COVER STORY
Unlike your typical brilliant scholar whose education came relatively headache-free, University of Tasmania vice-chancellor Rufus Black’s journey has been anything but easy – and his struggles have shaped his ideas in a fascinating and inspiring way
The University of Tasmania’s new vice-chancellor talks about his struggle in high school and what helped him deal with his dyslexia
H e doesn’t um and aargh much. I sound positively staccato and possibly scatty compared with Professor Rufus Black when I transcribe my conversation with the University of Tasmania’s mellifluous new vice-chancellor.
The 49-year-old speaks consistently in full sentences in a way that few of us do and he responds thoughtfully and precisely to questions without excessive elaboration. After he has answered a question he tends to simply stop, much like a student putting down an unchewed pen at the end of an exam, quietly confident he’s nailed it.
If only! Rufus Edward Ries Black’s school years were nothing like that. The quick and agile thinker blitzed it on the debating team, going on to compete at world-champion level. But written work? Forget it. Dyslexia made Black’s school years a nightmare.
“I was told in Year 9 I was unlikely to complete Year 12 because my spelling was so bad that my text was unreadable,” he tells TasWeekend in a tightly scheduled 50-minute interview in the Hobart campus’s administrative building. “I was simultaneously in the enrichment class for English, because I was a clever kid, and the remedial English class. The thing that probably saved me in lots of ways was debating, where I could communicate in ways where I could show what I could do intellectually.”
Completing Year 12 was “unbelievably challenging”, even at well-resourced Wesley College, a highly regarded independent school in Melbourne that has produced two prime ministers (Sir Robert Menzies and Harold Holt), 33 Olympians and 12 Rhodes scholars, one of whom is Black.
“I had to put a ridiculously extra amount of time just into memorising the words I’d need to write those exams,” he says. “Where other kids were learning the content, I just had to learn the words, knowing that within a month of finishing I would have forgotten them all.”
He made it into law at the University of Melbourne, but remained beset by anxiety emanating from the same “super-painful contrasts” he’d endured at school. “It was awful,” he says. “And it was absurd: in my first year of law, I got a pass in criminal law [but] with my mooting partner I beat all the other first years in legal debating.”
It wasn’t until Black arrived at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, aged 22, that he found his stride. “It was the first time in my academic life where I felt recognised for the kind of learner I really was,” he says. “I explained I was dyslexic and they said ‘that’s absolutely fine, we have lots of dyslexic kids here, they tend to be really bright and we’ve worked out accommodations for that years ago’. It was a total liberation.”
He went on to complete his PhD in theological ethics in nearrecord time and it was published soon afterwards as a book. “It worked out really well,” he says with a smile. “The only negative comment on my PhD thesis was ‘slightly more spelling errors than usual’.”
Is it any wonder, then, that Rufus Black is a strong believer in multiple pathways into university?
“ATARs are an extremely crude measure of somebody’s intelligence,” he says of the tertiary admission rank secondary students receive on graduating from Year 12. This score between 0 and 99.95 denotes the percentage of students an individual ‘beats’ in their year, but Black says it has relatively low predictive value of a student’s final university score. “They are not a good measure of somebody’s success or their capacity to learn,” he says. “Many people pick up their learning skills a little further down the track.”
Black says getting more students to complete Year 12 is the fundamental challenge upon which the future of Tasmania’s prosperity largely rests. Helping to slash the chronic dropout rate and get more students on to university is part of Black’s mission. Looming demographic challenges mean we need to sustain the current population base, he says, and we can do that only by getting more local people better educated.
“Having an unambiguous expectation and requirement to complete Year 12 by whatever pathways seems very important,” he says.
He believes the State Government is on the right track and understands the pressing need for change. Black sees no point in perpetuating the tired colleges debate that dominated the conversation over much of the past decade. He thinks we need to avoid the either/or argument over colleges or a continuing Year 12 rollout at public high schools, with most in Tasmania still operating only until Year 10.
“Colleges do a really good job at educating kids. We know that. They create a lot of independent learners who come through and are very successful at universities; but equally it’s important making sure there are accessible pathways through to Year 12 wherever kids are, and for some of them it will be best in their local schools.”
Since taking up his position in March, Black has rapidly gained a reputation in Tasmania for big-picture, strategic thinking. At the time of his appointment, former Tasmanian premier and University chancellor Michael Field AC described him as “an extraordinary individual” who stood out in a strong international field of candidates for demonstrating “a rare mix of high intellect, academic standing and commercial experience that we feel will be necessary to lead a period of cultural transformation here”.
The fact Black knew and loved Tasmania as a frequent visitor with his wife and two teenage children didn’t hurt either, Field said.
The family visited Bruny Island when their children were young “and completely fell in love with it”, says Black. “At the end of our week-long holiday, we did the most impulsive and best thing we ever did in our lives.”
They bought a block of land and built a shack on it, and they’ve retreated to it just about every school holiday and long weekend for the past seven years. His children, he says, loved Tasmania so much and considered it so much their true home that they were planning to come down to UTAS after high school and make lives for themselves in Tasmania. “So they were thrilled when we could do it a bit sooner,” he says.
Central to the vision that won Black his new job is his understanding of the university’s role in creating a more prosperous future for the state.
For him, the University of Tasmania is the antithesis of an ivory tower. It is a central part of the community and an economic driver with the ability to catalyse dynamic growth. And he has a clear sense of its role over the next decade in shifting Tasmania’s course to ward off some of the strain as we head into a period of enormous demographic challenge. On that front, he is keen to foster a sense of greater urgency to achieve deeper reforms “before it’s too late”.
But can we think our way out of the dire predicament he describes? Yes, he suggests. Becoming a clever state is the way forward.
“I think we should become a knowledge state where applying good thinking – practical, problem-solving type thinking to what’s in front of us – is really important to what we do,” he says.
“We have a window of a decade ahead of us where the demographics run in the favour of the state, where we continue to have natural population growth, can expect continued interstate migration as the economy stays strong and [rely on] foreign students coming as a continued source of international migration.
“A decade out, Tasmania starts to go into negative natural population growth – with older people dying and fewer children being born – and that starts to put significant downward pressure on the size of the population. We start to get a rapidly ageing population.
“For any society, demographics is destiny in lots of ways. We have a decade to put ourselves on a different trajectory that would see both the ability to continue to attract people to the island, given that the natural population will be shrinking, but also to make sure that those who are here have a level of prosperity that will support that changing demographic. We can sustain the base but only by doing significant work on the school leaver question.”
Education is the crucial factor because it dramatically affects an individual’s and a society’s prospects.
“Creating a higher skill base creates a more productive population,” he says. “So the better job we do [at UTAS] at creating a more skilled and educated population, that will significantly increase productivity on the island.”