Vice-chancellor first among equals

Prof Harlene Hayne has become the University of Otago's first woman vice-chancellor. Photos by...
Prof Harlene Hayne has become the University of Otago's first woman vice-chancellor. Photos by Peter McIntosh.
The University of Otago's new vice-chancellor is an American woman. But she's Otago through and through, reports Matthew Haggart.


Given her academic background, the University of Otago's new vice-chancellor, Prof Harlene Hayne, could be said to have a head start in the leadership stakes.

"I'm prejudiced, but I think all great leaders should be psychologists," she says, laughing.

The study of psychology concerns the principles of behaviour, something leaders soon figure out for themselves, she says.

"All people who move to a senior or administrative position, what you are trying to do is encourage good behaviours and decrease bad ones. I think psychologists are in a great position to be able to do that."

Prof Harlene Hayne and her daughter Marea Susanna Colombo following their New Zealand citizenship...
Prof Harlene Hayne and her daughter Marea Susanna Colombo following their New Zealand citizenship ceremony, with Mayor Dave Cull, earlier this year.
To put that challenge into some perspective, it is worth noting that the university has more than 3500 staff, many of whom are drawn from offshore, and last year enrolled more than 22,000 students, most of whom are not from Otago.

It has paid to come well equipped for the university's top job for another reason.

First order of business for Prof Hayne has been the fallout from Christchurch's earthquakes, which have taken a toll on the university's medical school and research campus in that city.

Damage sustained during the February earthquake was so severe it closed the university's main campus building, scattering researchers, staff, and students to other facilities around the city.

Co-ordinating the response has fallen to Prof Hayne and a team of the university's senior managers.

"A natural disaster like this is a great opportunity to figure out what you have to do run the university," she says.

"It focuses your attention very quickly and very rapidly on the things that are most important, the health and safety of your staff and students.

"An earthquake involves buildings, people, systems, and the research infrastructure.

" You wouldn't wish an earthquake on anyone ... and I certainly would have preferred to have learned about it under different circumstances, but it has been a very quick step up to what you have to do."

The February earthquake struck in Christchurch shortly after the announcement that Prof Hayne would step up to the chief executive's chair from her then position as deputy vice-chancellor, a five-month lead-in period that has been invaluable, she says.

Engaging and articulate, Prof Hayne displays a focused energy and enthusiasm for her new role - personal qualities matched by a youthful vitality that belies the recent passing of her 50th birthday.

Given the all-consuming nature of the job, she claims to not have too much time for outside interests, but does confess to being a devotee of Bikram Yoga - a discipline practised at temperatures upwards of 30degC.

A former head of the university's department of psychology, she has built an enviable reputation as a leading researcher in memory development in infants, children, adolescents and adults and her work has been cited in legal proceedings in New Zealand and around the world.

Her comparative analysis of interviews conducted with children in the controversial case of convicted Christchurch creche worker Peter Ellis, has been cited as providing further cause for the case to be reopened.

As you would expect, Prof Hayne is an enthusiastic advocate for her institution.

During an hour-long interview, she outlines and champions all of the University of Otago's six key strategic imperatives - from achieving research excellence and excellence in research-informed teaching, to contributing to the national good and to international progress, through to building and sustaining capability, among other things.

She becomes a little defensive, once, when it is suggested the timing of the release of a recent economic report outlining the $742 million the university pumps into Dunedin, was no coincidence.

Asked whether the tabling of the report, which was completed in May this year, at her first university council meeting this week, signals a more open approach from the university, she sits back in her chair, crosses her arms and looks down.

"Good news is good news and we should share it with people. We spend a lot of time when there is bad news to pitch it the right way, but this should always be coloured by the good news ...

"[The report] is one great thing, but not the only great thing. Hopefully, over time there will be many more other things," she says.

Among them, and a priority for Prof Hayne, is to see the university continue its proud tradition of excellence by strengthening its reputation for innovation in research.

During her tenure as deputy vice-chancellor Prof Hayne was charged with leading the university's Centre for Innovation - an arm of the university dedicated to producing commercial spin-offs from research.

This despite having "no knowledge of commercialisation whatsoever - heck, I'm a psychologist", she says.

Universities around the world are actively engaged in commercialising their research to international markets, Prof Hayne says.

Innovation is a key and very important role for any major university.

"We want to take outstanding discoveries and push them through to the marketplace. We are not ivory towers anymore, we are resources [of knowledge].

"The universities of the 21st century are universities that need to make their mark on the world," she says.

