Predicting Deakin’s future
“We are going to have to change how the university looks and the shape of it.”
DEAKIN University must become more nimble and rely less on public money in coming years, its retiring vice chancellor Jane den Hollander has forecast.
Factors tipped to impact on Deakin’s future include a rise in anti-intellectualism and anti-entrepreneurialism and a resulting fall in public funding.
She said Deakin needed to become more financially selfsufficient with more private funding.
“There’s going to be a shift,” Prof den Hollander said.
“We are going to have to change how the university looks and the shape of it,” she said.
“It’s going to have to be much nimbler and faster.”
Prof den Hollander, who has announced her plan to retire before July next year, said the reshaping of Deakin would take place over about seven years, which was a task for her replacement to see through.
In a wideranging address at an Entrepreneurs Geelong forum on Friday, the university chief said it would be for others to expand on her legacy when she leaves the job she started in 2010.
“If I had to say what I have brought to Geelong, or to Deakin, it was the confidence to make the university headquartered in Geelong,” she said.
She said that people had forgotten that Deakin was established as a Geelongbased institution.
“What we have done is establish the university, with Geelong as the headquarters, as a damn fine university, probably the best regional headquartered university in the country,” she said.
Deakin is ranked 213 on the Academic Ranking of World Universities and Prof den Hollander predicted it was possible it could crack the 200 barrier by 2020.