superfloor’ has been a long time in the making. There are few examples of large innovative teaching spaces that are not lecture theatres, and that means it is hard to break from tiers when you are given a blank design sheet.

After a few starts, and an endless supply of good will, passion and engagement, our Associate Deans Education, super teachers and the retired director of schools in our local territory settled on the need to design a statement about the future of learning and teaching. They took the lead, they designed, they crafted words that will take form in space. They needed to write in order for us to make. Their words are ground up, grounded, branching and embracing of a future for all of our disciplines. Fittingly, they will take form in the organic beauty of a wood building. And as their words are brokered and re-brokered across the campus, the walls start to go up. The built form belongs to them, is them, and is what they might be with all of the encouragement that we can give them.

This blog’s shout out is for Royston Gustavson, Jochen Trumpf, Stephan Fruehling, Carol Hayes, Wayne Morgan, Anna Cowan, Bronwen Whiting, Keturah Whitford, our super teachers, Ninotschka Titchkosky from BVN, Sam Jordan from Colony 6 and Diane Joseph.

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The Integrity of Giving

It is the role of universities to change the world, not to confirm it. But in order to change the world, universities themselves have to be open to change.

Giving culture is a key driver of change. This is because it turns on integrity.

Integrity means values and principles, but it also means having a sense of your whole self; knowing who you are, how your principles fit together, and how you can enact them. Integrity is about wanting to round yourself out, to be consistent and caring from top to bottom.

Donors can help us to see things in ourselves that we never thought possible. They can round us out. They can give us the courage to change. They can help us to round ourselves, to get a greater sense of our whole. It is in this sense that they can also teach us about integrity.

This is the journey in integrity that the institution that I work at is learning to take with thanks to our donors. Little donors and big donors. Staff, student, alumni and non-alumni donors. Donors who give of their advice, and their care as well as their resources.

It starts with the donor who asks you whether there could be more refugee students at your university. Who tells you about their journey as a first in family student and who asks you how many first in family students you now have. Who asks you about the daily struggles of students who miss meals, who work long hours and who live in straightened circumstances.

It is the volunteer who talks with new students and who tells you what the top worries of those students are.

We see our gaps, and our failings, but we also get a sense of what we can be.

It was a donor who told us that he believed in our courage to change the way that we think about admissions. It was a donor who told us that she believes in our role as the National University. It was a donor couple who told us that they could show us the first steps in providing more concrete support for refugee students.

They did not chastise, they did not tell us how we might be a disappointment, how we might have lost our way or how we might have fallen short in our eyes. Never. Rather, they have been great teachers, asking us to tell them how big our dreams might be, and what bold steps we might take towards them.

Ideas take flight in the belief of others in our ability to change.

In early May, we will announce changes to our undergraduate admissions model that confirm both our commitment to excellence and our role as the National University. It has been a journey staged with the belief of donors along the way. Two years of work, over twenty technical papers that have taken us step by step to the realisation that we still have so much to learn. I’ll say more in my blog after 9 May, but until then, know that I am on the journey to learn, driven by integrity.

This blog is based on my plenary contribution to the Council for Advancement and Support of Education 2018 Asia-Pacific Advancement Conference in Hong Kong. I would like to thank all of the donors, Alumni Relations and Philanthropy and CASE colleagues who have taught me that I still have so much to learn.

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Deluge

It was there on the desk when I got home that night. D20.G756 2002. Ranajit Guha’s History at the Limit of World-History. Due for return 30 July 2018. An extraordinary little paperback calling for nothing less than the refooting of my discipline. A book which arguably had its genesis at the university at which I work. Saved.

Relief and grief twirled in me like an eddy, moving with the force of the black water that had turned reading desks into battering rams which punched holes in the walls. Punched.

The rain had been steady, but not too heavy, over the previous days. A blessing, no doubt, to the farmers who had been watching the kangaroos descend on their parched crops and herds. Then over 60mm of rain in an hour took shape in a wall of water that crashed down Sullivan’s Creek and burst banks on and off campus. The suburb of O’Connor under water. The city’s main road impassable, flooding the carpark of our Fenner Hall.

