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Difficulty of communicating success
10 March 2007
One of the most often expressed views to me from a spectrum of people in the community, is that they had no idea that the University had grown so much, and why don’t we communicate more widely our scale and our achievements. Even the national quality audit team said much the same thing.
This repetitive theme is a source of great frustration to us, but it is as much about the state of the national media as it is about us. The major media are city-centric, obsessed with old universities, not much interested in good news stories, and much prefer exploiting scandals, weaknesses or conflicts.
This University’s success across just over a decade is close to phenomenal, considering our meagre initial resources, and the threat of closure unless we paid A$400,000 in headworks locally from a A$2million budget. Nationally, we weren’t to be reviewed to be a university until 2007 at the earliest, and in 1996 there were to be no more new public universities.
Despite those imposing obstacles, eleven years later we have 5,500 students studying in over 100 undergraduate and graduate degree programs. Students come in increasing numbers from the Coast, Brisbane, intra and inter State and over 40 countries around the world. We are Australia’s fastest growing University, with more to come, especially in research. We are regarded by the OECD as having impressive engagement strategies, and the Australian Universities Quality Audit gave us an outstanding report card.
Visit the University and you will see a A$50million building program nearing completion to provide facilities for students and the over 700 staff on the annual payroll. You will see car parks overflowing as we wrestle with increasing, faster and more direct public transport, to avoid degradation of the campus environment by cars.
We communicate our potential and capabilities via our website, an extensive range of publications, news stories, conferences, school visits, exhibitions, guest speaking engagements, workshops and many other means.
Yet we still struggle with all media, nationally, because good news stories are not what they want.
So I apologise to all those people who tell me we ought to do more to get that great message out, because for our part, including this regular column, we are doing our utmost to address your interest in more information.
Professor Paul Thomas AM is Vice-Chancellor of the University of the Sunshine Coast.