Model provost Peter McPhee bows out as the 'big punt' pays off

There was a moment in March 2006 when University of Melbourne provost Peter McPhee thought the prospect of overhauling the venerable institution's curriculum and introducing US-style postgraduate schools was just too difficult, that the culture of the university was just too conservative.

Not long before, Melbourne's vice-chancellor Glyn Davis had appointed McPhee, a French history scholar, as chairman of the curriculum commission charged with translating the idea into a concrete proposal. But after just a few weeks of meetings, the scale of the task had begun to weigh. Would the university rally around the project? Would students with their eyes on professional degrees be prepared to first study broad arts or science degrees?

Struggling with doubts, McPhee went for a walk along the beach at Aireys Inlet, southwest of Melbourne, determined not to return until he had made up his mind on whether to see the project through. But he had forgotten his sun hat. Four hours later he returned sunburned and tired, but he had made his decision.

"I was the colour of lobster, but I had decided I would give it my best shot," says McPhee, with the lightness of a man who feels his task is done. Today is his farewell as provost; he plans to return to French history writing and teaching, made sweeter by the prospect of three months of research in the south of France later this year.

McPhee, credited as the key architect of the university's new Melbourne model, raised eyebrows in April when he decided to step down as provost a year before his contract was due to end and less than two years into the implementation of the new model.

But McPhee says his decision to bow out was driven by what he says were reassuring demands in January for the university's broad bachelor of arts and science degrees that convinced him the university's "big punt" had paid off. Offers for science at Melbourne were up 21 per cent.

"I felt this great wave of relief and satisfaction that this had worked," McPhee tells the HES in the office he is giving up in Melbourne's historic Gatekeepers Cottage. "Knowing that we are going to be having a large number of really good students continuing to come here has led to a great sense of reassurance across the institution that, yes, this model is not only worth doing, it is working.

"That is when I thought it was time for someone with fresh ideas to see through the next part of the process and time for me to write a couple of books."

But while McPhee is confident the model will prove itself, he says there is still work to do. In particular, he says the university's ambition to teach cross-disciplinary undergraduate subjects, such as linking science and humanities, has proven to be more difficult in some cases than anticipated. Too much has had to be crammed into some courses, while in others the university had underestimated the difficulty of making basic science accessible to humanities students.

"In some cases we have had to realise that it isn't a simple matter to teach a genuinely multidisciplinary course," McPhee says.

And he says more attention needs to be placed on ensuring the pathways between undergraduate degrees and the professional graduate degrees are clear to students.

The transition to the new model is also still in process. Many professional courses have migrated to the new graduate model, such as law, teaching, nursing and architecture, but next year engineering will switch over, followed by medicine and veterinary science in 2011.

McPhee says introducing the Melbourne model has been the hardest thing he has done, and its adoption has fundamentally changed the university's culture. It has prompted new thinking about what an undergraduate or postgraduate degree should be, beyond a collection of courses, and about how to link teaching and research.

But the development and implementation of the model has been contentious. There had been an ideological debate over whether the move to two-year postgraduate professional programs would be a barrier to poorer students given the extra year added to full-time study.

Also, at the time the model was being developed, graduate courses were all full-fee paying. McPhee says the decision of the federal government to allow the university, and the wider sector, to allocate commonwealth-supported places to the postgraduate degrees was critical for the model to work. "It was a huge breakthrough for us."

Although an additional year has been added to securing professional degrees, McPhee says before the change many students were already having to take an extra year because they changed their minds about what they wanted to do.

Under the Melbourne model students are effectively required to take more time to decide and explore what they may want to specialise in.

The introduction also has increased workloads of staff, who have to continue teaching subjects that are being phased out while also teaching the new subjects.

McPhee says it is unfortunate timing that as the model was being introduced the arts faculty had to go through a cost-cutting and redundancy process to improve its finances. That spilled over into public stoushes between staff and management. But, overall, he says, staff have supported the new model.

"We have expected a lot from staff in terms of commitment to a good quality teach out as well as committing to a new program," he says. "There have been some wheels that have been squeaky but the level of commitment is really quite remarkable."

He says the new model has prompted a healthy questioning across all universities over how they see themselves and their mission. He notes that the University of Western Australia is adopting a similar model while universities such as Swinburne and Victoria University have moved to differentiate themselves with a focus on work experience and internships.

"While it has been controversial in the sector, there has been an enormous interest in it," McPhee says. "It has meant that every university has had to think about what is distinctive about it."

An immediate challenge for McPhee now is to write a biography of French revolutionary Robespierre, who ended up on the guillotine, a victim of the revolution he championed. Fortunately for the former, he has been able to come through his own revolution with his head still on his shoulders.
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17/07/2009