Professor Carolyn Evans (Victoria & Exeter 1995) is Vice Chancellor of Griffith University in Queensland Australia and Chair of Universities Australia. As part of our series on Rhodes Scholars in Education, she spoke to us about her work, the curreent challenges in higher education in Australia, and how the sector is more inclusive than ever before.
Tell us about your work at Griffith University.
It’s a wonderful job, a wonderful university. We have about 45,000 students across five campuses between Brisbane, Logan and the Gold Coast. There’s a big focus on health and environmental studies, but also on the creative arts. I really love that it's a comprehensive university where you can study anything from musical theatre to medicine, quantum physics to chartered accountancy. We've had a strong interdisciplinary history and we are certainly always looking for ways of bringing different disciplines or people from inside and outside the university together to solve problems in the real world.
I started at the start of 2019 at Griffith - 2019 was a good year, I enjoyed 2019 a lot! And then obviously the five years after that have been more challenging. We've had COVID; Australia didn't have some of the same health problems as some countries, but we had very closed borders - we shut the Australian borders very tight and we had very little travel between states. That caused a range of challenges, particularly as we sit on the border of Queensland and New South Wales - we discovered we had about 800 students and staff who lived in another state, which normally is no big deal for us, but became quite a big deal.
We’ve had bush fires, we've had floods, we've now had a cyclone, and all of the complexities that have gone with the changes to visa arrangements, which is making it very hard financially to run a university.
You’ve recently been appointed as Chair of Universities Australia.
Universities Australia is the representative body for roughly 40 large Australian universities - mainly the public universities, one or two private universities. Its role is to advocate with government to engage on issues of policy, but also with the broader public to try and put the case for the importance of universities - why universities are worth supporting, a case that I can make unambiguously because I think it's absolutely true.
The chair of Universities Australia has the role of trying to coordinate all the different universities with their diverse needs and interests, and putting those positions to government and to the public and to others that we might partner with.
To what extent are the challenges faced by US and UK universities the same as those in Australia?
Australian universities are under quite serious financial pressure. Like UK universities, there have been job losses, hundreds - probably now building towards thousands - of job losses across the sector related to two things.
One is the government cracking down on visas and reducing the number of international student visas quite precipitously with no real warning or chance to plan. Combined with quite a strong economy in Australia, which means unemployment is low, that means domestic students are less likely to come to university, particularly those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. That's put real financial pressure on universities.
We have some of the same issues around freedom of speech, encampments, questions about whether universities are too woke or too progressive. They are not at the same level of intensity as they are in the United States, but I don't think universities in Australia had the same degree of buy-in to some of the philosophies that United States universities did either. So we've got a diluted version of some of the problems of others.
I don't think we should conclude it's a global problem, I think it is more a problem of the Anglosphere, or western universities. If you talk to colleagues in other parts of the world they have quite different problems. There tends, for example, in many, not all, developing countries, to be a much stronger commitment to the importance of universities in helping to grow the economy of the country and helping the country to have the skills and the research capacity that they require for economic development. You have quite a different discussion going on in, say, India or Ghana, but you see some, some similarities even in countries like Singapore or South Korea, which are much more strongly pro-universities than perhaps the Anglosphere is. They are starting to raise questions about how many international students do you need, how many universities do you need, what percentage of the population need to be educated?
But from some parts of the world, that looks like a fairly fortunate set of problems to have. If you're trying to get the majority of your population to be literate or to get through primary school, these are the luxury debates that you have when you're quite a wealthy society.
How did your time at Oxford help shape your career?
I grabbed a lot of opportunities when I was at Oxford – one was being the representative of the doctoral students on the law board - the board that governs the faculty. It was a fascinating set of insights, as a student, into the sorts of debates and discussions and decisions that I would later on be part of, although not until I actually got to be quite senior at the law school at Melbourne and then later on in my career. Some of those things that might seem a little dull to some students, I found fantastic.
There was the formal writing of a doctoral thesis, which I think is really good, rigorous training intellectually in terms of research and self-discipline. The book that emerged from my PhD thesis on religious freedom in Europe was considered a bit of an obscure topic at the time that it came out at the start of 2001. But sadly by the end of 2001, global events meant that everybody suddenly was very interested in religion again. So part of my advice is, don't listen too much to people who tell you, “we know what the important topics are now and what they'll be in five years.” Think about what you're passionate about, what you think is intellectually stimulating, and work in those areas.
And the other thing that I did, and advice that I often give to people, is to try and be a bit engaged in the community. I volunteered at the witness support program in the Oxford Crown Courts, working with people who'd been the victims of crime, just trying to support them through the very difficult experience of being in the courts.
But I saw a whole different England to the England that you saw just being in the colleges and faculties. Wonderful though the experience of being in the colleges and the faculties was, such a short distance from where all of that was happening, there was a whole different set of people. I felt like the United Kingdom was giving me, through the Scholarship, a very serious capacity to set myself up in life. And I felt I should give back to the community.
Amidst all these challenges, what gives you hope for the future of education?
We should take the long view of history - people tend to have this rosy “back in the good old days” view. But in the “good old days”, almost no women went to university, almost no Indigenous people in Australia went to university. Very few kids from working class backgrounds did. You can point to particular wonderful examples, but they had to be exceptional to do that.
When I look at Griffith, 40% of our students are the first in their family. We have about a thousand Indigenous students enrolled, and they're enrolled in medicine and the arts and science. Many more people are getting the benefit of a university education.
They made universities free for a brief, shining period in Australia; my mother was one of those bright women from a working class background who hadn't had a chance to go to university. She went to the only university that allowed you to study part-time and did her BA. But once she got to honours, even that university wouldn't let you study part-time. You had to come in, you had to be in-person, you had to be there five days a week. And sometimes people get quite sentimental about that being the good old days.
But I look at all the people that excluded, brilliant people like my mother who would've loved to have continued with education. We are doing a much better job now at bringing more people in, at creating more flexibility. I think we are better engaged with the outside world as a sector than we've ever been. I thought I had a fantastic undergraduate education in law at Melbourne - we would have some people from the legal profession come in - but these days students are working in legal clinics, and they're working on big legal projects, and they're having an opportunity to engage with engineering and IT students about how the law is going to be changed by artificial intelligence. I think there are really exciting things that are going on. I would love our students to have a bit more money, and a bit more time to be able to enjoy all of them, but there was a lot that was wrong with the good old days. There are some things that are wrong with these days, but we shouldn't be looking backwards. We should be looking forwards.