Ian Findlay had retired for a second time when the email arrived at his Brisbane home, asking if he knew anyone open to a “challenge” in Cambodia.
The University of Puthisastra, a Phnom Penh medical institution established about 10 years earlier, needed a vice-chancellor. “They were looking for someone with a health background, which was me; someone with a financial background, which was me – I’d run my own company; somebody who had a background in learning and teaching. I’d been pro vice-chancellor learning and teaching.
“I ticked all the five or six boxes and said to my wife, ‘well, what should we do?’ She said, ‘just go for it’.”
Findlay arrived at a “bankrupt” university. “There were student riots; there were staff riots; no academic quality.” He vowed to make it the best university in Cambodia. “Within three years, it was the best university in Cambodia.”
By 2022 it was recognised among the best in Asia, earning gongs as Cambodia’s only fixture in?Times Higher Education’s World, Asia and Impact Rankings. By the time?Findlay?left in 2024, Puthisastra was breaking new ground. In 2025, the Madrid-based Cybermetrics Lab rated it within the top two deciles in the Ranking Web of almost 32,000 higher education institutions worldwide, while Singapore’s AppliedHE placed it 40th?in a list of South-east Asia’s top 100 private universities.
More importantly, student achievement and staff morale had improved. “We got the university out of a financial mess, and I could…start paying bonuses,” Findlay said. “Salaries went up. Students’ results went up.”
Now, after a third attempt at retirement “bored” him, Scottish-born Findlay is looking to repeat the feat at the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG) in Port Moresby.
It is the latest chapter in a restless career he began as a geneticist, working at hospitals in England and then at the universities of Leeds and Queensland. By 2005 he held concurrent posts as a professor at Griffith University, director of his own biotech company and chief scientific officer of Gribbles Molecular Science, a forensic DNA laboratory owned by hospital operator Healthscope.
Findlay claims 11 patents and his 50-odd publications include first-author credits in the?British Medical Journal,?Medical Journal of Australia?and?Nature, which??his pioneering work on DNA fingerprinting from single cells. He used the technique in an attempt to unmask Jack the Ripper, by analysing saliva on an envelope allegedly posted by the notorious serial killer.
In 2007, the then 40-year-old Findlay retired to spend time with his preschool-aged son. Fifteen months later his son was at school and Findlay was back at work, this time as academic director of higher education and head of the health sciences school at Southbank Institute of Technology, a public vocational education and training (VET) college.
“It was time to give back,” Findlay said. “That’s why I moved into education. I wanted to move into the VET sector because higher education improves lives, but VET changes lives. VET takes the kids that have got nothing and gives them a clear pathway.”
Stints as executive dean of health at the Think Education Group, pro vice-chancellor at Central Queensland University and executive director of studies at Bendigo Kangan Institute allowed him to straddle the tertiary education sectors in both public and private institutions. “I was very interested in the nexus between higher education and VET, because…they both need each other.
“Higher education provides critical thinking skills, but it fails generally on industry engagement and practical skills. VET is very good at practical skills and industry engagement, but it doesn’t teach critical thinking. I [was] thinking, there must be a space in the middle where there’s both.”
It was at bankrupt Puthisastra where Findlay let his leadership skills off the leash. The “multi-factorial” problems were easy to see.
“They’ve lived under a dictatorship for 40 years. They sit back and wait for the dictator to tell them what to do. There’s…so much nepotism. Someone’s friend or nephew is going to get all the good jobs, so why should you work hard?”
The road ahead was also easy to see. “I knew the changes that I wanted to make. I had to move people out of the organisation, those that weren’t willing to change. But basically, I sold them the vision that we were going to be the best.
“Everybody wants to be part of a success. Nobody wants to be part of a failure. They started to see the results. We got international recognition [and] national recognition from the accreditation council. When they can see their salaries increasing, their students’ results improving, the international collaborations improving, their international and national standing improving – something’s working.”
Once staff were engaged, the trick was to give them clear expectations, key performance indicators, milestones and – critically – some autonomy. “They take ownership,” Findlay said. “You can see their chest sticking out with pride.” Equally critical was “empowering them to make mistakes” by reassuring them it would not cost them their jobs.
“I’d tell everyone, ‘I want you to make mistakes because mistakes mean that you’re doing something’. The only way to not make a mistake is to do nothing.”
Now Findlay plans to deploy similar approaches at UPNG, where he became vice-chancellor in August. “The university is challenged in many ways. It’s been in decline for the last 15, 20 years. My job is to transform it.”
It will be no easy task, and mistakes can be costly. In 2019, then higher education minister Pila Niningi dissolved the UPNG council – citing serious performance and integrity issues – and supplanted vice-chancellor appointee Frank Griffin with a previously unsuccessful applicant for the job, Kenneth Sumbuk, who himself was subject of corruption allegations.
The events that followed were characteristically Papuan. “The academics didn’t like it and got the minister deposed,” Findlay said. A new minister repealed the dissolution of the council, Sumbuk was removed and Griffin became vice-chancellor. It was a demonstration of a unique aspect of PNG academia: academics can wield considerable power, particularly in an institution like UPNG.
“We’re the premier university,” Findlay explained. “We’re the only university with a school of law. All the prime ministers, all the chief justices, most of the secretaries of state – [they] all come from this university. They’re the personal friends of [our] academics. If there are things that academics or the students don’t like, then they can demand change.”
UPNG is not the only PNG institution where rank-and-file activism has reversed an unpopular external intervention into university leadership. In 2014,?staff and student protests?led to the reinstatement of reformist Dutchman Albert Schram as vice-chancellor of the Papua New Guinea University of Technology, in the country’s second city of Lae. Schram had been deported the previous year after apparently falling foul of the university’s governing council.
However, attempts to oust Schram continued, in a display of the internal politics that can be treacherously opaque to outsiders. He eventually?fled the country?in 2018 amid police action over what he described as “ridiculous” accusations that he had falsified his doctorate.
John Warren, a Welshman who had been enlisted to run the Rabaul-based University of Natural Resources and Environment (UNRE),?also fled?PNG in 2018 after falling out with the institution’s council. Warren said his troubles had begun when he alienated then chancellor Sumbuk – who the following year became the short-lived interim vice-chancellor at UPNG – by appointing a pro vice-chancellor on merit rather than tribal allegiance.
Two other UNRE vice-chancellors have been removed since Warren’s departure. The university was back in the news last year when four student representatives and a community leader were?imprisoned for months?over the torching of cars during a student protest, despite insisting that they had not played any role in the arson.
None of this turbulent history appears to daunt Findlay, who described his outsider’s status as a strength. “It…has the advantage that you don’t have any relatives to give the good jobs to. When you come in basically as a stranger to the country, people know that you can be objective. You’re making a decision for the right reasons – not because you’re someone’s friend.
“[Anyway] if it doesn’t work…the airport is half an hour away. When I came to PNG, that was my first discussion with the council – I’m here to help. No ulterior motives. If I’m not being of value, then give me an hour to pack my suitcase.”
Running a university in PNG or Cambodia is not everybody’s cup of tea, Findlay concedes. It requires drive, energy, resilience and “sheer bloody-mindedness at times. You can’t be here if you’re not committed. The internet cuts off or you have no water – not everyone will be able to live with that.”
Being an academic in Australia may be easier, but “you don’t get to make a difference. You don’t get to build a nation. I’m creating the vision, the qualities that will inform the next prime minister of PNG. How often do you get a chance to do that?”
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