Jacinda Ardern will make a perfect professor. You don’t need a PhD to know that

If you could pick one moment, one person, to help us sort the bloody mess we are in, you’d have to say the vice chancellor of the University of Sydney had luck – and love – on his side. I’m not the most sentimental or even the most superstitious of people but Mark Scott’s appointment of former NZ PM and flag-bearer for decency Jacinda Ardern as a professor of practice may, could, should be a turning point in our politics.

In the same month that the member for Indi, Helen Haines, was brutally attacked, in the same month that those who should know better called for Anne Aly to be stoned in the square, in the very same month that Victorian MP Georgie Purcell got a message from a constituent saying he wished the young Animal Justice Party representative had been the victim of the Haines attack – Ardern’s appointment must work as an antidote to all that.

Universities are still the places that educate our leaders. The University of Sydney has taught eight prime ministers. Eight. Six in cabinet right this minute. It’s a place that helps those who will be powerful one day to totally get their responsibilities. Or it should.

I understand the gatekeepers who think no one should be a professor without a PhD. But after 14 years teaching at UTS I came face to face with the realpolitik of academic appointments and promotions.

First, some folk with PhDs suck. They are not good at their jobs. They might have written thousands of words on one obsessive topic but that doesn’t make them good teachers or leaders. People who get promotions are, um, occasionally undeserving, while others wait in the eternal queue of unfairness. Too brown. Too female. Too unable to keep their mouths shut.

Sure, there are plenty of professors of practice who should never be let anywhere near an academic environment. They’ve got no idea what intellectual scholarship looks like, they don’t understand how universities work (cross social capital, intellectual capital, gender and bureaucracy) and they come in, elbows out, blundering from crisis to crisis, sometimes tossing in a pinch of harassment (pinch being the operative word) along the way.

Ardern has the intellectual capacity required of academic work. The woman has read and digested thousands and thousands of pages on policy. But she will bring much more than intellectual capacity – and that’s the empathy, the kindness, the patience required for a change in the way we do politics. She is a radiating anti-MAGA totem and, my goodness, we need those. We need far less toxic grandstanding and far more of the decency and human kindness for which Ardern is famed. Can you teach that? I bet you can. Role models matter.

Now, did the money to fund Ardern’s appointment come from teaching and learning or research? It came from a pot of kindness. Get this. As Lucy Macken wrote in 2022, Mudgee and Sydney Boys High teacher Kathleen Laurence died suddenly in 1972. She left her house to Sydney Uni with the catch that her sister Angela must be allowed to live in the property until she died. House worth $700,000 in 1972 gave the university more than $5 million 50 years later.

I’m not a very gentle person myself, so I admire those who can lead and be lovely and, more crucially, get stuff done. Ardern acted swiftly after the Christchurch mosque murders, kept COVID deaths to a minimum, tried and failed to act on housing, tried and (more or less) failed to act on child poverty.

She was better at including people of all kinds than any other politician I’ve ever seen in action; a lover, not a hater. We could do with much more of that.

As for no PhD, big deal. I did one while working full-time. I’m pretty sure that if she could be bothered she could easily manage doing one since she ran a country, had a baby and a relationship all at the same time. She quit before she was pushed. I even have quite the idea for a field of study: models of modern leadership.

I’m glad she moved to Australia. I’m thrilled she’s going to teach at a place where young ambitious people will have the chance to learn from those who’ve succeeded in doing politics differently. And haters are always going to hate. Let’s ignore them. Those who complain about her kindness and empathy prefer the world we are in right now. God help us all.

Jenna Price is a regular columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

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