Vice-Chancellor's Fifth Annual Address
The Vice-Chancellor’s annual address to the University of Melbourne community, delivered at Melbourne Connect on Tuesday 20 June 2023.
Chancellor Jane Hansen, Council members; colleagues, members of the wider University of Melbourne community:
I begin by acknowledging the Traditional Owners of the lands on which the University works and learns: the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Bunurong peoples (at Burnley, Fishermans Bend, Parkville, Southbank and Werribee campuses), the Yorta Yorta Nation (at Dookie and Shepparton campuses), and the Dja Dja Wurrung people (at Creswick campus).
I also acknowledge, and express my gratitude to, the Traditional Owners, Elders and Knowledge Holders of all Indigenous nations and clans who have been instrumental in the University’s continuing reconciliation journey.
I pay respect to Elders past, present and future, and acknowledge the importance of Indigenous knowledge in the Academy. As a community of researchers, teachers, professional staff and students, this University is privileged to work and learn every day with Indigenous colleagues and partners.
To deliver this year’s Vice-Chancellor’s Address, I have decided to come to one of the University’s newer public spaces, here at Melbourne Connect. For those who have not seen it, Melbourne Connect stands at the intersection of Grattan and Swanston Streets. I do so because of what this new location represents: a great meeting place where city and university merge almost imperceptibly into each other.
This choice of location is a gentle way of hinting at a significant theme that I want to address tonight: the importance of the University’s work in and with society.
In beginning tonight, I also note that it is a time of transition in the University’s leadership, and it is appropriate to begin with some words of thanks and welcome.
I thank the previous Chancellor of the University, Allan Myers, for his generous advice and unswerving support throughout his term.
I also warmly welcome our new Chancellor, Jane Hansen. I greatly look forward to working closely with Chancellor Hansen in the years ahead.
I also note that two of our most esteemed colleagues, Dr Julie Wells and Professor Jim McCluskey, are leaving their roles this year. Their service to the University has been exemplary and I shall miss their wise advice, their firm support and their sheer hard work in some of the most difficult and complex areas that we have to deal with. I wish them very well in the next phase of their lives.
This is, rather astonishingly, the fifth annual Vice-Chancellor’s Address that I have given, and I continue to be mindful both of the privilege of leading this great university, and of the fact that together, we still have a great deal of work to do. Thus it is timely tonight to consider the University’s recent achievements, and to reflect on our shared challenges and opportunities ahead.
Despite the pandemic years that are now thankfully behind us, it seems to me that we have emerged in 2023 as a stronger, more focused university. We have reset our approach in a number of important areas, including for example in responding to sexual harassment, and the over-casualisation of our workforce. We have opened up our wonderful University of Melbourne Student Precinct, just on the other side of the tram tracks; and I am delighted that the precinct last week became the most awarded project in the 2023 Victorian Architecture Awards. It also took away the top award, The Victorian Architecture Medal. The Precinct is a space which serves as a constant and welcome reminder of the central role of our students in everything we do.
We have emerged as a stronger institution partly because the disruption and enforced delays of recent years gave us added impetus to reflect on, above all, our core institutional purpose. This is, and always will be, our academic mission in the service of society. This mission is succinctly captured in a quotation that my colleague Professor Michael Wesley uses as the epigraph in his new book, Mind of the Nation. It is a statement by the famous Californian university president, Clark Kerr:
‘As society goes, so goes the university, but also, as the university goes, so goes society’.
We are indeed linked, heart and soul, with the society around us and our academic mission is what keeps the heart beating.
Crucial to our vital academic mission, we used time during the pandemic period to complete our Advancing Students and Education Strategy.
This helps remind us of a major part of why we are here while at the same time articulating extremely well what our Melbourne Curriculum is about – allowing our students to develop deep disciplinary knowledge and understanding while also encouraging their curiosity, creativity, and sense of inquiry.
I will return to this theme and reflect on it further in a few moments.
Following the change of government just over a year ago, the nation has been caught up in important policy discussions. These are welcome while also being challenging.
In my view, the single most important one, because it affects the soul of the nation, is that on Indigenous constitutional recognition – and here, the University Council, the University Executive and the Academic Board have all expressed their support for a ‘Yes’ vote in the Voice referendum.
More directly to do with the universities sector is of course the discussion concerning the future of Higher Education policy under the auspices of the Accord process. From the start this has invited us all to produce ideas about the future that are ‘big, bold and radical’, to quote Professor Mary O’Kane.
In the spirit of that invitation, I want to reflect broadly in this Address: first, on the national landscape of education as I see it from our vantage point at the University of Melbourne; and second, on two practical policy issues that confront the government, particularly in relation to funding the university sector. These issues are the funding of research, and fees charged to students.
