Pascale Quester moves from Uni Adelaide

The move will end her near 20-year career on North Terrace. Professor Quester joined Uni Adelaide as a marketing lecturer in 1991, becoming the first professor in the discipline in 2002. She became executive dean of the Faculty of Professions in 2007 and DVC A in 2011. As DVC she served three vice chancellors, James McWha, and two reformers, with different approaches, Warren Bebbington and now, Peter Rathjen for whom she led a full-scale curriculum review (CMM July 13 2018).

Professor Quester is admired at Uni Adelaide for a firm approach, apparent in the long, and at times tense, round six enterprise bargaining negotiations, which she led for management. ““I would urge the National Tertiary Education Union to see the process as one where both parties try to converge on a shared position, rather than one where one party unilaterally alters their demands further away from their previous request,” she said at one stage, (CMM July 3 2014).

And she is well-regarded for forthright policy views, as in 2016, when she explained that the community focus on HE did not meet the needs of young people who did not want to do degrees. “With every cohort of young people who are pushed by their parents or by society at large in the wrong direction, it is individuals who will experience neither fulfilment or satisfaction but instead carry with them – for the rest of their lives – the stigma of a failure they did not need to have, and the weight of a debt they should never have faced,” (CMM October 12 2016).

Professor Quester will replace Linda Kristjanson as Swinburne U VC in August.