Universities must ensure that their engagement with indigenous students is more than “accidental”, the Times Higher Education World Academic Summit has heard.
Barry Judd, deputy vice-chancellor (indigenous) at the University of Melbourne, said his slow road into academia had begun with “some very important teachers and role models” who – unlike him – were mostly non-indigenous.
“They were the…people who said ‘you belong, you can do this’. They encouraged me to go to university, get a degree and start this journey, which [has been] accidental in many ways.
“I’ve been in higher education for 30 years now but it still kind of freaks me out to turn up to events like this, to be honest. I still don’t quite feel as though I belong. I think it’s a very common experience for indigenous people in this country still today.”
Professor Judd, who grew up in regional Victoria, was the first member of his family to complete high school. His first glimpse of university came when his year 12 history teacher took him to Melbourne’s campus for a public lecture on the French Enlightenment.
It took many years, various jobs and an unsuccessful tilt at joining the army before he found his way into academia via an arts degree at the then Ballarat College of Advanced Education and a PhD at Monash University.
He told the summit that Australia’s major sector review, the Universities Accord, needed to champion more purposeful pathways for under-represented groups. “[For] people like us who are first-in-family, whether they’re indigenous or from regional or remote Australia, there needs to be planning to ensure that [they] actually get to higher education and succeed,” he said.
Matilda Langford, an indigenous student at the University of Sydney, which is hosting the summit, stressed the need for “structural change” to boost retention as well as admission.
She said administrators needed to understand that the priorities of indigenous students might not match those of universities. For example, a cry for help from a fellow indigenous student might trump the university’s demands that assignments be submitted by deadline.
“At the end of the day, what’s a 20 per cent assignment versus fulfilling my cultural obligations? My community, and what I can do to better my community, is always going to be my priority,” she said.
“But…I can’t go up to my lecturers and my professors and say ‘hey, I’m going to have to miss the next few weeks [because] there’s a big deal going on’. It’s really important for indigenous students to be understood – that we have such rich and full cultural lives outside university.”
Professor Judd said that if universities made a “commitment to engage with indigenous knowledge, and really listen to 65,000 years of experience here on this continent”, it would “pull indigenous people into the sector in ways that have never happened before”.
This would require changes to curricula and a concerted effort to recruit indigenous academics. “It would be good for indigenous people, but more broadly good for the planet, because we face a crisis as human beings,” he said.
“My view would be that if we don’t listen to indigenous wisdom and knowledge now, we might be finished in a very short period of time.”
