A year ago, I wrote about Muslim students at UTS navigating Eid al-Fitr alongside their academic obligations. The blog closed with four practical steps for faculty: calendar awareness, Canvas acknowledgements, consistent communication, and clearer signposting to community resources. Twelve months on, the same conversation returns. Eid al-Adha is just a week from today, and it lands squarely inside the Autumn final exam period. This recurrence is the reason I am returning to this question, and it is also the reason I want to broaden it.
The expectations are already set
The Australian Universities Accord Final Report was released in February 2024, more than two years ago. The Federal Government’s response, including the target of eighty per cent of working-age Australians holding a tertiary qualification by 2050, and the population parity goals for First Nations students, students from low socio-economic backgrounds, students with disability, and those from regional and remote communities, has now been the operating framework for the sector for two full academic years. The Australian Tertiary Education Commission was established to steward this work.
The Accord sits within a longer commitment, both national and institutional, to a more inclusive higher education system. UTS has made the same commitment in its own terms through its Widening Participation Strategy and the work of the Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion. Both frameworks rest on the same underlying principle: that public universities are structured around the lives of their students, not the other way around. The relevant question in 2026 is not whether the university has signed up to that principle. It is whether the principle is visible in how the institution operates day to day.
What this asks of a public Business School
That question matters with particular force inside a business school. The rhetorical commitments of contemporary business education to social impact, ethics, sustainability and inclusion are now standard. The harder question, two years into the Accord, is whether those commitments are being matched at the operational level: in scheduling, in communication, in how the institution actually conducts itself when a student’s life does not align with its default rhythms.
This is where the four practices from last year’s blog reappear. They look modest set against a national reform agenda, but they are precisely where that agenda either holds or breaks down. The macro commitments and the everyday institutional habits are the same project. The collision between exams and Eid al-Adha this year is a precise illustration of the gap between the two.
Coherence between what we teach and how we operate
Within Business and Social Impact UG, a core subject in the Bachelor of Business, we ask students to examine how organisations distribute recognition, respect and resources, and to look past what corporate disclosures claim about themselves. That teaching loses coherence if the institution delivering it treats religious observance, caring responsibilities or first-in-family navigation as administrative friction. The case for teaching social impact in a business school rests on the institution being willing to apply the same scrutiny to its own conduct. Change begins internally, in the texture of how subjects are run, how examinations are scheduled, how communications are written, and how feedback from students is received when something is not working.
What this means for Eid in May 2026
The Eid al-Adha clash with the final exam period is not a one-off scheduling problem. It is the predictable consequence of an institutional calendar that has not yet caught up with the diversity of the student body it now enrols, and two years after the Accord made widening participation a national priority, that lag is harder to defend. Addressing it does not require new policy. It requires a small number of concrete decisions to be made in the next week. Subject coordinators can check their final examination timetables against 27 May now, while there is still time to act. Where a clash exists, affected students can be contacted directly to acknowledge the date and offer an alternative sitting, rather than waiting for a special consideration application that places the burden on the student to advocate at the most stressful point in the semester. Canvas announcements can name Eid al-Adha explicitly. These are small actions, available to every coordinator without reference to faculty policy.
A year on, I remain committed to inclusive practice in my own teaching, and that commitment lives inside the institution rather than in front of it.