Recording: What kind of university does society need now?

VERITY FIRTH:  Hello everyone who's joining us.  Thank you for joining us at today's event.  I'll wait for about 30 seconds for people to enter the virtual room and then we'll begin. 

 

We've hit the 100 mark, so I'll start now and other people can enter as they log on.  So thank you, everyone.  Thank you for joining us. 

 

Firstly, I want to acknowledge that wherever we are in Australia, we are all meeting on the land of First Nations People and this was land that was never ceded.  I'm actually at home at the moment, so I'm on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, but the Gadigal people are also the traditional owners of the land on which UTS is built, so I want to pay special respect and acknowledgment to their Elders past and present.

 

My name is Verity Firth.  I'm the Executive Director of Social Justice at the Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion here at the University of Technology, Sydney.  It's my huge pleasure to be joined today by Professor Glyn Davis, Distinguished Professor Larissa Behrendt, and Professor Jonathan Grant, who I will properly introduce in a minute. 

 

Before we begin, I'll do a couple of pieces of housekeeping.  Firstly, today's event is being live captioned.  To view the captions, click on the "CC", closed caption, button at the bottom of your screen in the Zoom control panel.  We are also going to post a link into the chat now which will open captions in a separate internet window if you'd prefer to view them that way.

 

Now, if you have any questions during today's event, we do have time for audience questions.  So please type them into the Q&A box, which you can also find in your Zoom control panel.

 

Now, you can also go into the Q&A box and up‑vote other people's questions, so feel free to do that.  I tend on the whole to put the questions that get the most votes, so do go in and vote.  But please do try to keep your questions relevant to the topic that we're discussing today. 

 

So what is the topic we're discussing today?  We're discussing the issue of what kind of university does society need now and I'm really delighted to say we're also celebrating the Australian release of Jonathan Grant's new book, The New Power University: The social purpose of higher education in the 21st Century, and we're about to post a link in the chat where you can get a copy of this book and I really encourage people to read it.  I really enjoyed it.  It really tested me, made me think about a whole range of things in new ways.  So if you're into universities and you're into the power of education and social change, this is the book for you.

 

So what is the purpose of universities?  Well, the answer to that has changed over the very many years that higher education has existed.  Universities, like many other institutions, have evolved alongside the social and economic movements of the time.  Currently in Australia, as in other places in the world, higher education is at a critical point.  COVID‑19 has thrown into sharp relief and accelerated forces that have already been driving change in our sector since the beginning of the 21st century.  But now that change is more apparent than ever and for many universities, particularly in Australia, we're really seeing the urgent need to change due to declining revenues and other issues that we're now facing.

 

As public institutions funded with public money for the purpose of public good, we can and do deliver benefit to communities and societies beyond the accreditation of future professionals and always have.  We absolutely can be, and strive to be, institutions that strengthen democracy and civic engagement, drive progress that brings real improvement to people's lives and also hold a mirror up to society to apply a more objective, analytical gaze to the forces that shape our culture and power relations.

 

Here at UTS, we have a pretty ambitious social justice vision.  We state at the heart of our social justice strategy that we want UTS to be an agent for social change, transforming communities through research, education and practice, and this means engaging in impactful and partnered research, instilling graduates with capabilities and skills for both work, but also to be good citizens of their country and world, and we work alongside communities as equal partners, acknowledging that their knowledge, experiences and contributions are equal to ours.

 

So that's our vision and we try very hard to achieve it, but what we're going to be talking about today is not only how we commit to that vision, but how we actually achieve it working on the ground.

 

So I will now bring our three distinguished panellists into the conversation.  First, Professor Glyn Davis ‑ Professor Glyn Davis is the CEO of the Paul Ramsey Foundation and was previously Vice‑Chancellor at the University of Melbourne.  He's a public policy specialist, with experience in government and higher education.  His community work includes partnering with Indigenous programs in the Goulburn‑Murray Valley and Cape York and service on a range of arts boards.  His most recent book, released this year, is On Life's Lottery, an essay on our moral responsibility towards those less well off.  Welcome, Glyn, and thank you for joining us.

 

PROF. GLYN DAVIS AC:  Thank you, Verity.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Distinguished Professor Larissa Behrendt is the Associate Dean (Indigenous Research) at UTS and the Director of Research at the Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research.  She is a lawyer and an award‑winning writer and film‑maker.  She's the Chair of the Cathy Freeman Foundation, trustee of the Australian Museum, a board member of the Sydney Community Fund and a member of the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council.  She's also the host of Speaking Out on ABC Radio National and the ABC local radio network.  Welcome, Larissa.  I'm so glad you're here today.

 

DISTINGUISHED PROF. LARISSA BEHRENDT AO:  Thanks, Verity, great to be with you.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  And Professor Jonathan Grant.  Jonathan's book is one of the things we'll be discussing today and Jonathan Grant specialises in research on the social purpose of universities in the 21st, assessing research impact and health R&D policy.  He was formerly Vice President & Vice Principal (Service) at King's College in London, which he joined in 2014 to set up the Policy Institute at King's, and was its Director until 2017.  He continues to work part time at the Policy Institute, where he is Professor of Public Policy, and spends the other half of his time running Different Angles, a consultancy that focuses on the social impact of research and universities.  Jonathan's new book, The New Power University: The social purpose of higher education in the 21st Century, was published in March this year.  Welcome, Jonathan.

