Pascale Quester
A remarkable rise to the top of the university ranks

Can you tell us about your family background and the core values passed on to you by your parents?

There are no teachers in my family. In fact, myself and my sister – she is a medical researcher, were the first in the family to access higher education. My parents believed that education was a privilege that should be both valued and earned. So, I have always had various summer and night jobs to pay for my studies. I have not been given any largesse and I am extremely grateful for the grounding and for the sheer resilience this upbringing gave me. I have tried to replicate these principles when raising my own kids. I don’t consider I have been tough on them, but I have refuted the notion that happiness is a universal entitlement and that everything should be supplied.

What were your aspirations as a child?

I certainly wasn’t dreaming of becoming the vice-chancellor of a university … because let’s be clear … no child does! The only thing I was certain of as a girl growing up in a catholic school in St Nazaire, was that I wanted to live in a country where English was spoken. In fact, for a long time whenever I was on holiday, I pretended to be English… much to my mother’s dismay! From a young age, I developed a global outlook. The fact that Audencia offered all students the possibility to study one semester abroad was one of the reasons why I found the school so attractive.

You graduated from Audencia with outstanding results. Did you carve out some time for extracurricular activities and a bit of fun?

Well, I simply did not have the luxury of any spare time to enjoy much of the social activities whilst at the School. After one semester, I had my mindset on a master’s in the US, and the only option I had to fund my plan was to achieve top grades and earn a scholarship. Plus, I was working night shifts in an institution for pregnant teenagers. Helping to deliver babies in two hours flat in the middle of the night and following on with a 9am accounting class gave me a solid grounding of what life is really about!

This experience has certainly taught me how to function well on little sleep.

How did your fascination for marketing come about?

At Audencia I absolutely found what I was looking for. I got the revelation that a scientific intellect and an interest in people’s psyche could collide and find applications in real life. Marketing, which is about applying science to consumer behaviour, has been my love ever since. At Ohio State University where I studied for my master’s in marketing, I was fortunate enough to be taught by Roger Blackwell, the founding father of the discipline and a phenomenal lecturer. I then specialised in sponsorship and country of origin effect, but consumer behaviour remains the field I am most passionate about.

How does a young woman from the French provinces end up teaching in the antipodes?

At OSU, one of my professors encouraged me to stay and do a PhD there. My answer – and I quote, was: “I am extremely flattered, but life is too short for three more winters in Ohio!”. He happened to be from New Zealand and kindly helped me obtain a job as a junior lecturer at Massey University Palmerston North, NZ. Unfortunately, this was in 1986 at the time of the Rainbow Warrior case, so as a French person (and a keen scuba diver!), I was not a particularly popular visa applicant… When I obtained it months later, I had one day to pack and say goodbye to my flabbergasted parents who had never imagined I would go through with this impetuous plan. On the tiny plane from Auckland to Palmerston North (the last leg of a journey that back then took over two days), I remember feeling in awe of the stunning landscape… but also seriously questioning my career move: I was going to land in a country which counted 60 million sheep but only 3.5 million people at the time (i.e., the size of Columbus Ohio), and live in a town of 70,000 people (the size of the OSU campus). I ended up staying there for an amazingly fruitful five years, becoming a Kiwi and earning my PhD!

Your steady ascent within the university up to the top executive job was unlikely as a French woman who started out as a marketing lecturer. How did you manage to climb each step?

I had done a big gutsy experiment for my PhD, essentially using NZ as my lab. In 1990, I went to a conference in Tasmania, Australia to present my results. Some representatives of the university of Adelaide offered me a more senior lecturer job, which I accepted there and then. Marketing wasn’t popular at the time in Adelaide and only 20 students had initially enrolled. But within a month I had 300 people sitting in on my lectures. I got promoted to senior lecturer within a year, a jump which you can usually expect after 5 or 6 years. I figured out that my university was big on research, so I put even more effort into publishing papers, which earned me the promotion of associate professor in 1999. This struck a few people, but it’s down to a simple trick: understand the rules of the game and be willing to play.
Next, people told me that I would never be a professor because marketing was not a serious enough discipline, and because universities didn’t promote staff as professors, they appointed professors from outside. I decided to prove them wrong. My textbooks became the leading ones in the field, and in 2002 I became associate dean. I took a sabbatical year to teach at the Sorbonne in Paris and when I got back, I climbed the ranks up to deputy vice-chancellor in 2011. Last year, after applying for a job for the first time I was offered the role of vice-chancellor at Swinburne in Melbourne.
I have been lucky enough throughout my career to identify a set of sliding doors and then get my foot in at the right time and in the right direction. I believe that every career success is mainly about determination, skills and perseverance, but you also need a good dollop of luck.

Did you have to fight sexism during your career?

