She also shares why it’s important for her to be in the classroom as a leader
Before she took up her historic post as the first law dean at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University, Diana Bowman was all the way on the other side of the planet.
The well-traveled law and tech expert had headed to the US in 2011 to study at the University of Michigan. She then transitioned to Arizona State University, where she took on roles at the law school and at the College of Global Futures over a 10-year tenure.
Her time at Arizona State University gave her “great exposure to everything from the students and the staff to partners in the big ecosystem”, Bowman told Australasian Lawyer. It also taught her some valuable lessons about leadership.
“I learned that I hate being micromanaged, and I will not micromanage other people”, she said. “When you have a leadership team, those people are in those positions because they're really good at what their job is and they know what their job is”.
Bowman explained that her role as a leader was to provide the leadership team “with all the tools that they need to be the best at what they do”. She also grasped the importance of being in the classroom as RMIT University seeks to cultivate a “high tech and high touch” environment.
“You learn more about your students and how your school is operating when you're actually in the classroom yourself, as opposed to sitting behind a big desk and having that distance”, Bowman told Australasian Lawyer. “I am very much a person who believes in leading by example. We are a research-intensive school, so I believe I need to be publishing, I need to be in the classroom, and I need to be out there and visible to my students. As a dean, I want to build our reputation as being a fantastic place for students to study and to recruit incredible staff. I want us to be known as a law school where our students get to know their professors”.
The “high tech” part of the university's objective comes from embracing technology like AI and understanding it. For instance, in light of concerns about AI-assisted plagiarism, the university has implemented strict policies on AI use that require students to take responsibility for any content they produce in this manner.
“We bring that technology into the classroom and we think about how we teach, how we assess, and how we are going to be having to do things differently”, Bowman told Australasian Lawyer. “A number of people on my team are using gamification in their courses. We're looking at how to use virtual reality”.
In the face of technology, the university is opting to go “back to basics” on what it means to be a lawyer in the modern day – as well as in the next five years.
“We're reverse engineering our curriculum to ensure that our grads have the skills that their employers need. We've been talking to a lot of people in the profession about what they're looking for in their grads around AI proficiency and making sure that we're building that into our curriculum today”, Bowman said.