 

PROF. JONATHAN GRANT:  Thank you very much, Verity, for having me.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  He's also up at a very early hour, so we should thank him for that as well. 

 

So I'm just going to start very broadly to begin with and I'm just going to ask a question of all three panellists, and I'll start with you, Glyn.  As briefly as you can, what should be the main focus of a university in this day and age?  I'm giving you three minutes each.

 

PROF. GLYN DAVIS AC:  Thank you, Verity.  In the 8th century, the Islamic role was Baghdad, and Harun al‑Rashid founded what became the most famous university in the Arab‑speaking world and the literal translation is The House of Wisdom and it's such a lovely metaphor for what we'd all like university to be.  By contemporary standards it's a narrow metaphor for what we do in university.  It's more than 50 years since the Chancellor of Berkeley described his institution as the multiversity, a place with many roles, and he described a place that you might attend as an undergraduate to get a broad liberal arts education, you might return as a graduate to get a professional or a specialist training and you might join it as faculty to contribute to new knowledge, you might access it as a community member to hear about the great issues of the day, what Jonathan and his wonderful book calls engagement, and he's making the point these are all legitimate roles and this institution has to encompass them all. 

 

I was actually very interested to read that the new institution in Western Sydney is to be called the Multiversity, so somebody has been reading Clark Kerr, and they're going to combine tertiary and vocational study.  That's what Clark Kerr had in mind.  I think Kerr is telling us it would be a mistake to privilege one aspect of a university mission and say this is university.  In fact, he's telling us to be wary of essence and to think there's a way to define university that goes to some inexplicable but enumerable evidence.  There isn't such a thing, there's lots of ways for it. 

 

So lots of opportunities here to rethink what we think of as a university and that's what Jonathan's book invites us to do and as he'll reflect, one of the curious aspects of Australian practice is how little we've experimented with diversity across institutions.  There's a world of possibilities, but our policy makers, our legislators, have clustered around a single dominant model of university.  It's defined in law, it's reinforced by regulators, and it's of course rigorously enforced through the funding model.  We've legislated a single model in Australia for what a university could be, despite all of that opportunity to be other things. 

 

If we think about what a contemporary university could be, you can think about all the aspects of diversity ‑ differences in what's taught, how it's taught, where and when knowledge is shared.  You might want some institutions that are highly specialised, others that inspire to be residential, and others again that are commuter.  We might want to reward universities that bury themselves deep in a community or within workplaces.  We might hope for large and small.  We've only got large at this point.  We might hope for universities that teach in different languages, that emphasise very different traditions of thought.  We might want a university committed to Indigenous knowledge and another perhaps based around participatory learning.  Yet we're so caught up in status hierarchies about the research teaching binary that we really miss the wider opportunities for higher education systems.  So give us back our House of Wisdom, that would be wonderful, and think more widely and ambitiously about what we do mean by a university.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  That's a great opening, Glyn.  Thank you for that.  Larissa, as briefly as you can, the main focus of a university in this day and age?

 

DISTINGUISHED PROF. LARISSA BEHRENDT AO:  Well, a great opening and I actually found myself quite inspired by what Glyn had to say.  So what he said ‑ and I think what he captures, though, is while we can be feeling fairly negative about the incredible impact that COVID and the funding have had on our sector and policy decisions around that, actually there's a lot to be enthusiastic and optimistic about and I think Glyn has really said that. 

 

And my thoughts around this I think fit nicely into what he's mapped out there, about the many possibilities, and I think one of the great things that we've seen with the sector, particularly in the last 20 years, is there's no longer an assumption that universities are part of the structures of society that maintain the status quo and that actually what they offer are real opportunities for dynamism and perhaps because I come from a community that has seen higher education as really a way of changing our socioeconomic position much more effectively, we see our Indigenous First Nations people who come through university being able to be agents of change and to effect change at a grassroots level through their thinking, through their knowledge, by matching what they understand of their communities with what they're learning from the higher education sector and in a way actually being greater drivers of change than policy, government policies at a particular level.

 

So I think that's really important as an indicator of where we can go and I think what it shows is that the idea of diversity and inclusiveness has actually enriched the sector.  As it's made its doors open to people from broader backgrounds, more open to women, more open to people from different backgrounds and particularly targeting people from low socioeconomic backgrounds, we've actually seen not just a better, more impactful role for what universities can achieve, but as institutions they've become richer. 

 

I think we've particularly seen this in the last five years, where we've got a larger cohort of senior Indigenous academics.  No more is it just one or two First Nations professors at a university.  You know, we have 13 Indigenous professors at UTS, so across a range of faculties, across a range of disciplines.  And I think that's meant that we've seen universities become richer for that diversity.

 

I think the other thing that Glyn speaks to about opportunity that really resonates with me is that I think one of the challenges ahead is how quickly knowledge increases.  We're in an era now where knowledge and professions change at a rate we've never seen before.  So once upon a time you could pick a profession and the pathway was pretty straightforward as to how you would succeed at that profession.  It was often rare to change jobs, it was rare to change professions.  And now actually, because of that rate of change, there is a lot less permanency, but there's also a lot more opportunity.  There's no one career path.  And I think that makes for an exciting opportunity for the people who are coming in to higher education, but it means as institutions, as much as we're looking at disciplines and professions and training people for a professional role in the world, we have to actually think much more deeply about how we develop them as people who can be adaptable to the enormous changes that we can't even predict that will face them once they graduate and go out into the workforce.

