Issues in global higher education: the challenge to the University of Melbourne by Professor Donald Markwell
Speech by Professor Donald Markwell, Warden of Trinity College, the University of Melbourne, at the Conference Dinner, University of Melbourne Deans and Heads Conference, Lorne, Tuesday 7 February 2006
Trinity Papers Number 31
Issues in global higher education
Professor Donald Markwell
Issues in global higher education
Professor Donald Markwell
Issues in global higher education: the challenge to the University of Melbourne Speech by Professor Donald Markwell, Warden of Trinity College, the University of Melbourne, at the Conference Dinner, University of Melbourne Deans and Heads Conference, Lorne, Tuesday 7 February 2006 Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor, colleagues and friends – Thank you, Chancellor, for your warm welcome. Today is my first day back after six months of study leave – and where better to start than at Lorne? You probably know the feeling of study leave – it feels for a while as if it will go on forever, like eternity, and one is reminded of Woody Allen’s line: ‘eternity is very long, especially towards the end’. I am delighted to be with you tonight, not least because this gives me an opportunity to say how excited I am about the brilliant strategic direction which the University is taking in ‘Growing Esteem’, to congratulate the Vice-Chancellor on his remarkable leadership in this, and to pledge all the support which my college and I can give, including in meeting the challenge of promoting the benefits of liberal or general undergraduate education as we work vigorously to attract to Melbourne top students from around Australia and around the world. During my study leave, as well as completing a book manuscript, I spent over three months visiting universities and colleges in the United States, particularly Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, Princeton, and Amherst, as well as other universities and liberal arts colleges; the UK, particularly Oxford and Cambridge; and China, namely Fudan and Shanghai Jiao Tong universities. The Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor have suggested that I might speak tonight about issues I observed there, and how what we are thinking about in this university fits in that larger international picture. What I have to say will necessarily be impressionistic and partial, and based on my own personal experiences and encounters, but I hope it will stimulate useful thoughts. I cannot hide the exhilaration of discussing research on democratisation in China with scholars at Jiang Zemin’s alma mater in Shanghai, or seeing – in company with women students – how Wellesley College in Boston works to educate what it calls ‘women who
Issues in global higher education
Professor Donald Markwell
will make a difference in the world’ – its alumni include Hilary Clinton and Madeleine Albright – or watching as Oxford’s Congregation, the parliament of the dons, of which I used to be a member, debates John Hood’s governance proposals. On the day I left Melbourne last September, The Economist published a survey of higher education which argued, and I quote, that ‘the most important recent development in the world of higher education has been the creation of a super-league of global universities that are now engaged in a battle for intellectual talent and academic prestige’. My visits to American, British, and Chinese universities seemed to me to confirm this. For all their imperfections, some of which I will mention later, leading American universities remain: • magnets for faculty, staff and student talent; • with immense and ever-growing resource, private and public; • with a high degree of freedom of action; • with clear focus on the quality of education and of research, and also of service; • committed to equity and diversity as well as to excellence; • with the vigorous and generous support of their alumni and other supporters, often including in business and government; and • with a well-proven model of liberal undergraduate education and professional post-graduate education. Their leaders seem highly conscious that they operate in a national and increasingly global competition, but – ever vigilant – are comfortable but not relaxed about their place. When I asked the head of one leading US university – a prestigious and wellresourced state university – whether higher education institutions faced greater risk and uncertainty than before, his response was crisp: ‘That’s a particularly Australian perspective.’ More accustomed than we are to the anxieties of competition, and with greater resources, especially from student fees and philanthropic support, to withstand those anxieties, leading US universities are focussed on powering ahead. For the traditional cohorts of students in their late teens and early 20s, they do not see the rise of new education providers – online, for profit, or from overseas – as a serious risk to them. The top British universities, Oxford and Cambridge, have some but not all of the attributes and advantages of the top US universities, with high calibre academics and students, and well-proven models of education especially at the undergraduate level, with still-strong college and tutorial systems. They remain quite exceptional institutions, maintaining near-top positions in the global rankings. But – less well-endowed financially, with less well developed philanthropic programs, and far less freedom of action on student fees, and generally more heavily regulated by government – they are feeling more at risk in
Issues in global higher education
Professor Donald Markwell
