“She’s nickel-tough. But she’s unafraid of revealing vulnerability. She cares – and she doesn’t care who knows it,” says Jackson, who inherited Gardner as chair when she came into the role at UA in 2018. It will be a fitting end of a life writ large on the higher education stage in Australia that Gardner’s finale duty as vice-chancellor of Monash will be to officiate at the very first graduation for students at its brand-new Indonesian campus on Friday. That first graduation – and Gardner’s final one – will include 50 postgraduate students who receive diplomas in data science and…