 

So for me the idea of universities having a role around capacity building of our community remains a really important one, even though the skills we need to teach are really different, and for me ‑ we talk a lot about innovation in the sector and I think that speaks to a level of adaptability. 

 

I often, I guess perhaps because of my own interest in marrying things like the law with filmmaking and writing, think perhaps we don't value creativity enough.  Curiosity and creativity are of course essential I think for great thinkers and for thought leaders.  So I think there are ways in which we could be really broadening the way in which we understand what we should be equipping the people who come to university and who work there. 

 

And I guess the final point I'd make is I think there is really a continuing role for universities to be thought leaders about the best type of society we can be and I think that becomes particularly important when we go through periods like we just have now, where there's a lot of uncertainty, a lot of change, there's a two‑speed economy, there are people who are able to make the most of what's happening and adapt to those changes or are well positioned and there are those, of course, who are probably already more vulnerable who fall between the cracks.  So as we see those increasing dichotomies reemerge, you know, I think our role of being able to really lead conversations about what the best type of society we can be remain central to our role as well.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Absolutely.  And Jonathan, last but not least.

 

PROF. JONATHAN GRANT:  Well, all of the above, so you get fine agreement on this panel I think.  I guess what I'm really interested in is picking up on Glyn's point about the multiversity and putting at the core of the institution social purpose and through that social responsibility.  Now, we can use different language ‑ social justice at UTS ‑ but if we put social justice alongside education, alongside research, and make that the core purpose of the institution, then I think we can begin to stitch together the impacts that Larissa has talked about and Glyn has talked about.  And for too long in the recent history of universities we've focused on research and education, and probably in that order, and as institutions, the reason we've done that is that we have responded to the policy framework set for us by government and we've been less skilled at shaping that policy framework.  So part of the argument I make in the book is that we've got to stop acquiescing to government policy and start having confidence in our social purpose as independent institutions.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  And that's particularly pertinent in places like Australia, where the public investment in universities is diminishing every day, so to acquiesce or to follow, strictly speaking, on these government requirements becomes less and less necessary in some ways.  Jonathan, in your book you write:  "History suggests that there are long‑term economic cycles where a number of innovations ‑ social and physical ‑ come together to reset society.  We saw this with the introduction of the steam engine preceding the industrial revolution and we are witnessing a similar revolution today with the ubiquitous application of networked technologies", and you quote John Saul when you say, "At these moments of change, these 'in‑between times', the future can go one of two ways."  So looking at universities in these in‑between times, what are the different paths that you think universities could take and which path concerns you most?

 

PROF. JONATHAN GRANT:  So I sort of answer that from a UK perspective, but speaking to colleagues in Australia I think the argument resonates in Australia as well.  I think in the recent past the risk is that we've become too remote from life as institutions and as academics and that phrase "remote from life" is actually taken from a book published in 1943 by a woman called Amy Buller, who wrote a history effectively of the middle classes in Germany at the rise of Hitler and Naziism, and she sort of concluded that the middle classes acquiesce from the evils, the darkness ‑ it's called Darkness over Germany, this book, and I think you don't want to make too many parallels because of the sheer horror of that era, but at the same time I think it's naive not to draw some comparisons and therefore my concern is that we as institutions are becoming too remote from life and that is creating a vacuum and John Saul's language that will allow populism to take hold and that will have negative long‑term consequences not just on universities but also on broader society.

 

The antidote to that, the optimistic and positive pathway, which is far more interesting and engaging, is this concept of new power, which the idea of new power is not my idea, it's a book published by Henry Timms and Jeremy Heimans.  What they're doing in that book is sort of introducing this idea of connectivity through network technology such as social media.  They point out that a number of industries have been radically overturned by this ‑ think of Airbnb as a new‑power institution and think of your five‑star hotel around the corner as your old‑power institution ‑ and what I do in the book is I explore what would happen when you apply these new‑power models to universities. 

 

And the sort of new‑power values that Henry and Jeremy talk about are sort of decision making, network governance, sharing, crowd wisdom, open source collaboration, radical transparency, do it yourself maker culture, short‑term affiliation, all of which we can recognise I think in that sort of social media Airbnb model.  And they contrast that, Verity, to old‑power values of managerialism, of institutionalism, of exclusivity, of confidentiality, of professionalism, and of long‑term affiliation and loyalty, which are values which naturally stick to universities.  So what I try to do in the book is see what would happen if you start to apply some of these new‑power values to universities, hence the title.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  So one of the new‑power values that you essentially urge universities to take up is in your closing chapter, where you write passionately that new‑power universities must be prepared to be advocates, like universities should be advocates when it comes to key social and political issues. 

 

So I'm actually going to ask this next question of Glyn because I think it's interesting to get his perspective.  So Jonathan basically writes in his words for universities to pretend they are apolitical is a hypocrisy that undermines their social purpose and makes them remote from life.  So I want to throw to you now, Glyn, because as the Vice‑Chancellor of Melbourne University, as ex Vice‑Chancellor, what do you make of this argument?  Tell me your thoughts.