the global competition, especially from the top US universities. Their leaders strongly feel the need to become better able, in governance and other ways, to think and act coherently to maintain their international position. There has been and is much debate about the changes that this involves. In China, universities that recognise that their own global position is more modest are determined to remain or become part of a Chinese super-league that is increasingly competitive with the world’s top universities – aiming for their university to be one of the finest in the world. The Shanghai ranking of world universities was, in the words of its creators, developed – quote – ‘in order to find out the gap between Chinese universities and world-class universities’. The Chinese universities I visited seem: • eager to learn from western, especially American, models, including degree structures and curriculum, from freshman college to schools of public and international affairs; • hungry to attract western staff, and keen on faculty and student exchanges, degrees taught jointly with western universities, their researchers publishing more overseas (especially in citation index journals) and undertaking joint research and conferences; • focussed hard on research priorities greatly influenced, if not set, by government priorities in ‘key research centres’; but • constrained by various factors, including the limits to academic freedom in a country and universities still dominated by the Communist Party, and by the uneven command of the English language, which they recognise is, so to speak, the lingua franca of the academic world. At both Fudan and Shanghai Jiao Tong universities, I asked colleagues what the big strategic issues were for them, and at both universities they responded: attracting and developing top-quality faculty, and resources. This reference to American, British, and Chinese universities in competition makes it all sound a bit like the Tri-wizard Tournament in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, in which the competitors seek both the Tri-wizard Cup and, not merely ‘growing esteem’, but ‘eternal glory’. There are similarities between the Tri-wizard and university competitions: • the stakes are very high; • it is not possible to back out of the competition alive; • some competitors will do anything to succeed; and • it may be that it can in time be won by the youngest entrant – the Harry Potter of the university world. But, unlike the Tri-wizard Tournament: • the competition is open to anyone, and there are many competitors; • the competition is never actually won, and never ends; and • perhaps above all, the competition is not fiction: it is for real.
Issues in global higher education
Professor Donald Markwell
Many of us academics do not like aspects of this. Personally, I lament the huge international attention given to global rankings which are, in my view, methodologically questionable, if not unsound. Isn’t it bizarre that Melbourne ranked 19th in the latest THES ranking, but 82nd in the Shanghai index? And all of this so soon after Alan Gilbert and others stated that, ‘in resources-per-student or resources-per-researcher, Australia has no university in the first 100 in the world, and our competitiveness is slipping’. If the ever-growing number of rankings of US universities and colleges, based on differing criteria, and at the heart of the student admissions industry in the US, is any guide, we can expect the development of further global rankings, some more plausible than others. I hope there will also be much more work, as at the National Centre for Higher Education Management Systems in Boulder, Colorado, on – for example – how to assess institutional effectiveness in promoting student learning. Crude rankings cannot determine what it means to be ‘one of the finest universities in the world’, and I hope that we will not be lulled by our 19th place in one ranking into imagining that our work is done. We can be very proud of what has been and is achieved at the University of Melbourne, but I hope that we will take our aspiration to be ‘one of the finest universities in the world’ to mean working, year in and year out, to rise into the very highest echelon of the world’s universities - part of what The Economist called the ‘super-league of global universities’ – rather than being satisfied with being part of the U-21 tier forever. We should aim this high because it means that the education we offer, the research we do, the knowledge we transfer, and the service we perform is of the highest possible quality. As Sir John Medley said in 1943, ‘A university if it stands for anything stands for quality’. Is this too ambitious? Some aspects of the global competition appear more like the Red Queen’s world in Lewis Carroll than they do the Tri-wizard Tournament. The Red Queen pointed out to Alice that it is essential to run faster and faster simply to stand still – and if you actually want to get somewhere, you need to run twice as fast as you possibly can – something Alice naturally found somewhat perplexing. Strategists at the Stanford Business School have developed interesting analyses of what they call ‘Red Queen competition’ in the business world. But for me, revisiting Stanford University after not having been there for over 20 years, the most striking thing is that its extraordinary rise – from a farm in 1891, to a ‘middling regional university’ in the mid20th century, to indisputably one of the great universities of the world today – shows how it is possible for an institution dramatically to rise through the ranks. There is much to be learnt from Stanford’s particular blend of innovation and entrepreneurship, its ethos that anything is possible, and its intimate connection with Silicon Valley, a prototype of course for other regions – of which there are a growing number – of intense interaction between university research, commercial development, and other knowledge-based activities. But above all we learn that, although it may be necessary to run hard just to
