UTAS vice-chancellor Rufus Black would not throw support behind a move of the Business School to the North, despite being approached by industry on the topic.

“I have heard of that but we are moving away from the hub-and-spoke model and work towards a network approach,” Professor Black said.

Professor Black said UTAS was committed to offering business “across the island”.

“What matters is that we are seriously committed to the business community here and we are committed to providing good business education in the North,” he said.

“We will have strong, distinct business offerings and we will have some offerings you can only do here. That is different to today.”

The network approach is part of a redesign of UTAS’ curriculum, which will result in more basic courses offered at all locations.

In addition, the Northern Transformation project will ensure exclusive courses will play up to region’s strengths.

Professor Black said in the North, those strengths were in agriculture, food production, business and engineering.

Ensuring the university met industry’s demand would be UTAS’ role in the economic prosperity of the North and the state.

“Clearly it [UTAS] has an important role in the North and North-West’s economic future,” Professor Black said.

“We want to ensure the North continues to create value in enterprises that boost the region.”

He said one way to do that was to engage more students in disparate regions to go to university.

In the region, UTAS is working with high schools to close those gaps and encourage more students to follow the tertiary path to higher education.

Professor Black said one such enterprise was in defence and naval engineering, which was serviced by the Australian Maritime College.

“AMC is home to the best maritime training in the country by far,” Professor Black said.

“So bringing national and international companies to Tasmania is really important.”

The future of the AMC will play a role in the future use of the Newnham campus, after the Northern Transformation project is completed.

Professor Black said the future use of the Newnham site is being worked through, and a master plan is being completed. The master plan will detail the future of the Newnham site and what will happen to the buildings that remain there.

“AMC will remain there [at Newnham] and there will be some land available for them to expand to develop a defence precinct for businesses that want to move up there,” Professor Black said.