Twenty years ago, academia was still a pretty hard terrain to navigate for senior female academics. I was always one of the very few senior female academics in the school, so as the “token female” I was asked to sit in countless committees and ended up carrying out a lot of additional admin work. When I adopted my two girls from India and decided to take maternity leave at a time when this was not allowed, I found myself doing some intense juggling. I have worked with bosses who all had a different approach to managing women. Some were defenders of gender diversity, some were gender blind, and some, still stuck with a boys’ club mentality felt threatened by capable women. But I am resilient and passionate and I find that humour is an effective weapon to assert one’s views. Fortunately, I have discovered a great culture here at Swinburne University, and my team is very diverse on all levels.
Do I consider myself a feminist? I would not want to be promoted or congratulated because I am a woman, but I would not want to be mistreated because I am a woman either. It doesn’t make me a feminist, but a person who is acutely aware that fair is fair.

What are going to be your main priorities in your new role?

The pandemic impacted the higher education sector in Australia particularly strongly because international students who represented a high share of our students have gone home, and not all of them will come back. We were more ready than most universities for the transition towards online teaching, but we have lost this competitive advantage now that every institution is doing it. So, to ensure the financial sustainability of the enterprise, we must tip the business model on its head. Swinburne is a university of technology which has gone a bit “vanilla” and has spread itself too thin. My objective is to go back to our roots, to lead the university towards a more focused model and to make it a world leader in STEM*. That may be a bit traumatic for the university community and I may not be popular initially, but I am convinced that this is our way to greatness!

What makes your job fulfilling?

Having made my mark in marketing provides me with vast array of opportunities. I love supervising PhD students and I continue to have an almost motherly relationship with many of them – they now send me pictures of their kids! I am hooked on research, so I still publish to this day. And of course, now I am also experiencing the applied side of marketing because being the vice-chancellor means being the CEO of a large enterprise that relies on its strong brand and on delivering customer service and satisfaction. So, I’m having a ball!
Universities are our longest lasting institutions (along with churches) and they absolutely transcend history. If you are into future making, I can’t think of a better place to be. Their contribution to society is invaluable. For example, in Australia, the indigenous population suffers from tragic social deprivation, with a life expectancy 30 years shorter than the non-indigenous population, and an incarceration rate that is five times higher. But research proves that when young indigenous people obtain equal qualifications from higher education, then this social disadvantage can be overcome. I am totally dedicated to the mission of closing that gap.

And by the way, if you enjoy Nantes, don’t feel that you have to move! It is now a dynamic tech hub so anyone starting a business here is not at a disadvantage anymore. No need to choose between ambition and lifestyle…

What’s your proudest achievement?

Through my research, I have become an advocate of co-creation, which consists in involving consumers in the process of designing new products. I have decided to apply this concept to the development of new learning spaces at the university of Adelaide, ensuring that students were consulted and empowered at every stage. This involved shifting the culture from a confrontational stance to one of positive collaboration with students, including the student union. People thought I was crazy, and the project had many detractors at first, but a year after our Learning Hub was inaugurated, students spent more time on campus and the retention and completion rates increased. The Hub is now visited and admired by people from all over Australia and Asia as a model to what co-creation can do. I am proud to have instilled a cultural change in the way that the management and the students work together.

When you are so passionate about your job, is it a struggle to achieve balance and satisfaction in the other areas of your life?

When you embrace an academic career, you learn to forego the capacity to switch off. Your brain is constantly thinking about your research ideas and the way to progress them. That is certainly the price I pay for being passionate. But it is not a sacrifice because I don’t feel, ever, that I’m working. I have made a very conscious and unapologetic choice to focus on my work and some of my previous relationships haven’t survived it. I am now in a very happy partnership with someone who has been generous enough to follow me to Melbourne. I have been fortunate to adopt two girls from India, Maya in 1998, and Nalini in 2002. They sometimes feel resentful that I was “the mother who was never there” for the school concerts and sporting events. But I never signed up to be a perfect mother. And I remind them that they should appreciate the other opportunities that I have given them, such as the access to travel and a rich culture. Being busy has not prevented me from forming a close relationship with my girls; so quite early on I have decided to give up on guilt… despite my catholic upbringing! My only regret is not to have stopped more often to watch them grow up, to take stock and enjoy the moment instead of constantly chasing my next move.

What are the most common myths about working in Australia that you would like to debunk or confirm?

Australia and New Zealand have got this golden halo of adventure and represent “the new frontier”. People have this fantasy of bush kangaroos, the great outback; yet 95% of the population live within 10km of the coast, so it is by and large an urban society. What I can absolutely confirm however is that if you live in Australia and you care about your social standing, you are better off working as a footballer than an academic! Sport is the country’s obsession: you have never seen Australians collectively feeling a passion unless it is at a football game.

What message would you like to send to the students who will graduate from Audencia this year?

With Covid-19’s massive and long-lasting disruptions, the risk is that there will be a whole generation of students who are going to feel that they are the victims of circumstances. My advice to them would be: “Accept the situation, don’t lament it, don’t blame anyone. This is what is normal for you, this is your story, make the most of it. You are in the driver’s seat, go and do something extraordinary!”