Water lapped into Toad Hall, turned benign by a community bound together by the Wind in the Willows edict that there is nothing half so much worth doing as messing about in boats. But it crept on, up and down hills, insinuating itself into Kambri in a pincer movement that buried the construction site under four metres of water and washed into the neighbouring A. D. Hope, Melville Hall and Chifley Library buildings.

Uncle Carl was right. Never underestimate the power of the creek.

People are not bounded by the limits of their bodies. You only have to look at a university office to know that. Machines, archaeological fragments, sofas, maps, and piles of paper are extensions of people. And books. Books are made by authors, of course, but they are sustained by readers in afterlives that stretch over millennia.

When you wash away a book, it seems as if you wash away a person, even if it is not the only copy on earth.

I knew early on that afternoon that my books had probably been drowned. D13. Low enough on the shelves to have copped the full force of the water. No mind, I will give the library replacements. It was the loss of other people’s books that smarted. Hayden White died this past week. His Metahistory, playful, gone. Greg Dening’s powerful accusation about leadership, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language, gone. And countless others in my twin fields of history and philosophy. Not singular copies, but singular people.

People cherish books as they cherish people. I repeat thanks over and again that no one was in the affected buildings when the waters washed through, and that no one made the choice between saving books and other objects, and saving themselves. That’s a non-choice. No object is more important than a person.

And I am also mindful that eucalyptus tree breaks its boundaries after a fire. Sprouts and branches break out in all directions, wilful, off piste, defiant.

Inspiration sprouts in CIRCLE, a project which over four decades has recovered over 20,000 copies and mentions of letters destroyed in the explosion and fire that obliterated the Irish Public Record office in 1922. The Chancery will never be replicated, but it will be reborn. In the last week, too, Katherine Bode gifted me a generous peek of her beautiful new book on Australian novels. She has found traces of over 16,000 nineteenth-century Australian novels that we didn’t know existed. She found them through a forensic examination of digital news archives. That we now have more Australian women novelists is due to the strong research boughs that she is building. We are gaining a stronger sense of ourselves from what might be lost.

And I think of Guha’s invitation to think differently about what a history is. Rebuild the field, he tells us. But don’t use the same foundations. They are more negotiable and more ephemeral than you think. He was right, just like Uncle Carl.

Hold your books tight for a moment. They are safe in your arms. Breathe deeply. Then loosen your grip and let the powerful minds who wrote them carry you to a place in which a branch does not sprout in exactly the same place. Chifley will not be exactly as it was, and it does not have to be. The borrowed books—the saved—will return. But they will take their place in a collection created anew, one that is not just necessarily different, but one that we can choose to be different.

This blog’s shout out is for Roxanne Missingham and our beloved librarians at ANU.

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The Sense of Wood

You feel and hear creaking floorboards. The curve of a clinker or carvel boat plank invites your eyes and hands to follow it. The smell of steam infused wood can flood your lungs and mind with memories. Wood is multi-sensory. And as we shape it, so it shapes us in many different ways.

Our relationship with wood is deep and varied, deep enough for trees to be many-named and multi-used. Every Burin—Red Stringybark (Eucalyptus macrorhyncha)—on our campus suggests stories of shelters, rope, fire and shields; and the Nummerak—Hickory Wattle (Acacia implexa)—offers flour, medicine and the means to catch fish. And wood continues to surprise us, unfolding its stories in more than just its rings.

Wood has waited for us as we have returned to it through building. Familiar uses of wood for floorboards, frames and interior features are now joined by new uses made possible by wood composites like cross-, nail-, dowel- and glue-laminated timber (CLT; NLT; DLT and glulam respectively), and laminated-veneer lumber (LVL). Add to those an ever-growing list of new composites and you have the means to make big, multi-story buildings and a vibrant research agenda to achieve even more improvements in fire, moisture and biological resistance. This is good news, because use of wood in construction reduces our reliance on higher carbon footprint materials like plastic, steel and concrete, reduces net greenhouse gas emissions compared to alternatives, and further minimises waste from harvested wood. But wood makes sense for other reasons too.

Wood buildings go up faster than buildings made from other materials, and they require far fewer wifi repeaters than steel-framed buildings. They also generate better internal air quality by buffering moisture and therefore reducing humidity swings. All of these features are important for university projects.

