Professor Mike Wilmore has been appointed as UNE’s Pro Vice-Chancellor – Academic Development. The position is new to the University, and comes at a time when academics are grappling with multiple pressures from a changing higher education environment. Pulse spoke to Prof. Wilmore about the role and how he expects to approach it.

Pulse: How does your background inform your role as Pro Vice-Chancellor – Academic Development?

Mike Wilmore: I spent my first decade as a kind of jobbing academic working on short term, casual teaching and research contracts. Following the completion of my PhD, I moved into my first ongoing roles in universities in the UK and then Australia. So I believe that I bring on authentic understanding of what the working life of an academic is. I’ve worked in leadership roles more recently; my last decade has been largely taken up with different types of leadership roles as an associate dean or a dean, or last year as the interim DVC. But you don’t forget where you came from. I think I have a pretty firm grasp of academic development because of my own lived experiences. 

Pulse: This is a new role for UNE. How will you approach it?

Mike Wilmore: An important part of my role in the first year will be listening. I’ll be listening to what people are currently encountering in their working life, and very persistently, on behalf of the whole university, asking the question: is there a way in which we can improve things? 

Improvement might be as simple as redesigning an over-engineered form that takes far too much time to be completed. But then we have to connect what we do at the micro level to the macro level. You can’t make big changes overnight. You have take the stepping stones; you’ve got to work out how you get there, bit by bit, by solving problem after problem. 

A PVC Academic Development has to listen, they’ve got to empathic, they’ve got to collaborate. They need to see the problems of the university through the eyes of all of the different people in our community – academics, professional staff, students. You have to look at problems through all those eyes, and then you have to collaborate to bring about the changes necessary to have a more positive working environment.

It’s also about finding ways to communicate so others can listen, so that they have an understanding of what the University is trying to achieve under the Future Fit strategic plan. Some of the things that we’re challenging people to do are not things that are completely different to what they’ve done previously. They are just an adaptation of what of what they’ve already been doing; maybe applying their skills and talent in a slightly different direction.

Pulse: How is the world of academia changing?

Mike Wilmore: In the world I inhabited 20 years ago, things like learning management systems were only just coming into use in universities, if they were used at all.

We were dealing with a very different set of expectations on the part of our students, partly because of the way in which student finance is organized. This university is not inhabited by types of students that are stereotypical in the media. It doesn’t matter what age they are, whether they’ve come direct from school, or whether they’re mature-age students who are learning while bringing up families or holding down jobs. These students are learning in a different context, and with a different set of needs, compared to the student stereotype. 

That’s something which I think absolutely forces us as academics to think differently about how we go about our work. We need to think about the design of our courses, we need to think about time management, we need to think about the use of technology, we need to think about our interactions with stakeholders inside and outside the university. 

I think being an academic is now a much more collaborative process than it has been previously, because of the complexities of what we have to do with technology, and the expanding range of student demands.

When someone looks at the University, they are looking to the University to provide answers to questions they have. It may be a prospective student, or an organisation thinking of collaborating with the university around a research project, or some kind of work integrated learning project. We’re there to provide answers: that’s what universities have done for centuries. 

But I think we are now being challenged as universities to put ourselves into the position of those outsiders, and to bring them into the university – but not to bring them into the university and say, ‘here’s the solution, now go away and implement it”. It’s becoming a much more collaborative process. 

That requires academics to develop a different set of capabilities, and a new confidence in interacting with those collaborators – even interacting with their own students. How do we develop academics individually, and as a community, that have got the kind of capability and importantly, the kind of confidence to engage in that sort of collaborative activity with a whole range of different stakeholders?

That, for me, is one of the things which is the next challenge. It’s our generational challenge for academic development. But I do think that academia by its very nature has always been collaborative. So, it’s not really about learning new skills, or new capabilities: it’s that classic challenge of taking what you can already do, and adapting and moulding it to a slightly different set of circumstances. 

I’m very confident that we’ve got academics throughout UNE who are already doing this, or who are capable of doing it, and it’s just a case of supporting them to give people the confidence to apply their skills.

Pulse: What changes might we see in the near future to the role of the academic? 

Mike Wilmore: It’s going to be important to develop different types of academic role – for example, the new teaching-focused academic role that emerged in the new enterprise agreement in 2020.

When you look at the terms ‘teaching-focused’, ‘research-focused’ and the traditional academic split between a teaching and research focus, it looks like there are three categories of academic. But the reality is that it’s a spectrum. Describing work roles in those terms is for bureaucratic purposes. 

If we consider the teaching-focused academic – they are engaged in higher education. The education we provide to our students is necessarily at the cutting edge of knowledge. That means a teaching-focused academic is by necessity engaged in scholarship, to maintain the currency of their knowledge so that they can put their hand on their heart and say, yes, you’re being taught cutting edge stuff here. 

But if we are going to have teaching-focused academics at this university, then there’s got to be a clear way of bringing them together as a community of academics that share a clear interest in excellence in teaching. We’ve got to support them with proper forms of professional development. There has to be a career structure so that somebody who is a teaching-focused academic can be supported and promoted through to a professorial level. 

That doesn’t happen by magic. It happens because the university works hard to create the supportive environment that we need to have to support really great teaching-focused academics here at UNE. 

I’ll be engaging with people like the Deputy Vice-Chancellor, and others, to rethink and reform what we do around promotions for academics as a whole. We’ll be thinking about the hundreds of academics that we have who, like me in my first 10 years of work, are employed on a casual contract basis. We don’t have a university, and we cannot teach many of our courses, without those we quite inappropriately describe as “casual academics”. They are anything but casual in the way they go about their work. They almost uniformly go about their work with incredible professionalism. 

So how do we acknowledge and support these crucial members of our academic community? There are very good examples of how you can put together really great institution-wide frameworks for the support of casual academics, so they really do feel that they are what we know them to be, which is a valued part of this academic community.