My starting point is that there exists an absolutely crucial landscape of education across the country, upon which the entire future of the nation depends in multiple ways.
A landscape may comprise many different terrains: glades and forests, hills and plains, complex flora and fauna – but all of its elements are interconnected and interdependent. We should consider the educational landscape in a similar light – schools right through to technical institutions and universities, and within each of these different elements, yet more kinds of differentiation between various educational institutions that focus on people at different times in their lives, people from different places and backgrounds, and with different personal outcomes in view.
If the nation is to flourish, nothing in this landscape can be neglected. Every part of it is extremely important.
If we doubt this, we need only consider our own individual education journeys, and those of family members. I remember being shocked when I first discovered that my mother, who worked in a factory, could play the piano beautifully and to a very high standard. Unknown to me she had acquired this ability early in life. This memory is a personal reminder to me not to pre-judge either the knowledge that non-university educated people possess, nor the potential of every human being, given opportunity.
Just as we should celebrate those who come to us for university education, so we must also recognise the great value and importance of non-university tertiary education, undertaken by talented and dedicated individuals seeking non-university trade and technical skills and knowledge.
At the same time, we should think rigorously and creatively about what it is exactly that we – currently the leading research-intensive university in the country – uniquely have to offer. What does our own particular part of this interconnected education and research landscape look like?
I contend that there is an absolute necessity that part of the educational landscape must consist of universities like this one, that have a clear mission to provide students and graduates with a deep intellectual foundation, where we can help people to form their minds, and where ideas and concepts that might not be clearly or directly related to economic success are debated rigorously and vigorously.
Developing a deep intellectual foundation requires a great deal of learning within a discipline area, over time. When successful, this is not about limited rote learning of content; it is about a student, in whatever discipline, coming to understand the complexities of, and nuances in, their subject area of choice. When students come to this kind of understanding, it allows them to interrogate thoroughly – and ultimately question – the knowledge base of their discipline: to question and, driven by curiosity, to keep questioning what they have learned. This constant questioning leads to a deep appreciation of how knowledge can change over time.
Too many of us are all too ready to assume that what we know now is the endpoint of human discovery, and that learning the current canon is sufficient for an education. It is of course incredibly important to become deeply familiar with the canon, but it is also essential to understand its limits and to be receptive to new things.
An example of this 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 and revolutionised things by proposing space-time and relativity, deriving the 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.
The point is that we need to educate our students broadly so that they understand what is currently known, but in the context of understanding that knowledge should be regularly challenged. This is not the same as simply saying ‘I don’t believe that to be true’, with no further argument. This relies on students being educated so that they develop a range of abilities: so that they can understand the importance of evidence and sources, can adduce relevant evidence on all sides of an argument, and can formulate a position rigorously based on that thinking.
This educative principle – challenging the canon, questioning and re-questioning, applying analytical thinking with rigour – applies across all the disciplines in the University. And this ongoing educational activity of questioning, challenging and re-prosecuting, undertaken with our undergraduate and postgraduate students across all our disciplines every day, reflects the foundations of the research excellence that characterises this university.
What I am saying here underlines, I hope, our commitment to educate our students in the full light of an active research program. Research is crucial to a university education. Great teaching should take you as a student to the edge of human knowledge and understanding; but this cannot be done without the presence of deep research that constantly pushes and revises the boundaries of our knowledge. At Melbourne, some of our research is pointed at immediate practical outcomes like new drugs, digital innovation, and emerging art forms. But crucially we also pursue blue sky, curiosity-driven research and scholarship that is enlarging the canon of knowledge.
We can be proud of our fantastic research across a comprehensive range of disciplines, and we should make every effort to ensure that our educational offerings are firmly embedded in this questioning research environment. The longstanding marriage of education and research is what makes the university proposition distinct from all others in the educational landscape. Some standout examples: we have fantastic work in biomedical research across a wide range of areas, with infectious diseases being in the spotlight recently of course. We also have so much exciting sustainability research work happening, through initiatives such as Melbourne Climate Futures, the Energy Institute, the Biodiversity Institute and the Biodiversity Council; and from another angle, research tackling another of the world’s serious current problems – statelessness – through the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness, which is of truly global stature. We have the capacity to undertake extraordinary research across all our campuses and precincts, and that will soon include the one in development at Fishermans Bend, where major new research initiatives are planned through the Faculties of Architecture, Building and Planning and of Engineering and Information Technology. An immediate plan is to make our contribution with partners there in defence research, which is high on the Government’s priority list.
The research and impact dimensions of what our university does are also an aspect of what attracts generous donors to the University to support exciting new directions. This includes the exceptional gift of $250M from Geoff Cumming to the Doherty Institute for the Cumming Global Centre for Pandemic Therapeutics, and donors who generously reach out to support research such as the Elizabeth and James Tatoulis Chair in Classics, the Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature, and, at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, the Research in Effective Education in Early Childhood Hub.
