Between the Dance Floor and the Balcony | Iain Martin

Iain Martin, guest · [01:42]So I started my education career really at the University of Leeds when I studied medicine in the mid, early to mid 1980s. And I went from there into a mixture of university and clinical roles and had been in Leeds about 18 years and I was at risk at that point of spending all of my university career in one city. And I thought, well, probably a good time to think about having a bit of time abroad and an opportunity came up in New Zealand. And at that point, our kids were relatively young. Five years would have meant we could have gone, had a good time, come back, they still could go to high school. Sort of didn't work out like that. Thirteen years later, I was still very much in New Zealand. I was doing a very different job. I was then deputy vice chancellor at the University of Auckland, working on a whole range of things that I would have never imagined even a few years before that. And the question is why? Probably two reasons. One is insatiable curiosity in that I love getting involved with things that are new and got plenty of opportunity in the university engagement, but also really importantly, a conversation with the then university president who said, think about what you're up to. I think you could do something different and enjoy it. And I took that opportunity and went with it. So it wasn't planned, wasn't anything else. And then you start making friends and Fred Hilmo, who was the then president at University of New South Wales, I got to know through other university links and said, come over and be DVC academic. I said no initially because I was sort of committed to Auckland and then they came back a couple of times and I went. And the more I moved into the university world, the more I loved it, and at that point I made a decision, and it was university the whole way, so I gave up my medical license, and then sometime in New South Wales, three years back in the UK, and now seven years at, back in Australia leading Deakin University. Why? I just get a huge amount of enjoyment from the university world, Daniel. I mean, that's the main thing is you just get to meet the most extraordinary group of people, you're privileged in the engagements you have, you're slotted into a life that you could never have imagined living in terms of conversations with senior leaders from a wide range of areas, and For someone like me, I can play in new areas, play with leadership, and I don't mean that in a negative way, but look, explore, develop in ways that I would have never have got through a clinical medicine career, however rewarding that would have been.

Iain Martin, guest · [08:59]I think number one in there is being really clear about mission, Daniel. So over the last, and I'll say 25 years, because sort of outside of the US, the sort of the global rankings, the sort of the global pressure to compete between universities really started about 25 years ago. and a lot of that started to see universities concentrating on grow research, get better reputations, get more students, give you more money to grow your research. And that was good, but it In too many ways, I think, distracted from the link with local community. It subjugated the importance of the education mission in the minds of the public. Now, whether that was perception or reality, I don't think it really matters. It subjugated that, and there was too much narrative, and I saw it in the UK, you certainly see it in the US, that we had lost that sense of most people from the wider community say, why are universities there? They are there for their education mission for a second, third, and we've lost that. So I think there is that sense of back to basics. I think there is a sense of Openness about what we are doing, and understanding what we need to do to get that openness. Now, this is a silly example, but I've given it before. I don't know what it's like in Canada, but in Australia, there is a lot of public scrutiny of, university presidents' remuneration, and a lot of sense of, how do they set it? It's out of whack with the community expectations. some of it, you're never going to be happy with people having large paychecks, and I will be the first to say, I am well paid, I'm happy to be well paid. But from the day I started, we put up the entire details of my remuneration package on the university website. There was no secrets about it. It was open and transparent. And the questions are always dried up overnight. Now, I use that as a silly example, but it's not really. Open it up to the world, much of what is seen as Non-transparent, difficult, elitist is not really, it's just that we don't talk about why we do it. The second thing that has changed is when I went to university in 1982, in most Commonwealth countries, maybe only about 10% of 18-year-olds would have had a university education. We are now up to about 50% in most of those countries, and that has made a huge difference to opportunity, to social mobility, to education available to so many people. But that has inevitably changed the nature of universities, inevitably. And We need to do a better job about explaining what we're doing and how we're doing it. This notion of a small number of very highly educated individuals sitting around the university lawn debating the future of the world, as many senior stakeholders outside the university for a member from their time at university, has gone. It's gone forever. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing. It's a different thing. You cannot do what you did for 10% for 50%. Well, you can, but no country's prepared to pay for it.

