Farewell remarks

Farewell remarks by Mr Peter Varghese AO, Chancellor of The University of Queensland, Customs House, Brisbane.

Date: 8 July 2026

I acknowledge the many dignitaries here tonight.

To Their Excellencies the Governor and Professor Nimmo, thank you for your attendance and, Governor, for your very kind words. You and Graeme have been wonderful supporters of UQ including being our regular guests of honour at our annual end of year Senate dinner.  

To Minister Langbroek, thank you for your generous words. We greatly value our relationship with the Queensland Government and it has been a privilege as Chancellor to work with governments from both sides of the isle. I acknowledge Christian Rowan.

I acknowledge senior members of the previous government present tonight including Cameron Dick and Di Farmer, former Education ministers Kate Jones and Grace Grace and of course former Premier and newly minted elected UQ Senate member Annastacia Palaszczuk.

I would like to acknowledge the current and past chancellors and vice chancellors of the other universities in Queensland here tonight. Your presence reflects the spirit of collaboration among the eight Queensland universities.

Thank you, Michael Zavros, a remarkably talented artist. It is unnerving to sit for a portrait. They say a portrait artist persuades you to sit still for long enough to discover your faults and then politely neglects to include them. Michael, you are a model of politeness.

I have had a career characterised by a very short attention span. For me ten years as Chancellor is the longest I have ever been in a single job. My average is about two and a half years.

Chancellors have a very flexible job description. Their most important role is as an enabler:  giving Vice Chancellors the headroom to manage, helping set the strategic direction, ensuring that our systems of governance are strong without being unduly intrusive, understanding risk and always attuned to the broader purpose of a university.

That purpose has been remarkably consistent over many centuries. Universities in the west are said to be the second oldest institution after the Church which would make academics the third oldest profession thereby putting a more respectable distance from the oldest profession.

In that time universities have had three core objectives: to teach, to push out the boundaries of knowledge through research and to enrich the life of our communities.

Some 170 years ago John Henry Newman, making the case for the idea of a university, wrote that “knowledge is an end in itself”. We have since become a more utilitarian society but we have still held true to Newman’s other observation that “if a practical end must be assigned to a university course, I say that it is that of training good members of society”.

When I look back over the last ten years, I would like to think that UQ has been faithful to these foundational objectives. We have sought to give teaching the prominence and the recognition that it deserves. We are now a world leading research institution and we strive to be, as the Vice Chancellor often puts it, not just The University of Queensland but also a university for Queensland.

I am a radical incrementalist when it comes to the philosophy of leadership. You aim to leave your organisation stronger than when you found it, not through great leaps forward, but by incremental steps towards a transformative destination.

In the process we have achieved some big things. We pivoted quickly to online teaching during covid. We set our own path on international students, being the first university to set an internal cap on the proportion of international to domestic students.  We were a pioneer in setting up a future fund to bank a proportion of international student fee revenue for strategic investments. We have lifted our global ranking over the last decade into the top fifty. We have held our position as the most successful university in Australia on the commercialisation of research. And through the Queensland Commitment, we have set ambitious targets for enrolments from low SES, regional and indigenous backgrounds. We instil a global perspective, but we are firmly anchored in a local, state and national community.

No institution can rest on its laurels and the next ten years will be a challenging time for the university sector.

We will need to win back the social licence we are losing. We will need to put even more effort into enhancing the experience of our students, domestic and international. We will have to grapple with the impact of AI on how we teach and what we teach.
We must prepare our students for a technology driven disruption to the labour market where many skills will likely become redundant before they become reimagined.

There is today a mismatch between the role innovation will inevitably play in underpinning an AI infused economy and the willingness of governments to invest in a key driver of Australian innovation, namely, university research. Let us hope that in an age where we all genuflect to sovereign capability, the capability of our public universities will be seen as a vital national investment.

Universities will also have to deal with the growing reach of regulation, almost always well intentioned but increasingly burdensome and now a growing threat to our autonomy. Balancing autonomy with public accountability will become increasingly difficult and the sector will need a clear sense of its red lines and the courage to resist their crossing. 

Over ten years a Chancellor builds up huge debts of gratitude with no prospect of repayment. They are too many to name but I must mention a few.

To the Deputy Chancellor, one of only two Senate members who were there when I commenced as chancellor, (the other was Greg Hainge) thank you Tonianne for being a steadying influence and a source of wise counsel.

To all the members of Senate across the four Senates that I chaired, I thank you for your commitment to the university.  Whether you were elected or appointed, you always put the best interests of the university first.

I particularly want to thank the chairs of the Senate Committees where so much of the heavy lifting of Senate work is done: Finance, Risk and Audit, Campus Infrastructure, Equity Diversity and Inclusion and Advancement and Community Engagement.

Tonianne chaired Infrastructure for my entire time as Chancellor, as did until January this year Phil Hennesy in Finance and Grant Murdoch in Risk and Audit. The comfort level of a Chancellor is directly related to the competence of our committee chairs, and I have consequently been a most relaxed chancellor.

There is no more important relationship for the running of a university than that between the Chancellor and the Vice Chancellor. I have had the great good fortune to have worked with two outstanding Vice Chancellors in Peter Hoj and Debbie Terry. They say that the only reason you have a chancellor is so that you can have a Vice Chancellor and there is much truth in that. So Debbie, thank you for your gracious words tonight but more importantly thank you for your leadership, your calm presence and your extraordinary diligence.  UQ is lucky to have you at the helm.

Thank you to UQ’s senior executive team for your professionalism and your commitment. You prove the point that a chancellor has the privilege of being surrounded by brilliance without the inconvenience of having to display it.

To the four Senate secretaries I have worked with, John Montgomery, Melinda Rettke, Sarah Spencer and Janey Saunders, you have all been wonderful guides, clearing the path and quietly choreographing our Senate meetings, all under the watchful eyes of Jo Connah who has an encyclopaedic knowledge of Senate practice. You made us all look good.

And a very special thanks to my executive assistants over ten years, Sue Cox, Sue Allen and Sarah Thomas who have juggled both mine and the Vice Chancellors programs with acrobatic skill. I simply could not have done the job without you.

For me UQ has been more than my alma mater and the institution where I have had the honour to be chancellor.  It has been intrinsic to my family’s Australian story.

My father taught at UQ and if he had not been offered that position we likely would not have stayed in Australia and so would have been denied the extraordinary opportunities Australia has given to the nine children my parents brought with them to Australia in 1964.  

Six of my siblings are UQ graduates as are their spouses. One, Jim, served on the UQ Senate and was President of the UQ Students Union.

I courted my wife at UQ and she remains for me the most influential alum of this institution and an anchor in a life lived across many continents. I think however for Margaret the mix of my career would have been better if it had been more domestic and less international.

Our only child, Christopher, began his engineering studies at UQ and completed them at the Australian National University showing that at least one member of the family can rise above parochialism. And already ten of the next generation of the Varghese clan have graduated from the University of Queensland with many more likely to come.

I leave enormously grateful to have been part of this great institution. They say professors teach, administrators manage, students complain – and the Chancellor nods wisely at all three. So like old soldiers, chancellors fade away but with luck perhaps we continue to nod wisely.

It has been a privilege. Thank you all.