The importance of international university cooperation

The Vice-Chancellor’s address to the Annual International Forum on Higher Education, hosted by the China Association of Higher Education and Sun Yat-sen University, was presented on Sunday 26 June 2022.

Fellow Presidents, colleagues: it is an honour to participate in today’s Forum, co-hosted by our colleagues at Sun Yat-sen University and the China Association of Higher Education. It is great to have the opportunity to participate in this dialogue among peers from respected universities across the globe. The world has changed a great deal since we were last able to meet together in just one location as world university leaders, doing what international scholars have always done: exchanging insights and discussing problems and challenges in an atmosphere of shared enlightenment and respect. We are fortunate indeed that during the pandemic we have had the contemporary communications tools we do, and so have been able to continue much of our work in universities, educating our students, conducting our research, and meeting together collegially at least to some extent via video technology and the World Wide Web, as we are doing today.

A distinguished historian from my own university, Professor Geoffrey Blainey, published a famous book more than 50 years ago titled The Tyranny of Distance, reflecting the challenges that Australians had often felt in being physically far away from most countries, because of the country’s geographic location deep in the southern latitudes. To a large extent we now find ‘the tyranny of distance’ has been overcome, through digital communications. This has been one valuable lesson from the COVID-19 pandemic experience.

In my brief remarks to the forum today I will address the theme of collaboration across vast distances as this relates to our work together as leading universities within our respective nation states. We can think about collaboration in relation to our particular institution-to-institution links, the circumstantial challenges of the moment and of the foreseeable future, and to the quality of work that we all do as universities, on the world stage and in our home countries.

First, I will start by saying that international collaboration on research projects, person-to-person exchanges and joint academic programs is a growing area of activity that universities should prioritise. Increased collaboration between us, both formally and informally, is something that we as leaders should be proactive about, and perhaps most importantly, it is something that we should encourage our staff, our academics and our students to prioritise as far as possible. Let me reflect a little, from a personal perspective, on why I think this is so.

There are some obvious global challenges facing humanity, to which universities can help shape great solutions. To mention just two of these, the world faces significant challenges both from infectious diseases, of course, and from climate change.

My own academic field is in the study of infectious diseases and vaccinology, so I am very mindful of the extraordinary contributions that researchers in these fields have made, not just during the past two years but over several decades. Scientists at our own Doherty Institute in Melbourne were the first outside China to replicate the SARS-CoV-2 virus in a lab, producing data which immediately assisted in the worldwide quest to understand the virus and help public health authorities everywhere to combat COVID-19. I am sure that scientists from all the institutions represented at this forum have been proactive in responding to the pandemic, and I include in that statement social scientists, because their role is also crucial in tackling such a major global human emergency.

But the challenges – physical and social – from infectious disease do not end with the Delta variant of COVID-19. There will be other variants, and there will certainly be other diseases, and probably other pandemics. In fact, COVID-19 has been a startling reminder that plagues, pandemics and dangerous diseases have been a permanent feature of the experience of many species throughout history, including the human species – a fact that some people might have forgotten until last year. This reminder highlights the importance of all our work in university research collaboration. As universities, we are curators and custodians of the most important knowledge that humans possess, and the task of developing and applying that knowledge is a major part of our social role.

One part of this ‘canon of knowledge’ is the research underpinning mRNA vaccinology, which may yet prove to be one of the great gifts bestowed on humanity by modern medicine: it has already saved a huge number of lives. But there are many other frontiers of shared global knowledge in many other disciplines where researchers, at all our universities, are working, and where major future contributions can be made.

These researchers are instinctively global workers. They know who the experts in their fields are, whether they be in their own countries or overseas. It is part of our mission as university leaders, I think, to encourage our researchers to seek out their fellow experts wherever they are, to converse and collaborate with them, and to explore and expand the ways in which expert academic knowledge can be developed, extended and applied. Crucially, this knowledge is also shared with our students as they are taught in our universities.

One other area in which collaborating researchers can potentially make huge contributions in coming years is climate research. Whether we think of this in terms of the science of temperature change or the social science of nations adjusting to different, newer energy policy regimes, there is a great deal to be explored. This is a continual talking point for governments in every nation, and is of great concern to populations of people everywhere.

Meeting the twin challenges of carbon reduction for the sake of temperature management and energy delivery to support people’s legitimate aspirations for economic development will require increasing international cooperation, respectful dialogue and an active support role played by universities and university researchers.

