The Town and the Gown: address to Sugden Institute

The Vice-Chancellor’s address to the Sugden Institute at Queens College, the University of Melbourne, was delivered on Tuesday 22 March 2022

Thank you, Stewart.

I begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the lands on which we work and learn. I pay my respects to Indigenous elders, past and present, and acknowledge Indigenous people here this evening.

Thank you everyone for being here and thank you for inviting me. I am delighted to be part of the program of the Sugden Institute, named after Edward Holdsworth Sugden, the first master of the college, and a true-born Yorkshireman. We should really therefore call him SOOOGDEN.  He was trained for the Wesleyan Church at Headingley Theological College in Leeds, but this was some 15 years or so before the famous cricket ground was opened there, so sadly he wouldn’t have been spending his spare time in that most precious of activities: watching cricket in the freezing Yorkshire cold, and certainly not with some warm beer in his hand, given his faith!   This is the Institute’s first face-to-face event for a couple of years. I have found the lack of face-to-face contact with people very hard to endure during the past two years. My heart rejoices at being able to re-connect now with people at the University and in our colleges, in the city and in our country towns.   Walking round the campus there is great energy about the place, and I have been accosted more than once by students who wanted to inform me of my inadequacy of thought about some of the controversies of the day, about which they are of course convinced that they are right!  It’s great to be getting back to normal!

I will start by saying something that should be obvious to anyone observing the world at the moment: namely that we are living in a time of constant change.

This itself is nothing new. As far back as Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher of the sixth century BCE, the theme of constant change, or “flux” sometimes rendered as “becoming”, has been a staple of Western thought.

Heraclitus famously said that when you step into a river, the water in the river constantly changes around you, but the river itself stays the same.   “Panta rhei” or everything flows. Certainly when we look at the world over the last couple of years, the metaphorical water in the river has changed a very great deal.

We might observe how, from a completely COVID-focused mindset in 2020 and 2021, the world has quickly become focused on a different crisis, the senseless and barbaric war in Ukraine. Almost no-one is in favour of this war. From a brave TV presenter on state-controlled Russian TV who held up a sign opposing the war, to anti-war protesters in at least 37 Russian cities, to Russian tennis players who continue to play in tournaments but refuse to do so under the Russian flag, through to the united opposition of the Ukrainian nation, and united support for Ukraine from the international community, the war has no support from anyone except Putin, his close disciples, and those in Russia who have been misled by Putin’s Soviet-style propaganda and fear campaign.

This war has produced the gravest refugee crisis in Europe since World War 2, thousands of civilian deaths, and the prospect of escalation, including the threat of nuclear weapons being used against human beings for the first time since 1945. We have even heard an incumbent United States President explicitly warn of the dangers of ‘World War 3’, should Putin cross the NATO border.

It is not my intention to spread alarm on this. Everyone knows that the situation is serious, and as always in human affairs, there is hope. Ukrainian and Russian government negotiators seem to be talking at least. The strong international support for Ukraine may deter Putin from further escalation. Potentially, even if it seems unlikely at this minute, peace might return as quickly as war came, and the world could turn its mind to problems of a different kind.

In other words, the water in the river of history can and will change again, and this can happen very quickly. Climate change, for example, is never far from our minds, and could come roaring back into the headlines with the next major flooding event or bushfire season. Racism and intolerance of diversity is a constant major challenge for nations and communities everywhere. There are many other persistent world problems that receive fewer headlines but demand attention, too. They include the stubborn problem of statelessness – people with no nation that they can belong to – of whom there are an estimated 10 million in the world today. That is on top of the aforementioned refugee problem – people who have a nationality but cannot return home at the moment because of one problem or another, like war or famine. Refugees represent an even bigger world population, and their numbers keep growing, as we have seen in recent weeks.

Having painted a possibly bleak picture of the here and now, I contend that challenges in the world are not essentially different from the way they have been throughout the long run of history. There is value in seeing all such events – COVID-19 during the past two years, even the Ukraine war today – as forming part of the constant flow of history.  As university people but also as citizens, we can benefit in every moment from holding clearly in our minds a longer-term view of history and of ‘crisis’ and of conflict and of challenge – not just focusing on the water that is flowing around us in the moment but seeing the whole river as well. I think that this is something that universities in particular should be able to do.

All of the things that are happening in our very uncertain times are matters that affect real people where universities can and do have an important role to play, in finding solutions perhaps, but certainly in dissecting and explaining the issues, and in challenging governments and others to think harder about what is happening.

Meeting here at Queens College at the University of Melbourne on a March evening in 2022, how should we think about this phenomenon of constant change, constant uncertainty, changing crises and challenges that confront the world and our communities?

The first reflection that I would make about what we can say from the vantage point of a University looking at the world’s problems in early 2022, is that meetings like this series of Sugden Institute conversations are extremely important.  Although a large part of my day is taken up with university management, it is the big picture of what universities do in and for the world and in people’s lives that excites me, and also provides a foundation for everything that people in university management spend their time doing.

I notice in connection with this evening a description of Senate Square in Helsinki – a very beautiful spot in the heart of what is one of my very favourite cities in the world.

