The Road
Distance and dialogue at Universities Australia’s Solutions Summit
From social licence and political intervention to truth-telling and institutional identity, Universities Australia’s 2026 Solutions Summit highlighted the widening distances – geographic, political and cultural – shaping the future of the sector.
By Dr Ant Bagshaw
"Some of the distances that need bridging are not geographic but social and political."
“Leave ego at the door. Lead with humility. Listen deeply. Use your platform for truth-telling.”
“Universities must do more to combat racism and antisemitism.”
"International student recruitment started to evolve as a business... on the back of strategy."
"The social and political distances between universities, governments and sections of the public are harder to quantify though no less real."
If you know anything about Australia, you know that it is vast. The distance from Perth on the continent’s west coast to Brisbane on the east is more than a thousand kilometres further than from London to Moscow. Geography shapes culture, politics and infrastructure in profound ways, and it shapes higher education too.
Digital connection has bridged many divides. Research collaborations stretch across continents; students attend lectures from their bedrooms; policy debates unfold in real time online. And yet, in a country where universities are separated by thousands of kilometres, physical convening still carries weight.
The 2026 Solutions Summit, convened by Universities Australia – the representative body for public universities – is not simply another conference in an already crowded calendar. It is one of the rare moments when the leaders of Australia’s universities, alongside policymakers, business representatives and civil society voices, are physically in the same room.
In a period of heightened scrutiny and political pressure, that proximity matters.
A meeting place, then and now
Long before it became the planned capital of a modern nation, the Canberra region was an important meeting place for Indigenous Australians and home to the Ngunnawal people, recognised as the traditional custodians of the land. It was a site of gathering, exchange and negotiation. There is symbolism in the higher education sector assembling here.
Australian universities are navigating a moment of negotiation – about funding, about regulation, about trust, and about their place in the national story. The dialogue that takes place when people gather matters. Though, as this year’s Summit made clear, some of the distances that need bridging are not geographic but social and political.
The sector is facing sustained scrutiny. Political rhetoric has sharpened. Media attention has intensified. Public expectations have shifted. In that context, conversation cannot be performative. It must be substantive.
A case of déjà vu
At last year’s gathering, the dominant theme was social licence. This year, the phrase echoed again through plenary sessions and corridor conversations.
There remains a serious – and now seemingly entrenched – concern in parts of the political class that higher education has drifted from its core purpose. The nostalgic pull towards some imagined era when universities were universally admired by their political paymasters is palpable. The implication is clear: the sector must rebuild trust.
Social licence is an uncomfortable concept for universities. It implies conditionality – permission granted by society, and potentially withdrawn. Institutions that prize autonomy and academic freedom do not instinctively reach for language that frames their legitimacy as revocable. Yet the debate cannot be wished away.
For me, the most compelling contribution to this discussion came not from a policy insider but from Wayne Denning, an Indigenous Birri and Guugu Yimidhirr man and founder of a creative agency. Through storytelling – rather than slides dense with metrics or vacuous platitudes about excellence – he demonstrated the power of authenticity.
His message was simple, and therefore powerful. Leave ego at the door. Lead with humility. Listen deeply. Use your platform for truth-telling.
There was a clarity to his argument that is too often absent from institutional communications, which can drift towards the overly polished and defensively curated. Denning was not arguing for better marketing. He was arguing for credibility – and credibility rests on honesty.
The difficulty of truth
Truth-telling can feel particularly exposing for university leaders. The week before the conference, the Australian Human Rights Commission revealed results from a survey of 76,000 students and staff across Australian universities. Seventy percent of respondents reported experiencing indirect racism; fifteen percent reported direct interpersonal racism at university. These figures are sobering.
Campuses in which members of the community feel unsafe, or experience psychological and physical harm, stand in sharp tension with universities’ self-image as inclusive spaces of opportunity and inquiry. If social license rests on trust, then confronting such realities is not optional.
The seemingly simple questions therefore become unavoidable. Why doesn’t the sector communicate with greater openness and humility? Why are campuses not consistently places where everyone feels safe? To ask these questions is to expose the complexity beneath them.
Universities are large, diverse communities. They must balance academic freedom and freedom of expression with the harms that can arise from words and behaviours. They are places where ideas are explored, contested and sometimes rejected. That process of formation is inherently uncomfortable.
