Professor J R Rowland is the inaugural Pro Vice-Chancellor Global and Graduate Research at the University of Auckland, a role that oversees all doctoral research students and the University’s global research engagement strategy.

Higher education in the developed world has reached a pivot point, sharpened by the pandemic, demographic changes, the digital revolution, and heightened global tensions. Decades of expansion on the back of the knowledge economy, social commitment to equality of opportunity, and the educational export industry, are giving way to leaner times. In this talk, Professor Rowland will place the New Zealand university sector in a global and domestic context and explore the notion of the fourth-generation university, an emerging concept in higher education. She will explain why, despite the shifts in public support and outright attacks on autonomy in some jurisdictions, universities are critical to the function of a healthy, free society, and must be supported to deliver high quality education and frontier research without undue interference.