Campbell measures Notre Dame’s impact

IT’S been a long time since Christians could be considered a majority in Australia.

Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics tracks the decline in plain terms, with the proportion of Australians identifying as affiliated with Christianity declining from 85 per cent in 1971 to just 44 per cent as of last year’s census.

At the same time, the proportion of Australians identifying as areligious has grown from single digits to more than a third of the population.

Lest it be seen as a problem with Christianity specifically, the likes of Buddhism, Islam and Hinduism continue to comprise a distinct minority of religious affiliations, with just 10 per cent of Australians adhering to other faiths.

It’s a tricky set of figures for Francis Campbell to contemplate.

Growing up Catholic in Northern Ireland, an aberration that side of the border amid The Troubles, Professor Campbell describes his faith as a constant amid the alienation of sectarian conflict, with his devotion so strong that it led him to the seminary while at university.

Politics and the public service would prove more appealing than the priesthood, though, and he joined UK prime minister Tony Blair’s office as an adviser in his late 20s.

Not long after that he would enjoy a series of promotions culminating in his appointment as UK Ambassador to the Holy See, the first Catholic to be appointed to the role since the Reformation.

He finished in that job about a decade ago, and now leads The University of Notre Dame Australia.

Its status as Australia’s only Catholic-affiliated university was clearly part of the appeal for Professor Campbell, who moved to Perth to take the job at the start of 2020.

Though the university’s nursing courses are well regarded, ranked by Times Higher Education as one of the top 300 subject course providers globally, its creation in the late 1980s was thoroughly indebted to Roman Catholicism, with a desire among its founders for private primary and secondary schools to have appropriate access to teachers who understood the church’s mission.

Professor Campbell cites the story as part of the appeal for him to leave St Mary’s University Twickenham, located in the well-heeled London suburb of Strawberry Hill, and replace Celia Hammond as vice chancellor ahead of her being elected to federal parliament.

Faith is clearly an important part of Professor Campbell’s life and identity.

It informs his approach to education, too.

The work of 18th century scholar John Henry Newman, whose conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism coincided with his role in founding Catholic University of Ireland, is a major influence, one he cites as a key inspiration in the university’s recently overhauled 2026 strategy.

It’s unlikely many other vice chancellors in Western Australia would have leaned as heavily on such texts, most likely because Notre Dame is the state’s only religiously affiliated university.

Still, with 12,000 students enrolled, it’s a tough rival to the state’s public universities.

It’s on this front that Professor Campbell prefers to measure the flow of Catholicism in the Australian community.

As he points out, about 20 per cent of Australian students are taught in Catholic schools, while the likes of St John of God Health Care perform an outsized role in operating private hospitals, not least of all in WA.

That’s why he insists closed questions probing faith specifically can be a crude measure, failing to capture the influence the Catholic Church’s mission has had on Australia.

“What I see here in Australia is a Catholic Church that’s making a huge contribution beyond its base to a broader society,” Professor Campbell told Business News.

“That’s the sort of church we’re called to be part of.”

It’s a prescient note for him to touch on.

On a personal level, Professor Campbell describes the role of religion in his life as something that broadened his world view from an early age, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s when he admits it stopped him from leaning towards “lazy” ideologies, a likely reference to the political extremism of the IRA and its various adherents.

It’s a grounding he still sees as important in his life.

“I may be 10,000 miles from home, but when I go into a church here [I’m] following something that is identical to what happens two fields away from where I was born,” he said.

“That’s followed me throughout my life as a diplomat and wherever I’ve lived.”

Public contributions and Catholicism generally are intertwined in his capacity leading Notre Dame, which has recently released an internally commissioned ACIL Allen report into the university’s social and economic return to the City of Fremantle.

That report suggests the university directly contributed $86 million in economic activity to the city in 2020, with $152 million returned to WA overall.

Operating revenue, capital spend and employment data comprise that figure.

Social contribution is a more ambiguous topic, and the measures used, which included a series of workshops and data collected from staff, spat out what it describes as a conservative estimate of $159.7 million in cultural, business, health and skills benefits.

Slippery as these topics can be to measure, Professor Campbell was not shocked at how heavily they factored into the final document.

“We do have a strong social justice dimension. We do have a strong community dimension,” he said.

“We do want to include, we want to make a difference in people’s lives, we want to reach out to communities on the margin.

“A Catholic university should never see itself as a standalone.

“It has to be inter-dependent with the communities with which it lives, but also communities that might feel marginalised or disenfranchised from education.”

There are a few significant examples of that, not least of all the university’s Broome campus, which Professor Campbell dubs an act of reconciliation.

The story behind Fremantle’s campus is naturally different.

Edward Malloy, who for 16 years was president of University of Notre Dame in Indiana, has written extensively of the university’s history, tracing its origins to the 1940s when senior figures in the Catholic Church first considered founding an affiliated university in Australia, with Sydney’s Northern Beaches the preferred location.

Competing opposition, including political paralysis in New South Wales’ state parliament and general anti-Catholic sentiment, scotched the idea, and for decades after the church focused its efforts on contemporaneous debates over private school funding.

Former footballer and Catholic education proponent Peter Tannock revived the concept in the 1980s through discussions with Leeuwin Estate founder Denis Horgan, physician Michael Quinlan and Archbishop William Foley, and, modelling it on its Indiana namesake, received ascent from state parliament and began teaching in the summer of 1992.