 

PROF. GLYN DAVIS AC:  There's nothing so brave as an ex Vice‑Chancellor.  But I imagine everyone who's committed their professional lives to higher education ‑ that's a huge number of people on this webinar ‑ will agree passionately with Jonathan that that's of course ‑ and it's hard to be apolitical when universities are required to work within a political system in which it's government that makes policy, sets prices, decides load.  It's a really weird thing to say we're in a political system but we're not allowed to have a political opinion I think unless you have this responsibility. 

 

But I also think we carry it out lots of times.  I think the example we've all just lived with, the way a whole set of academic public health specialists set agendas around COVID and how just incredibly important that's been and the public conversation in this country has been remarkably evidence based and that's because there's a series of voices from epidemiologists and others that keep cropping up.  When we get the mad stuff that inevitably comes up, it's drowned out by the rationality of voices that don't always agree but are in a sense setting benchmarks about what evidence should mean here. 

 

That's an example of universities doing exactly what Jonathan is asking.  We might not think of that as political, but actually it is.  You're buying into a very standard controversy and you're off offering a view.  The view you're offering, whatever the particular detail, is a reflection of the academic culture, that this is how ideas are dealt with, this is what counts as evidence.  If more of our debates were like this, it would be a good thing.  Evidence in the end is what matters. 

 

We see lots of negative examples.  The one that makes me grind my teeth at the moment is the free speech argument because it's blatantly a culture war that's being prosecuted in the absence of any evidence of a problem.  In fact, we have a public inquiry led by former Chief Justice of the High Court which found no systematic evidence whatsoever of a problem with free speech on campus and yet we now have new regulations and we have new powers to the regulator and we have a whole set of new legislation in which politicians are effectively pursuing a political agenda against universities.  And it's been very interesting in the last week to watch the way the penny has dropped as the fight between Israel and the Palestinians has produced commentary at institutions that Ministers have taken exception to.  I think this is when universities have to stand up and say sorry, you can't be for free speech when you agree with it but against it when you don't want to hear it.  That's the price.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Larissa, what do you think about advocacy for universities and universities having a stronger advocacy role?

 

DISTINGUISHED PROF. LARISSA BEHRENDT AO:  I feel like this is a loaded question for me and of course I've never been a Vice‑Chancellor and I'm just speaking from I guess what I've found powerful about the sector.  I became a lawyer because I wanted to change the world and over time realised that the really systemic change that I wanted to achieve was actually better supported by having a base at a university than it was by being in legal practice, even though I've kept a foot in that world as well. 

 

So for me it was one of the things that attracted me about working in the sector because I guess if you're at an institution that, you know, as Glyn is articulating, understands what real academic freedom means, as an academic you do have a really great foundation for being the kind of advocate that Jonathan knows secretly lurks inside all of us.  And I guess from my perspective too, I would say that ‑ I think one of the challenges for the sector has been that not every university I guess would be as comfortable as say UTS has been. 

 

So I just want to speak to my own experience about how my thoughts around the advocacy role of universities should look and I guess one of the things that I was very mindful of, and always have been mindful of, is the perspective that many First Nations people have of universities and although there's a lot of aspiration to come in and get higher education, there is a view around the work we do as researchers that it's always been about Indigenous people, there's been a lot ‑ obviously bad practice, a lot of appropriation of knowledge, artifacts, et cetera.  There is a strong history that links our sector, as it does with many of the collecting institutions, with the aims of colonisation. 

 

So for showing that universities are relevant to the Indigenous community, I think it's been a really important part of our work to show that we will stand up and not be neutral about issues that really impact on our community.  And from my personal experience working within the US, one of those moments that I think serves as a really good example for us was our decision to be very vocal and concentrate a lot of resources on challenging the assumptions around the Northern Territory intervention.  I think we were probably the most vocal university group on that, although there were a lot of other people who were vocal as well, but in terms of challenging it, and we were able to do that because the university backed us to be able to do that, even though, as the provost at the time would tell you, we did get political pressure for us not to make such comments. 

 

What was important about that was first of all just to be able to use our voice and position to say things that weren't being said elsewhere, but in hindsight and reflecting on the importance of that, I think what we did realise too was it sent a very different message to First Nations communities about what universities could be, that actually we could be places where their perspectives, their voices, their points of view and their experiences could be valued.  It had really positive impacts for us in terms of our relationships with Aboriginal communities around the country, particularly in the Northern Territory.  It had a very positive outcome for us in terms of how students then saw UTS, our brand name of Jumbunna, but the fact that people knew if you came here, there was a certain politics and a certain type of academic. 

 

And of course I would say as well the other thing that's been really important about it is that it's meant a level of satisfaction for our staff who are able to work on issues that are really close to their heart, often very personal to them, and it's meant we've attracted a really high calibre of staff in to do the kind of advocacy work we do.  We continue to do a lot of work in the areas of child protection, a lot of areas which is again a place where we find ourselves butting up against governments all the time and in deaths in custody in a similar way and I don't think that any of that advocacy has meant governments won't engage in us.  In fact, in both of those areas we're often sought for our advice. 

