Martin Betts:
Our guest today on HEDx is Catriona Jackson who as CEO, leads our higher education peak body, Universities Australia. Catriona has been with UA for coming up to six years, after three years leading a voice for the research community as CEO of Science and Technology Australia, and also had spells supporting both the ANU vice chancellor and a federal minister. She’d earlier worked in the press writing as an education editor, and in these various roles, she’s seen all sides of the policy debate in and around our universities, and is at the very heart of it now at what might be it’s most critically important time. Catriona, welcome to HEDx.

Catriona Jackson:
G’day

Martin Betts:
And Catriona, what a start to the year and what an end to the last one. As I think back to when I went to the beach at the end of December in 2021, it ended up with the big story of the acting minister declining to approve six ARC discovery grants, a delayed opening of the new grant rounds that people are normally looking to finalise for the early weeks of January, a new announcement of grant review processes, a shift of influence in those to research end users, and the resignation of the ARC CEO, and happy new year everybody. And in that new year, despite what we’ve now seen as an injection of firms into research commercialisation, I assume that for organisations like yours and all of our universities, our long term research funding might be one of the biggest issues that we’re still facing. So, what do you make of what has happened at the ARC? And what are UA’s priorities in advocating for research funding policy coming into 2022?

Catriona Jackson:
Well, Martin, the rejection of grants at the date before Christmas is clearly the Christmas present you don’t want when you run a peak body for universities. We need to remember very clearly that every single one of those grant applications has been the result of an enormous amount of work by people who have spent their lives trying to better understand whatever it is, from nuclear fission to political interactions in Ukraine, to whatever topic it might be. And certainly we have some very profound concerns about that sort of intervention, when those grants have been very meticulously peer reviewed and recommended all the way up through the process. So that’s a sober, and continuing, and forthright conversation with the acting minister, and with the government, as we grapple with those issues around the ARC. If you look at the Australian Research Council, the biggest non-medical granting body we have in this country, there are a couple of things that are fundamental. It needs to have really robust governance, really robust peer review, internationally high standard peer review, merit based decision making processes.

Catriona Jackson:
And the third thing is transparency in all that it does. We all know that transparency is absolutely the best medicine, seeing what is going on is fundamental. But also we know that the way research works around the world, is that we have an entirely unbiased, excellence based system for working out who gets the money for their projects. I like to use a sporting analogy. You wouldn’t want the Australian netball coach choosing the football team. You wouldn’t want a person who’s an expert in nuclear fission, telling you who’s better to be on your AFLW team. The experts in the space make very careful judgements about who it is, who deserve scarce taxpayer’s money for those grants. And it’s a very serious matter for a minister or an acting minister, to veto those recommendations. So, that’s an ongoing conversation, and something about, which the sector has rightly very serious concerns.

Catriona Jackson:
But look, you mentioned Christmas and summer, and going into that whole that holiday period. I know the ARC issue is really serious and research you’re right is a great big priority for us, for advocacy for this year and beyond, and has been over the terrible period of COVID.

Catriona Jackson:
But let’s not forget that there was a fantastic valve relief just before Christmas. The borders opened, and hadn’t we been waiting for that? So I’m sure we’ll get to this, but a real feeling, I think, of optimism as we watch people going into orientation weeks for the first time in what seems like more than two years, frankly. But in a considerable period of time, domestic students and international students being able to see each other face to face for the first time in sometimes 18 months, and just life coming back onto campuses. I mean, no university campus ever closed during the period, but there was so much working from home, but gee, they were quiet. Anyone who walked through a university campus through most of that period knows that it is unnatural to see them quiet and empty. They are not quiet and empty places, they should be exploding with life and ideas, and hard work, and all the stuff that means we do a really great job of educating older people, younger people, middle aged people from here and around 144 countries.

Martin Betts:
It’s a lovely and passionate explanation of the purpose of our campuses. I wonder if I can just go back to the issue of the non-approval of grants, and invite you to compare how that was handled with an interference, if you like, in an academic peer review process. Well, the other issues that I know have been important for UA and for the sector through 2021, and I presume remain on the agenda, and that’s the pressure being placed on our universities about both freedom of speech and academic freedom. Did do you see some irony, and has the part of your representations to the minister been focusing on the distinction and the connection between those two issues?