Iain Martin, guest · [12:37]the final thing that I would say is to start to make decisions that don't necessarily only serve your own institution. Think about leaders who will advocate for the system as a whole. Reflect on the pressures that are out there and do it. International education is a good thing. Economically, for almost any university in Canada, the US, the UK, at the moment New Zealand, lots of international students mean you have the flexibility to do other things. But there is huge societal pressure on migration, huge societal pressure on social infrastructure, and simply saying, leave us alone, we're not harming anybody, let us get on and recruit, has not served us well. So actually to say, look, we recognize this, we will put some of our own limits on here, we'll work on ensuring quality, is again part of, I think, what we can do as well. So it's partly doing that. So there's lots of individual things, but it's all those incremental things about ensuring integrity, ensuring trust, so that the public believe what we're talking about. Being accountable for what we do and being responsible to our communities for what they believe they are supporting is really important. But there is a flip side to this, and one of the things that we need to be really clear about is that accountability and responsibility does not mean you are simply subservient to the political whim of the day. That notion to go into difficult, challenging areas, that notion to debate unpopular policy, research, educational ideas is vitally important that we maintain. If we lose that, we're nothing more than a glorified high school, and I don't want to lead a system that's like that. So, but we will lose that if we don't do the other things. So I've made it very clear in everything I've talked about, because some of my colleagues are saying, is this just subjugating sort of the academic responsibility to go where you need to go with the work? No. But continue to get the trust to do that, we've got to work on the other stuff.

Iain Martin, guest · [26:48]AI is interesting because it is the first general purpose technology that many people have encountered in their working lives that touches on just about every corner of the institution. But it's not a standalone. And I think one of the, if I look at my own university career, one of the characteristics that has changed is access to information. So, as a student, You had a university card that got you into the university library, and in there was most published knowledge that existed or you could get at through interlibrary loans. But if you were outside of the university world, pretty much nobody could get at that stuff. it was hard, it was, time consuming. The internet opened that up, not overnight, but over the course of ten to fifteen years, it truly globalized, and universities suddenly went from being guardians and custodians of knowledge to navigators and supporters of knowledge, and again, we had a, a, a change there. AI has been the next stage in that, because AI has made it easier to get at that knowledge. It's made it easier to summarize large volumes of information, but at the same time, it's made trust a whole lot less, because Without enough understanding, you don't know whether that AI analysis is actually churning out the truth or whether it's hallucinated and half the references it's giving you are just completely made up because it suits the argument of the day. so I think number one is it hasn't taken away and removed the need for a university, but it's changed the need. That sense of being navigators, validators, justifiers of what actually is, I'll get in trouble here, is true because as we all know that true is truth to the best of our knowledge at this particular point in time, but what is true is, is really, really important. But the flip side of that is it has thrown into deep question the meaning of a university qualification. Why? Because many of the traditional approaches that we took to validate students' understanding and learning are no longer valid. So if I look at what we're going to have to do over the next two, three, four, five, ten years, it will be on assurance of learning, it will be on ensuring that society trusts us. When we say we have a graduate who can do X, Y, and Z or understands X, Y, and Z, that there is confidence that they can. Because if we lose that bit, we are utterly and utterly lost. So I think that that's where, when I come back to changing the nature of academic work, the evidence that we need to build around that, that would be the biggest thing. So I actually don't think AI is going to mean that we suddenly become a whole lot more efficient. It's going to mean that academic time is spent in different areas. It's going to be much more on understanding and assurance of learning, aiding students' journeys, and much less on delivery of information. Now, that's part of an ongoing trend, but you said, what are we going to have to do to maintain that into the future? That's probably number one.

Iain Martin, guest · [35:34]If I sat here and said, here is the perfect solution and others can follow it, I would be deceiving you. It is one of those conversations that you, you, never quite get right. And I think part of your reflection is, as a university president, you're sort of thinking, what is the job that I could do that others can't do in the organization? And, there's a few things that I, that I reflect on, on doing that and what, what can I do that others can't do? What's my job? To be the bridge between the inside of the organization and the outside world. To decide actually what's our business and what's not our business. To balance out what we can do now with what we should be investing in for the future. And to set the culture of the place. And actually, as I've gone through and 20 something years later in that leadership career, I've come to reflect on those four things. And actually, they do balance out because most of the difficult stuff you have to do comes in one of those four categories. And, and I think that's sort of been a framework. And then within that, how do you do it? Well, there's a lot of internal conversations. And some of that is exposing yourself to vulnerable positions in the organization. So I do three or four whole of institution town halls a year. it's relatively formulaic, but there's always 25, 30 minutes for questions, and they are completely free form questions. So there is nothing on the agenda, there is nothing that's off the agenda, anyone can ask anything they want. And people are surprised that you're prepared to do that. I've started extending that inside the organization to what I've called fireside chats, which is much more informal. I'm going to be in this room at that time, we'll be there for an hour, come, you ask the questions, I'm not gonna, and we'll have a conversation. Those are sort of the more formal ways of doing it. Wandering around, buying your own coffee, buying your own sandwiches, having conversations, again, really, really important. And the other is navigating that to the outside, which is how do you make sure that you engage sufficiently outside the organization alongside that? And one of my biggest leadership challenges over three or four jobs is What is the right balance between internal and external activity for university president or a CEO type person? And I don't think you ever get it quite right, Daniel, because you're always sort of adjusting. Sometimes you're feeling I'm spending too much time inside and I need to be out, and other times you get very nervous that you're on yet another trip to Canberra to see the political leaders or yet another outside engagement, or wouldn't it be really nice just to be an academic again? And I think for me, one of those leadership learnings in a messy organization was there is no right answer to this, but I keep on coming back, what can I do that others can't do?

