HEDx

Episode 4 of The AI Inflection Point — and the second of four conversations on coalitions.
Australian universities have been building global partnerships for decades. But have those partnerships actually changed anything — for students, for institutions, for the sector?
This conversation asks the harder question: not whether to collaborate globally, but whether the partnerships being built are genuinely transformational — or mostly transactional. And the honest answer, it turns out, is complicated.
Joe Chicharo puts it plainly: as a nation, Australian universities have been like lone wharves — each going out, making mistakes, figuring it out — but never building a shared science of learning from those experiences.
Helen Bartlett, Vice-Chancellor of UniSC, chairs a panel with Joe Chicharo from the University of Wollongong, Paul Mazerolle, Vice-Chancellor of UniSQ, Shân Wareing, Vice-Chancellor of Middlesex University, and Weihong Liang, President of the International Students Representative Council of Australia.
What emerges from this conversation is not a blueprint for better partnerships. It's a more honest reckoning with what it actually takes to build one worth keeping.

Episode 3 of The AI Inflection Point — and the first of four conversations on coalitions.
Can universities lead the AI transformation that higher education needs — alone? The answer is no. But what "together" actually looks like when your institution is under real financial pressure is a much harder conversation.
This panel brings together four leaders with very different starting points. Rose Luckin, CEO of Educate Ventures Research, has built one of the most active AI coalitions in UK schools. Noah Pickus, Head of Global Strategy and Partnerships at Duke, has just launched the Future Universities Alliance — 49 institutions from 23 countries. Theo Farrell, Vice-Chancellor of La Trobe, is two years into a serious AI transformation. And Shan Wareing, Vice-Chancellor of Middlesex University, inherited a 12% deficit on day one.
What emerges from this conversation is not a simple case for collaboration — but a more honest question about what we're actually trying to protect, and whether we can do that alone.

Episode 2 of The AI Inflection Point — six conversations recorded at the HEDx 2026 conference in Sydney. The diagnosis is set. Now: what does it actually take to respond?
Lucy Marshall from the University of Sydney names what most leaders know but rarely say out loud — universities don't have an innovation problem. They have a culture problem. Fear is the barrier. Not budget, not technology. Fear.
Then Aleks Subic, who built an innovation precinct in the heart of Birmingham, and Grant Robertson, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Otago, answer the same question from the outside in — by changing where the university stands in the world, and who it stands for.
If the barrier isn't technology but culture — what does it actually take to change a university from the inside?

Episode 1 of The AI Inflection Point — our six-part series recorded at the HEDx 2026 conference in Sydney. This first episode sets the diagnosis: universities were designed for a student who no longer exists. Professor KC Chua, President of Singapore Institute of Technology, and Pierpaolo Limone, Rector of Pegaso University in Rome, answer the same question from opposite sides of the world: for what kind of student was the university actually built — and is that still the student in front of us today? AI didn't create the problem. It just made it impossible to ignore

In this episode for Student Experience, UQ students Madison Piper and Ben Roden-Cohen sit down with Professor Kris Ryan, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic), for a conversation about uncertainty, AI, cost of living pressures, mental health, learning, and what universities are actually for.