http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,24897,22013391-12332,00.html
Hilmer looks beyond the
pain
Catherine Armitage, Higher education editor
July 04, 2007
A YEAR into his job as vice-chancellor of the University of NSW,
Fred Hilmer is looking forward to a $700 million program of capital
works using innovative financing methods, and back at the worst day
of his working life to date.
He is a former chief executive of listed newspaper group Fairfax
Media and a veteran of the cutthroat competitive world of
international management consultancy. Yet the news of UNSW Asia's
collapse was the hardest Professor Hilmer has had to handle.
His trip to Singapore to bear the bad tidings to students and staff
in late May was "really awful" and "emotionally very difficult", he
said in an interview in his office at the Kensington campus this
week.
The decision to abandon a proposed $200 million-plus greenfields
campus after projections for enrolments turned out to be wildly
optimistic left UNSW with $17.5million in losses and 106 staff and
148 students without a university.
"I felt I had to explain it myself. I fronted the students and the
staff. That was the worst day of my working life," Professor Hilmer
said. "People were crying, it was terrible, it was like a
funeral."
Adding to the upset was his belief he had a workable plan for the
campus's future, which was rejected at the 11th hour by the
Economic Development Board of Singapore.
UNSW's rescue proposal called for a significant but "not
unreasonable" subsidy from the EDB, Professor Hilmer said, but it
"didn't find the plan was attractive enough to support".
"It was basically for a smaller, slower start-up with less
research, certainly in the early years," he said. "We could have
got something a little more like Monash in Malaysia, which is much
more closely integrated with this campus. But it was not going to
be the fourth great university in Singapore."
Professor Hilmer said there were no signs that UNSW's standing
among prospective students had suffered. "There is nothing in our
enrolment figures in next semester or next year that gives me any
cause for concern. The reality is, to students who want to come
here, it is irrelevant."
The students from UNSW Asia were "now largely taken care of and we
are working through the staff issues", Professor Hilmer said.
"The only thing that got me through it was, I thought that if I
don't do it this year, if it's next year, with a larger number of
staff and a larger number of students, it would have been an almost
impossible egg to unscramble," Professor Hilmer said.
On the upside, he has plans for a more rounded education for UNSW's
international students and new ways to pay for a $700million
building program during the next five years or so.
The key to successful international operations was close
integration of core domestic activities, he said. To this end UNSW
planned to offer overseas students studying in Australia work
experience in their home markets as part of their degrees, as it
already does in a program for domestic students.
It will take "some years" to put in place, Professor Hilmer
admitted, but "our students could get work in Hong Kong, Singapore
or Malaysia. We will be using our alumni and academic network to
seek co-operative strategies so students' experience will be
international.
Meanwhile, a financing method he learned during a visit to leading
US universities last year will pay for a new $120million cancer
centre.
Frank Lowy, executive chairman and co-founder of Westfield, has
made the largest philanthropic gift, worth $10 million, in the
university's history to the centre, and government funding and the
university's capital bring the total available to $70
million.
To pay for the remaining $50million, the university is setting up a
sinking fund of $10million to be quarantined and invested until it
reaches $50million.
Universities can use the advantage that they are not "under the
gun" from shareholders, as commercial ventures are, to take a
long-term investing stance, Professor Hilmer explained.
"You have to use the fact that you don't have urgency to minimise
the risk," he said.
He hoped the financing method might be useful to leverage any
payments from the Higher Education Endowment Fund as the university
embarks on a renewal program to update its ageing capital
infrastructure.