Catriona Jackson:
Look, Martin, there’s undeniably a connection between those two issues. You know better than me, that free speech and academic freedom are in the DNA of the nation’s universities. I mean, we all know that university campuses are the places where the big debates happen, always have been, always will be. It’s where you have no fear that you will find people really grounded on expertise, being absolutely frank and fearless about how we discuss the really complex issues. And there are a lot of complex issues right now to be discussing. If we just look at these seismic shifts in geopolitics, they’re really massive differences. I mean, the rise of China, the rise of the area in which we live, the Asia Pacific region, the fact that two thirds of the world’s middle class by 2030 will live here. I mean, that’s just an enormous shift. That raises all sorts of issues, difficulties, opportunities.

Catriona Jackson:
They’re the things that we are so proud and so resolute, will be debated backwards, forwards, always grounded on expertise in our campuses. So, all through that process of discussion of free speech, with the French code written by Robert French, that’s now been adopted, or version of it adapted into every university’s governance processes and policies. So, that process as far as we’re concerned, is at an end. But, this discussion never ends. There is always a tension, there is always debate. And we know there has been interference inside our universities. We know there is pressure from governments of many colours and many sorts on students inside our campuses. And it’s our job to make sure that those students and researchers are absolutely supported in their right. Their right to express their very carefully honed views, their views grown out of, in some cases, decades of study.

Catriona Jackson:
So it’s our job to make sure that they can express those views and they can express them absolutely freely. And you’re right, that does bite up against the ARC decision. But we just keep on making the point, that a robust democracy like Australia, is founded on the free and frank exchange of really well-founded views. And in a broad sense, right now, we need to make sure that we are absolutely solidly behind that, because the future of democracy, frankly, is on the line. We see what happened in some parts of the states during the Trump period. We’ve all been really distressed by the strange relationship with the truth, that some of the demonstrators we’ve seen around the country, who have every right to demonstrate, but weird conspiracy theories swirling around what we would regard as fact about vaccination.

Catriona Jackson:
It’s our job to make sure that every day, day in day out, we don’t just defend the right to clear free speech. But we as universities see our job as improving the standard of public debate, engaging with the communities that we serve, and making sure that we are assisting the community in navigating what is an incredibly complex period, not just in Australia, but around the world with clear, factually, strong and robust information so they can feed that into their thinking process and and we can maintain our place as
a trusted source of information.

Martin Betts:
Here we are opening up in a quite fragile world at the moment, and the issues of foreign interference, and its clash with what we’re all seeking as international research partnerships and collaborative research, is a really critical issue. I know, you know, all of our listeners will know for many universities, that navigating complexity, it sounds a bit like walking a tight rope. How well do you feel that as a sector, we’re all walking that tight rope, between managing the control of foreign interference, that is a big part of the policy debate, and continuing to grow international research partnerships? Is that a tight rope walk that we are making well? And what steps is UA taking to keep us all balanced on that wall?

Catriona Jackson:
That’s a very good way to describe it, Martin. It really is a tight rope walk. It’s incredibly important that we manage that very fine balance, between protecting our staff and students from undue interference, and maintaining the very thing that makes our research so good. Let’s remember that Australia is a very strong research country. We have 0.3 per cent of the world’s population. We produce, it’s more than 4 per cent these days, of research output. So we do very well. It’s really important we maintain that. At the same time, we’ve got to, as you say, maintain that balance between… I mean, let’s face it. How does research get done these days? It gets done in great big international collaborative groups, that’s how the great big research breakthroughs get made. If we don’t collaborate as a relatively small population country, we are out of the game, completely out of the game, and that’s not where we want to be.

Catriona Jackson:
We’re a smart country, lots of fantastically smart people doing really good work, going to make the most of that. So, what have we done in this space? A couple of years ago, we went to have a meeting with a gentleman from ASIO. And I’ll be completely honest with you, we were speaking fairly different languages. I think I understood about half of what they said, they might have understood a bit more than half of what I said. Since that period, we’ve set up a thing called the University Foreign Interference Taskforce. The security agencies are involved, the department of education, a number of other departments, including home affairs. Also, universities are involved, including vice chancellors, and us, the peak body, and the Group of Eight. So we sit down and have at a very high level, very frank conversations about what the dangers are, for Australia’s universities, for our ability to continue doing that research, and what can we do to make sure we’re putting the best protections in place.

