The Gardasil gap: A case study in how universities undermine their incredible impact

The University of Queensland developed a vaccine that saves 300,000 lives annually. Yet their story is buried under meaningless buzzwords and marketing-speak.

The University of Queensland’s HPV vaccine is revolutionising women’s health worldwide. Gardasil protects against 90% of cervical cancers and has put Australia on track to eliminate the disease by 2035.

This narrative is simple yet effective. It should be familiar not only to University of Queensland (UQ) students and alumni (of which I am one), but to the general public. It should be used to attract future researchers and funding, and to demonstrate the value of university research to the community.?

But if you visit UQ’s website, you’ll find that the narrative is MIA. The story is buried.?

It is not mentioned on the UQ homepage, the research main page or the research strategy and impact main page. Instead, hero-ed on the research page (image below) is a corridor and a building:

On the research strategy and impact main page (image below), all we see is marketing speak. It’s generic – most universities (and most corporate organisations) will claim to be making an impact on the world’s most challenging and complex problems. This samey-samey language is everywhere. It’s ironic that it looks like hype, because UQ has the impact to back it up. Why not just tell those stories directly, and show the reader how you’re making an impact?

If people can’t find or understand your impact, how do you justify your funding? How do you argue for more investment? How do you build trust and confidence with the community? How do you convince alumni to donate and prospective students to apply??

There are 10 pictures of buildings across UQ’s main pages and zero stories about Gardasil or its inventors Ian Frazer and Jian Zhou. Extraordinarily, an image of a? building is the first image you see across every of the main web pages – Study/Research/Partnerships/About. This is precious online real estate far too valuable to spend on … real estate. What is it with universities and prioritising pictures of buildings over their impact??

Compare this to the front page of Novo Nordisk.

Or AstraZeneca

Not a building in sight. (Also, notice how specific the Novo Nordisk lead story is – no “innovating solutions to tackle the world’s most challenging problems” marketing copy here).

By contrast, to find the Gardasil story, you need to search it out. It’s buried deep in the news pages. If you didn’t already know about it, there’s no way you’d find it.

How will society know and value your impact if you bury it in favour of generic marketing speak and pictures of buildings?

Universities everywhere, take note: if you take the same-old same-old approach to marketing, the priority becomes a slick – and safe – presentation that is indistinguishable from other institutions. This “buildings over breakthroughs” approach has several drawbacks:

• undervalues research achievements;
• misaligns with student interests in real-world impact; and
• misses opportunities to differentiate from other institutions.

You are failing to build your social capital.

This isn’t just a UQ issue, it’s symptomatic of the whole research sector.

I’m not just picking on UQ – in fact, I’m one of their greatest champions. Not only am I an alumna, I’m an industry fellow and member of the advisory board for UQ’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB). I’m highlighting this because I want to see them succeed – and because they’re not the only culprit.

Globally, research institutions are underselling their impact. A 2017 study has shown that university researchers have played a crucial role in 40% of the most significant inventions since the 1950s. The study also revealed that universities have contributed to around 75% of the world’s important inventions – from the polio vaccine to the personal computer. Notably, the study demonstrates that academic contributions were, in its author’s words, “much higher than would be expected” given relatively limited funding.

But how many of us can list just one invention that has come out of top universities like Harvard and Oxford, let alone our own alma mater? (If they aren’t one and the same!)

I'm tired of the “woke university” narrative in the media, which emphasises political or cultural controversies surrounding academia and misses the bigger picture: that universities have changed the world and made our lives so much better. That’s what we should be talking about.

Of course, there are bad-actor machinations behind the discrediting of research, but that’s only part of this story. The university sector is not doing itself any favours by burying its impact.

Let me give you an example.

In 2020, frustrated by the incorrect political and media narrative that Australian scientists are terrible at commercialising and translating research, I decided to write a piece for my publication, The Brilliant, about inventions from research. I figured that with my extensive experience as a science publisher, it would be simple. But it was far from it.

I started by Googling Australian inventions, but the same examples kept coming up: Wi-Fi, ResMed, Cochlear implant and the black box. While impressive, they’re all decades old. These stories represent a fraction of what Australian scientists have achieved. The real issue, I found, lies with universities — they focus more on showcasing their buildings and disconnected news stories than telling impactful stories.

Finding these inventions became a manual, time-consuming process, as I picked the brains of my extensive network of contacts. If it’s this hard for someone like me, who is motivated and well-connected, how can we expect the average student, politician or funder to do it? Why do universities make it so difficult?

This isn’t just an Australian issue. Global visibility of university impact is nowhere near where it should be. Communicating the impact of your research to the public has always been important – but now, it’s existential.Yet the conversation seems stuck—caught between outdated reliance on prestige tied to the value of a university degree, old-fashioned approaches to science communication, and the ongoing struggle to define and promote research impact effectively.

So, we need to fix it. Having worked with over 80 universities, research organisations and governments, my vision is a world in which research and science is a valued part of our society, and the organisations responsible are able to tell powerful, effective and engaging stories about their impact.

In the STEM Matters newsletter, I am going to talk about how we can do this – drawing on decades of experience in building the profile, awareness and funding for science and research. The goal: show how today’s marketing strategies are falling short, and help the research and science sector re-establish itself as one of society’s most valuable.

See you next time!

Kylie

PS. Kylie, here! I’m an expert strategist, start-up founder and publisher. My company, STEM Matters, has worked with over 80 organisations globally crafting corporate, engagement and funding strategies, capability statements and pitch decks, research impact audits and more. If you’d like to explore working with me, get in touch via [email protected] - I am always happy to have a 30 minute chat to discuss ideas and see if we are the right match.