 

So I think ‑ I like to sort of think of that as showing that actually advocacy, and honest advocacy, has many benefits in terms of showing what a university looks like and who you attract and it hasn't meant that our reputation has been damaged and that governments won't deal with us.  We do quite a bit of government work.  But people know when they get us on board that we come with a certain point of view and I think it's been nice over time to see that that's something that's appreciated.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  It's a really interesting point about the attracting ability of a strong advocacy position, both attracting of students but attracting of staff as well.  So Jonathan, you've just heard a great example of how advocacy works, but in your book you are arguing that a lot of times universities in fact don't do this and in fact the only time they really speak up is when it directly affects their interests and they're very careful the rest of the time.  Do you have anything ‑ I mean, yay for the work Larissa is doing, but do you have anything you want to add about that?  You're muted.

 

PROF. JONATHAN GRANT:  So again, agree with all of the above.  I think I'm trying to sort of make in that final chapter of the book quite a subtle argument, so one of it is whose advocacy it is ‑ is it the advocacy of the academics and broader community students and other staff or is it the advocacy of the institution ‑ and on the whole university said yes, we protect academic freedom, we'll let you say what you want and you get into free speech debates very quickly, but we as an institution are going to try to remain neutral.

 

My issue with that is that they don't remain neutral because when it's in their interest, they are the first people on the radios and TVs saying "we need more money" or whatever the argument is.  Secondly, when it's not controversial, so sustainability is a good example there, they're very willing to do sustainability pledges, and my worry is that the public, whoever they are, see through that and therefore don't understand the purpose and the principles of university and see them as self‑interested. 

 

So what I'm arguing is actually we're being hypocritical by only creating an institutional voice when it's in our interest or it's not controversial and if we had more self‑confidence institutionally, that would actually help repair the social contract.  Not everybody will agree with us, but at least we're being consistent to our purpose.  So that's quite nuanced I appreciate, but that's the point I'm trying to make.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Yes.  So Larissa, I'm going to come to you now because linked to that sort of sense of that overriding sense of purpose is genuine community university engagement, right?  So part of the criticism of universities in the past has been that they don't really do community engagement particularly well.  They'll go in with their clipboards and study people and then say they've done community engagement.  So what does authentic community engagement look like to you, Larissa?

 

DISTINGUISHED PROF. LARISSA BEHRENDT AO:  Yeah, look, I think there's been a lot of thinking and development of what that means, you know, in recent times after a long tradition of it being pretty much as you described.  And I guess for me, coming from the Aboriginal community like I do, I sort of have always felt the principle of self‑determination is something that is really helpful in guiding how we do work in the space I work in and what it's meant in relation to that question of what does community engagement mean is first and foremost the question has to be how is the work that we are doing building capacity in the community and answering things that they need and not things that I think they need and that I think my research will be helpful to them because of X, Y and Z, but from their perspective with their agenda and the issues that they're facing, how can we as a university respond to that? 

 

So it's an Indigenous ‑ we think of Indigenous‑led research in lots of different ways, but for me the heart of it ‑ we have to be solving problems that are relevant to particular Indigenous communities and doing it with them and on their terms.  That's not as easy as it sounds.  There's a whole range of having to build trust with communities.  As I said, there is a history of communities rightly being incredibly, incredibly suspicious of researchers and I think just because we're an Indigenous unit and we have Indigenous researchers, that hasn't changed that perception.  We don't get a free pass because of that.  So relationships often have to be built up over decades to have that level of trust.  So there has to be a long commitment to it.

 

But I think asking those questions about who needs the work done, who are we empowering by doing this work, what are the outcomes, and how can we shape outcomes that are actually useful for the community ‑ I think that's been a challenge as well.  We like to rank our successes in terms of grant outcomes and publications and they're not useful outcomes for community.  So rethinking how we value research and how we value impact I think are conversations we're starting to have now and we should have been having them a long time ago.  But they're really critical in terms of rethinking and making the sector more relevant in how it's actually engaging in those communities. 

 

I think, just to add to one more element to that to show how far we've had to go ‑ but how I think things are changing is universities of course have a very strict structure about ownership of intellectual property and being challenged by how we work collegially and equally with Aboriginal communities that hold cultural knowledge has made us have to give up our stranglehold on intellectual property and we see for things that were sort of so rigid before actually there are enormously flexible and good ways to accommodate protecting the intellectual property of Aboriginal people, their Indigenous cultural IP, and it just means that we have to think about doing things differently.  We have to stop thinking the way we've always done things is the way we have to be every time we go into a community. 

 

I think what we have shown by the inroads we've made in thinking about ICIP and knowledge ownership and sharing and thinking about outcomes differently is that the sector can be much more flexible in areas that we once thought were really, really rigid.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  That's a really great example about how working alongside community and with community actually helps build understand the equality of the knowledge that each side is bringing, you know what I mean?  So I think that was a really brilliant example. 

 

Now, I was going to ask Glyn a question about his book The Australian Idea of a University and Julian Zipparo is asking a very similar question, so I'm going to ask Julian's question because he has the most votes and he's being very complimentary to you, Glyn.  He's saying, "Professor Davis is way too modest to spruik it himself, but in 2017 he wrote a book called The Idea of an Australian University", which was very prescient. 

 

Now, your book really talked about the lack of diversity in Australian institutions, and you alluded to this before and you ‑ sorry, now Julian's question is going around the screen.  So he's saying, "It seems fair to lay some of the blame on that for the regulatory environment, but should some of the blame also perhaps go to universities themselves in the sense that they've followed the same pathway and been unoriginal in their approaches, are we potentially a little too passive and unoriginal and not blazing our own trails ala Clark Kerr?"  I'll send that to you first, Glyn.