Issues in global higher education
Professor Donald Markwell
stand still, it is also possible really to go places. The striking rise of New York University in the last 30 years, and especially of its Law School, which I briefly revisited, makes the same point. And there are many other examples around the world. It is possible for a university to make itself, over a period of time, one of the great universities of the world. As we aspire to this, let us focus sharply on what the attributes are of the finest universities, and learn from them. I have for many years argued that we have much to learn from undergraduate education in the top US and British universities and liberal arts colleges, and I have to say that my recent visits have confirmed that conviction. Let me simply list, as a sort of ideal type, the attributes that I identify in the finest undergraduate institutions in the world. They have concentrations of the very best students from around their country and indeed from around the world. Generally these students come together in a residential college community, usually in a campus of considerable beauty. Students benefit from individual mentoring or advising from senior academics. There is a high quality of academic tuition, with an emphasis on small group teaching and individual attention, by high-quality academic staff, who – whether in research-intensive universities or the leading liberal arts colleges – work, sometimes with great difficulty and sometimes with great benefits, to combine research and teaching. This teaching stresses genuine mastery of material, independent thought, and clear communication. Face-toface teaching is, of course, increasingly supplemented – but not replaced – by online provision. The focus is generally non-vocational at the undergraduate level, providing some form of liberal education. (Incidentally, I was impressed by the emphasis placed on science in leading liberal arts colleges.) In the institutions I am describing, there is a sense of engagement in a rich intellectual and public debate outside the classroom, strong attention to student welfare and pastoral care, and concern for the development of character and values. There will be rich opportunities for extra-curricular activities of a high quality – be they in sport, music, theatre, politics, religion, community service, or more – from which students gain much in their personal development. This is helped by the strong sense of cohort – of belonging to the Class of 2009, or whatever it may be – sharing its journey together through university years. All this will generally be in a university or college considerably smaller than the typical Australian university. It seems to me that ‘Growing Esteem’ addresses very many of these points, in particular, with its vision of a Melbourne Model of ‘a few generalist three-year undergraduate programs’ giving a liberal or general education ‘leading into two-year intensive professional training at graduate level’, all of this embedded in an all-round ‘Melbourne experience’ that is increasingly high-quality. I would add that those students who have their Melbourne experience in a residential college that works effectively to enhance their academic and all-round education will be able to get here in the University of Melbourne an education which increasingly compares favourably with the best in the world.
Issues in global higher education
Professor Donald Markwell
It is interesting that, last year, its centenary year, Fudan University established Fudan College, with – as it was described to me – first-year undergraduates at Fudan doing a course of general education – including English, physical education, and liberal arts – prior to more specialised study in their later undergraduate years and, for some, in postgraduate courses. This addition of general or foundational education to the traditional stress on professional education is seen as better educating students, including in all those topics that require an inter-disciplinary approach, and which benefit from understanding their wider context. It enables students’ choices of specialised studies to be informed by their first-year exposure to a range of subjects. Mentors help students in their subject choices. You will not be surprised that there have been organisational or management issues, as well as, of course, difficult issues to resolve between Fudan College and specialist colleges, such as the medical school, which naturally want students with a strong foundation in their fields. At the same time, there are advocates of general education for longer than a single year – advocates of, say, a US-style 4-year liberal arts undergraduate degree, followed by professional graduate study. Fudan College is also residential, with first-year students living together – in quite modest conditions – on campus in so-called ‘academies’, with living and taking classes together deliberately integrated. I was told that Fudan College consciously borrowed from Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and especially Yale. The initiative had received wide attention in China, and was depicted by the President of Fudan as a step for Fudan to become a ‘first-class world university’. I think he must have been reading ‘Growing Esteem’. In the institutions which I visited, six themes seemed to me to recur. At one level they will seem unsurprising, but they were all often pursued with vigour, intensity, and imagination. You will be relieved to know that I will mention but not expand much on these six recurring themes. First, what McKinsey, controversially but I think without exaggeration, call ‘the war for talent’ – the competition to attract, develop, and retain the most outstanding faculty and academic leaders, and students, anywhere in the world, including increased recognition of family circumstances as a factor in career decisions, and renewed emphasis on developing one’s own junior faculty members. The world’s finest universities seek the very best people in the world, and invest in them. What I think of as ‘the Harvard question’ – who is the very best person in the world in this field, and how do we get them? – should be our question. Secondly, the need for ever-greater resources, which governments are unlikely adequately to provide, and so need to be drawn increasingly from student fees,