Iain Martin, guest · [43:24]As we touched on earlier, I think the thing that makes me most worried is AI and assessment, because if you think about the educational value of a university education, that ability to warrant that we've got students coming out with a particular set of skills, experiences, knowledges is really important. And if we lose that, then I think that really does throw into question the whole piece. The other thing that worries me, how do we return universities to being a middle ground space where you can have genuinely difficult conversations about genuinely challenging ideas that don't descend into personal vitriol, personal attack, and the absolutism that we're seeing with many debates at the moment, which is you're either 100% with us Or you are evil. And I, I, I use that word with caution, but it's almost got to that point now that, that, and I think we have a great opportunity as a sector to sort of regain that space. But again, it's going to require some pretty brave leadership along the way, because it's not going to be easy. But that does worry me, because again, if we lose that space of the university is there to have these difficult conversations, then where in society do we have them? And whether it is political environment, whether it is a social media world where algorithms are driving us into our own little echo chambers, it's got harder and harder. And as I say, I think that piece as well does worry me, but I think we accept it as a challenge, certainly I do, over the next few years to say we need to be having or hosting Conversations that are safe enough. And I use that term carefully because they are safe enough so people can engage. It might be challenging and uncomfortable for them, but they're not going to be attacked personally, but they are not so safe that you're not going to have challenge. And you and I both love our quotes and, Clark Kerr was sort of talking about his challenges leading the University of California system in the 1960s has got one I come back to, which is our job is to make students safe for difficult ideas, not difficult ideas safe for students. And that really has not changed. And I think alongside assessment in that sense of how do we have those really challenging conversations, explore the most difficult areas so important.

Iain Martin, guest · [48:42]I think there's a couple of key learnings that transcend almost any of the other things, which is there are very few challenging leadership problems that cannot be solved. By actually getting people into a room and having difficult conversations. It's become a bit of a joke in my team, but it's, it's pick up the phone, don't send an email. And it is how do you build that culture of what do you need to do to solve those difficult problems? The other uniform thing that I've realized is how important recruitment is to your leadership team and your leadership recruitment. And getting great people who will be an advocate for the area you're recruiting them to support, but a champion for the whole institution and making that really clear from day one. It is very easy to suddenly have basically the rubber baron sitting around the table trying to decide how the institution gets carved up, as opposed to how do we make the institution stronger. And setting those parameters from day one. You sort of inherently know it, but it's one that I've really come back to, and now every time I make a senior appointment that sits large is, are they going to be able to do that in a good way that's for the benefit of the whole institution? And you might say it's obvious, but you and I will have seen there are lots of times where people do not want to play that. They are there to champion just their little corner of the institution at almost any price.

Daniel Atlin, host · [50:24]I love calling that out, actually, Ian, the fact that you need to be expert in your field and in your domain, but at the same time, you have to be that sort of team player who knows when to pitch in on behalf of the enterprise as well. And I think that's so important, especially when you bring people in who are either academics and in a very different type of leadership into the senior administrator roles, or else even from people from outside in different sectors too. Having that sort of understanding and getting that sort of shift made in people so important in a people-laden, values-laden institution like a university.

Iain Martin, guest · [51:00]And I think the final thing that I've learned over that time is the importance of narrative and storytelling in leadership. I'm, my daughters would be unkind, nerd or geek, but I'm a numbers-driven, technology-driven person who's got, if you look at my personality type, I'm very much in that, understand it, work through it logically. Of course, that's the solution starting point. Whereas you rapidly come to realize that actually You need to have that understanding, but you've got to have a really strong sense of storytelling and narrative because that gets you to where you need to get to. And that for me was a big learning. And I think if I look where I'm different now than I was 20 years ago, I'm much better at starting with the storytelling underpinned by the technology rather than the other way around.