Beyond Discord and Deficit: The Failures of Regional Higher Education and Revisioning an Abundant Future

The Australian Universities Accord Final Report was released with much publicity on February 25, 2024.  Forty-seven recommendations were offered.  As with so many of these reports and recommendations around the world, the diagnosis of problems in the sector was clear, but the capacity to create change was truncated, parked, marginalized and missed. This article focuses specific attention on regional higher education institutions and their future imagining beyond the Universities Accord.  The ideologies of regionality presented and perpetuated in this Report hold consequences not only to the Australian university sector, but to the configuration of effective leadership within it.  By perpetuating the ideologies of crisis and deficit, specific alignments of urbanity and education are perpetuated.  Therefore, this article demonstrates the alternative ways, shapes and modes of organizing regional education, while transforming theories of urbanity and excellence.