Again, the virtues of being a comprehensive research university are obvious. Our comprehensiveness across the disciplines and faculties is a major source of our positive impact on and in society.
Since we have been invited by the government to think radically, I want to add a couple of personal comments on the way that the funding of universities works in this country. These concern the way that research is funded, on the one hand, and the way that student education is funded, on the other.
One of the main problems the nation faces in funding its research efforts in universities is simply getting a full understanding of how much research actually costs. Unnecessary complexity has been present in the system for a long time, leading to the conceptualisation of costs as either direct or indirect, the latter being those costs required for a range of support functions that service that research. This is not useful and is indeed misleading. The fact is that direct and indirect costs are both real costs of doing the research. Added up they form the Full Economic Cost of the research. Competitive research grants awarded by the Research Councils come nowhere near to supplying the full cost of the research being funded, with the consequence that universities must find money for the difference between the full cost and the amount awarded. This is a very large sum of money. It is also increasingly clear that the money granted to universities even for teaching costs is not enough to fund the actual costs of delivering that teaching. Again, universities have to find the money to fill the gap. We do so from several sources, but the main one, as most people realise, is overseas student fees.
A more rational approach for the nation, is to establish clearly and transparently, with an agreed methodology, the full economic cost of doing research. You might be surprised to learn that this is not a simple exercise. The complexities of different costs for research within different disciplines and the time fractions spent by academics on teaching and research are two areas that indicate the complexity. But it should not be beyond the capacity of governments and universities to agree to a methodology to arrive at a transparent estimated full cost of research that can be used as a benchmark for research funding policy. In fact, it has been done in other countries, including the UK.
I am not even saying, necessarily, that governments should fund 100 per cent of the cost of research, though this would be the ideal outcome. But we should have clarity about the full cost, so that government can decide to what extent they will fund the nation’s research effort.
Again, in the spirit of thinking radically, I want to add a second view on policy that I think is important to consider. University costs have always existed, but university students have not always been expected to pay for these costs, through fees, out of their own pockets. It has become sadly fashionable to assume that students taking out loans to pay university fees is a natural part of the order of things.
But this is most certainly not necessarily a part of the natural order of things; it is a policy choice by governments, and quite a recent one: most recently in this country since 1989. Numerous innovative countries even today make the policy choice that higher education should be largely free for their citizens. Like many people hearing this Address tonight, I did not have to worry about fees, or being saddled with a loan to pay for them. I was the beneficiary of an education that was ‘free’, at least as far as I was concerned as a student. It is unequivocally true, coming from my background, that if I had been required to take out a loan I would not have gone to university, and I suspect that the prospective burden of significant debt is still a big factor in people choosing not to go to university.
A key element of this discussion, which I know is very important to the new government and especially to Education Minister Jason Clare, is the need to improve equitable access to higher education. I contend that one of the most important radical changes that could be made to facilitate this would be once more to make education free to the Australian domestic student.
Since the introduction of student fees we have not solved the problem of disadvantaged people having access to higher education. But importantly, what we have done by normalising the business of the students paying their university fees, is to entrench in our culture the idea that university education is only of private benefit to individuals – not public benefit to societies. This is a gravely mistaken emphasis, I would argue.
Against my argument here, some might say that the cost to government of returning to a ‘free’ university education regime would be excessively burdensome to public finances. To that I would reply that the future positive revenue implications from having more university educated people in the country would easily outweigh the cost. This is in fact a point made by successive ministers for education, usually in defending student debts against criticism that they are too burdensome to students! The fact is that increased earnings associated with higher education qualifications naturally result in increased taxation earnings to government, and this is a long-term benefit, seen over the course of long working lives, when university degrees are completed by students in young adulthood.
The essential point here is that the year-on-year public revenue at stake in funding student learning is not the main issue. This is fundamentally about the kind of population that we want to shape for the future in this country. I believe that, generally, the more educated a population is, the higher the standard will be for many different things. Thus, the public as distinct from private benefit from increasing education in a population is real. From a public policy point of view, education cannot be reduced to a private good. Of course, I am not arguing that there is no private benefit in education. But from a nation’s point of view, the private benefit is not, and should not be the whole story that determines our policy choices governing student fees.
With a clear focus on the next few years, both for the University and the nation, I will return this evening to speaking of Indigenous Australia.
