Recently, the HASS School Executive Committee held a planning day and affirmed a strong consensus of support for diversity as a crucial underpinning principle for us as we work towards the School’s future. In this discussion, it was recognised that diversity applies to us and our work in (ahem) many ways. It may refer to the people of the School: we’ve had significant success in recent years, for example, with more women progressing through promotion. If you look around at us all in a meeting sometime, though, you will see that we are a notably not-very-diverse-at-all bunch in other respects. The Executive also discussed the diversity manifest in our intellectual breadth. While recognising that strategies since 2020 have helped us maintain our portfolio of disciplines, sustaining this diversity and breadth through future challenges will require us to do many things differently—and, let’s be honest with ourselves, doing things better.

The importance of diversity across the spectrum of our activities has never been more apparent. As I wrote in the Australian Humanities Review a few months ago, “While it might seem an obvious statement to some of us, a truism even, it needs to be said that diverse perspectives help us as a society understand the world better, more completely, in all its complexity[.…] Business-as-usual is not going so well for universities, regional communities, or humanity in general; fundamental rethinking is necessary. If we are to have a chance at solving the existential problems and challenges of our time, we need an expanded range of modes of thinking, new methods for solving problems, and multiple languages.” Opposition to diversity is not only about oppressing or bullying people one doesn’t like. It is also about choking the intellectual capacity of humanity at large.

At the present time, people everywhere seem unhappy with their work and work environments. Compounding this for us, even the most basic purpose or function of a university seems up for debate or, as an academic friend of mine recently put it more bluntly, ‘Alistair, the voter hates us!’. There has never been a better time to reimagine who we are and what we do; to engineer a reset. The reality is that a university can do great harm as well as good—and the withdrawal of social license suggests we are overall not convincingly on the side of good. If you wanted to contribute to making the world a better place through your work at UNE, starting right now, what would that look like?