Prof Duncan Bentley GAICD

Professor Duncan Bentley is Vice-Chancellor and President of Federation University Australia, which has recently announced that it will become Australia’s first co-operative university based on the highly successful models of Waterloo in Canada and Northeastern in the US.

Professor Bentley has built his career on developing models of learning since he moved into academia from international tax consulting. He retained his consultancy part-time for most of his career so that he could understand the needs of employers firsthand. He developed models to integrate co-design, co-creation and co-delivery of courses under rigorous governance and quality measures to satisfy all accreditation requirements.

He was able to work with passionate academics and employers as Pro Vice-Chancellor and Dean of Law at Bond University, Pro Vice-Chancellor of the Curtin Business School, one of the largest in Australia and then as Deputy Vice-Chancellor in dual sector universities, identifying pilots to integrate work and learning extending to vocational education at Victoria University and Swinburne University of Technology.

Professor Bentley has engaged in co-design and delivery of learning at every level with governments and university colleagues internationally across five continents. As chair of the Education Committee of the International Legal Services Advisory Council to the Attorney-General he has provided advice on the recognition of professional services in free trade agreement negotiations. He has represented the Law Council of Australia on the Law Admissions Consultative Committee.

His work extends to his research, where he led a national Office of Learning and Teaching Project on internationalizing the law curriculum, which focused particularly on identifying the knowledge, skills and competencies required by lawyers for global legal practice. More recently his research has focused on identifying the requirements of the future workforce in the public sector, particularly in tax administration, to take full advantage of digital transformation, artificial intelligence and deep machine learning technologies.