 

PROF. GLYN DAVIS AC:  Let me do 10 seconds of autobiography.  My first job as academic was at Griffith University in Queensland and it was then the most extraordinary and radical institution.  It refused to have professional qualifications of any sort.  It had a faculty structure that was just extraordinary.  It had brought in a lot of people from the open university in UK and it had a really interesting ethos and I was there for 20 years. 

 

I watched this transformation.  It was completely student focused, it was all about teaching, and so on, and over the 20 years it morphed into a very conventional ‑ very good but very conventional university, and there's a lot of reasons.  Part of it was regulatory, part of it was Dawkins reforms which forced change, and they were predominantly the reasons, but the other reason was how much we were all captured by the idea of what a university should be.

 

So Griffith University, across the river from Queensland University, as it recruited increasingly recruited out of Queensland University and filled itself with people whose idea of university was grown up in the traditional sense and what they really wanted to do was replicate what they knew and valued and so over time that institution got a law school, it got a commerce degree, it basically mapped out a pathway that became more and more conventional.  You can tell that story about a whole range of Australian universities. 

 

So yes regulation, yes the policy makers, but we should never forget that academics also are big players in this.  We have a status hierarchy in our head about what matters and give us a free hand and we will tend to impose that status hierarchy on the institution where we are and we drive it towards the centre, we'll drive it towards a standard model. 

 

We've seen that, we've seen it ‑ we've had multiple goes in Australia at setting up new and different institutions and we've had the same result each time.  They have started with such promise and they remain great institutions, but they've lost the magic moment that makes them separate.  And the test of it is just close your eyes, get someone to read out to you the slogans, the marketing slogans of 41 universities and try to tell which is which and if you can work it out, you're doing very well because the truth is very few of our institutions have a really distinctive offering that is genuinely different in substance rather than in branding.  That's I think our tragedy because we didn't need it to turn out this way.  That's not to denigrate any existing institution. 

 

So I tried to argue in some more recent pieces we've got 100,000 new students who will have to join the system between now and 2030 ‑ 100,000.  That should be two, three, four new universities.  If we follow the pattern of the last 20 years, we'll just try to shoehorn them into existing institutions which will get even larger and I think within a couple of years we'll have 100,000 students in a single institution.  I think RMIT will cross that boundary at some point, closely followed by Monash.

 

If we're going to educate another 100,000 people, isn't this the moment to do something very different and to force ourselves to do it?  We have failed in the past to do it, other places have succeeded, and the one I always point to is Lingnan University in Hong Kong, which is a small liberal arts institution, high quality, fabulous teaching but consciously different, and Hong Kong regulatory authorities have used their ability to say, "We're not going to have you change, you're not going to put your hand out for a law school and then a medical school, that's not what we need.  We need you to be this distinctive liberal arts college."  Why can't we do the same?

 

VERITY FIRTH:  So, Jonathan, there's far more differentiation in the UK higher education, isn't there?  I read that in your book about you spanned the six criteria you had in your book.  So how did that happen?  Tell us a bit about what's going on over there.

 

PROF. JONATHAN GRANT:  Well, so I think you do have more diversity, and I read Glyn's book on the Australian experience but I don't think it is necessarily as diverse as you think.  I think those questions that Glyn is referring to sort of drive us to a degree of conformity and probably not as sort of homogenous as in Australia, if you like, but that's the direction of travel. 

 

The expanding student population is demographically occurring in the UK as well.  Obviously the whole debate about international students is very live here as it is in Australia and I think universities struggle to differentiate themselves. 

 

So there are brilliant examples and the two I always cite outside my own institution are Lincoln on the east coast in sort of an impoverished rural region of the UK set up by the council, the city council of Lincoln, about 30 years ago because they didn't know what they were going to do because they had no industry, so they thought they'd set up a university.  You physically go there, you see the impact of the university on the community and on the surrounding economy.

 

In contrast, Manchester, under the leadership of Nancy Rothwell, has really embraced community engagement whatever language we include and to a degree they're just about to complete on an engineering campus and they put into the procurement contract for that multimillion pound building contract that you have to employ and train people from the local community on this construction site and if you go to that construction site, you walk down a corridor and there are photographs of 50 individuals who came from inner‑city Manchester who have apprenticeships and qualifications through those apprenticeships by working on that site. 

 

So they're using their sort of institutional power to do good in their local community through the way they buy stuff and I think we can be really innovative as institutions, as large and wealthy institutions, to actually do things in ways that can make a direct impact on our local communities, which may not be sort of "academic".

 

VERITY FIRTH:  That's right.  You see that happening particularly in Australian regional universities, they really become quite an economic anchor for those communities. 

 

I'm going to ask another question now that's come up in the chat from Alistair McCulloch.  He's talking about what he says is the obsession of government and other stakeholders towards work, employment, preparation and an instrumentalist view of knowledge.  So for Jonathan's benefit, the Government's most recent round of education sort of reforms were called Job‑ready Graduates Package, so it really is all about jobs, and the question from Alistair to the panel is do you think university managers and academics have an appetite to challenge this view, this sort of instrumentalist towards work employment preparation, because he contends that if you don't, much of the discussion about what a university could be is redundant.  So I might go to you Larissa first and then I'll come to you, Jonathan.

