University of Melbourne v-c Duncan Maskell to step down

Australian higher education is “in a much better state than many people give it credit for”, but “we’ve got to be careful…that we don’t suck a lot of people into the system and they don’t succeed”, said departing University of Melbourne vice-chancellor Duncan Maskell.

“If we’re going to increase the number of students quite dramatically, we need to increase the number of staff as well,” Professor Maskell added. “I’m not sure that we’re training enough people…to become the university professors of the future who are going to teach these kids.”

Professor Maskell, who has announced his intention to leave Australia’s top university early next year, said there were no easy answers to the staffing issue. But it needed a rapid fix to prevent a deterioration in staff-student ratios. “It’s a fairly important little missing piece in the jigsaw. Bringing in a lot more students [with] the same number of staff...would be really not good at all.”

He said his decision to leave Melbourne, having taken the reins there in late 2018, had been motivated primarily by a sense that six or seven years was “about the right time” to run a university.

“In Cambridge, where I came from, the vice-chancellor has a fixed term of seven years non-renewable, and I’ve seen that work pretty well. It’s enough time to get stuff done [and not] stick around for too long.”

The decision was also spurred by a January visit to the UK. Professor Maskell said the coronavirus pandemic had taken its toll on an expatriate couple who had been unable to visit their adult children for two years or attend his wife’s mother’s funeral.

“It wasn’t the deal I’d sold my wife when we got here, a year-and-a-half before Covid started,” he said. “It was incredibly tough, but I’d signed a contract and I was committed to the university, so we stuck it out.”

Roughly half of Australia’s vice-chancellors moved on in the first two years of the crisis. In a website announcement heralding Professor Maskell’s achievements in the top job, Melbourne chancellor Jane Hansen said he had led the university “with distinction” through an extraordinarily challenging period. “The pandemic was the greatest test of any vice-chancellor’s leadership,” she said.

The announcement coincides with yet another challenge, as pro-Palestinian protesters occupy a lawn at the university’s Parkville campus in a Columbia University-inspired encampment.

Professor Maskell has drawn criticism for paying “lip service” to the demonstrators’ freedom of expression while issuing veiled threats of police action. Meanwhile, shadow education spokesperson Sarah Henderson harangued him for failing to “expel students and call in the police” to stem the “ugly tide” of antisemitic hatred on campus.

Professor Maskell said it was a “very complicated” issue, with little clarity on exactly what had happened at the five-day-old encampment or the university’s jurisdiction over its inhabitants. “Not every person there will be one of our staff or students,” he noted.

Administrators have an obligation to act when free expression “tips over” to racism or worse, he said, but “different people draw that line in different places”.

“A lot of people are very, very worked up at the moment on all sides of this question. We do stand up for free speech, and that does mean that you’ve got to hear things you don’t like sometimes.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com