But the sector has not consistently demonstrated its ability to navigate these tensions with clarity and confidence – particularly under the relentless scrutiny of traditional media, social media, political attention and the expectations of fee-paying students. Bridging these gaps requires more than carefully drafted statements. It requires institutional courage.
Mind the political gap
If internal reform is one pressure point, external intervention is another. The space for autonomous universities to generate their own solutions appears to be narrowing. In his address to the conference, the federal Minister for Education, Jason Clare, spoke of the increasing influence that would come from his proposed Australian Tertiary Education Commission – a body intended to provide stronger system-level oversight.
The language was telling. Out with a model in which universities shape their strategies largely independently; in with a more centrally designed system that encourages – or enforces – differentiation across the sector.
The proposed Commission was not the only signal of interventionist intent. The Minister also referenced reviews into academics’ teaching standards and qualifications, scrutiny of the costs of delivering education, and the new national student complaints body. He was explicit that universities must do more to combat racism and antisemitism.
The antisemitism point was reinforced, forcefully, by the opposition’s education spokesperson. The tone was sharper. Universities were accused of hiding, of failing to act. In rhetoric that many in the room would have considered inflammatory, leaders were branded “Quislings” – an accusation implying complicity rather than resistance.
The contrast between that language and the lived reality of university leaders working to protect students and staff was stark. Yet the message was clear: political patience is thin.
The challenges come from across the political spectrum. In one sense, that is a sign of a sector that has not aligned itself too closely to a single party. But the absence of consistent advocates is a structural vulnerability. Universities require adequate funding and proportionate regulation as preconditions for delivering their missions. When both are in flux, uncertainty grows.
This is another kind of distance: the widening gap between institutional self-understanding and political narrative.
Who participates in the debate?
During a coffee break, a senior university colleague remarked that he “didn’t want to get all Marxist, but isn’t the problem that the only people here are the universities’ political class?”. It was a pointed observation.
With tickets priced at over AUD$2,000 – before flights and accommodation – attendance is inevitably restricted. The room is filled with vice-chancellors, senior executives, policymakers and corporate partners. Important voices, certainly. But not the whole university.
My colleague argued that a fuller representation of “the university” would include a broader range of academic and professional staff. Students, too, might add authenticity to the debate. While it is unrealistic to expect everyone to participate, there could be more deliberate space for staff and student representative bodies, including unions.
The composition of the room shapes the conversation that unfolds within it. I wrote last year that when chancellors and vice-chancellors gather, we must be honest about the inherent tension in their position. They are required to act in the interests of their institution. They are not required – or incentivised – to act in the interests of the sector as a whole. Indeed, where sector-wide compromise might diminish their institution’s competitive position, there can be significant personal consequences.
That tension remains central. There is too little independent research into higher education in Australia. Specialist media is shrinking. Think tanks focused on universities are scarce. Voices beyond the executive tier are often marginalised. Having taken the starring role in public debate, vice-chancellors have limited structural incentive to share the stage – even if doing so might enrich the conversation for the greater good.
If dialogue is to bridge distance, it must also broaden participation.
The starring role
Australia is making incremental progress towards a more coherent system-level architecture, albeit one currently weighted towards regulation rather than strategic coordination. In the meantime, leaders leave Canberra with the immediate task of strengthening their institution’s standing within their own communities.
Denning offered a useful compass for that work. Ask first: why do we exist? Then: whom do we serve? And finally: what distinctive value do we create? Express the answer in one sentence. Make it the institutional North Star.
It is a deceptively demanding exercise. It requires stripping away jargon and grounding institutional identity in human benefit. It requires humility, acknowledging that universities exist not for themselves but for the communities they serve.
In a country defined by distance, the act of coming together remains powerful. But if the Solutions Summit is to be more than an annual ritual, it must bridge more than kilometres. The physical distances between Perth and Brisbane are measurable. The social and political distances between universities, governments and sections of the public are harder to quantify though no less real.
If social licence is to be rebuilt or reaffirmed, it will not be secured through conference speeches alone. It will require broader participation, greater openness to criticism, and a willingness to confront uncomfortable truths. Dialogue, in other words, must extend beyond the conference centre walls.