 

DISTINGUISHED PROF. LARISSA BEHRENDT AO:  Look, I guess it's reflective of a very particular ideological approach that we have to counter, but I guess also need to not get trapped by as well.  I think in a way there's obviously an important role to be challenging government approaches.  I think it's also important to acknowledge a lot of them are ideological as well, so universities are well placed to have evidence base to counter a whole range of things, but when things are ideologically driven, that has a limited ability to do that, and I'm sure Glyn is better placed to answer that part of the question. 

 

But what I would say is I think through our practices we can subvert those ideas because people come to us and enrol and come to work for us for very different reasons than what the Government projects that they do.  So in that way, being true to many of the things that Jonathan, Glyn and myself have been talking to shows a relevance that the university has to the community, to the people who actually use it, the people who apply to come to us, the people who walk through the doors, and of course they're looking at employability, but a lot of them are looking for other things as well and we can offer those things.

 

So I think we just need to I guess not get too caught up in losing our core values because I think they're the things that at the end of the day outlast the ideological tussles that we have at a policy level.  I'm not saying they're not insignificant, as I'm sure Glyn could talk a lot more about this, but I think because we get punished through funding, we get punished through a whole range of other things, national priorities funding with grant applications.  So I think through that what we need to do is still realise that how the community responds to us will be through their values and how they see we're relevant and we can't lose sight of it.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Yes.  The next two questions ‑ I'll come to you now, Glyn ‑ are closely related.  Chris Sanderson stalks about once upon a time the main purpose of a university was to develop students' ability to think and Tebeje Molla has the quote from Simon Leys, "A university is not a factory producing graduates as a sausage factory produces sausages.  It is a place where a chance is given to men to become what they truly are."  Despite the funding pressures or immediate political pressures of a post‑COVID recovery, universities still understand that point, don't they, Glyn?  There's still a commitment to that idea, isn't there?

 

PROF. GLYN DAVIS AC:  Yes, but let me have a note of scepticism.  Most students at most universities have been pursuing professional qualifications since the 1850s.  It isn't like there's a golden era in which most students were arts students and their aspirations were to come to university and read great literature and hear the best that's thought and said, in the words of Matthew Arnold.  So we can get a little carried away here.  It's not up to us in many ways to tell students why they're studying.  Students have a right to say, "Actually, I'm here because I want professional qualification", "I'm here because I do want a job." 

 

I think the Government's view on this is probably closer to community views than we're comfortable with because of course we value knowledge and of course we value reflection and of course we want it to be the place to think.  That's what we care about.  That's the image of a university we carry in our heads.  We shouldn't assume that we speak for students when we say that. 

 

So one of the interesting things in looking at long‑run stats in Australia is that the percentage of students studying, say, arts and the social sciences has shifted not at all in the last six years.  It's neither bigger nor smaller than it was.  There's huge expansion in the overall pool, but as a percent, no, it actually hasn't shifted.  Student preferences have remained astonishingly consistent and that's a bitter reminder it's not just us, there's a community out there that funds us, that has views about what we should do.  Its views might be a lot more conservative than those of us in the system.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  I know.  Well, we run the participation programs out of our centre and it's very interesting when you talk to the parents of all our low‑SES students ‑ it doesn't necessarily mean it's the students' views ‑ they really want kids to go into traditional professions, engineering, law.  It's professions that give them economic security in the longer term, interesting tension.  Sally Varnham has asked a really good question on that point, which is she's talking about there's no better way to develop students' ability to think than to embrace their voices in the big questions.  "Referring also to Verity's opening comment about developing citizens, my question is:  are we asking our diverse range of students what they see as the purpose of a university today", which also speaks to what Glyn has just said.  Jonathan, what do you think of that?

 

PROF. JONATHAN GRANT:  I agree in once sense, that's why I ended up writing the book because I held a pen on developing a new strategy when at King's and I deliberately did a very sort of open and consultive way and ran many workshops with students at King's, you know, an elite group of students, I have to say that, and found that they were talking about something which was completely alien to what I'd been sort of brainwashed into thinking university was for and that led me into looking at the data around the values of this generation of students, Gen Z as the social demographers call them, and they have a fundamentally different set of values than the millennials before them and it is about social purpose.  And when you speak to students, who undoubtedly are quite instrumental, as Glyn has pointed out, are quite instrumental in seeking a degree that is going to advance their career and their life prospects, they can do that at the same time as having a core set of values which are focused on social purpose.  They're not mutually exclusive. 

 

So it's those conversations with students that got me thinking well, actually maybe we are stuck and we are too uncomfortable and there's a degree of groupthink going on here within the academy ‑ horrible word ‑ that has led us to sort of talk to ourselves rather than talk to these constituents who are students and then their parents who are also constituents and that lot turn out to be voters and maybe this anti university rhetoric is just a manifestation of that.  If that's the case, we ‑ we, not them, we ‑ have to change and that's why listening and that's why reinventing what we do.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Larissa, what did students tell you?  The students you work with, do you have conversations with them about why they're at university and what they want to achieve from their time at university?