The strong suit of wood, though, is an ever-growing body of research on the link between wood and wellbeing. A 1000-participant survey of Australians by Planet Ark in 2014 highlights people’s perceptions of wood as warm, inviting, cosy, visually appealing and nice to touch. This is not a singular finding. International research—most recently summarised by Strobel, Nyrud and Bysheim—also relays the consistent global message that people prefer to work and study near wood, and that it has a positive impact on productivity and stress levels. The appeal is multisensory: people want to look at, to touch and to smell wood. Wood is not a panacea for the growing tide of mental-health issues that universities face, but it can contribute to a happier work and study environment. That’s worth the construction price alone.

I could barely disguise my joy when I heard that it might be possible to include wood buildings in the precinct that now has the beautiful name Kambri. Joy turned to delight with the confirmation that two of our multi-level buildings will be made from wood: our new teaching building and a new student hall of residence. Even at six stories—under the local height limit—our teaching building is dwarfed by the eighteen storey Brock Commons hall of residence at the University of British Columbia, other tall timber buildings around the world, and the seventy story ‘plyscraper’ planned by Sumitomo Forestry Co. in Tokyo. But as the frame for the first of these buildings emerges quickly from the ground and the furnishings of the teaching building are finalised, the immanence of wood is highlighted. You get a glimpse, you strain to look closer, you can’t wait to touch it and to smell it. You sense it will be beautiful on opening, and beautiful as it ages. And that brings on a smile over and over again. Wood makes sense.

This blog’s shout out is for Wally Bell, Peter Kanowski, and Phil Evans (UBC) for sharing their love of wood.

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Elders

If I have seen further it is not because I have stood on the shoulders of giants, but because I have been in their country.

There are moments where you feel profoundly humbled by history. Not history in the sense of documenting events, but history in the sense of hearing and being taught to see the world differently.

I came to a meeting table having read Bringing Them Home (1997), still carrying the shock of learning about what it means to separate children from their parents, and families from their country, their knowledge, their language. And I came to a meeting table with an open sense of being sorry for believing what I was taught as a child: that there were no Indigenous people where I lived.

I never for a moment came to the table I sat at three months ago with the thought that I might be given something. And yet I was, we all were.

Indigenous consultation is a critical part of any development or construction project. This is not to entomb the past and to build over it, but to recognise through the built form and public spaces the living contribution of Indigenous peoples to nurturing and teaching country to all of us. And to achieve that, you have to listen and to think about the future through the past.

You have to really listen. What you begin to hear is a tumble of generous ideas driven by the desire to pass on knowledge, to teach.

Representatives from the Little Gudgenby River Tribal Council, Buru Ngunawal Aboriginal Corporation, King Brown Tribal Group, and the Ngarigu Currawong Clan have been helping us over nearly five years to peel back the concrete in the centre of our campus and to think about giving and teaching in a broader way.

It is with thanks to them that we will capture their family stories in a Creekside walk, create a teaching bush garden, show a map of country as you approach a bridge with the four families acknowledged on its columns, welcome people in language and provide a fire pit in recognition of the importance of smoking ceremonies.

These features all connect together under a history-making gift of language. Last week, the four local Indigenous groups gifted the University the name Kambri to describe the centre of campus. There has been no greater privilege in my working life than have been there at the moment that they offered this gift for the first time. It was the straightforward, matter of fact act of four elder teachers: you impart knowledge in the hope that the people who receive it will learn from it.

Their teaching is not simply the very epitome of philanthropy; a selfless act of giving with no expectation of return, an act of giving by people that have been treated less than generously themselves.

It is also the very epitome of what it is to be a university. When people write about, or give lectures on the meaning of a university, they inevitably turn to sources like that of Cardinal Newman and talk about free enquiry and the transmission of ideas through alumni. These are good ideas, but in the gift of Kambri we see the crucial role of country in what makes a university a university.