Prof Hayne moved to New Zealand in 1992 and will celebrate 20 years of working at the University of Otago, in January.

She emigrated with her husband Prof Michael Colombo - the couple first met at graduate school - when the pair both took up lecturer positions in Otago's psychology department.

Initially, the intention was to stay for about three years before a return home to the United States.

A suggestion during their job interviews to take a trip to Queenstown and through Central Otago brought home to the couple how similar the southern landscape is to the land they left behind.

"One reason we settled so well here is because it is so similar to Colorado," she says.

She experienced a far greater "culture shock" when she moved from the western mountains of Colorado to the eastern seaboard of the US to begin postgraduate studies, Prof Hayne says.

The couple have raised two daughters in Dunedin, Marea (20) and Sara (17), and have worked alongside one another for nearly all of their academic careers.

"Until I moved in to the [university registry] clock tower [building, where the vice-chancellor's office and those of his deputies are], we had worked in the same building pretty much from the day we first met," she says.

However, Prof Hayne's move into the administrative side of university life has brought their research efforts closer.

"Remarkably, we've collaborated more on research than we ever seem to have in our careers and have submitted more joint publications in the last 18 months, than in the past 20 years," she says.

Prof Hayne was born in the state of Oklahoma and was raised in Colorado, where she attended college after gaining an academic scholarship to study - the first person in her family to attend higher education.

Her father worked as a salesman "for all his life" at a company that was "one of the first to start building large computers", while her mother worked at a variety of jobs, she says.

She has a younger brother and nephew, who now live in Missouri.

The family were comfortable, but without her academic scholarship would not have been able to afford expensive college fees, she says.

Prof Hayne says she was brought up with the "philosophy that education was key to making a better and brighter future for oneself".

Her academic career at Otago has been "more successful than anywhere else in the world it could have been," she says.

"The opportunities which have presented themselves to me are, and have been enviable."

Not only is Prof Hayne the first female chief executive of the university, she is the first international vice-chancellor to be appointed to head Otago - a point no-one had raised until the Otago Daily Times brought it up, she says.

She says she is proud of her nationality - "yes, I'm American" - and believes her appointment reflects the university's diversity - almost 70% of academic staff are from overseas - and proves Otago is "truly an international institution".

"I have been surprised that everyone has focused on my gender ... I actually thought my nationality would be mentioned but it never has.

"Lots has been said about my gender, but I don't think it is a big deal here because the university has fostered my career like anyone else.

"There has been no glass ceiling, no advanced acceleration. I might do things different because I'm a woman, or because I'm American, but that is all part of who I am."

The university's 2010 annual report shows women are slowly taking on more of the top jobs. In 2006 there were no women among Otago's coterie of senior academic managers. By last year there were at least three.

The number of women professors still lag far behind those of men, 23 compared to 152 on 2010 figures, but the total number of women academics is now pushing close to the total for men and many more women have risen to senior lecturer level in the past five years.

Prof Hayne says she was flattered when it was suggested she would go down in history as a female pioneer of the university, her name alongside those of first graduate Caroline Freeman, medical graduate Emily Seideberg, and law graduate Ethel Benjamin.

"I don't feel like a pioneer. I'm in a privileged position and have said many times I never aspired to be the VC and it was never in my 10-year plan.

"My sole motivation in applying for this position was because it gave me the opportunity to give back to this institution which has given me so much.

"If history writes in that I am among the firsts of the University of Otago it will be outstanding, but it is not something I think about."


Prof Harlene Hayne fact file

THE ROAD TO OTAGO
• Bachelor of arts degree in psychology from Colorado College 1983.
• PhD from Rutgers University, New Jersey.
• Postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University, New Jersey.

UNIVERSITY OF OTAGO CAREER
• Department of psychology lecturer, 1992.
• Senior lecturer, 1995.
• Associate professor, 1999.
• Becomes full professor and awarded a personal chair in psychology, 2002.
• Head of department of psychology 2006.
• Deputy vice-chancellor (research and enterprise) 2008.

NOTABLE ACHIEVEMENTS:
• Fellow of the American Psychology Society.
• Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.
• International adviser to the British Psychological Society.
• Member of recently established Innovation Board of the Ministry of Science and Innovation.
• Co-chairwoman of the Office of the Prime Minister's science advisory committee working party on reducing social and psychological morbidity during adolescence.
• Made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM), 2009.
• Prof Hayne is the author, or co-author, of more than 90 reference journal articles, 20 book chapters, a book on memory development, and is the editor of six other academic titles pertaining primarily to infancy research.


 

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