Paul Harpur

Professor Paul Harpur OAM is a leading international and comparative disability rights legal academic, current Australian Research Council Future Fellow, leader in higher education reforms, an Associate with the Harvard Law School Project on Disability, and duel Paralympian. He competed in the Sydney 2000 Paralympics and the Athens 2004 Paralympics and has the Paralympics Australia Pin #614. Professor Harpur is a TEDx speaker (“Universities as Disability Champions of Change”). He is chair of the University of Queensland Disability Inclusion Group, as well as holding international posts, including as an Associate with the Harvard Law School's Harvard Project on Disability, an International Distinguished Fellow, with the Burton Blatt Institute, Syracuse University, Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law, and is a former Fulbright Future Scholar. Professor Harpur is active in university-wide and sector-wide higher education change. Illustratively he has chairred the UQ Disability Inclusion Group since 2016 and sits on a range of university-wide committees. At the sector-wide level, during 2023 Dr Harpur served on the Ministerial Reference Group for the Universities Accord. He also serves on the Higher Education Standards Panel (HESP), which is a statutory body under Part 9 of the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency Act 2011 (Cth). The HESP is charged to advise and make recommendations to the Minister and to the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) on the Higher Education Standards Framework and to TEQSA on matters including TEQSA’ strategic objectives, corporate plan, performance against that plan, reform agenda, streamlining of activities and resourcing requirements and its regulatory approaches. He also serves on the Advisory Board for the Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success, formerly the National Center for Student Equity in Higher Education. In April the Univertas 21 (U21) Senior Leaders Group adopted the U21 Framework for Equitable and Inclusive Global Engagement to guide EDI across the 30 university Network. This Framework as a committee, the U21 EDI Management Committee, to which Professor Harpur was appointed in 2025. His transformational work and service has been recognised with numerous diversity and inclusion, human resources and leadership citations and awards. In the 2024 Australia Day Honours, Professor Harpur was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia by the Governor General of Australia (OAM). The citation for his OAM is “for service to people with disability”. Professor Harpur has published 220+ publications. Professor Harpur's recent publications include 2 books with Cambridge University Press • Discrimination, Copyright and Equality: Opening the E-Book for the Print Disabled (2017) • Ablism at work: disablement and hierarchies of impairments (2019)