Kambri means meeting place. It encapsulates the profound observation that the giving and exchange of ideas in meeting takes place. Universities turn on these simple mechanisms of generosity. But these acts in turn are shaped by the places in which they take place. Places where tradition tells us not to walk on the grass, or to recognise a quadrangle as a place of learning, or to mourn the loss of a jacaranda tree. Places which denote flexibility or an openness to the future, or which can help people to feel included and respected. Sometimes place is so powerful that it overrides time: we may get the sequence of our university memories mixed up, but we may have a powerful sense of where they happened.

You can create a digital simulacrum of a university, of course, but it is bound to include assignment boxes, virtual lecture theatres, and silent exams. Squeeze it through binary and it still comes out looking like a place on the other side.

So what if we thought about how Indigenous understandings of country, and of teaching, might shape our understanding of a modern university? By this, I do not mean simply teaching a course on Indigenous perspectives, although I think this is a good thing to do. Nor am I suggesting that we turn our back on Cardinal Newman, but I suspect that our local elders gifted us a name because they think that we are ready to step up and to find our own sense of university, to speak it in country, and to speak it to the world.

This blog’s shout out is for Dave Johnston, Anne Martin, the Little Gudgenby River Tribal Council, Buru Ngunawal Aboriginal Corporation, King Brown Tribal Group, and the Ngarigu Currawong Clan.

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Buzz Wire: Construction and Cash Flow

Boom cranes loop and roller wheels squeak as they turn over road base. The rhythmic clinking of scaffolding’s rise is punctuated by the hum of jets of water dampening down the dust.

The buzz of construction is captivating. People bound up the library steps to look through the windows punched into plywood hoardings; peek through the gaps in fence fabric; peer out of their office or the tea room window to check on progress. They even show me videos of the diggers, which I love.

Construction’s tempo is that of an S curve, starting slowly, accelerating dramatically and then levelling out as completion approaches. Andante. Accelerando. A tempo. Its partner beat is the syncopated, inverted U curve of workforce on site, the peak of which in our project will be just under 500 workers.

This tempo is not autonomous, for the hum and clink of construction flow echoes the tides of cash flow. Cash flow monitoring for a university budget is complex because major sources of income such as student fees and grants may be received in large blocks, as against more evenly spread expenditure needs.

Construction project cash flow is recognised as even more complex again because of the need to order and pay for materials and workforce in sequence when there looms the possibility of delays such as those caused by weather. Some things have to be ordered long in advance because of manufacturing and shipping times. But you might also find yourself having to order trees, for example, long ahead of their planting so that they grow to the size that you want at opening. Storing trees and other materials on site might not be possible if adverse weather conditions mean that you are not ready for them.

In addition, construction projects present uncertainties that might only be resolved after a project commences. You might not get a full picture of the ground beneath a building until you demolish it. Façade materials may become unavailable, and new kinds of materials may appear. Other large construction projects may compete for worker attention.

And all the while you have to keep the projected costs per week, per month, per quarter, and so on, as close to actual costs as possible. If you have money to pay for the project invested, you don’t want to move it to the lower rates of more accessible—liquid—accounts before you have to, or pay for things when they are at their highest price, or too far ahead of when you can use them. Importantly, too, you have to manage variations. Some are unavoidable, but you have to steer clear of tinkering and endless iterations if you want to finish on time and within or close to budget.

Mastering construction cash flow is very like playing buzz wire, where you move a grip mounted loop along a bent wire as quickly as you can, without touching it. Overcorrections and contact trigger a buzz, which is meant to feedback designed to improve your efforts.

Monitoring your line of cash flow travel is done through tables and charts that combine historical data from other, similar, construction projects, and mathematical models. Construction cash flow research suggests that you have to keep an eye out for six main groups of factors that can impact on the successful completion of a project: financial management; sub-contractor issues; suppliers and materials (eg price change); communications skills (eg contractor-sub contractor disputes); prior construction (eg incomplete) and during construction (eg rework arising from mistakes).

But not all factors are created equal, as work by Tarek Zayed and Yaquiong Liu in 2014 highlights. The bigger the project, the greater the risk in managing payment timing and bottlenecks, and the gap between prior construction cost estimates and actuals. That’s far away from the ‘windows haven’t turned up’ narrative arc of Grand Designs, but pretty fundamental to also getting university budgeting—from operational management to start up monitoring—right. Yep, maths. Leapfrog algorithms and stochastic modelling. People may rattle on like echo chambers about the need for us to step up the pace in maths education, and to value maths more, but when you see a construction project buzz it is apparent in a concrete way that maths is critical. Maths is the music of construction. Remember that the next time you hear the sounds of a digger.