Issues in global higher education
Professor Donald Markwell
especially domestic student fees – where possible combined with scholarships and loans – and from major philanthropic support from actively-engaged alumni and other benefactors. Philanthropic support is proving crucial in Britain and in China, as well as in the US. For example, Li Ka Shing, the richest person in Asia, has created a university in southern China. Thirdly, review of the areas in which the university teaches and researches, most especially to ensure an inter- or multi-disciplinary approach where it is needed, as it is from stem cell research to neuroscience to the study of global poverty to non-traditional security and beyond – all topics, and there are many others, that require expertise from across a range of sciences, and social sciences and humanities, including ethics. An interesting case is the need to understand various world religions if current international conflicts and cultural diversity within countries are to be understood, and the advantage in this to those institutions, such as most leading American and British universities, with strength in religious studies. How to balance the need for strong research within disciplines with the need to encourage and remove obstacles to multi-disciplinary research is demanding careful attention. Fourthly, partly in response to criticisms in the US of the alleged decline in quality of university education, renewed focus on the academic and broader student experience, be it through reducing student-to-staff ratios and class sizes, or curriculum reform, or improving students’ writing skills, or re-strengthening out-of-classroom connections between faculty and students, or providing high-quality campus centres for students, or increasing online support, or enhancing the performing and visual arts in students’ lives – for example, with a recent $101 million benefaction at Princeton – or grappling – for the most part unsuccessfully, I think – with problems in student culture and behaviour. On the latter: there is growing awareness in the US that their jock equivalent of what I call ‘the three Fs’ – excessive and inappropriate focus on Fosters, football, and fornication – has very damaging effects. A woman student writing in the student newspaper of one of America’s most prestigious institutions wrote that rape, often in a fog of alcohol, is – quote – ‘the most severe problem on our campus’. I was urged to read Tom Wolfe’s novel I am Charlotte Simmons, about a bright woman undergraduate, which portrays the dissipation of intellectual aspirations in a sex-obsessed jock culture. And a recent book on US student culture is called Binge: Campus Life in an Age of Disconnection and Excess. Though we in Australia are often more conscious of the problem of disconnection of students from campus life, if you doubt that issues of excess, such as alcohol abuse and sexual harassment, are or should be issues here, you might begin by reading the men’s song on the Melbourne University Hockey Club website. Fifthly, and related to this, strong emphasis on equity and diversity, including efforts, of uneven seriousness and success, to promote gender equality, ethnic and religious diversity, socio-economic diversity, and equal rights for LGBTs – the widely-used term for lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people. Very many co-educational
Issues in global higher education
Professor Donald Markwell
institutions retain essentially masculine cultures, and have not yet achieved the thorough transformation needed to have cultures of genuine equality. Some have embarked on wide-ranging programs of profound change – such as Duke University’s Women’s Initiative. And there is much concern in the US that, despite strenuous efforts and the expenditure of much money on scholarships and financial aid, top universities and colleges often remain too much, as the president of one of them described his own to me, a ‘rich people’s place’. Sixthly, one encounters a strong focus on internationalisation and globalisation, including seeking to develop a coherent strategy for all the rich dimensions of global engagement, not simply – as in some Australian institutions – as a cover for the recruitment of students as a source of revenue, crucial though that is to us. Internationalisation increasingly means taking a global perspective on all matters and acting as an international, as well as a local, state, and national, institution – including setting high international standards in everything, and encouraging international, intercultural and inter-faith awareness throughout the university community and ensuring a culture in which people of all backgrounds feel equally welcome, seeking faculty and students from around the world, encouraging language studies, encouraging international experience by students and staff alike, curriculum that