Southern Cross University (SCU) has had a very challenging last four years.

Go back to March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic was beginning, SCU announced an income shortfall of $58 million over two years describing the situation as an 'economic crisis'.

COVID-19 was the catalyst for SCU to start to think differently and reinvent how it operates in a new world.

Then February 2022 provided SCU with an opportunity to not only help the community when it desperately needed but also provide a look at what SCU Lismore could be like in the future.

The Lismore caught up with Vice-Chancellor Tyrone Carlin and asked what that future looks like for Southern Cross University and especially the Lismore campus now life is settling down two years on from any disaster.

"Our university is a much larger university than it was back in the time of the early 90s and early 2000s. But our students are distributed quite differently to that time bearing in mind that Coffs Harbour has been a part of our university story ever since inception but obviously Lismore is usually regarded as the birthplace.

"Students are distributed different ways. Half of them at any one time are tapping into things online and that necessarily means that the life of the campus is different.

"When this university was founded It had incredibly limited capabilities in terms of research. Over the course of the last three decades but with a really particular and emphatic growth over the last decade or so, the university invested very, very heavily in building up research capability and probably the single most significant, block of contribution to that core work at the university occurs here at this campus.

"One of the things that I think a lot of people in the community don't necessarily realise, because a lot of this work is going on in laboratories and things that they can't necessarily observe, is just how much world-class science and indeed social science and health research is taking place here on the Lismore campus. Because we've got the land, the space and all of the sort of beauty and amenities of Lismore, this really is our absolute research hub.

"This is where we've got the vast majority of our group of PhD students. This is where we've got a very substantial concentration of our researchers. This is where we've got a very substantial concentration of research infrastructure and this is also where we've got two very substantial and nationally significant commercial research laboratories that do work for industries like farming, pharmaceuticals, the food industry and so on.

"So research is a big, big part of our future."

Mr Carlin explained that universities have a dual obligation under the regulatory framework that exists in Australia to do two core things. One is education and the other is research. You cannot be a university in Australia unless you are meeting certain standards, and they're quite rigorous standards in relation to both education and research.

"So when you see the university establishing itself on an upward trajectory into the top 600 or so institutions, where we're now sitting, a lot of that is driven by the work that we're doing in research and a lot of that is happening at Lismore, and that will continue to be the case. This is the epicentre of a lot of that work.

"More broadly than that, because the campus was designed in an era where the dominant mode of interaction with students was face-to-face and the dominant place where that face-to-face activity was occurring was Lismore, and that, of course, has all changed.

"We've been in a position to be very thoughtful about the way that we maximise and really take the highest and best use of some of the facilities that were traditionally university facilities but are no longer so. That's why, for example, we've got that very deep sort of integration of Trinity Catholic College onto the campus. That's why, when the floods hit and a lot of the Lismore TAFE facilities were very, very badly damaged, we were able to get their creative arts programs up and running very quickly here and use a lot of kit that we already had in place. It's why we've got the Living School here thriving. It's why we've got GPs, mental health services, and other allied health services operating in and around our clinic. It's why we've got the ambulance station still operating at our campus.

"Our campus planning process, very much conceives of this campus as an integrated learning and health hub, but particularly an educational hub. That vibrancy through that sort of shared use approach is something that is very much in evidence when you come to the campus these days.

"Some people say to me, what's the university's intention? Is Lismore really important?

"Yes, it's our birthplace, it is the absolute beating heart of that core element of our persona and indeed, I'm pleased to be able to tell you that for the first time in a lot of years, this year we have grown the number of students who have commenced their programs here at Lismore. So we're even getting students coming back in larger numbers. Not hugely larger numbers but seeing that growth come back to this campus is also pleasing.

A breaking piece of news that will please those interested in veterinary medicine was announced by Mr Carlin.

"We're bringing new programs that we hope will attract additional students to Lismore. Importantly, one of those in the near term is veterinary medicine. It will only be the eighth program in Australia that produces accredited veterinarians and that will be happening here on the Lismore campus. Again, because we've got the capacity to have all of the necessary laboratory animal handling and other facilities that you need for a high-quality program of that ilk.

With Trinity and the Living School now utilising SCU's facilities, do you feel there will be a long-term commitment to keep SCU as an educational hub in Lismore?

"We, have a deep belief that there is enormous virtue in that model and everything that we have done in interacting with Trinity and the Living School has been reflective of that.

"Ultimately, the governing bodies that oversee, respectively, Trinity and the Living School will have to make up their own minds about where they see themselves as being best situated. We're very hopeful that as they reflect on that, they can see a huge ongoing upside in being part of this precinct. If for no other reason than there is a virtue of a cross-organisational educational community, and it obviates the requirement that would otherwise arise to replicate very expensive infrastructure, like swimming pools and gyms and basketball courts and specialist science laboratories and all those sorts of things, road networks and everything else, which we can quite ably share and as you've seen we're enormously happy to share.

If that commitment was there, would that mean a redesign of the Lismore campus?

