Page 34 - Luce 2023

C ouncil N ews

The Rev’d Prof. Russell Goulbourne is Dean of the
Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne.
In 2022 he was welcomed as a member of the
JCH Council.

I’m now in my fifth year as Dean of the Faculty of Arts, having
moved to Australia from the UK at the beginning of 2019. For
the five years before that – having studied at the University of
Oxford and taught for more than a decade at the University
of Leeds – I was Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Humanities at
King’s College London. In many ways the two Dean roles are
very similar, having overall responsibility for the academic and
financial performance of a major part of a comprehensive,
multidisciplinary university. But I’m still grappling with
two significant differences in my role here in Australia that
represent both challenges and opportunities – and these are
relevant to Janet Clarke Hall, too.

The first difference relates to place: put simply, teaching
and researching in the Humanities and Social Sciences in
Melbourne is necessarily substantively different from pursuing
that work in London because we’re doing that work on the
unceded and sovereign country of the First Nations people.
Here in Parkville, it is the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin
Nation who have an ongoing right and responsibility to care for
country. Properly recognising this reality – including the living
legacy of settler-colonial violence – obliges us, it seems to
me, fundamentally to refocus our work. And so I’m delighted
that, in my first year as Dean, colleagues in the Faculty joined
with me in committing ourselves to being transformed by
recognising and engaging Indigenous ways of knowing. By
the end of my first year I’d appointed the Faculty’s first ever
Associate Dean Indigenous – Associate Professor Sana Nakata
– who led a multifaceted programme of work that is still
changing what and how we teach and research in the Faculty.
We’ve also focused on capacity building: we’ve worked hard
to increase access and support for Indigenous students right
through from undergraduate to doctoral levels, and I’m proud
that in the time I’ve been Dean we’ve more than doubled the
number of Indigenous academic staff in the Faculty.

On joining the JCH Council I was delighted to learn that each
year the College works with a local Elder to welcome students
and staff to Country with a traditional Smoking Ceremony,
helping them form a deeper understanding of the unbroken
65,000-year-old ecological and human story of the unceded
land on which they will be living and learning. The College’s
Cecily Faith Statham Scholarship provides generous financial
assistance for a student of Indigenous heritage, and in 2023
the College will offer students the opportunity to take part in
workshops in which they will learn about Indigenous cultural
and creative practices and help to create a large scale artwork
to express the community’s deep respect for the Wurundjeri
people who have long cared for this beautiful country.

The second difference I’m aware of in Melbourne relates to
the scale of the work that we do and the implications that
that scale has for community. Put simply, there are half as
many higher education institutions (including both public and
private universities as well as non-university higher education
institutions) in Australia as there are in the UK but only about
25% fewer students overall, so on average the institutions are
significantly larger than their counterparts in the UK. In 2021
the average higher education institution in Australia had 50%
more students than in the UK. What’s more, a really unusual
feature of Australian higher education is that higher prestige
institutions have large teaching loads – in 2021 four of the top
34 LUCE Number 21 2022