genuinely reflects international experience and global issues, international community service projects, alumni activities around the world, and more. There is much focus on the study and debate of issues related to globalisation, and also seeking to ensure that universities have expertise on all major regions of the world, including specifically China, India, and the Middle East, and on major religions. While some universities are interested in teaching overseas, many are very cautious about overseas campuses. Ad hoc and desperate expedients for international student recruitment which risk the reputation and quality assurance of the university are not how the world’s finest universities operate. It seems to me that ‘Growing Esteem’ is most closely attuned to leading overseas experience when, as I have mentioned, it urges liberal undergraduate education before post-graduate professional education, and when it stresses the need for a rich all-round ‘Melbourne experience’, including its implicit recognition of the value of integrating academic and residential life; when it stresses the need for increased scholarship support, and the importance of alumni relations and the active seeking of philanthropic support; when it seeks to connect community service with the curriculum; when it stresses cross-disciplinary research, and works to overcome the obstacles to this; when it encourages international engagement at all levels; and much more. As I reflect on this visionary strategic plan in the light of my own recent travels, I am left with a number of questions, some of which have no doubt been addressed in conference sessions already: • Are we sufficiently ambitious and clear about what we mean by becoming
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Professor Donald Markwell
• • • •
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‘one of the finest universities in the world’, and how we measure our progress towards that? Do we give enough stress to attracting the most outstanding intellectual talent from around the world, and more generally investing in our people? Would a smaller university than is envisaged in 2015 be a better university? Don’t we need massively more resources if we are to be truly ‘one of the finest universities in the world’? Should we be more ambitious in what we aim to raise, not immediately but over time, from philanthropic support, for endowing professorships and other academic positions, for research projects, providing new buildings and other facilities, and general endowment, as well as for scholarships? Indeed, can’t the University of Melbourne lead a profound deepening of the culture of educational philanthropy in this country? The University of Toronto raised a billion dollars in seven years. What a difference even a half or a third of that would make! I know from personal experience of fund-raising in Australia that far more can be achieved than the University has yet attempted, and I applaud the Vice-Chancellor’s drive to change this. Are we giving enough attention to a coherent and comprehensive student financial support plan, including scholarships and financial aid, loans perhaps from the University itself, and student employment, all allocated on a fair and equitable basis? Will a higher proportion of domestic students have to pay fees than we now envisage? Are we developing an international strategy which genuinely covers all aspects of the University’s global engagement, thinking it through from first principles as to what one of the finest universities in the world should do? Does our strategy plan give enough weight to issues of equity and diversity, including a culture of genuine equality of respect for women and men of all backgrounds?
In 1855, at the opening of the University, the founding Chancellor, Redmond Barry, whose aspirations for this University were extremely high, said that the founders – quote – ‘have endeavoured to avoid the errors which have crept into, and the abuses which have been engrafted onto, and which have chilled the usefulness of old and venerable Universities’. He went on to refer to the ‘spirit and confidence’ – the deliberate ambition – with which the motto of the University, of ‘growing in the esteem of future generations’, had been chosen. I hope that today we can continue to learn, both from the weaknesses and from the strengths of the world’s outstanding universities, both old and new, as we work to live up to that lofty aspiration.
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Issues in global higher education
Professor Donald Markwell
Trinity Papers: This paper represents the 31st in a series published from time to time by Trinity College which focus upon broad issues facing the community in such areas as education, ethics, history, politics, and science.
Further Copies: Copies of this and other Trinity Papers are available upon request from: Tutorial Office Trinity College Royal Parade Parkville VIC 3052 Australia Telephone: 03 9348 7100 Facsimile: 03 9348 7610 Email: enquiries@trinity.unimelb.edu.au Trinity Papers can also be found on the website at: www.trinity.unimelb.edu.au/publications/trinity_papers/
About the Author: Professor Donald Markwell has been Warden of Trinity College in the University of Melbourne since 1997, and is a Professorial Fellow in the Department of Political Science and Centre for Public Policy in the University of Melbourne. Rhodes Scholar for Queensland in 1981, he was Proctor Visiting Fellow at Princeton University in 198485, a Research Fellow of New College, Oxford, in 1985-86, and Fellow and Tutor in Politics at Merton College, Oxford, and a lecturer in the University of Oxford from 1986 to 1997.
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