Fremantle was not unanimously chosen as the preferred location, with a land grant in Alkimos briefly considered.

Restoring disused buildings in Fremantle’s west end proved more appealing to both the state government and founders, though, and, taken alongside the influx of investment that preceded the America’s Cup just five years earlier, kickstarted the wave of gentrification that has since transformed a derelict port town into a distinctly cosmopolitan haunt.

The benefits to the state and city council were obvious.

Freed from needing to pay through the nose to restore dozens of largely disused, heritage-listed buildings, the City of Fremantle allowed the university to put resources towards upgrading the PJ Morris Building and Bateman’s Warehouse along Mouat Street.

ACIL Allen’s social contribution modelling, while not arriving at a specific figure, attempted to account for the heritage restoration.

That the report gestures to this work was helpful for the likes of Professor Campbell.

“It was as much for an internal audience for us to be looking at with our board, staff and students, but also for our local community,” he said.

Fortuitously if not coincidentally, the report’s findings arrived less than a year after City of Fremantle voters went to the polls and elected Hannah Fitzhardinge, a councillor from the city’s Beaconsfield ward whose campaign brief included calling for the university to pay council rates.

She’s not the first to have raised the issue. Council surveyed residents on the issue in 2012 and found nearly a fifth of residents were open to the idea of Notre Dame paying local taxes.

That it doesn’t owes to its rate-exempt status, granted as part of its memorandum of understanding with the city, which, on the question of tax, treats the private institution like the state’s public universities. Ms Fitzhardinge hasn’t spoken much of the issue publicly since being elected.

When asked, Professor Campbell seemed unperturbed by the subject, insisting the relationship between City of Fremantle and the university remains productive, particularly when it comes to overlapping strategic priorities.

“There’ll always be political debates,” he said.

“At the end of the day, there’s an appraisal and understanding of the contribution the university makes and measuring that, I think, is important for us and for others.”

Difficult as that debate might be, it’s small change compared with the at-times partisan brawls that have come to affect state and federal debates over higher education.

Most frustrating for some in the sector was the suggestion floated late last year by WA’s chief scientist, Peter Klinken, that the state’s public universities explore the possibility of amalgamation in search of economies of scale and the promise of better showings on international league tables.

Academics, however, were frequently caught offside by the previous federal government, which, under acting education minister Stuart Roberts, earned derision for vetoing Australia Research Council grants on the basis they didn’t demonstrate “value for taxpayers’ money”.

That, along with the highly contentious jobs-ready graduates reforms, may have motivated the current government’s universities accord, which is explicitly aimed at de-escalating partisanship in higher education policy in the spirit of the Hawke government’s prices and incomes accord.

Most of these arguments have not been of concern to Professor Campbell.

Notre Dame, as a private university, was never a player in the amalgamation debate.

Its performance on league tables barely warrants a mention, anyway, given it doesn’t submit to the three major surveys and is not mentioned at all on Shanghai Ranking Consultancy’s list.

As for the role of universities generally, Professor Campbell again points to the works of Newman, specifically in opposition to the Humboldtian concept of university as a place where research and education are viewed as core duties.

He cited the concept of ‘integral human development’, as outlined by Pope Paul VI in an encyclical written in the 1960s, to support his view that universities should value preparing students for employment as just one part of an education.

“There are healthy questions each age asks them, but I think if a university education is defined in too narrow a utilitarian end, I don’t think that’s healthy,” he said.

Many of these ideas are present through the University of Notre Dame’s updated strategy document.

Launched earlier this year, it set a series of ambitious targets to be achieved by 2026.

Integral human development is one area of focus and is characterised by a series of widely accepted, achievable goals, including achieving net zero emissions by 2050, enacting Reconciliation Action Plans across all campuses, and growing enrolments across Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, low socio-economic status and regional cohorts.

Other elements of the strategy present more ambitious goals for the university, including a 12.5 per cent target for international students as a proportion of the overall student body.

That would require significant work given latest reporting shows overseas students paid just $4.77 million in fees to Notre Dame last year, an exceedingly small figure in both raw and percentage terms compared with public counterparts.

Increased engagement with StudyPerth and international agents is an obvious solution.

Professor Campbell, however, volunteers a newly signed student exchange agreement with Notre Dame in Indiana as one way to top up on overseas pupils.

Referred to as the university’s global gateway network, that pathway will enable domestic students and vice versa to move between London, Jerusalem or South Bend to study without additional tuition fees.

Some of the strategy’s goals are clearly aspirational.

Though the university performs strongly on federal QILT (quality indicators for learning and teaching) surveys, finishing in fifth place nationally in the latest covering student experience, the strategy document calls for a 90 per cent approval rate by 2026.

It’s not impossible to think it might get there, given it improved on the student experience front from 74 to 80 per cent approval in 2021.

None of this is especially daunting for Professor Campbell. He was confident the university would find a way to achieve most of the strategy’s goals over the next three years.

“There will be probably areas of the strategic plan we will exceed our KPIs, there might be areas where we fall short. Wisdom tells you that,” he said.

“In terms of making decisions in the time that we did on the basis of the information we had, [not only] as a community of academic scholars but also professional staff, this was our collective view of what we could achieve and the strategic direction the university would and should go on.”