Getting to Know Professor Peter Høj

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Tags: summer-2012

In his first interview since taking on the role as UQ’s Vice-Chancellor, Professor Peter Høj opens up to Contact about his thoughts, aspirations and challenges.

Vice-Chancellor, Professor Peter Høj

CONTACT: Professor Peter Høj, what drew you to Australia in the first place, and to Queensland?

Professor Peter Høj: I love Australia. I’m a Dane who has lived here for 25 years now. I’ve lived in various states, but everybody told me that the weather’s great up here in Queensland – as a keen bike rider that is a great plus. The people are relaxed but serious about achieving, but first and foremost UQ is a globally ranked university. Whatever ranking you look at, it’s well inside the top 100 universities and that’s just such a privilege and attraction. There are also wonderful facilities for domestic and international students as well as great staff. It’s the whole package that attracted me to Queensland.

C: You’ve worked extensively in academia and industry. What does that bring to your leadership style?

PH: You’re absolutely right and I’ve also worked in government. I was a senior official in the government, running the Australian Research Council, reporting to two cabinet ministers. So I think I’ve now learned how people think in the three important domains that a modern university has to understand.

Through my experience, I believe we can deliver better value for our stakeholders. I believe a successful university is a university that creates win-win situations. A successful university understands that decision-making has to happen on realistic timeframes not on archaeological timeframes – that’s what the business world gives to you.

It also gives you the discipline to look very hard at where you can best spend your funds. I think we can introduce a degree of efficiency so even higher proportions of our funding can go towards our core academic goals of great teaching and learning outcomes, great student experience and great research. This is the discipline I think I’ve been given through my multi-faceted career.

C: What do you think will be critical alternative sources of funding in the future?

PH: I think as we look forward, universities have to create a relevance and a quality that underpins that relevance. So it will be the preferred choice for organisations, government and business to invest in our university, when they have defined a research need or a personnel need they have to fulfill. That will be the way they should go.
To achieve that situation, you’ve got to be globally connected. My ambition is that The University of Queensland will measure up as Australia’s most globally connected university.
With that will follow the contacts that will make investment more and more likely, so we’ll get even more funded chairs from abroad. We’ve just recently had two chairs in Geosciences and Geomicrobiology funded by Vale and I’m sure that is because we’ve been connected to Latin America for a long, long time. We need to absolutely expand that approach. That’s where I think the future funding will come from.

C: We’re very lucky in that we have more than 200,000 alumni in more than 150 countries around the world. What sort of roles do you see alumni playing for the University?

PH: Alumni play a multitude of roles, but I actually think one of the most underrated is what they do to our reputation by simply doing really well, doing a really good job. So through their process of obtaining personal and professional success, they brand us a top-quality, enviable destination for others to study and get their qualifications. That’s the number one thing in my view.
Number two is how they talk about their experience at UQ. If you have 200,000 people out there sitting on a bus, sitting in a plane, sitting in a theatre, saying “Wow, this reminds me of UQ because it’s good”, that’s the number one thing they can do.

Of course, because we’ve grounded them really well and prepared them as a complete employee or a complete entrepreneur, the chance is that they will also do so well that there’s a little bit left in the kitty. Once they’ve looked after their families and done their hobbies, they might also assist their alma mater by making a financial contribution towards the University. Because every time our alumni assist us with financial support, we will put it to good use, our global rankings will improve, and their CV looks better.

C: Do you have a core message to our alumni?

PH: The core message is firstly one of thank you – all our alumni are an underpinning element of why we’re as good as we are now. Secondly, we’re very proud of you. We hope you’re proud of us; and if you are, help us make you even prouder by helping us become even better. Such assistance can be given through a multitude of actions.

C: Do you have some key aspirations or objectives for the next couple of months?

PH: In the next couple of months the first thing I have to do is actually understand how this place works, understand what all the very good people here have done, and make sure I don’t change something that works really well. Then, with a different set of eyes, I’ll have to find things that perhaps we can do better. And they’re the things I’ll work on with my colleagues to implement – not in a rush, but in a determined and strategic manner.

After that, I think we’ll all get to understand each other so well that you will see a UQ that will be turbo-charged, and something we can all be even prouder of!

Postscript:

Contact also asked Professor Høj if he’d sampled any Queensland wines:

PH: Well, I’ve done that for many years. I used to be Managing Director of the Australian Wine Research Institute. I think there’s some good potential there and I’ll certainly be sampling some more!

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