Regional universities make a difference

Regional universities play a crucial role in providing local knowledge to rural communities. Professor Andrew Vann, Vice-Chancellor of Charles Sturt University, sees a mutual benefit for universities and their communities.

Recently I had the pleasure to announce Charles Sturt University’s new community grants scheme, the Community-University Partnership program.

The program will provide grants to help community groups achieve their goals in education, sport, the arts, indigenous affairs and other areas. I was very proud to announce it and will be eager to see the tangible benefits it delivers to our communities.

But engagement is a two-way street. It is not only about what the University can do for the community, but how the University can work with its communities for our mutual benefit.

Rural communities in Australia fought for more than 100 years to get their own universities – institutions that could invest in rural people, rural ideas and rural solutions.

Charles Sturt University is just such an institution and this year, our 25th as a university, is a good time to reflect on how far we have come together and what more we can achieve.

Regional universities provide opportunities for students, help address local labour market needs and support industry innovation. But that is only part of the story. Regional universities are embedded in their communities and make things happen simply by their presence.

The parent tutor program at CSU in Albury-Wodonga is a good example. It brings together second year speech pathology students and children with communication difficulties and other complex needs. The students work with the children while the parents of those children tutor our students about the needs of these families, giving them a level of insight and understanding that could not be achieved in a classroom.

It is this type of collaboration that makes the partnerships between regional universities and their communities special. Often they are small in scale, local in impact and built on the relationships formed between university staff and community members across a variety of spheres.

This is precisely the type of collaboration that is difficult or impossible to achieve across distances. If our rural communities were to lose their regional universities, I am doubtful these sorts of partnerships would be able to be reproduced with metropolitan institutions.

And there are other, larger scale impacts of regional universities which are not always widely appreciated.

Whenever I go to Darling Harbour and look up at the skyscrapers badged with banks, financial institutions and consultants I ask myself, who is generating real wealth? We must never forget that it is rural people who deliver 65 per cent of our nation’s export wealth, almost all of the nation’s base-load power generation and the bulk of our cheap, safe and fresh food supplies.

Rural communities need local knowledge and local solutions to maintain and develop these contributions, and regional universities have a crucial role to play in providing them.

If Charles Sturt University were to be removed from regional NSW, for example, we would lose more than 5 000 additional jobs created as a flow-on from our operations and more than $1 billion in economic output each year.

We would lose the graduates who have provided access to health and dental services, the knowledge our researchers have added to industry, and the skills our students bring to local economies.

Regional universities make a difference because we are different. We do what we do in our communities because we live here, because they are our communities, because what happens to our communities happens to us.

We don’t labour to develop new programs in areas of community need to grow our esteem, but to grow our communities. And we don’t judge our success by global research rankings, but by whether we are creating opportunities and delivering jobs to rural and Indigenous students.

Our definition of equity is not that rural students have a chance to move to Sydney to study, but that they have an opportunity to learn and work in their own communities. The choice, of course, is their own to make and we wish them well whatever they decide. But without regional universities, that choice is already made.