Recording: What kind of university does society need now?

Descriptive transcript

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 peoples, and this is 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 acknowledgement 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.

So what is the topic we are 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. We're about to post a link in the chat where you can get a copy of this book. 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. 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. 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 when we're 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 Ramsay 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.

Thank you, Verity.

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 filmmaker. She is the Chair of the Cathy Freeman Foundation, a 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.

Thanks, Verity. Great to be here.

And Professor Jonathan Grant. Jonathan's book is one of the things we'll be discussing today. Jonathan Grant specialises in research on the social purpose of universities in the 21st century, assessing research impact and health R&D policy. He was formerly Vice President and Vice Principal (Service) at King's College 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.

Thank you very much, Verity, for having me.

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.

Thank you, Verity. In the 8th century, the Islamic world 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. It's such a lovely metaphor for what we'd all like a university to be.

By contemporary standards, that's also a very narrow metaphor for what we do in a university. It's more than 50 years since Clark Kerr, who was the Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, described his institution as the multiversity, a place with many roles. 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 specialist training, you might join as faculty to contribute to new knowledge, you might access it as a community member to hear about the great issues of today—what Jonathan, in his book, calls engagement. 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's been reading Clark Kerr, and they're appropriately going to combine tertiary and vocational study, research and community facilities. That's what Clark Kerr had in mind.

I think Kerr's telling us it would be a mistake to privilege one aspect of a university mission and say, "This is the university." In fact, he's telling us to be wary of essence, to think that there's a way to define university that goes to some inexplicable but immutable evidence. There isn't such a thing; there's lots of ways forward.

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 policymakers, our legislators, have clustered around a single dominant model of the university. It's defined in law, it's reinforced by regulators, and it's rigorously enforced through the funding model. We've legislated a single model in Australia for what a university could be, despite all that opportunity to be other things.

If we think about what a contemporary university could be, you could 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 aspire 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 the status hierarchies about the research-teaching binary that we really do 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.

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?

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 stated that.

My thoughts around this, I think, fit nicely into what he's mapped out there about the many possibilities. 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.

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. 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. We have 13 Indigenous professors at UTS, so across a range of faculties, across a range of disciplines. I think that's meant that we've seen universities become richer for that diversity.

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. 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.

I think that makes for an exciting opportunity for the people who are coming into 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. We talk a lot about innovation in the sector, and I think that speaks to a level of adaptability.

I often, 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.

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 re-emerge, I think our role of being able to really lead conversations about what the best type of society we can be remains central to our role as well.

Absolutely. And Jonathan, last but not least.

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.

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.

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?

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 Nazism, and she sort of concluded that the middle classes acquiesced from the evils, the darkness—it's called Darkness over Germany, this book.

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, in 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 introducing this idea of connectivity through network technologies 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.

The sort of new-power values that Henry and Jeremy talk about are 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 in that social media Airbnb model.

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.

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.

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 universities 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. 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 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.

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.

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

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 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, 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.

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.

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. 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 of bad practice, a lot of appropriation of knowledge, artefacts, etc. 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. From my personal experience working within UTS, 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.

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 like to 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.

That'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—you can say yay for the work Larissa is doing—but do you have anything you want to add about that?

So again, agree with all of the above. I think I'm trying to make in that final chapter of the book quite a subtle argument. One of it is whose advocacy is it—is it the advocacy of the academics and broader community, students and other staff, or is it the advocacy of the institution? On the whole, universities say yes, we protect academic freedom, we'll let you say what you want and you get into all those 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—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.

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?

Yeah, look, I think there's been a lot of thinking and development of what that means in recent times after a long tradition of it being pretty much as you described. I guess for me, coming from the Aboriginal community like I do, I 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 is 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.

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. We see for things that were 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 in