Dr Quinton Temby completed the Flexible Language Immersion Program and East Java Field Study in 2005 as part of his studies at Murdoch University. Quinton is now Assistant Professor in Public Policy and Management at Monash University, Indonesia.
When Dr Quinton Temby arrived in Indonesia as an Acicis student, he had no idea that two decades later he would return to help shape the country’s newest international university. Today, he teaches public policy at Monash University, Indonesia, where he was part of the original team that helped establish the campus in Jakarta’s BSD City.
“In 2021 I was lucky to become one of the founding academics at Monash University, Indonesia, the first foreign university to open in Indonesia,” he says. “It’s a unique experience to be part of a new international education ecosystem that includes places like the Indonesian International Islamic University (UIII), Georgetown, and others.”
It was the first time a global university had been invited to operate locally, as part of Indonesia’s effort to expand international partnerships in research and postgraduate training. Quinton describes the early years as “a rare chance to build something from the ground up” and says the role continues to be both challenging and energising. “Every day we are creating opportunities for collaboration between Indonesian and international students, researchers, and policymakers.”
That commitment to collaboration with Indonesia traces back to Quinton’s own student years, when he joined Acicis to study at Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM) and Universitas Muhammadiyah Malang. His time at UGM left a lasting impression.
“Looking back, the most valuable experience was being taught by the late Cornelis Lay, a political scientist at Universitas Gadjah Mada and an advisor to president Megawati. He was funny and insightful about Indonesia in a way I’d never seen before. Lectures were masterclasses. It’s maybe even truer today that if you really want to understand Indonesian politics you have to go to UGM.”
After completing a PhD in political science at the Australian National University, Quinton’s research has taken him across the region. Before joining Monash, he was a Visiting Fellow at Singapore’s ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute, where he helped establish the Media, Technology, and Society programme, and he previously lectured at Murdoch University in Perth.
Reflecting on his path, Quinton credits Acicis with shaping how he approaches both teaching and research. “Acicis was easily the most valuable part of my undergraduate degree, so it’s made me very long on the value of travel experiences in education, even more so now in the era of AI.”
He now encourages his students to think about how place, technology, and learning intersect. “There’s never been a more exciting time to study culture, in part because Large Language Models are essentially a cultural technology that finds patterns and connections across and within cultures,” he explains. “But LLMs are teaching us that culture is more complex than we realised and much of it is not digitally encoded. This is especially true outside of the English language and Western culture, as anthropologists always knew.”
For those considering their own study in Indonesia, his advice is practical yet philosophical. “The natural advantage for humans in a world of AI is in anything that hasn’t been digitally encoded: in what’s often called tacit knowledge, in mentor-apprentice contextual knowledge, and above all in knowledge created by interacting in physical space (hence travel experiences).”
Quinton’s trajectory from Acicis student to founding academic at Monash Indonesia shows how early in-country experiences can evolve into long-term professional impact. His work now contributes directly to the next generation of educational partnerships between Australia and Indonesia — a continuation of the same exchange that first began with Acicis.
