Mitchell was a founding member of the University of Canterbury Political Science Department in 1963, supporting it breaking away from former conjoint with the History Department. In 2015, he returned to the University of Canterbury as a Canterbury Visiting Fellow. The Canterbury Visiting Fellowship is generously paid for by the University of Canterbury and administered by the Erskine Programme. Austin is lecturing on "Britain and New Zealand - The Great Unravelling' looking at the evolution of recent British politics, drawing analogies in each section with parallel developments and implications for New Zealand to examine all worldwide trends in the evolution of liberal English speaking democracies.