This blog’s shout out is for Robert Hitchcock, Sam Jordan, Phil Heaney and Chris Grange, for bringing me to up to buzz-less speed on construction cash flow.

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The Hand that Straightens the Sleeve: Rhodes Australia 2018

Cufflinks fail. Shoes scuff without you knowing it. Cutlery is confusing.

Being interviewed for any kind of position is daunting for most people. A small number of individuals seem to be unfazed by selection processes, but most people need some practice and help. That’s even more the case when you carry the niggling belief that everyone else probably deserves to be at the interview more than you.

This year marks the 113th round of Rhodes Scholar selections in Australia. That’s 113 years of questions, formal and informal dinners, and generous hospitality by the state governors and the Governor General. Our volunteer interviewers are dedicated, focused, and quick on their feet. They have had to navigate hailstorms and humidity, and even the occasional bird that decides to bust in on the interview via a nearby fireplace.

Over a century, Rhodes Australia has come to be a household name, and it has also acquired a rich constellation of folklore. Many of these stories are delightful and joyful. But some see potential applicants rule themselves out from applying. It starts with students thinking that they have the wrong kind of degree, that they aren’t smart enough, or that they went to the wrong school or the wrong university. So they don’t open an application form or if they do, they rule themselves out by being unsure about approaching referees. When they get invited to interview, they assume it must be a mistake. Over and over again.

Folklore can be rewritten. Selection attrition can be overcome. It starts by acknowledging and tackling doubts publicly. In the two years since we launched ‘Should I Apply for an Australian Rhodes Scholarship?’ via the free platform Storify, we’ve had just under 7,300 views. In it, we answer application questions that applicants have often felt too embarrassed to ask. In making that story, I have to thank our community of Rhodes scholars, whose experiences range over seven decades. They have wonderful stories of selection nerves and stumbles and their strategies for overcoming them.

It continues with our network of state secretaries and volunteer application advisors, which are found now at nearly every university in Australia. Not all of them are Rhodes Scholars; many are senior staff who believe in the importance of helping people early in their career to achieve their best. Our team now numbers around 70, not including panellists.

And it comes to a peak with our state administrators and that interview with so many curly questions and often a dazzling array of cutlery. Imagine if you came to an interview and you saw a familiar face? That familiar face places no part in the selection, and does not even go into the interview with you. But that familiar face greets you, talks with you warmly to calm your nerves, and tugs down that jacket sleeve to make sure you go into that interview room knowing how talented you are and how much potential you have. That familiar face delights when you succeed, but works with you and the state and the national secretary to give you thorough, constructive and encouraging feedback when you don’t. Our measure of success is for every applicant to feel that they gained something positive from the process.

It works. More Australian universities are now participating in Rhodes selection. We have elected our third Indigenous Rhodes Scholar in 113 years, with the second being last year. Griffith University, Curtin University and University of Technology Sydney have won their second ever Rhodes Scholarships. Our shortlists are more culturally diverse and we are slowly making headway in increasing the number of applicants who went to government high schools, particularly in rural and regional areas.

Progress sometimes feels slow, and it is not as if we are not taking some knocks and backward slips along the way. Incomplete applications are our Achilles heel. But more of Australia is now seeing Rhodes as its to celebrate.

Rhodes is a microcosm of the wider selection landscape. In thinking about diversity, we often hone in on the interview as the place where we most need to address selection bias. Indeed, nearly all of the research on unconscious bias in selection focuses on interviews. But Rhodes is no different to other selection processes in that much happens before the interview which leads people to select themselves out.

113 years of history teaches you much. Acknowledge the myths and misconceptions and tackle them publicly. Appoint selection mentors who can help all applicants to be their best. Do not assume that only people from underrepresented backgrounds need help: not all male applicants are confident. And make sure that when someone comes into an interview room, they feel best able to succeed.