I will quote the words of Professor Paul Gooch, the former head of Victoria College at the University of Toronto, and Queens’ sister College, in order to reflect on it briefly. Professor Gooch writes:

"In the centre of …. Helsinki sits Senate Square. … On the south, near the sea, were merchant houses; to the east, the state government; to the west, the university; on the highest point to the north, the Lutheran cathedral. Business, government, church, and university [thus] enclose the town square, expressing architecturally the conversation and commerce between and among parties. … Whether in Helsinki or in any city with universities, the parties will look across the square at each other, anticipating some benefit or other."

This is very well put and makes it very clear that universities are not luxuries that we can do without, but are core, foundational institutions in society, and which in turn would do well to remember that fact when considerations of the ‘Town and Gown’ relationship come into play.  Aloof separateness is not the right answer for a university in my view.

I think that there is a further element in the Helsinki town square symbolism that could be emphasised which comes from the mention of the sea, which captures international commerce and interaction, on which the wealth of so many nations depended in the past and still now. Helsinki and Melbourne are both port cities as well as being university towns. Today for us (as, I’m sure, it is for the Finns) the global dimension is absolutely vital, both for the city and for the university, and for the two in partnership.

International trade is an important element in this of course. So is international collaboration in research. We saw this exemplified in the efforts by researchers here at Melbourne, at the Doherty and other institutes, in collaboration with colleagues at institutions overseas, when the international research community quickly developed the science in relation to the new coronavirus in 2020. On this point, it is still too often overlooked that the new vaccines which have, in a real sense, saved us from the COVID-19 pandemic (or at least its worst effects) are the direct outcome of decades of truly international research collaborations, across several disciplines, all directed at helping humanity, even if the research were at the very basic end of the spectrum.

Other partners on ‘the town square’ also contributed to this rapid vaccine development and roll-out – governments which put up incentives to develop them, hospital and health care teams that led the way in distribution and getting shots in arms, community groups which helped advocate for vaccine take-up, in the face of some ignorant scare-mongering about how vaccines work. So the ‘town square’ image is very valid. I would only add the international dimension or the global dimension to the model, to make it more complete, and perhaps a truer image of how universities and cities work together. They work by talking and partnering together, but also by looking out on the wider world, with a view to making a difference there.

One other important global dimension of universities’ work is in the area of public education and advocacy. Two relevant examples of this especially leap to mind for me at the moment, in relation to nuclear disarmament and to refugees. Both issues, sadly, have become prominent because of the war in Ukraine.

Though the threat of nuclear weapons has not been as prominent in media discussions in recent decades as it was during the distant days of the Cold War (which some of us are old enough to remember) the fact is that the threat of nuclear war has never gone away. This has made the work of university people like Professor Tilman Ruff extremely important. Professor Ruff is an associate professor at the Nossal Institute for Global Health and, as a public health physician, is well known for his work over many years towards abolishing nuclear weapons. His work helped to establish the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, or ICAN, and ICAN was recognised with the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017.

In relation to refugees too, universities play an important role – alongside other members of the community – in being a place where everyone is welcome, including those who literally have nowhere else to go. I was delighted and moved by the story of Khalid from Afghanistan, who was enabled to join the University as a Masters student in the Faculty of Arts this year. Both Khalid and his sister (who is a medical student) were forced out of Afghanistan after the Taliban took power last September.

I also warmly applaud the work of Queens College, in partnership with the Faculty of Arts, in  supporting other refugee students and scholars at risk. Again there is the brilliant story of a student from Iran who is now a second-year Arts student on his way to studying law. I know Queens is working hard to support him on this academic journey, and that soon you will be joined by another ‘at-risk’ student from Myanmar. We wish you and her all the best as she takes up her studies here too.

This is such important work because education is our mission. Again pointing to the global dimension, our education is not to be the exclusive preserve of Australian students but of people with potential no matter where they come from. This is important for the whole world, not just for the local city and nation.  It is greatly to the benefit of our city and nation that we engage so strongly at the international level, something that was mentioned by federal Minister for Trade Dan Tehan at an event at the Australia India Institute this morning at the University.

I will end with another story of a refugee and a member of the Queens College community, the late Sam Pisar.  You may know the story. Sam was a Holocaust survivor who narrowly escaped death at the hands of the Nazis as a teenager, then in the 1950s was able to come to the University here and graduate in law, while living at Queens. A few weeks ago the United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who travelled to Melbourne for an international summit meeting, decided to visit the University while he was here. The reason was that Sam Pisar was Antony Blinken’s step-father and had had a huge, positive influence on Blinken’s life. He was very touched when I was able to present him with a framed photo of Sam that was taken while he was a student here at Queens, during the 1950s.

The city and the university are full of stories like this, embedded in our joint past and the history of the wider world, and sometimes these stories only surface because of particular events that pop up from time to time. They are reminders of the flow of history. They also remind us of the persistence of the university mission over very long periods of time, and how that is embedded in the cities and societies of which our universities form an essential part.

The mission clearly remains as relevant during the twenty-first century as it was in previous centuries.  And it is a mission that works best only when ‘Town and Gown’ unite with common purpose.