Notes for the Faculty History: Lindsay Falvey[1] 

These notes differ from the styles of other OAF’s – they are written to provide a context of my thoughts that will no doubt inform the section for the history – some personal comments and lists of activities are irrelevant to the history itself.

I had written a book-long polemic¹ about my time as Dean soon after stepping down using sources of minutes of meetings, progress reports of Associate Deans and other senior staff and some University records.  I embargoed that treatise for 20 years or until 2020 because I knew my view might change with time and I could modify it or arrange its removal from the University Archives; I was also concerned that I might have been overly critical of some persons, apart from myself. Having re-read it before working on this paper as an input to the part of the chapter for the Faculty history to which my time belongs, I find that the polemic is in fact not very polemical. I attribute this benefit to my having edited it in 2002, nearly two years after I first wrote it – and to having done so with wider awareness than could have been possible in the first instance. I now see no reason for the embargo to remain and have therefore today published it so that it can serve as a reference to the Faculty history.[2] Accordingly, I write this paper as an adjunct to that earlier one rather than as a substitute for it.

Before, during and after my tenure as Dean I have written my perspectives on the subject and context of agricultural education. One part of that served to introduce the detail presented in the 171-page ‘polemic’, which includes the chapters: 

• The Agricultural and Related Education Debate: Is it Important?
• An Appropriate Context? Global Food, Environmental, and Learning Needs
• Towards a Merger: The Institute of Land and Food Resources
• Strategic Planning Outcome: The Process & The Plan
• Governance
• Management
• Course and Students
• Marketing and Enterprise
• Research and Internationalisation
• Polemic
• Phoenix Faculty?
• Epilogue
• References

 Overall my experience of the Faculty – both the smaller old Faculty and the huge merged Faculty (of Agriculture, Forestry and Horticulture, and then the Institute of Land and Food Resources) – was positive. I came with a respect for the merging groups of the old Faculty and VCAH, and also with a view that both contained some dinosaurian traits. I was proud of the strategic planning process that served to get staff interacting and to understand each other as a means of facilitating merger, and I was content that we accomplished the legislative completion of the merger ahead of the expected schedule. But I made mistakes in judgement concerning the Board; the first being its vague mandate, the second being its appointments and another being an uncharacteristic patience on my part with unacceptable actions. All of this is elaborated in the ‘polemic’.  Others have also mentioned this time in the life of the Faculty or the University including the historian Stuart Macintyre[3] and the Chancellor of the time, Sir Edward Woodward.[4] Their perspectives are accurate so far as I can see, although in some cases I see opinions to be based on partial evidence and so distorted.  This is all par for the course.

Appointed from outside the university, I came with a brief to effect the merger and bed it down, which meant to begin the inevitable rationalisation of staff, programs and facilities. It was a management task that I relished, and I was soon supported by a strong team, particularly Malcolm Hickey, Janet Beard and Nigel Wood. My management credentials were fine, but my University of Melbourne credentials were scant and included diverse consultancies, including: an external review of one the old Faculty’s masters programs sponsored by the aid program – notably the M.Agric.St.; a ‘views of industry’ consultancy commissioned by Adrian Egan when he was Dean; having employed moonlighting academics from the Faculty, and various professional interactions with the Faculty and the University. Otherwise, education-related consultancies from my CV included to that time: Review of Dairy Education in Australia (DRDC): Russian Research, Education and Extension, (World Bank); Review of University Course in Agriculture (University of Melbourne); World Agricultural Knowledge Systems in Developed Countries (World Bank); Thailand, Prince of Songkla University Review (AIDAB); Africa, Preservation of Stored Cereals Course (AIDAB); Thailand, Marketing Training Course (AIDAB); South Asia, Preservation of Stored Cereals Course (AIDAB); Philippines, Rural and Marketing and Extension Course (AIDAB); Asian Region ASEAN Investment Promotion Workshops (AIDAB); Thailand, Rural Marketing Course (AIDAB); Philippines, ASEAN Training Course in Agricultural Extension (AAECP); Thailand, Rural Extension and Marketing Course (AIDAB); Masters Program Reviews (AIDAB) at UNE and ANU; Thailand, Rural Development Project (World Bank); Masters Program Reviews (AIDAB), University of Queensland.

While not the major part of my consulting profile, this was a hot-potch of opportunistic consultancies, and it had led me to establish Victoria College in Melbourne initially with Warrnambool (Deakin) as a partner, the English Language Centre of Australia in Bangkok (sold to IDP) and to take a majority share in Vientiane College in Laos with Monash University as a partner. I sold out of all to take the Dean’s role in the expectation that I would be open to controversy. I present this to suggest that I was an unusual appointment.

In negotiations I advised VC Penington that I thought I could accomplish the task in three years; he said five as a minimum and offered his opinion that intransigent academics can wait out three but not five years. In the event I was Dean for four years and three months. Much was accomplished, and much could have been done better – its all in the ‘polemic’, at least my limited attempt at objectivity is there. One matter dealt with in less detail in that treatise is relations with the University. I enjoyed the University environment – I still do – and learned to respect many persons with whom I interacted. But I was perennially disappointed with a lack of understanding of the culture of agriculture and rural areas (I do not intend to mention Asia here – that is another wider subject) and support in difficult times; I naively expected that, if I could navigate some of it as one whose life had been mainly international, then suburban Melbournians should be able to at least do the same.  I felt the University overreacted to political pressure and so curtailed the full scope of the changes we were making together. For example, I recall after the most hostile VFF meetings that it was not unusual for a local leader to privately assure me in earthy agricultural style that ‘you know we have to say this, but you know us, its just words’ – and it mostly was. Unfortunately, University reactions when face-to-face with such politics was to interpret them as deep seated and long-term anger that could impact unpredictably.