Catriona Jackson:
So we’ve now developed two sets of guidelines for universities. The second one, the updated one has just gone out into the sector. And we talk with our colleagues overseas .. this is the first time we’ve seen such close partnership between the sector and government, to make sure that we are putting the best defenses in place, the best defenses to make sure we can be as free as we can be. So, just walking that balance. So that’s a partnership that our colleagues and other countries, other peak bodies, other sectors in comparable countries like the UK, the US, Canada, are looking at really closely as a best practice model for how you do this sort of stuff. You can’t deal with this by yourself. You really do need to be working with government, closely with government, in a very frank, very genuine partnership way, to be
able to deal with interference from foreign powers.

Martin Betts:
Okay. Just changing the subject a little bit, but a subject that is close to my heart, and close to what we’re doing in HEDx, and I imagine is close to your heart and what you’re doing in UA. We had our first HEDx live event in Queensland just last week, and had all Queensland’s nine vice chancellors sign up to sending their current and emerging leaders to a book launch. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Marcia Devlin’s Beating the Odds book, a fabulous-

Catriona Jackson:
Absolutely.

Martin Betts:
A fabulous provocative contribution. We had a panel discussion around that about gender equity, occlusion, inclusion, and more broadly about culture change in our sector. Zooming in on that set of issues, where do they fit within your personal priorities? And those of UA as a peak body?

Catriona Jackson:
Look, Marcia Devlin is a fantastic woman and has been a great leader inside universities for a considerable number of years. And it’s a great book, it’s not an easy read. We need to hold our head up and work harder and do better at this. I find the contention that you are not as smart or not as good as something because you’re a woman a ridiculous contention, which means we need to adjust the way we recognise people’s worth inside institutions, but also make sure the structures don’t in-build a bias against women who, let’s face, still have the majority of the caring responsibility for kids, and in some cases, parents as well. At UA we’ve been very early supporters of some substantial moves in this area. So the SAGE project, sex and gender equity inside universities. UA has been closely involved in that from the
start.

Catriona Jackson:
I won’t actually forget the presentation we heard from the lovely young man who ran the similar project in the UK, Athena Swan. He explained to us that, making sure you’re doing absolutely the best, and making universities compete to do better at gender equity inside the universities, wasn’t just good for women inside universities, women and girls, it was good for men too. And that’s what they’d learned. They’d had a number of years of this process already and they had found that, men were coming back to them and saying … this is making, in my department or my area of the university, we are having more frank conversations around, how we do all the normal off you’ve got to do in your life, and make progress, and we are having better cleaner, more honest discussions between individuals about how you do the work, balance it with everything else, how you recognise merit. Things like how you accommodate the fact that a woman will often have a few years where she’s got to raise kids.

Catriona Jackson:
And that doesn’t take a big chunk out of her academic record, and make it less likely that she’ll be promoted. I mean, there are a myriad of issues. But look, our work at UA, both supports that work, which continues inside the universities, and SAGE is pumping ahead through the connection they have with the academy of science and that mechanism. There’s also additional work in an area which is much less pleasant to discuss, but very important to discuss. We have a very solid program of work in combatting sexual harassment and sexual assault in universities, with the unashamed aim of getting the rates down. Why do universities do this rather than the whole rest of the community? We’re part of the community we live in, but we also have a very large number of 18 to 24 year olds.

Catriona Jackson:
Desperately unfortunately, 18- to 24-year-olds are more likely to be raped and harassed than people in other groups. So the sector took a principal then strong position back in 2016/17, that we would start a series of campaigns, but also survey what was going to turn the spotlight on ourselves, what was going on inside our campuses. So, as universities, we could establish the evidence base. We like an evidence base in universities, and then base our actions on those to try and reduce the possibility of being raped or harassed on campus. But also, assist people to report, assist people to come forward, and make sure that all the supports are there for them, so that we can reduce the likelihood of the harms that result.

Martin Betts:
So when you were commenting at the start of our interview today, Catriona, about the return of people and the vibrancy on our campuses that we’ve all missed so much, and we’ve had a discussion there both about the issues of gender equity and the much sharper issues around sexual harassment and assault. As we have lots of female staff then maybe returning to campuses to work for the first time in such volume and for such amount of time then that’s been there for a while. And as we have of students, thank goodness, returning to campuses, and three fifths of those female, if my reading of the data is anything like right, what would your message be to female staff and students returning to our campuses this semester, about how safe and comfortable they ought to feel in doing so?