At Melbourne we have made a recent, important move to support this general goal by establishing Melbourne Climate Futures, an initiative to bring cross-disciplinary researchers deeper into dialogue with each other about ways forward to help meet this global challenge. Again, deeper cross-disciplinary international collaboration on climate research is also one of the most important ways forward for us all.

As a final point on this theme, we can reflect that today’s greatest challenges in the world – such as pandemic disease and climate change but including many others – are far beyond the capacity of any single university or any single nation to grapple with successfully. This basic reality makes international collaboration essential.

Most of the remarks I have made so far are perhaps neither contentious, nor unfamiliar to most of us who attend inter-university forums like this. I would now like to say something a little different, and a little more difficult to express, concerning the deeper purpose of the work that we do.

I have spoken so far about specific challenges, or problems, like infectious disease and climate change. Meeting these challenges is a duty we have, and an important source of the unique contributions that universities make. But there is another area of the life of individuals and societies in which universities play just as important a role as they do in solving obvious problems, and I would call this ‘culture’ or ‘meaning’. Throughout the pandemic, as I have considered the sad loss of life, and the time and opportunities lost by so many people, I’ve come to see that scientists and public health authorities and medical researchers are achieving great things by helping to prolong lives.

But we are still left with important philosophical questions: what are we preserving life for? What is the meaning of the life and the culture that we are preserving? How do we think about the ethical challenges involved in fighting a disease, given the various burdens it imposes on our societies?

These are not necessarily empirical questions, like the question of what is the genome of a particular virus or microbe. They are important questions, however, which university researchers, particularly those in the social sciences, arts and humanities, are well placed to think about, give leadership on and show us how to tackle. At my university, colleagues in these fields are deeply interested in the question of what it is to be human, something that is actually quite contested worldwide among scholars who vigorously debate concepts such as ‘humanism’, the ‘post-human’ and human and post-human ethics. Given the state of our world, it seems that humanity today needs an entirely refreshed philosophical and ethical framework, or perhaps a variety of frameworks, to help it cope with the many challenges, social as well as physical, that we collectively face.

Arts, social sciences and humanities scholars from many nations have a key role to play here, showing us how to think through the deepest questions confronting the human species.

Here again, international collaboration seems crucial.  The fact is that inquiry into these kinds of questions can be helped enormously by bringing cross-cultural and cross-country collaboration to the table. When we have scholars educated in the pursuit of knowledge, coming from different cultures and different traditions, thinking together about the same series of deep questions, then we have a great chance of developing more coherent, powerful answers to these questions than we will if we continue working in isolation from one another.

This is one area of activities in which universities are indeed unique. I think that every university represented at this forum is keen to collaborate and cooperate as much as possible with their governments, and with business and communities in their local area. This is true of my university. There is some work, though, that only universities can do, or at least do better than governments, businesses or other groups can do, and this work is research and education to the highest level.

A distinguishing feature of our work is the clear methodologies that we employ in the disciplines in relation to debate and the verification of knowledge. This is important because, as is commonly observed by many people now, there is a growing polarisation of opinion and a politicisation of knowledge in many countries. Universities with their clear procedures for debate and the testing and certification of knowledge – procedures grounded in centuries of practice – have a uniquely important role to play in holding back this tide. Again, collaborating with each other and showing solidarity with each other across international borders is a powerful way of defending these essential aspects of what we do.

Given today’s growing global needs for research and education in a broad range of fields, it makes perfect sense that university leaders should hold collaboration with their colleagues and partners in other countries to be one of their most important priorities. This is certainly a view that I encourage at my institution and in Australia.

While we respectfully interact with governments and with business, universities and their work persist as a kind of golden thread throughout the history of nations. Many changes in how governments operate, in the interests of businesses and in the concerns of communities, have been seen during the long period of history that universities have been doing their work. Today, we are ready to enter a bright new phase because of the growing need for global solutions and global cooperation, and the increased opportunities for collaboration afforded by the digital age.

This is a phase on which we embark, despite present challenges including the pandemic, with our core values intact, focused as we are on the pursuit of knowledge, the pursuit of truth, and in a deep way, the interrogation of the universe, the world and ourselves.

I hope that we may seize the opportunities this next phase offers us, as universities right around the world. Thank you.