Goulburn Valley Public Lecture

Lecture delivered by Vice-Chancellor Duncan Maskell on 17 October 2024.

Thank you, Lisa. It is always great to be in Shepparton, a town that I have got to know very well during my six years as Vice-Chancellor. I have always appreciated the hospitality and friendship of people here, in welcoming a stranger who is not just from Melbourne but also (when I first came here) from the other side of the world.

In mentioning hospitality and friendship, I think in particular of that from Indigenous colleagues, Elders and partners of the University, in organisations such as the Kaiela Institute, the Rumbalara Football Netball Club and most recently the Munarra Centre. The friendship of Paul Briggs in particular I cherish. And so I begin tonight by warmly acknowledging the traditional owners of the land and waterways in this area, the Yorta Yorta people. I pay my respects to Indigenous Elders past and present, and acknowledge all Indigenous people here.

In thinking about this talk, I have been casting my mind back many years, to another country, because I wanted to make this about why I believe so strongly in the importance of university education. That belief goes back a long way with me, to when I left my working class, North London upbringing behind me and started my undergraduate studies at Cambridge. That represented a radical change in the world for me.

I thought I knew a lot back then. But in my first year as a student, a supervisor told our class that we came in to university thinking we knew everything; by the end of the second year we would think that we knew absolutely nothing; and by the end of the third year, if he had done his job properly, we might think that we knew a little bit about something, but that there was still a large amount to learn. And of course I am still learning.

My attitude is perhaps summed up in the quote from the great Mark Twain:
“Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.”

University education remains extremely valuable, because when a young person goes through that experience, he or she often starts to think differently about knowledge and the world. I’ve said previously that the life-changing thing about being a university student is when excitement about knowledge starts to build. Under the influence of scholars at a university like the ones I’ve known, here and overseas, that sense of excitement within the student can grow into something that can change the world. “The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled” said the Greco-Roman historian Plutarch, in another well-known aphorism.  At its best, a university degree can be experienced by the student as being brought into the ongoing conversation around knowledge. It’s a conversation that’s been happening for centuries and will continue long after all our lifetimes.

In the promotional flyer for tonight, I quoted the words ‘education kills poverty,’ from respected Indigenous Elder Leon Atkinson when he was speaking at the Dungala Kaiela Oration last July. Uncle Leon’s words emphasize the important role that education plays by opening up new possibilities in communities that have suffered from disadvantage for a long time, and which aspire to make things better for future generations of their people. I support the sentiment strongly, because we know for a fact that education changes individual lives and the lives of communities so much for the better. This is the case all over the world.

Those words resonate deeply with me also because they connect with one of my strongest beliefs, which is that education – and this includes tertiary education – is a right and not a privilege. Everyone should be able to access education but for many reasons, we have not done a perfect job of ensuring that everyone does have that access. As a society we are very far from having done a perfect job. We have made considerable progress towards making sure that all Australian citizens have access to schooling, through secondary school level, though there is always room for improvement in the way that we encourage, resource and support the school system. That ‘room for improvement’ is obvious from the recent announcement by the Minister for Education (Jason Clare) to increase funding from Canberra so that schools in the Northern Territory can be fully funded for the first time. We are a first world country but there are gaps even today in the provision of basic education.

My concern is with tertiary education, where we have also made some progress. But there is a great deal more to be done. If we believe that all education is a right not a privilege, then we should do all that we can to put tertiary education, including university education, within the reach of everyone who can benefit from it. That is a vast number of people, much larger, I believe, than the number of those who currently access it.

In the public discussion about this, we often get side-tracked by the issue of ‘skills’ and preparing students for jobs. Skills and jobs are obviously very important. They are one of the keys to social mobility. They are one of the keys to the nation’s economic growth. Many providers of tertiary or post-secondary education focus exclusively on skills for particular jobs or sectors of the economy. This is extremely important, and I applaud the work of all the education and training providers at work in the Goulburn Valley, including La Trobe University and GOTAFE with whom we collaborate in the Goulburn Valley Tertiary Education Partnership. On that theme, I want to emphasise that the University of Melbourne is a rural as well as metropolitan university, with strong connections at so many places locally: here at the Department of Rural Health, at the Dookie campus of our Faculty of Science, and in active education and research projects across the Goulburn Valley.

