To teach and to be an education leader
[ UniNews Vol. 13, No. 23
13 - 27 December 2004 ]
As the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Kwong Lee Dow, prepares to retire in January 2005, Senior Media Adviser Christina Buckridge talks to him about his leadership role in Australian education and his long career with the University.
No one needed to tell Kwong Lee Dow that he should look for a career in education. He had three very convincing role models his mother and two of her sisters were teachers.
But Professor Lee Dows career has touched all levels of education. After completing a science degree, he trained as a secondary teacher but found himself, 25 years later, Dean of Education at Melbourne, responsible for teacher training from early childhood through to secondary.
During his almost half-century association with the University he first came here as a student in 1956 he has seen the University change significantly from a small campus with fewer than 10,000 students to a campus with high-quality infrastructure to support around 40,000 students.
After Alan Gilberts resignation in 2003, Professor Lee Dow agreed to put off his retirement to lead the University in 2004 a year that has been, perhaps, one of the most critical as the higher education sector responded to Education Minister Brendan Nelsons wide-ranging reforms.
He sees the University response through Access Melbourne as one of the most important achievements this year. Although our equity profile has not worsened over the years we have not been able to improve it, he points out. This is a chance to make a step change, to open the University up to 1000 students each year who will have opportunities they otherwise might not have had, with 200 of them receiving scholarships.
Professor Lee Dow believes that getting the Nelson reforms through was very important for Australia as a whole. We were grappling with exactly these same issues during the West review in 1997-98 and, although they were well identified and articulated, there wasnt the follow-up for implementation that there has been with the Nelson reforms.
Kwong Lee Dow is probably one of the best known figures in education in Victoria with his signature appearing on HSC and VCE results over two generations. For both the Victorian and Commonwealth governments, he has led development of curriculum, assessment and standards.
Most recently he chaired the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority. In 1997, he had oversight of the radical reform of the Year 12 curriculum and assessment, initiated by Victorian Education Minister Phil Gude, which led to a more inclusive VCE.
Reflecting on issues surrounding the Faculty of Land and Food Resources, he says his enduring memory is that there are parts of rural Australia that dont enjoy the extent of facilities and the ease of access to post-school education that the rest of us do. Its important to enable growth and development of the institutions which exist in regional Australia which might mean a very high priority is to change the nature of those institutions, to make them more relevant to the opportunities.
Also, the perspective of people who are looking at the whole needs of a region wont necessarily be the same as that of a faculty which is running within one discipline area from an institution a long way away, he said.
Professor Lee Dow doesnt see anything incongruous about his passion for education and the need to work in a businesslike manner. Admitting it is not always easy to marry the two, he points out that its the nature of so many management positions in education whether as a school principal or in a university such as this. You have to be pragmatic, to be a realist.
Asked by a journalist what he planned to do when he steps down as Vice-Chancellor on 7 January 2005, Professor Lee Dow promptly answered rest!, and went on to point out that he has taken on many jobs over a very long period of time at which you go very hard all the time.
But anyone who knows Kwong Lee Dow wont expect him to rest for long and he will remain an active participant in education affairs though his appointment by Minister Nelson to the new National Institute for Quality Teaching and School Leadership, of which he is deputy chair. And he will consider other projects as they come along.
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