Visiting Professor at RMIT University Melbourne, where he was Director, Community and Regional Partnership after being Professor of Lifelong Learning at the University of Auckland. He is an Honorary Professor of Lifelong Learning at the Universities of Glasgow, Leicester and Stirling in the UK.

He worked in the sixties at the now University of Greenwich and then at Leeds before becoming Foundation Director of Continuing Education at the Australian National University in 1969, then in 1985 Foundation Professor and Director of Continuing Education at the University of Warwick. At that time he became Secretary and then Vice-Chair of the UK universities lifelong learning body now called UALL. After serving as Pro-Vice-Chancellor at Warwick he became President of the University of Western Sydney Nepean.

He has worked extensively from the seventies with Unesco, DVV Germany, the OECD and other international organisations mainly on education in relation to development, recurrent education and lifelong learning, also equity and poverty reduction issues, and sustainable development. This international work included serving as Secretary-General of ASPBAE (1974-85) and Associate Secretary-General of ICAE until 1985.

He is a life member of UALL, ASPBAE and ICAE and a registered workaholic, but stress-free. This to be explained by rediscovering his vocation as peasant manqué in the Burgundy countryside where extensive gardening equates with average zero food-miles.