Tonight, I want to focus particularly on the possibilities, for individuals and communities, that come with tertiary education. Paradoxically or not, these possibilities do not always come with specific training for a particular job, or with a tailored provision of ‘job ready skills.’ We can label this kind of education – non-skill specific higher education – the teaching of a rigorous ability to think. If it’s ‘training’, it is training in the nature of knowledge: the ability to understand what constitutes a body of knowledge, in science or the arts, and the ability to interrogate knowledge, and even perhaps make your own contribution to new knowledge – what we commonly call research – that can benefit not only you but people all around the world.

This is what university education can provide. The most familiar and most popular forms of this kind of university education at university level are the Bachelor of Arts and the Bachelor of Science. These are fantastic platforms on to the knowledge journey. Tonight, I particularly want to praise the idea of the BA and the BSc as being extremely worthwhile beginning points to a career, and even as later additions to a career already begun.

I want to mention a recent conversation I had with a colleague in Shepparton. My colleague says that here as in many places, university education is often viewed as valuable when it leads to a specific vocation, like being a nurse or doctor or lawyer or engineer or teacher or accountant or pharmacist or other specific professions. To those who think this way, the idea of a general arts or science degree can be seen as being ‘useless.’

Coupled with that, in many parts of regional Australia there is a long-held attitude that parents want younger people to be educated from home, so there is no value recognised in seeing a child move to Melbourne or another big city to learn about themselves and the world they live in.  ‘I find it really sad’, my colleague said.

I want to say that I find that idea really sad, too; and this is why I’m here tonight, to address it, as best I can, person to person.

I don’t know if I will persuade anyone of anything! But I can affirm what I believe; which is that a university education has great value, not just for a specific job but for personal development and critical thinking; this in turn can open up many more opportunities than simply training for a job. I say this in the understanding that university aspiration is somewhat lower here in the Goulbourn Valley than it could be.

But as Uncle Leon says, education is important for communities. What I want to add to that insight is that education includes university education for a much larger number of people than we might have thought.

In beginning I note that as we probably have a number of tertiary-educated people in the room, I may be preaching to the choir to some extent. But this is where dialogue among like-minded people, and even between those who disagree with each other, can be helpful. Because none of us is necessarily doing a great job of promulgating university education, and by talking about it, we may work out better ways to understand what value a university degree can have.

Let’s start with Plutarch. Human beings are not ‘empty vessels’ to be filled up with technical facts about this or that subject. They are beings who all share the capacity to ‘come alive’ in a particular way by being ‘woken up’ to the power of knowledge. This is just as true in 2024 as it was when Plutarch was alive two millennia ago.

Of course, a university education always involves the learning of many facts, progressively over the course of several years: facts about the human body for a trainee doctor, facts about words and grammar for a student of foreign languages.

But these facts are not the core, foundational feature of a university education. The foundation of a university education is when we become capable of rigorous  thinking in the sciences or the arts, or both. It changes our relationship to knowledge and because of this, in some subtle way, to the world. It does not make you morally or politically a better person than you were before. But it changes the way that you look out on the world. It unlocks some new potential that was always inside you.

Learning to think at university level is, for me, the foundation upon which other things can be built. With those strong foundations educationally, you can then include the vocational elements. To put this another way, you can still do a high-powered university education and train for the job, as almost a side-effect. There will be specific things that you have to do. The obvious examples are professional degrees like medicine, law, veterinary science, accounting and teaching, where there are accrediting bodies that tell you that you must tick very specific and technical boxes to be allowed to practice in the field.