We are experiencing several important moments of history in 2023. One of the sadder ways that history is marked is by the deaths of great people, and this year we have experienced the passing of one of Indigenous Australia’s great leaders, and the holder of our Doctor of Law, honoris causa – Yunupingu. Yunupingu’s life has been an inspiration for all Indigenous Australians, and in particular for the peoples of Northeast Arnhem Land. His leadership and immense contribution will be recognised in history and he will go down as one of the great Australians. The University of Melbourne has been honoured for several years to have been in partnership with the Yothu Yindi Foundation which has been fired with his example and passion for the advancement of Indigenous people, and for meaningful reconciliation. The University will draw from Yunupingu’s example as we push ahead with our commitment to advancing Indigenous Australia, in partnership with Indigenous communities, with our particular focus on education.
We are currently very active on this front. I point to three initiatives in particular. The University Council has now approved our Murmuk Djerring strategy. The new Strategy will take our engagement with Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous Australia to new levels. Encouraged by all that we have learned on the journey through three earlier Reconciliation Action Plans, with Murmuk Djerring we will undertake many initiatives led by Indigenous people, will work hard to empower Indigenous leadership, and will strive to elevate Indigenous knowledge in the Academy. All this work is vitally important, for the University but also for Australia.
An important part of being a comprehensive university is that we apply our own scholarship to our own record as an institution. This brings me to an important historical project that is now coming to completion, the telling of the University of Melbourne’s Indigenous history in the form of a new two-volume monograph. On publication this will be our own moment of Truth-telling, as requested by the Uluru Statement from the Heart. With oversight from Indigenous scholars, leaders and Traditional Owners, and contributions from Indigenous and non-Indigenous experts in our history, the book is a comprehensive exercise.
It will provide difficult reading for many. At this point in our national history, there is much more ‘truth-telling’ to be done by Australia as a whole. As a university we cannot in all conscience demand of the rest of Australia a standard that we do not apply to ourselves. Hence this exercise in public truth-telling, which will put on record numerous shameful facts about our past, including the involvement of University of Melbourne scholars in the now discredited pseudoscience of eugenics. It also documents ways in which the University has sought to promote Indigenous outcomes across the breadth of our academic mission, and the achievements and resilience of our growing Indigenous community. I am immensely grateful to everyone involved in this project, and in particular to our Indigenous scholars and partners.
A third is the extraordinary work of the Atlantic Fellows in Social Equity program, which works continuously and positively for change through supporting new generations of Indigenous leaders. This program is funded by extraordinary philanthropic generosity and truly has its sights set on change over the long term.
We have also witnessed outstanding leadership over many years within the University by Indigenous colleagues at Melbourne – leadership that has benefited both the University and the nation. No more obvious example can be found than the inspirational leadership shown by Professor Marcia Langton. Passionate for the cause of justice and of empowerment for Indigenous people, Marcia’s public voice can never be silenced, and should the Referendum result in victory for the ‘Yes’ case, that victory will be, in some appreciable measure, hers.
In conclusion: reflecting a little further on the great example of many of our Indigenous students and staff members, we may sense the huge importance to Australia of the University of Melbourne remaining a great university, and becoming an ever better one – a university that produces extraordinary graduates, from all places and all socio-economic backgrounds. Though we have impact as a university in many ways, the impact that we have through our graduates is what I think fundamentally changes the world. We create that impact through teaching our students and graduates to think in powerful ways. This is what the research-infused Melbourne Curriculum aspires to deliver. These graduates challenge the world, help communities and businesses and governments and people everywhere to think through problems, enhance culture, and extend the impact of the arts and the sciences in Australia and beyond.
And this impact is only just beginning when our students leave campus at their graduation. In their time here, our students are introduced to the joys of learning, and this learning can go on throughout life. Through their learning and curiosity, people’s capabilities are enhanced. I firmly believe that we should value people for what they are able to do, and this ability to do new things increases with the education that we deliver.
This emphasis on the importance of human capability through learning is reflected, I think, in the framework articulated by the Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, in his influential ‘capability approach.’ In the words of two eminent authors1:
- ‘The capability approach is [Amartya Sen’s] theoretical framework that entails two normative claims: first, the claim that the freedom to achieve well-being is of primary moral importance and, second, that well-being should be understood in terms of people’s capabilities and functionings.’
The enhancement of capability, and thus of freedom, through education is for me, and many of you here today, one of the most worthwhile human pursuits. It is a pursuit reflected in many different ways across the diverse landscape that I have spoken of tonight, the great educational landscape of the Australian nation. We are an important part of this national and international landscape – remembering that in total, former students of the University of Melbourne today form a global living community of nearly half a million people, who carry and enhance our institutional reputation everywhere they go.
All that we do here at the University of Melbourne forms a unique and vital part of the wider landscape – a part that endures in importance year by year. Let us keep our shoulder to the wheel in the year and years ahead, to help that landscape to flourish.
Thank you.
1. Robeyns, Ingrid and Byskov, Morten Fibieger. 2023. "The Capability Approach". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2023/entries/capability-approach/>