Challenges facing management education in Australia: Presentation at 2010 launch of ANZAM HOD network

The environment for global management education is rapidly changing and yet, universities have derived enormous strength from resisting the demands of environmental change. Fashions and fads rightly passed us by as we had the luxury of looking beyond or through turbulence. But that was when we had the freedom and the time to sit and observe, knowing we were supported by government funding, academic tenure, and an abundance of gifted students desperate to get into university. All that is changing and we will have fight for relevance, for students, for staff, on a global scale at a time when our resources and our revenue contribution gets stretched even further across institutions. The current generation of academic managers, have experienced a period of steady growth, and while we've experienced turbulence, we've come through it in fairly good shape. The problem now is where the next generation of academics is going to come from, and whether they will have the necessary global exposure, innovative mind set and cultural diversity to be capable stewards of management education in Australia.