It takes vice-chancellor Deep Saini just four minutes to get from his front door to his office at the University of Canberra each day. Next year, his commute will be almost exactly the same distance, only he will be trudging through snow, not grass, and the rosellas that gather each morning on his balcony won't sing to him anymore while he makes his first coffee of the day.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
On Friday, Saini will bid farewell to UC to take up the helm at a new campus - the University of Dalhousie in Canada.
"I'll miss those birds," he says. "You don't realise how deep your roots go in a place."
But it will be a homecoming for the biology professor too - at 23, he immigrated to Canada from India and most of his family still live in the Great White North.
"There's a real need now for us to be closer to them, especially my mother-in-law," Saini says. "And we're about to welcome our third grandchild."
Since May, when he made the shock decision to pull out of his five-year contract at the university early, a yellow post-it note has been sitting on his desk. A list of things to get done. Not all of them have been crossed off, Saini admits, including significant reforms to both sexual violence responses on campus and the university's controversial assistant professor scheme.
"But they are well on their way now," he says.
Likewise the ambitious residential development on campus he inherited from his predecessor Stephen Parker has also missed milestones - slowed down, he says, by the "usual planning complexities".
When Saini arrived in 2016 - the first non-Anglo vice-chancellor in Australia's history - he says the university was at a critical moment.
"It was a good time to take a pause and decide what we wanted to be, where do we fit in the academic universe," he says.
For Saini, it was about focus in a shrinking government funding environment, playing to the young university's strengths in disciplines such as sports research, education and health. While that helped UC rocket up international research rankings at a breakneck pace, clearing house within the institution also led to its first staff strike in more than a decade as tensions over workloads and job security boiled over.
Saini says UC's academic promotion scheme, accused of exploiting junior academics to boost research output, will be fixed in collaboration with staff over the coming months but the university did not provide a timeline for reforms.
READ MORE:
Last year, as universities across the country took stock of their sexual violence policies, a review of UC also exposed concerns about bullying and sexism. At the time, Saini vowed to look into it personally and, while policies haven't changed, he says the university has since rolled out more training and education.
"The policies were there but it's been about calling it out," he says. "I always try to call out bad behaviour when I see it, though I've never seen any bad cases but little things like talking over someone... So we've done work there and I'm pleased to say we haven't seen a spike in reports since."
Likewise security and lighting on the "bush campus" has been upgraded, with sexual violence reforms now about 75 per cent completed.
Saini insists there's no such thing as a personal legacy at a place as collaborative as a university, but describes his time in Canberra - in particular the spectacular grand final win of his beloved UC Capitals in February - as among the most exciting of his life. Looking around his office this month, he likens immigration to a packet of dye dropped into water - the dye dissolves and changes of course but the water, the country, evolves too.
"Canada is my home, more than India, because I grew the most there, but we've grown here too and we've seen it change," he says.
For Saini, the Australian university sector is "the most entrepreneurial in the world". It's inspired him to take more risks but provided plenty of cautionary tales too. Now, he warns, it could be in danger of losing its competitive edge internationally if it does not rethink recent cuts to research.
Likewise he stresses that international education ("a phenomenal thing for the world") must be done for education's sake. More and more, he says, he has become concerned about the at times "perverse" relationship between Australian university funding and international student numbers. To that end, he has sought to diversify country intakes at UC, forging closer ties to places like India and even Bhutan, rather than just relying on Chinese students.
Welcoming in refugee and disadvantaged students to study has been another personal project for Saini, whose family were living in a remote Indian village when a chance encounter with a local teacher first brought academia into their world.
"Again I come back to that saying in my native Punjab," he says of his final day in Canberra. "It literally means 'one eye is smiling while the other is crying'. This place has been good to us. We're leaving but it won't leave us."
The university has yet to reveal its next pick for vice-chancellor, though Saini hints it "won't be long now".
In the meantime, vice-president of university relations and strategy Belinda Robinson will take over as interim vice-chancellor from January.
Sherryn Groch
Sherryn is a journalist at The Canberra Times, with a special interest in education and social affairs.
Sherryn is a journalist at The Canberra Times, with a special interest in education and social affairs.
