Deakin VC awarded Order of Australia

Deakin University Vice-Chancellor Professor Jane den Hollander has been honoured with an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) medal in recognition of her distinguished service to tertiary education, professional educational organisations and the community.

Growing up in South Africa, Professor den Hollander understood the privilege of being born white and being able to gain a good education. Her exposure to racial exclusion fuelled a lifelong passion for equity and access to education for all who want it.

Since arriving at Deakin back in 2010, Professor den Hollander has aimed to uphold the university’s originating Act from 42 years ago, which said the institution would be a university for Geelong and for regional Victoria, as well as a university for access and participation.

“I’m striving to uphold the Act, but to do that in a contemporary 21st century situation,” Professor den Hollander explained. “So what does access and participation mean today? It means to be the best university at the digital frontier; education for the jobs of the future; staying contemporary; making sure that we do that in a very inclusive way; that anybody who wishes to get a university education can choose Deakin and get the learning and skills they need.

“We know that to have a job in the future, many of which will be alongside machines or making machines or instructing machines, you’ll need lots of skills — that’s how you stay contemporary,” said Professor den Hollander. “That’s our focus — to ensure our graduates have the skills they need for their future.

“We need to think about quite a few things, such as globalisation and automation. The most important is that we have to get more kids to finish school and to do a post-school qualification. You don’t have to come to university, but you need some post-school qualifications if you want to compete in the world.

“If you are doing something that is routine, a machine will be able to do that. As a consequence of this industrial revolution 4.0, many jobs are going to go. But one thing we’ve learned from the last three industrial revolutions is that more jobs are created. We want to stay ahead and educate people for those jobs.”

The vice-chancellor said she is particularly proud of Deakin’s achievements in student satisfaction and as a contributor to the wider community, with the university having been voted number one for learning satisfaction in Victoria for six years in a row.

“We have reinvented the university to meet the needs of this town exactly when it needed it,” said Professor den Hollander. “We’ve grown here. We’ve moved business and law to the Waterfront; we’ve created thousands of jobs on the Waurn Ponds campus with carbon fibre, materials research and our emerging battery and environmental efforts. Our health faculty with its medical school and the association with the Epworth Hospital rounds out a sensible and useful approach. And a great satisfaction has been our growing Arts and Education portfolio, which has kept pace with the future and has grown.

“It’s an incredible story of two things: a great group of staff who have absolutely understood the vision of what we had to do and a community that has embraced its university.”