Opinion
For most of ACU’s 35-year history, our university has prided itself on being radically independent. In that time, we’ve not been part of any university network other than Universities Australia. It was a deliberate posture, one that reflected our sense of ourselves as a distinctive institution with a clear mission and no need for explicit alignment with others.
There’s something admirable about institutional self-sufficiency. But that quality can harden, over time, into a kind of stiffness. A tree that refuses to bend in the wind doesn’t prove its strength. It either snaps or becomes so fixed in its own roots that it forgets to grow.
Today, with the launch of the 2050 Alliance, ACU joins a university network for the first time. In doing so, we join a coalition of nine like-minded institutions that span the country, from Perth to Townsville. Formerly known as Innovative Research Universities, the 2050 Alliance is focused on working collectively to build the higher education system Australia needs.
Let me explain why this is the right fit for us at this moment.
The Universities Accord is the most significant review of Australian higher education in a generation. It has set a 2050 horizon for the sector, with goals including student success – specifically, an 80 per cent tertiary attainment rate. It emphasises meaningful progress on equity – not as charity, but as a core driver of participation and productivity, and backs a research culture capable of delivering knowledge that serves the public with real-world purpose.
These are targets that will be met or missed in the communities where universities actually operate – in outer-metropolitan growth corridors, in regional centres, among students who might otherwise lack opportunities to enter higher education. No university will meet these challenges alone.
When I first began discussions about what would become the 2050 Alliance, I was struck by how closely its purpose aligned with ACU’s own language and priorities.
Our Vision 2033 speaks of flourishing lives, thriving communities and an ethical future. The 2050 Alliance speaks of student success, inclusive participation, community-embedded research and knowledge with purpose.
These are not identical vocabularies, but they point at the same things: serving students well, strengthening communities, generating knowledge that benefits society. These are expressions of exactly what a Catholic university should be doing – and what ACU is already doing.
We have long held equity in education as central to the mission of our university, with a strong focus on access for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds, from regional and remote communities, from first-in-family circumstances.
It is why we run programs like Uni Step-Up, which helps students like Michelle Guinane, a young woman from rural NSW who found her way to ACU’s Canberra Campus and a degree in nursing and paramedicine. It is why, since 2019, our groundbreaking Student Veteran Support Program has helped ex-soldiers like Michael Addis, who served in Afghanistan before returning home to study nursing at ACU, make a successful transition from the military service to studying medicine. But we are always working to do better.
Joining the 2050 Alliance is, in part, a public commitment to that work – an acknowledgment that we want to be held to account, alongside other universities for whom equity is not a peripheral concern but a central measure of success.
Each university in this alliance brings something distinct. Our contribution is rooted in our Catholic tradition, one that takes seriously the question of what education is ultimately for – the relationship between knowledge and human flourishing, and the responsibilities that come with being a public institution in a pluralistic society.
The Accord’s agenda is not simply a technical challenge of lifting attainment numbers. It is a moral challenge about whose lives are changed by higher education, and how. That is a question ACU has been wrestling with for more than three decades.
The answers are there in the teaching and nursing students who graduate from our university and go on to fill the nation’s schools and hospitals with skilled and dedicated professionals. They are there in the work of researchers like Professor Sandy Middleton, whose nursing protocols for acute stroke care have been implemented across the world, closing the gap between evidence and clinical practice. And in the child protection research of Professor Daryl Higgins, whose team has given policymakers the most comprehensive national picture of child harm ever assembled.
These are examples of knowledge with purpose, and we have much more to contribute.
The 2050 targets will be met in the communities our campuses serve, or they will not be met at all. That is too important a challenge to face in isolation. After 35 years of going it alone, it’s time for ACU to bend the constraints of independence – and move toward deeper collaboration, and greater collective impact.
Professor Zlatko Skrbis is Vice-Chancellor of Australian Catholic University