This blog’s shout out is for Deirdre de Silva, Kathleen O’Hare, Lee-Anne Phillips, Sylvia Tropiano, Joan Vosen, Rosie Wilkes and Lyndell Wilson, the familiar faces of Rhodes Australia

Australia’s 2018 Rhodes Scholars are:

Ashleigh Barnes (Australia at Large, University of Technology Sydney, International Studies and Law)

Robert Ferritto (Western Australia, Curtin University, Engineering)

Elizabeth Hamilton (Queensland, Griffith University, Medicine)

James Maccarrone (Victoria, Melbourne University, Economics)

Damien Maher (Australia at Large, University of Queensland, English)

James Norton (New South Wales, University of New South Wales, International Studies and Law)

Brigid O’Farrell-White (Australia at Large, Melbourne University, History and International Relations)

Claudia Paul (South Australia, Adelaide University, Medicine)

Henry West (Tasmania, University of Tasmania, Medicine)

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Gully

I get the taste of dust in my mouth every time I think of the word gully. Rain is more memory than experience for many parts of Australia, but even scaling the dustiest of gullies reminds you that it plays a powerful role in shaping both the land and our sense of who we are.

Canberra is a pretty dry place. Its blue skies prevent the winter blues, except, that is, if you are a farmer trying to make a living. But occasionally the rain belts down in a reminder than Sydney is not too far up the road. And when it does rain, water slides off the hard surfaces of an increasingly urban environment, and carries nutrients in to the local streams and our crafted lake. The result is algal bloom and anoxia—water with depleted oxygen—which spells bad news for organisms up and down the food chain.

The creek that runs through our campus is part of this story, but you have to work hard to remember that. Most of the time it’s a desolatory dribble, punctuated by the occasional shopping trolley and a once in a year flood that has me reminding students not to raft on it. It’s a gullied memory of a meaningful place for Indigenous peoples over tens of thousands of years. When someone told me that it hosts a platypus, I was incredulous. I pictured a six-eyed creature in the style of Matt Groenig. Yet it does—a normal one, I hear—and much more besides. Last week a member of the team spotted a ballet of swans.

Large-scale construction projects such as the one in the centre of our campus provides the opportunity to reset the flow and management of water in ways that will benefit the trees, the creek and the lake under the global framework of what is called water sensitive urban design (WSUD), or the related ideas of low impact development in the US (LiD) or a sustainable drainage system in the UK (SDS).

At one level, urban water management is pretty simple. The goal is to filter and to regulate the amount of water runoff, and to reduce reliance on drinking water for uses such as irrigation. How you do that comes down to the species of plants you choose, and methods of stormwater detention, filtering and use.

Take a footpath. Great for walking or wheeling down, obviously, but it’s also an efficient conveyor of stormwater, particularly on a slope. Slope that path from its centre—ever so gently—and you can usher water into accompanying rain gardens.

Plant those rain gardens out with water-tolerant plants and support them with pebbles and free-draining soil mix and water capture outlets and you have the basics for slowing the movement of water down, of filtering out nutrients, and of capturing that water to top up a creek or to retain for irrigation.

Add a weir to raise the level of that creek, and plant out its banks with species including rushes, and you have a much better environment for plants, animals, and humans alike.

Multiple elements are needed to maximise management of water and environmental improvement and maintenance. Not all of them are effective from a standing start, so WSUD also involves ramp-up phrases. You won’t have any water captured after installing rain water capture, and plant species may not be established enough to survive without some irrigation. We acknowledge that we’ll need drinking and irrigation water for some elements at the beginning.

But we’ll get there. That just leaves the rafting and the shopping trolleys to worry about. The former will be managed by the use of a weir that will raise and stabilise the creek water level, and the instillation of a ceremonial fire pit that reminds us all that this is a special place for Indigenous peoples, and to be respected.

The local government has a trolley containment framework—all trolleys require coin deposit, for example—but the related example of oBike dumping suggests that use of GPS data and use ‘good user’ credits is probably also needed to ensure that the only thing that lands up in creeks, gullies and lakes is nutrient-low water. That will make a water-sustained environment more than just a dust-filled memory.

