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World-class ideas exchanged at USC
12 July 2008
During the week the University hosted the fifth annual national conference of the Australian Universities Community Engagement Alliance (AUCEA), and it attracted 150 delegates from around Australia and overseas. Businesses, local councils and universities were represented, drawn together by how they could cooperate most effectively for regional advantage.
The first three days were conducted at the University and on Friday delegates were at Kingfisher Bay Resort at Fraser Island, where the University has a range of important environmental initiatives, both at the Resort itself and at Dilli Village on the eastern side of the Island, where there is also cost-effective accommodation for visitors to Fraser.
The themes that have driven the Conference are engagement and sustainability and on Wednesday evening Mayor Abbot gave a speech on his personal perspectives on the importance of those themes to the Sunshine Coast, all of which was well received by delegates.
The Conference papers reflect the staggering elevation of interest in engagement and sustainability across the last decade. The themes are now core business of almost every university, whereas a decade ago the picture was of only a small number with these interests.
One of the papers dealt with universities’ appointment of senior executives to drive these missions, and another looked at the way consortia of universities were pooling their expertise on environmental issues, and yet another on how community-university engagement was changing the nature of discipline and trans-discipline studies and knowledge in universities.
The range of topics covered by the conference papers was extraordinary, ranging from the creation of community banks to help people denied bank accounts by traditional banks, to wildlife studies, to worm or ‘poo’ farms, to climate change, to arts initiatives, to community health, to ecotourism, to design, and the list goes on.
AUCEA has in its short history attracted the great majority of Australian universities as members, and the interest that the Alliance has created continues to develop an important momentum.
Learning from examples around the nation and around the world in order to inform and influence our own practices is what international university conferences like this do best. The networking and contacts endure long after such conferences end, and become rich veins for research, teaching, staff and student exchanges and the betterment of our universities and communities.
USC was not only the host organisation, but well represented in the ideas generated by important papers, and in the leadership of AUCEA. Again, USC was ‘punching above its weight’ and in many respects has both engagement and sustainability initiatives that can withstand international scrutiny as exemplars.
Professor Paul Thomas AM is Vice-Chancellor at the University of the Sunshine Coast.