 

DISTINGUISHED PROF. LARISSA BEHRENDT AO:  Yeah, look, and obviously we recruit a very particular demographic with First Nations students and in a way it does go to the points being made about people wanting jobs, but it's perhaps broader than that and what we've seen is that students come to university, who choose the university pathway above other pathways, to primarily and historically do jobs that they can see visibly in their community, so teaching, health, increasingly law. 

 

So one of the great challenges and one of the big shifts that we're seeing now has been from us having to show what's relevant to communities in terms of what have been given the terrible name of non‑traditional areas, but particularly with interests around climate change, I think a really great example of the importance of engineering in places like the Torres Strait, where there are real challenges around housing with rising water ‑ being able to show students how other aspects that they might not have thought about can make a contribution back to their communities.  Obviously while access to new media and internet is an issue, adaptability and adoption of that has actually had a high take‑up in Aboriginal communities, when you see these wonderful things of rangers caring for country now integrate sophisticated technology into how they do their traditional caring for country. 

 

So it's been our challenge, I guess reflecting some of the comments Jonathan and Glyn have made, of showing how what we do actually has a relevance to the very issues that are facing communities where we haven't had pathways through before, so people haven't been able to see those connections for themselves.  So we are seeing some changes around that and that's meant that we've had to think differently about how we recruit and understand that what brings a student into the university is for the most part in the group we recruit from a real desire to make a difference in their own community, but what that means I think is what we need to kind of show a broader range of options and be much more innovative about it.

 

Just in relation to that in terms of how we change, one of the things that I think we've needed to think about more deeply is how we support on‑country work, not just research, which is perhaps the easier bit, but that challenge between doing on‑country ‑ having researchers and teaching on country and students on country, but making sure that isn't secondary to the experiences they have and the benefits they have when they come into a big institution. 

 

So at UTS we're thinking differently say with our Indigenous Residential College providing a space that will think differently and will be a space for non‑Indigenous people to engage with Indigenous cultures as well.  There are ways in which we have to rethink what we do because we're not thinking outside the box.

 

But I think it's interesting that over the 20 years I've been recruiting students into UTS that basic passion for giving back to community is one of the key drivers that brings somebody through our doors.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Yes, that's really interesting.  Thanks for that, Larissa.  So I'm mindful of the time.  We've got only 2 minutes left.  So I'm going to ask Kim Graham's question and slightly twist it so it can be the end of the conversation question.  Kim is asking how much impact do you think research can have when driven by values, eg social justice, income equality, and these values perhaps aren't shared by government.  I'm going to slightly twist that to say as activist researcher or advocate researcher, how do you have your ideas picked up by government or how do you create the relationship that will mean that your research has the greatest impact?  And I know that's a huge question, but I will start with ‑ I'll do the opposite of how we started.  I'll start with Glyn, then Larissa, and end with Jonathan Grant.

 

PROF. GLYN DAVIS AC:  The power of research is the power of idea and the power of evidence and, as we all know, it goes through this path of "That can't be right" to "Well, maybe there's something in it" to "Oh, well, I always thought that." 

 

I just recall in the 1990s a research project about Neighbourhood Watch in Queensland which showed unambiguously that Neighbourhood Watch makes zero difference to crime in a neighbourhood and people hated it and then they quietly dropped Neighbourhood Watch.  We can make change to the world and we use evidence to do so.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Wonderful.  I love that ending.  It's very positive.  Larissa.

 

DISTINGUISHED PROF. LARISSA BEHRENDT AO:  Always hard to follow Glyn, but again we advocate from a position often with passion and belief, but you cannot do that without doing what our core business is, which is finding the evidence to back it up. 

 

And I think of examples where we have invested a lot of resources and it's not work we've been funded to do, but the work we do supporting families through coronial inquests in deaths in custody is work that we've been really committed to.  Off the back of that, understanding a very unique perspective of how the coronial inquest system lets down Indigenous families has allowed us to put forward those reflections in policy form and recently the New South Wales Parliamentary Inquiry into Deaths in Custody referred to our submission 89 times because of that area of expertise and we're now called upon by the coroners in the state to give them more support and insight. 

 

So I think you need to be thinking about how you put the research into a form and it's one thing to be passionate about an idea and an issue, it's another to actually do the hard yards so you learn how to articulate what needs to happen in terms of change to make it meaningful.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Great.  Thanks, Larissa.  And Jonathan, you get the last word.

 

PROF. JONATHAN GRANT:  Yeah, so I would finish on an alliteration of trust, timing and translation.  You've got to build trusted networks ‑ we've been talking about that; timing is critical, both when you intervene, but also some impacts can take a long time, Glyn's Neighbourhood Watch example; and translation, we've got to talk in a language that policy makers and the general public and citizens understand.  And as researchers we've got to work on those three, so trust, timing and translation.

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Thank you, Jonathan, and thank you to all of you.  That was an absolutely fantastic panel.  I really enjoyed myself.  We could keep talking for the rest of the night, but we won't.  We will end on time. 

 

So thank you very much, panellists.  Thank you for everyone who joined us.  I remind you again that the link to Jonathan's book is in the chat.  I really enjoyed it, so go along, click on it and buy it.  While there, you can buy Glyn's book as well, The Australian Idea of a University, and Larissa has plenty of books, buy some of her books too.  Thank you very much, everyone, and we'll see you next time.  Thanks again to the panellists.  Bye.