My main point is that the specifics of professional entry in any field are not the be-all and end-all of university education. Too many people think that they are.

This also connects with the fact that jobs today change quickly and many times during the course of one human lifespan. Yet despite that rapid change, people with university education often do better in the jobs market. This is consistent over time. For example, a recent Australian Bureau of Statistics report on ‘Qualifications and work’ finds this: ‘In 2022-23, 78% of people with a non-school qualification were employed compared with 57% of those without a non-school qualification.’[1] Cause and effect can be notoriously hard to trace. But university qualifications are no disadvantage in the jobs market today.

Overall, the positive ‘change’ that can be brought about in a (young) person through a good university education does not depend upon the particular degree that you take – whether for a professional qualification or a broad degree such as the bachelor of arts or bachelor of science. The core of the change that is brought about comes through learning how to think – not what to think – and by learning both a body of knowledge and how to interrogate that knowledge.

The purpose of all education is to change – to change yourself and come to understand the world better through acquiring knowledge. Often, using that knowledge later you can also change the world itself.

The change that I am pointing to here often leads to an unlocking of the self: the untapped potential, the human brilliance that can otherwise lie dormant throughout a life.

Defending the broader non-vocational science degree, the BSc, is natural for me. It teaches you a way of thinking that is very robust. It gives you a broad landscape of understanding how science works – and this is important because we live in a very science-driven world. I can talk personally for hours about my journey in science – about how I use all the things that I learned in science at school, and then in my fairly broad science degree at Cambridge, and about how it comes in useful all the time, for understanding the world. It gives you the foundations from which to grow new ideas. When I read Darwin’s Origin of Species much too late in life, about ten years ago, I discovered that I had a vast store of knowledge in the background which I could see all fitting into place around this theory of evolution. Suddenly it made sense in a different way. Or made sense for the first time.

We always must remember that what humans know now is not the endpoint of human discovery. An example I like to give is the fact that for hundreds of years, Newtonian physics held sway.  Sir Isaac Newton’s laws of motion were repeatedly shown to be correct, and they worked very well – and in fact still do – for most of our purposes.  But then Albert Einstein came along in the early twentieth century and revolutionised things by proposing space-time and relativity, deriving the famous mathematical relationship between energy and matter: E=mc².  So much of our contemporary digital world depends on understanding Einsteinian physics to work. And yet in our daily lives the Newtonian model still pertains for our daily tasks.

Not everyone studies physics. But the point is that through a university education, students learn to understand what is currently known, and they do so in the context of understanding that knowledge should be, indeed must be regularly challenged by those who understand it.

Defending the broad arts degree, the BA, also comes naturally to me because the relevance of the arts even in a science-driven world is obvious, and should be obvious to all.

I often ask, how did we all survive through the horrible lockdown period of Covid 19, through 2020 and 2021? Part of the answer for me was music, and literature. Music has always been a hugely important part of my life.

Alongside music, the other branches of the humanities are all incredibly important. Literature: again, for me, re-reading The Odyssey by Homer during lockdown helped. The power of that ancient poetry, telling the story of a man who experiences war and yearns for home. All that he goes through, all that he thinks – and knowing as a reader that even the darkest thoughts have been thought by others over thousands of years, and still humanity has survived.

When we face really hard experiences in life, the arts and humanities can be absolutely vital. They warrant serious study over years, and this is one of the reasons why the bachelor of arts has remained one of the most popular university degrees in Australia, despite the fact that two Australian governments now have done all they can to actively discourage undergraduate study of the arts through the terrible so-called ‘jobs ready graduates’ policy, which has made the BA more expensive to students. In our science-driven world, we can overlook how all-pervasive the arts and humanities are, and how much they enrich our lives. At its simplest, we see art literally everywhere around us in the world. It is even in the way that the trees are planted around us. The approach by road into many Australian towns features a memorial avenue of trees carefully planted to create an effect of thoughtful reflection and memory. This is humanity reflected in the treescape, we might say. In fact, the longest memorial avenue in Australia is not far south of Shepparton, the Calder Woodburn Memorial Avenue; it spans over 20 kilometres and includes more than 2000 native trees. This is nature but it’s also art. You walk through the Botanic Gardens and have an uplifting experience from encountering nature: that is also art. We are surrounded constantly by it, so much that people take art for granted. But it is an essential part of the world.

