‘Creative, energetic’ Victoria University of Wellington lures new Vice-Chancellor

After an exhausting international search, Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington has appointed a successor to Grant Guilford, who retired as vice chancellor after eight years.

Internationally renowned scholar Professor Nic Smith will trade the golden sands of Queensland, where he works as a cheerleader at the state’s technical university, for the slightly less glamorous and imported sands of Oriental Bay.

But it wasn’t Wellington’s scale, pace, or climate that drew him here. Rather, it was the chance to come to this university in particular – one that was “creative and energetic and diverse”.

Smith, who won’t start his tenure in Wellington until mid-January, has compiled an impressive, if not slightly intimidating, list of academic credentials.

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He was Professor of Computational Physiology at Oxford before becoming Head of Biomedical Engineering at King’s College London, then returned to New Zealand to become Head of Engineering at the University of Auckland.

Victoria University is the capital’s second largest employer. In the past two years, a controversial restructuring used to be demolished after recoil of staff and students and an internal report showed more than half of staff felt stressed, fatigued and anxious.

A later investigation showed that the staff little trust in senior leadersand just four months later, the emotional toll of the pandemic was only exacerbated by the Parliament occupation ahead of the Pipitea campus.

“The staff have done extraordinary things at this university,” Smith said. “In many cases they have taken on extra tasks, either because colleagues have been out with Covid […] or because we’ve had to expand the way things are delivered online and in person.”

Smith has been meeting with staff and students in recent days and learned that “huge amounts of money were underway”. On top of the uncertainty of Covid, it was wearing people down.

“If you hold onto everything, and everything is important, you run the risk that nothing is important.”

National, mental health of students has been in heavy weather, with universities”noticing a sustained and marked increase in those reporting mental health problems“.

“I think a lot of good work has been done here, but I don’t think for a moment that that work is finished,” Smith said. The next decade of young New Zealanders would have to deal with the effects of disrupted education, isolation and stress and the university had to be prepared to support them.

Rising cost of living were hitting students hard and the university felt the squeeze too. “The revenues used to provide for [assistance for students] is decreasing in real terms.”

The absence of international students – a major source of income – was “felt acutely”.

“Right now we are also limited by what the immigration institutions are,” Smith said. “And we’re kind of a hostage to the fortune in terms of what that looks like.”

Long-term, Smith wanted to lead a university that was “a gateway to an increasingly connected but also increasingly challenging world”.

“One that not only delivers disciplinary training, but also provides the kind of lifelong learning skills of resilience that I believe this generation will face.”