SCOTT Bowman looks out of his office window as Mount Archer disappears in a shroud of mist and cloud. He grabs his iPad, checks the weather forecast again, then, still disbelieving, pores over aviation charts and topographical maps. He knows the 20-minute, 100km flight south to Gladstone well, and reckons any rain will be patchy. He can fly around it, if need be.
But the Bureau of Meteorology is not as upbeat. Showers tending to heavy rain are predicted.
As it turns out the BOM is spot on. It pours, all day and all night, but a prolonged deluge is not enough to dampen Bowman's spirits. He's been in the job as vice-chancellor of Central Queensland University for nearly two years, and is due in Gladstone today as part of his "I'm All Ears" tour. It's an in-joke about his most prominent feature, but more importantly a nod to his personal style as he goes about reforming the fortunes of the 10-campus university, six of which are sprawled across Queensland, from Mackay in the north, to Noosa in the south and Emerald in the west.
As Bowman likes to tell it, CQU covers an area three times the size of Victoria or twice the size of Britain. Add four metropolitan campuses - in Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Sydney and Melbourne - to the regional Queensland locations, and it's not a geographically easy patch to manage.
As such, his preferred mode of transport is a Jabiru J230C - a four-stroke, 3000CC single-engine tin can. He took up flying gliders as a 17-year-old and has owned a series of planes, including death-defying ultra-lights.
But in some ways distance is the least of his problems.
Having arrived in Rockhampton in August 2009, Bowman was well aware there were a few issues with CQU, but just how significant he was about to find out. Two weeks earlier, the Queensland Treasury Corporation had handed over a 200-page report into the university's operations, which revealed in gory, clinical detail an institution about to go broke. It painted a picture of plummeting international enrolments, stagnant domestic enrolments, dilapidated infrastructure, low staff morale, and insufficient cash in the bank to keep it viable beyond 2011. Topped off with a cringe-worthy reputation, the talk was of if - or when - CQU would finally shut up shop.
Bowman had chucked in a senior position at the esteemed James Cook University, up the road in Cairns, to take on CQU because, as he says, he's "up for a challenge". "I can't see the point of taking on a successful, fully functional university," he says, apparently without irony. "They have everything they want, so anything you do as VC is peripheral."
A radiographer by training, Bowman had the equivalent of a TAFE diploma and was teaching in a medical education centre in Britain when it merged with a university. Suddenly, he was officially an academic.
Higher education trades on status, reputation and old school tie networks. Where you studied and with whom you researched are the currency on which careers are forged. On Bowman's CV there is no prestigious sandstone. His masters in politics and government is from City Polytechnic, later known as London Guildhall University, his PhD comes from the British online education broker, Open Universities, and his MBA is from the University of the Sunshine Coast.
"I did once go to Oxford University. After I qualified as a radiographer, I couldn't get work so I took a job delivering rubber goods. I dropped off some piping there once," he deadpans.
AS Bowman flies from one campus to the next, selling his vision of renewal and reform, far below him is ample evidence of the biggest mining boom in Queensland's history.
The small regional communities of the Capricorn Coast are being transformed as wave after wave of mine workers are disgorged from commercial flights, wearing their company polo shirts, beards and Blundstones.
Central Queensland's workforce is expected to expand by 600,000 over the next few years. And Bowman knows that booms need skilled workers and quickly growing communities need nurses, teachers, hospitality workers, and health professionals.
In an area with one of the lowest university participation rates in the country, Bowman is doggedly focused on increasing domestic student enrolments. In just two years he's already overseen a jump of 9 per cent - not huge, but a positive trend given the university handed back 1000 student places to the federal government in the two years before he took over. Numbers are back up around 6300, but Bowman's hoping for 10,000 within a couple of years and 17,000 within 10.
"It sounds ambitious but we have two things going for us. One is low participation rates, so if we work with our communities and schools we can improve that and increase the size of the potential market," he says. "Two, we only have 50 per cent of the market share. The rest of the students who go to uni head off elsewhere, mainly to Brisbane. We think we can close that."
Bowman's also adding courses to attract students who might otherwise head off to greener pastures, including law, paramedics and medical imaging. And he's spending millions on new buildings, equipment and student accommodation turning what were once study centres into full campuses.
For the record, he says the Queensland Treasury Corporation got it wrong and fundamentally misread CQU's finances - there is and always was plenty of money in the bank - hence his investment in infrastructure.
At the same time, Bowman is lobbying hard for CQU to become a dual-sector university by merging with the local TAFE institute. It would provide a ready-made network of people, skills and, importantly, infrastructure. It would also provide pathways between vocational and higher education for students.