This blog’s shout out is all of the staff and students in the Chifley Library, A D Hope, Haydon-Allen, Hanna Neumann, Copland, Crisp, PAP Moran and Dedman buildings who have patiently ridden out the noise, dust and disruption of the demolition phase. Here’s a time-lapse reminder of what we have been through: http://www.reunioncourt.com.au/news/project-time-lapse/ 

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Give and Give

Google is well known for its idea ‘20% time’, the idea that employees might be free one day a week to do whatever they like to help the company. It’s a nifty idea, and something that you would expect a technology company to do. Indeed, across the technology sector you can find lots of variants, with Atlassian’s ShipIt days being just one example.

We expect technology companies to do this because their employees are extremely highly skilled and hard to recruit and to retain. They need their workplaces to be fun, stimulating and meaningful. Conversely, we don’t associate 20% time with employees in high volume transactional jobs. They belong to narratives about automation and jobs of the future in which they do not feature. Theirs is a narrative of future obsolescence.

It’s time to turn that narrative upside down.

Since mid-2016, our admissions team has had to deal with a tsunami of applications. Brexit and Trump are clearly factors, but the investment of Asian countries and families in higher education to avoid the stagnating wages of ‘middle income trap’ is also a key driver. Our team is no different to many other teams around the sector, and I am sure that they were not the only ones to have their end of year party in March, 2017.

Picture the situation: more and more applications come in, and you get faster at processing them. The pile waiting for you to process still gets bigger, however, and the rate that it gets bigger accelerates. As that happens, people become more and more cross and impatient with you. Kindness evaporates, and a few land a kick or two. It’s unsurprising that a work environment like that might be seen as demoralising, and that rates of burnout and turnover might be high. It’s a lousy situation, if you stop long enough to think about it.

The typical solution is to automate and to improve business process efficiency. That certainly helps. But it might not make the work any more meaningful or motivating for the small group of people who have to be there to help applicants day in, day out. Moreover, I am not sure Siri or Alexa could do this job.

That’s because admissions is a giving profession. An admissions officer is often the first person that a future student speaks to. The conversation that they share can traverse the hopes and fears that come with taking a big leap into a future that will hopefully mean better health and economic outcomes for them as an individual and as part of a community. That’s a big deal, so often passed over. That first conversation brings with it the opportunity to get right a relationship in which both students and staff feel connected to a university community for life.

This year we took a deep breath. Alongside extensive business process improvements—for which we owe much to the help and support of our faculties—we invited all admissions staff—and all administrators across the Academic portfolio—to take time out of the workplace to attend giving culture training run by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE on campus). Around the world, this kind of training is typically reserved for Vice Chancellors, executives and deans. Yet giving, kindness and caring often starts with administrators.

The results are promising, with staff reporting that they can see the important role they have to play for education, and the connection of their work with the efforts of alumni relations and philanthropy. Another administrative area—Student Central—has started highlighting the volunteering efforts of its staff.

But seeing yourself differently is only the first step. In 2018, we’ll pilot ‘100 opportunity’ in admissions, in which staff will have 100 hours work time across the year to volunteer in ANU, in the cause of education. This is not 100 hours on top of their existing work, ‘Google 120%’ time as some people call it, or the expectation that people will work in a 24-hour-stint to get things done in a ShipIt stint. That’s not exactly work-life balance friendly. It will be within the existing work envelope. Work by Timothy Windsor, Kaarin Anstey, and Bryon Rodgers on older Australians, for example, has shown that volunteering for around that amount of time supports higher productivity, happiness and better health outcomes for workers. It also builds on two decades of work by the National Australia Bank in supporting a volunteering culture in its workforce.

My biggest hope for this change is that admissions staff will see how important they are in creating a giving culture that is stewarded by Alumni Relations and Philanthropy, and that they feel good about it. Odds are, too, that they will be more productive, even taking in to account the 100 hours that they will give. I think it could be time to stop talking about taking from transactional workers, and giving them a new sense of who they are, so that they can give in turn.

This blog’s shout out is for Ariel Edge, Sarah Hawkins and the Admissions Team, and Joanne Shoveller, Waterloo University and Beng Hwee Chua, Council for Advancement and Support of Education Asia-Pacific