The University’s distance from rural understanding would not have mattered had rural campus heads not had some conflicting objectives, which together with the Board’s meddling in management, unnerved Vice Chancellor Alan Gilbert. Alan was not easily unnerved, but he had political deals afoot including government decisions on and after the University Square and Melbourne University Private initiatives. After he and I both misjudged the effect of media manipulation, he confided to me something to the effect ‘next time we address this matter we will not blink’. I said that the decision was not in the long-term interest of agricultural education or rural communities. With the effluxion of time, I now see that these are minor matters. The Faculty goes on regardless; Deans come and go just like VCs, and all are flawed – and Deans rely on steadfastness from their Vice Chancellors.

I have said little here about VCAH. The College is easily maligned, yet might best be seen as having been a nascent multilevel agricultural education entity that could have become something special if it had been adequately funded. This was probably the dream of some in VCAH on entering the merger. But it also contained some old attitudes from State department days, and these would have been better trimmed before entering into the merger (Dean White’s era), in the same spirit that the Faculty had shown in shedding some senior staff in anticipation of merger. Nevertheless, I adopted the merger cause wholeheartedly and became ‘progressively consumed’ by it. Once we had promulgated a long range strategy and orchestrated the ‘smooth merging of the colleges with the University, I enjoyed the post-merger period as a preparation for the next challenge of reshaping the Faculty’. It had been an exhausting schedule of travel, talks, meetings and planning – and it all felt worthwhile. I did not anticipate the subsequent eruption of confrontation in 1998, and ‘it was at first hard for me to accept that some colleagues were actively feeding misinformation to the press’ – 100s of press articles and over 1,000 postal communications in addition to emails and phone calls resulted. But now some 16 years later, I find that my opinion of it is similar to that expressed in 2000-2002 that, ‘to see the period objectively is difficult, and I am inclined to blame someone, myself or others, for something that may have just been an incident of no consequence’.

‘I had made the merger and subsequent reorganisation my personal mission and became overly attached to it, such that interference with the plan was a personal affront to me’. It took me some time to recover – a time when I developed a sympathy for Bob Richardson even though we never became close. My feeling through this time was that ‘’the cause still seemed correct and I remained offended on its behalf’.

I concluded my ‘polemic’; with the following words: ‘To the University, the disappointment of being unable to effect a significant increase in global standing for its agricultural and related activities is tolerable.  Individuals who understood the foregone potential expressed both their sense of frustration and concern over the apparent personal cost which accrued to me. Grateful for their comfort and acknowledgment, I am now more conscious that there is no place in history for any Dean.’ Of course, that last quoted phrase is wrong – otherwise the current OAF’s project of a Faculty history will crumble to dust! But it is a useful thought to counter my sometimes self-aggrandizing versions of events.

After stepping down as Dean, I remained in the Chair in Agriculture until 2005, reducing the proportion of my time progressively. I resigned while writing in Cambridge and realizing that the best relationship an academic can have with the University is one of freedom from its bureaucracy while enjoying its intellectual stimulus, libraries and seminars. I see my continuing responsibility as contributing to the Faculty and the University through my role in international and Australian agriculture so far as this generates publications, prestige, access and some research funds to the Faculty. These spin-offs relate to such items, also pasted from my CV as: Board Chair of ILRI; Director of Hassad Australia; review of Central Asian Republics education, ADB; food security thought piece, ADB; trade negotiation options for GATS, Indonesia; sustainable quality universities, Saudi Arabia (with Malcolm Hickey); creating an International Graduate Program for Thaksin University, Thailand; capacity development for the Greater Mekong Subregion, ADB; feasibility for world-class private university for Boston Consulting, Indonesia; review of global livestock research program, CGIAR; agricultural human resources development, Iraq (Foreign Affairs); review of the International Service for Agricultural Research, Netherlands; revising lending to agricultural education, World Bank; chairing Victorian accreditations of private providers (with Malcolm Hickey).

I see this as all part of the future in which university agricultural education must be engaged. And that insight is a legacy of my time as Dean.

Lindsay Falvey

7 September 2016

 

[1] All quotations are from the treatise referred to herein as the ‘polemic’, which is correctly referenced as: Lindsay Falvey (2002) A Faculty’s Fate: Hindsight of Introspection – Unreliable reminiscences of the Faculty known as the Institute of Land and Food Resources from 1995 to 2000. University of Melbourne Archives. Pp171.

[2] See either: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/307877890_A_Faculty’s_Fate_Hindsight_of_Introspection or https://www.academia.edu/28312146/A_Facultys_Fate_Hindsight_of_Introspection

[3] Stuart Macintyre, Gwilym Croucher and Andrew Brett (2016) Life after Dawkins : the University of Melbourne in the Unified National System of Higher Education 1988 – 96. Melbourne University Publishing.

[4] Sir Edward Woodward (2005) One Brief Interval: A Memoir by Sir Edward Woodward. Miegunyah Press. Pp310.