"We want to be a university which celebrates someone getting a diploma in hairdressing as much as we celebrate someone getting a PhD," he says.
But his grand plan needs state government approval and he is agitated with the lack of action. A spokesman for the Queensland Education Minister Cameron Dick says the project has merit and will be fully considered in due course. But Bowman is sick of waiting and has a strategy to go it alone by registering as a training organisation, or acquiring one.
FOR many years, CQU was an anomaly among Australian universities. Some might even say an embarrassment.
From humble beginnings in 1961, the institution morphed through several names and identities before emerging as a fully fledged university in 1994. Fully fledged, but different.
CQU was Australia's only public-private hybrid university. The public university ran the domestic regional campuses, while a controlled entity, Campus Management Services, ran and profited from metropolitan campuses in city office blocks designed and customised entirely for the international student market.
"They were pioneers in developing the overseas student market. They were famous initially, and then infamous later on," says Bob Birrell, a demographer from Monash University who has closely followed the travails of Australia's international student industry over many years.
With campuses already in place in Sydney and Melbourne, CQU was perfectly placed in 2001 to exploit the Howard government's new rules linking education to permanent migration. On graduation international students could apply for residency without having to leave the country. They received additional points for having an Australian qualification and relevant work experience was waived.
CQU poured thousands of students through their two-year courses. At its peak in 2006, CQU had nearly 14,000 international students, outnumbering the 11,400 domestic students in regional Queensland. The money was rolling in. That year, then CQU vice-chancellor John Rickard was among the highest paid in the land, with a salary of nearly $700,000.
"CQU was seen as a degree mill by the rest of the higher education sector," says Birrell.
THEN it all came crashing down.
CQU had been recruiting heavily from India. Unlike other universities, it had been targeting potential students from the far northern province of Punjab, bordering Pakistan and Kashmir.
"Those students weren't interested in education, but in cheap prices and residency," Birrell says.
But by 2005, overseas students had realised there were cheaper and easier routes to permanent residency, particularly vocational courses in hairdressing and cookery. And, in 2007, CQU hit the headlines when 60 students in Melbourne went on a hunger strike, claiming they were being exploited as cash cows; forced to pay thousands of dollars extra to complete their degrees after failing exams that, they said, tested them on material they had not been taught.
"The irony was that CQU was trying to act with some integrity by not just passing everyone," Birrell says. But the drama drew mainstream media attention to the fact that customised universities were churning people though half-baked degrees in just one or two subject areas. "It made a nonsense of what we think of as university training," he says.
The negative press drew CQU to the attention of governments, with the Victorian government conducting a review of its Melbourne operations and the QTC undertaking an audit of the university's financial situation after a $5.5 million deficit in 2008. Between 2006 and 2007, international student fee income had plummeted $35.5m.
Then vice-chancellor John Rickard, dubbed Tarmac Johnny for his frequent overseas travel, dismissed reports the university was in financial dire straits, pointing out it had $105m in cash and other assets. But the university's ongoing viability became a topic of intense speculation.
BOWMAN says he was drawn to CQU because, as manager of the Whyalla campus, he had witnessed Denise Bradley turn the dead-duck University of South Australia into a thriving and viable research and teaching institution. Bradley says Bowman is up to the task of reforming CQU. "He loves the country; he's tremendously good at meeting people, getting out there and interacting, not just with people in the university, but connecting into communities and building good strong relationships. That's really important in regional areas," says Bradley.
"There is a significant amount of confidence in the sector in Scott's ability to get rid of some of the odium associated with some of the activities at CQU and move it back to what it really should be, which is a regional university with a significant outreach in the region."
And he is not afraid to take a punt.
"Taking on something like CQU needs someone who takes risks," says Bradley, whose support for this particular character trait has its limits.
"He once offered me a lift to Whyalla and I told him to f . . k off!" she laughs. "I've been in little planes but nothing would get me in one as small as that."
BOWMAN loves to laugh and to make people laugh. Among his many stories and anecdotes, he tells of an incident at the end of last year when, surrounded by lightning and rain, he was forced to make an emergency landing in a paddock somewhere between Mackay and Rockhampton.
"Two blokes turned up in a boat on the river. They'd just been to town to stock up on grub. They said their sister lived in a tent somewhere in the hills around here. She was a bit lonely and would definitely like to meet me."
Sometimes there is just no more room for community engagement, bridge building and selling the vision for a new CQU. Bowman says that with lightning and rain all around he hightailed it back to Rockhampton.
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