Adelaide’s Opportunities

Strategic Goals

Yet anxieties about the shifting environment need not inhibit the University’s vision and strategy. Change itself can be a creative force. More than ever a university with a clear identity and sense of purpose will flourish in changing times.

School students are looking for a distinctive university education in which they can have confidence; and as labor-force needs for professionals of all kinds increases, there is a broadening body of prospective students beyond school leavers looking to join them. For innovative research teams the opportunities to address new fields and major global problems expand continually. And the need for educated leaders in public life, the professions, business and the community is ever greater.

In such a climate, the University’s founding vision has never been more relevant, and the research university ideal it espoused never more potent: now is the opportunity to recapture them. It is imperative we restore vibrancy to the unified teaching/research model which created the modern university and to the founding vision that so compelled our early students and staff and inspired the South Australian community.

During mid 2012 the University spent three months in conversation with its staff and students, its alumni and external supporters, about its challenges and opportunities for the coming decade. They discussed a series of questions addressing goals that would rekindle its vision. They sought strategies that would:

• assert a distinctive Adelaide educational proposition
  • creating a compelling, uniquely Adelaide educational experience
  • producing in our graduates the core skills and attributes employers want
• reach out to a still broader student body
  • providing flexible learning and e-learning to meet new student needs
  • articulating pathways and support for the disadvantaged
  • expanding internationally in innovative ways
• remake our academic recruitmentinternationally
  • adding research leaders and research networks where they are needed
  • attracting tomorrow’s leaders —outstanding research students—domestic and international
• enliven a spirit of freedom to investigate new fields of learning
  • interweaving our major research questions into undergraduate teaching
  • addressing problems creatively, across discipline boundaries
  • supporting discovery in long-term, basic research
• embolden our focus on learning and teaching excellence
  • recapturing the excitement of discovery in teaching
  • simulating the small cohort experience
  • lifting our Study Abroad and internship participation
• rekindle our importance to the community
  • showing how our research addresses problems of critical public concern
  • communicating vividly our success in producing independent, educated leaders
• reanimate our quest for the resources we need
  • creating research partnerships with government, industry and peer universities, domestic and international
  • winning major support from alumni and philanthropic supporters

The following pages set out the ways the University will achieve these goals in the coming decade.

NEXT: Recapturing an ideal
The Centrality of Small-Group Discovery >