One of the key questions that lies behind all studies in the arts and humanitiesis: what does it mean to be human? This goes back to the ancient philosophers. Every civilisation has profound (and different) ways of formulating the question and the answers. But it is as relevant today as ever.

Educated or not, each of us has to face the question sooner or later. For me, part of the answer lies in unlocking your own potential. If you are going to be classed by society as an unthinking drone, and that’s the only expectation that is ever placed on you, you very likely will be a drone. But if this attitude becomes widespread, then what will happen to our society in general is that of all the potentially brilliant people who are here – the X per cent in every population with brilliant, brilliant minds – these brilliant people will never know it. And the rest of us will never have the chance to know these people as having brilliant minds. We waste all of that human capital, every year, by not allowing these potential brilliant people to discover themselves through rigorous university education.

When I think about the power of what a university education gives you, I think often of my own late father. My father was every inch as intelligent as I am. But he could not attend university because he was not allowed to go to grammar school, which was the pre-requisite for university education in those days, and the reason that he could not go to grammar school was that his family could not afford the uniforms. Do not misunderstand me. My father had a great life; he lived well and achieved much in the community. So certainly without higher education you can have a marvellous and wonderful life.

But we are losing enormous potential brain power every time someone like that is not allowed, through circumstance or through the choice by others, to progress to and through tertiary and higher education. My father may have become the person who was going to solve the problem of peace in the Middle East. He may have cured cancer. We just do not know, and this is the case with every person with potential who is discouraged or turned away from higher education. This is a source of impoverishment in the world.

Around 2019, a Deloitte report was published on ‘why the future of work is human’. It noted that technology is changing demand for skills in many ways. But it emphasised that the biggest demand remains for capabilities wherein “humans excel and digital technology has been less successful in automating or augmenting human effort.”

AI continues to improve all the time. But we are still at the point (and I think always will be) where humans still excel in some features of the mind, compared with what machine learning can achieve.

So, what is it that cannot be replaced by machines? Clearly, high-level technical knowledge will remain in demand, though increasingly we can source vast amounts of the information we need from AI. But through education, and in particular, quality university education, we can still help deliver better on the things that only humans can do, through connecting and relating with and understanding others, to know and understand the world in its diversity (both social and natural), to develop the capacity for insight in many different situations, to acquire the acumen to synthesise knowledge, and to develop the sensitivity to incorporate the perspectives of others.

Last week in Melbourne I was privileged to deliver the annual Weary Dunlop Lecture[2], and I spoke there with both Australian students and international students on our campuses in mind, I said then, and repeat now, that universities in this country offer to all students, international and Australian, the skills that are relevant to their professional pursuits in future years. But importantly – and I would emphasise tonight, much more importantly – we offer the chance to every student to discover who and what they are. This is because higher education is ultimately about formation of the person as well as giving that person the knowledge and the tools to think clearly and apply knowledge rigorously.

These are all very important things and will remain in demand in societies and communities everywhere. As it happens, these are things we do particularly well with students through the traditional broad Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science degrees, as well as through the many other professional degree courses we teach.

Fundamentally, as universities we are not in the business of cloning graduates to fit precisely into one, time-sensitive job-mould, not least because the employment landscape is rapidly changing, and what we set out to produce in five years might not be the right shape or fit at that time. Similarly students leaving university now are unlikely to stay in one single industry or role for the rest of their working life.  Flexibility is thus key to their success. Broad education and high-level thinking skills are part of the grounding in knowledge that a university can give its graduates. This will remain valuable in ours and our children’s (and our grandchildren’s) lifetimes.