Catriona Jackson:
Look, the very clear message is, your institution is doing everything they can to make sure you are as safe and secure as you can possibly be while you pursue your studies. If you see something, if you know someone’s been affected, please do encourage them to come forward to your university. Universities are working day and night to make sure they do everything they possibly can to make sure that this terrible scourge doesn’t unduly affect students and staff. I know university executive teams and university staff are thinking very hard about the coming back this time. This is different to coming back any other orientation period, because for almost two years, people have, I mean, not everyone, in some places, universities have been fairly full, but in many places they’ve been sitting in their study, their garage, sort of locked away.

Catriona Jackson:
So, what will we see? I know schools are thinking about this very carefully too. In some cases we will see students absolutely let loose, as they’re back on campus for the first time, there’s a joyous end to that. And then of course we know there’s a very complicated end of it, the letting loose. At the other end of the spectrum, there will also be students who have gotten very used to being in their own space, and are finding being back out in the big world, quite challenging. So there are a whole set of issues for universities to deal with in terms of safety, but also wellness and mental health that are simply more complex than they’ve been in previous years. Universities know that, and are absolutely up for that challenge, but don’t want to pretend that it will be a simple one. We’ll be calling our communities to work with us, to make sure that we help students get back into study in the best way they possibly can.

Martin Betts:
Great. And let’s all hope that those transitions back into whatever the new normal way of working can go as smoothly as they can for our female staff and students, but for everyone in our communities. What other ways would you typify the strategy that you and UA as a whole, will be taking into advocacy as a federal election campaign looms on the horizon in the middle of this year?

Catriona Jackson:
Look, the festival democracy, don’t we love them. I must say, as a very long time ago, but former journalist, I find elections intensely exciting. I know that not everyone has that same view. But look, it’s an opportunity for us to put before the public and before parliamentarians of all stripes, the things that are really important to us as a sector, as we lead up to a federal poll. Federal elections are not always times for deep policy debate, so it’s probably not the time to be sorting out things that are really hugely complex. There’s a very large number of issues to be dealt with across a very large number of topics.

Catriona Jackson:
But we will as always, Martin, be arguing the case that universities are a fundamental strut of a modern democracy, and that support for universities. And when I say support for universities, I mean for these students who are getting their education inside those universities, the research that is the foundation of so much of our economy. And remember, every dollar that goes in for research comes out as $5. It isn’t just about money, but it does help to boost Australia’s economic performance. Those are the things that I’m talking about it. We just need to make sure that as we go into the election period, our priorities are really clear, that we base everything we say and do on evidence, and that we allow the festival democracy to take place, with our voice appropriately heard.

Martin Betts:
I wonder if in closing, I sense you’re going to have a very strong thing to say about this from what you’ve said already, but what would be your message of optimism and hope for the leaders, the staff, and the student in our sector, in 2022?

Catriona Jackson:
Australian universities have a very strong history. We’re resilient, we’re innovative and I think the last two years have shown that really clearly. If there was any doubt in anyone’s mind, how fundamental universities are to the way we deal with good times, and the way we deal with bad times. I mean, all through COVID, all you had to do was turn on any form of media, and you heard university researchers, university students and staff helping us navigate what was an incredible level of constant corrosive uncertainty. I think scientists and researchers are always among the most trusted people. In society, every poll tells us that the role that we have is fundamental to our national fabric. You are seeing us come back, not that we were ever shut, but you’re seeing university campuses come back to life.

Catriona Jackson:
That is a joy to behold. That’s a real sign of recovery, not just for universities, but for all of us. We serve the communities in which we live day in, day out. And seeing that reviving, those fabulous young, mature, and middle aged minds back on campus, sparking away, driving what is a really great country with fantastic prospects, with some difficult times ahead. My message of optimism is, this year is a thing to be grasped with both hands, and our universities are there to do just that.

Martin Betts:
Well, you’ve certainly grasped the opportunity in this interview with both hands Catriona, and it’s been a real delight talking to you, and hear you see it being so articulate positive and forthright, and a whole range of policy issues facing our sector. So, for your generosity of time and spirit, and your optimism about the future of a great sector here in Australia, thank you very much for being our guest on HEDx today.

Catriona Jackson:
Absolute pleasure, Martin.

If you need support, help is available.

• 1800RESPECT – National Sexual Assault, Domestic and Family Violence counselling: 1800 737 732 or 1800respect.org.au
• MensLine Australia: 1300 78 99 78 or mensline.org.au
• QLife – referral service for LGBTQ people: 1800 184 527 or qlife.org.au
• Nationwide university support and safety services: visit our Student Safety – Contacts page
• Beyond Blue: 1300 22 4636 or beyondblue.org.au
• Lifeline: 13 11 14 or lifeline.org.au