"There's been a lot of thought that has gone into that. We will be releasing the product of that thinking in the guise of a master plan for the precinct in the near future. I think I've got a time booked in with the university community over the next 4 to 6 weeks to really begin sharing that. When we do that, I dare say that it will demonstrate that the logic of your question is very sound.

"We've been working on this and working on it collaboratively with a range of other partners because we did a whole series of things in a very agile way post-flood. But we knew when we were doing that, or at least we knew in the early days after we began doing that, that in due course what we would need to do is take a step back and do a really careful process of reflection and planning. We've been working hard on that over the last sort of 12 to 18 months and that will come into the public gaze soon.

How much land has the university got at its disposal?

"The campus proper is a very expansive site in its own right. It comprises basically the entirety of this very, very beautiful valley in which we are situated. There there is a very substantial amount of, as yet, undeveloped, unutilised land on the campus proper site.

"That is one of the reasons why when we were reflecting on the Crawford site we realised that if it crystallised into that vision for the kind of housing that we know is just so desperately needed here that would in no way curtail the aspirations or capacity of the university to do all of the things that we foresee that we may wish to do. We've got huge optionality on the existing campus site.

People talk about SCU's heyday back in the 80s and 90's, do you see the campus reaching those or greater heights again?

"I would say that the university is always changing and always moving forward, and in terms of the national and global stamping of the university today and its overall scale, it is a much, much more substantial undertaking today than it was at the foundation here. If we can calibrate that, in the early days here you were talking about a student population in the sort of 3 to 5000 range and they were a very visible population because they were on this campus. Today, the university is approaching closer to 20,000 students. That means the number of people that we employ is very substantially enlarged set against the cohort of people that we employed in the earlier times and it means that the reach of the institution is wider.

"One of the reasons that you have had such substantial changes in the populations of students seeking places at institutions like this is because the Commonwealth has radically changed funding arrangements for universities over the last couple of decades. I'll just explain a little about what I mean about that.

"Back in the times that you've referred to, universities were funded on a very strict quota basis and the number of places available across the sector as a whole was small relative to the demand for those places. The system was managed as such. In the early millennium period, the Commonwealth changed its approach and introduced something called the 'demand-driven' funding system. When the demand-driven funding system was enacted, what it literally meant was that any institution could, in a practical sense, with some very, very small limitations on things like medical training places, any institution could offer as many places as it wanted.

"When that occurred, what happened was there was an explosive growth in the availability of places across the sector and that imbalance between supply and demand changed quite radically. A number of institutions, particularly metropolitan-based institutions, in effect grew hugely. So, in that period of time, there are a number of universities across Australia that grew their enrolments by more than Southern Crosses' total enrolments. So, the dynamics of where a place might be available and who might be seeking a place at a particular institution are radically different today than they were in the era that people often hark back to.

"However, what is interesting, is that the Commonwealth in the universities accord final report, and certainly the panel are starting to adopt this language of 'system-based planning' again. The outworking of the logic that I've explained to you has been that there has been a drawing of students out of the regions into the cities. And there has also been the creation of institutions that are at scale that would have been frankly, wholly unimaginable a generation ago. Now you're talking about institutions like Monash, for example, that have 80 to 85,000 students enrolled. Places like Sydney in the 70,000 range. These are just mega, they are just unimaginably large.

"One of the things that policymakers have really started to reflect on, is if they are to provide an envelope for further growth in higher education in Australia, such that we can get greater access and participation to higher education than we've ever had before. There is an operative question as to where that growth might take place. I think a lot of the policymakers have realised that it may not be in the country's interests to allow some of the existing mega institutions that are sitting in the 80 to 85,000 range to suddenly, over a period of a decade or two, become 150 or 160,000 institutions.

"One way that the government could attend to that could be to be quite purposeful in allocating more of those growth places specifically to institutions like Southern Cross University and specifically to places like Lismore. That is the open discussion that is occurring across the university sector at the moment and within government.

"To tie a bow around that, the underlying circumstances that created the conditions in which you saw those large concentrations of students at the Lismore campus, many of whom were not northern rivers people by origin, but came out of the cities. Those conditions disappeared, over an important period of time and have not yet returned.

"During that period of time, though, the university has evolved and adapted in the way that we sort of traversed earlier on and of course, created new campuses, including, notably our Gold Coast campus. But as we look to the future, what will be really important, is the decisions that the Commonwealth makes in relation to where it wants to put those growth places, and indeed the kinds of programs that it wants those growth places to be associated with. Much will turn on the nature of those decisions which I think we will start to see crystallising, or at least the beginnings of those, in coming years.

"In the meantime, we're building more and more research capacity. We've been attracting a greater number of students to the university and as I said one of the really great things this year is we've, finally looked at it and said, wow, we've

actually got a larger cohort of commencing undergraduate students at the Lismore campus this year than we had last year and I'm hoping we can repeat that again and again and again. Because for us, that's a great news story and we understand the significance of that to Lismore and its ongoing vitality.

"We are bullish on Lismore. We are optimists about Lismore, but we're also realists in that the world in which we're working is quite a different world to the world that existed at the time of the inception of the university 30 years ago."