tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-71698196208170286002024-03-11T14:22:24.703+11:00Royal Parade DiaryThis blog is for occasional comment related to the life of Trinity College, the University of Melbourne.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07635251367963117391noreply@blogger.comBlogger48125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7169819620817028600.post-11172202849944738422014-05-16T09:38:00.000+10:002014-05-16T09:38:49.835+10:00A New Stage in Ecumenical Theological Education<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Since 1969 students of theology at Trinity College have benefited from a unique and remarkable educational partnership with the Jesuit Theological College and what is now the Uniting Church Theological College. Students from each college and tradition were to be taught by the others, without exchange of fees; more than just financial generosity to each other, this signalled a commitment to scholarship and ecumenism that has had few parallels in the world. The United Faculty of Theology became an associated teaching institution of the Melbourne College of Divinity, and pioneered the coursework Bachelor of Theology degree. The UFT was however never incorporated as a distinct structure, but technically remained an informal arrangement between the three Colleges.<br />
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Today came the formal announcement that the UFT will cease to operate at the end of 2014. This is a sad outcome in many respects, but there is much that is positive that will not be lost from the change. Here I want to reflect on some of the background from Trinity’s perspective, and to consider issues that remain for us all in the work of theological education, denominationally and ecumenically too.<br />
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<i>Changes in the Colleges</i><br />
In recent years each of the three partner Colleges has faced changing circumstances and new challenges. Most starkly the Jesuit Theological College has been affected by a significant downturn in Australian vocations. The Uniting Church Theological College, funded by a denominational structure which had historically been deeply committed to theological education but has had significant and very public financial issues, has faced hard questions about costs and benefits.<br />
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Trinity, too, has faced challenges. While not a department of the church, the changing reality of Australian Anglicanism has impacted the Theological School. There are now few young and single resident candidates, and more part-time and mature age students, often still in discernment (most of whom have, however, sought ordination at some point). The Dioceses of the Victorian Province, led by Melbourne, support us not quite to the extent of one staff position. We are dependent on significant support from the wider operations of Trinity College, as well on philanthropic support from individuals and parishes.<br />
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<i>Independent Students, Dioceses, the University</i><br />
The environment in which we do the work of theological education has also changed in a number of ways.<br />
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Over time, the centre of gravity in the UFT had shifted. Students of the three constituent colleges were originally the whole student body, but for very good reasons the UFT began to admit private or independent students who were not (or not yet) seeking ordination. These included considerable numbers from the traditions of the three Colleges themselves, but who unlike College students were charged tuition fees that supported a growing central UFT office. Over time, a considerable number of Anglicans who were eventually to seek ordination came to enrol initially as independent students rather than through Trinity, lessening their exposure to specifically formational elements of theological education. And these independent students, channeled into that category by a somewhat narrow sense of what College students had to be (i.e., ordinands or professed religious), actually became a majority of the student body.<br />
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While College students had for decades paid token or no tuition fees to the UFT (and only administrative capitation charges to the MCD), in 2004 the Melbourne Diocese determined that all its ordination candidates should now do so and make use of the FEE-Help program, which like HECS allows students to borrow the cost of tuition fees. This was an important step that not only provided a new funding source for Trinity, but helped to focus our attention on the importance of increasing enrolments and on having an impact on Melbourne Anglicanism wider than the training of clergy for catholic-minded parishes. It did however put Trinity’s students on a different footing from those of the other two Colleges, who paid no fees and typically received more material support.<br />
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Last but not least, the Melbourne College of Divinity, once a rather “light-touch” accrediting body, became more and more a central University administration. It attracted research funding, including support for doctoral candidates in its Colleges, and expected the Colleges more and more to account for their programs relative to wider educational regulations and standards. This process culminated in University status for what is now the University of Divinity in 2012. The new University meanwhile was signalling that it would require clearer accountability from its affiliates around their financial and organisational stability, among other things. The UFT - organisationally not a legal entity with whom an agreement could even be made - posed some anomalies.<br />
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<i>What Now?</i><br />
These changing realities led to different responses among the member Colleges of the UFT.<br />
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Trinity has for some time affirmed that access to formational experience - worship, spiritual direction, field education, and denominational as well as ecumenical forms of advice - should be available equally to students with different goals, tailored according to their specific needs. We have long stated that the “independent” student should be an exception allowed for, rather than a norm, and have thus been enrolling more Anglican students at Trinity, regardless of their place in the ordination process.<br />
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We thus proposed that each College of the UFT should henceforth be affirmed as a constituent of the University, not merely through the central and legally-intangible UFT itself. We also felt it was insufficient to celebrate the ecumenical character of the UFT as an end in itself, when there were increasing possibilities in the wider University of Divinity - which now includes Lutherans, Copts and others as well as Anglicans, Roman Catholics and Uniting Church - that could benefit our students.<br />
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Neither the Uniting Church Theological College, which has a more immediate governance nexus to its denomination and is funded to train its candidates, nor our Jesuit colleagues, with their mission focussed specifically on members of the Society of Jesus, had the same incentives for direct College affiliation with the University. This became a sticking point in our conversations. Some of our ecumenical partners were concerned at the growth of Trinity’s student body relative to those who had been “independent”, not least because Trinity’s faculty had historically been the smallest contributor to the whole. Ultimately our partners expressed an unwillingness to continue the arrangements to teach Trinity students without fees. Alternative proposals, including one by us to share all costs and revenues equally, were not favoured.<br />
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The recent news that the Jesuit Theological College will cease to operate in its present form has made some of these issues moot. While we hope there will be ways, yet to be determined, in which our Jesuit colleagues will continue to contribute to the life of the University of Divinity, the envisaged end or departure of JTC also means the end of the UFT as we have known it.<br />
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The 2014 academic year has been one of transition. Both we and our Uniting Church colleagues have been granted status as Colleges of the University of Divinity. Both will continue to teach the UFT students whom we have historically known as “independent”, and will seek to continue the UFT’s tradition of academic excellence and ecumenical cooperation, in new and distinctive ways. We hope that Trinity students will continue to study with our Uniting Church colleagues, but also at other campuses of the University of Divinity that provide wider denominational and theological perspectives.<br />
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The passing of the UFT in its known form is certainly cause for sadness, but especially for gratitude for these many years of fruitful cooperation. We now stand on the verge of a new period of ecumenical theological education, characterised not just by the local cooperation of three Colleges in Parkville, but by the growing cooperation of a larger number of denomination Colleges across Melbourne and beyond it, in a strong ecumenical University. To our ecumenical colleagues, our students, and God, we give thanks.<br />
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<br />Andrew McGowanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01304601214734931518noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7169819620817028600.post-62159854666629917972014-04-07T10:33:00.000+10:002014-04-07T16:30:39.759+10:00From Trinity to YaleToday both Trinity and Yale will be announcing my resignation as Warden from the end of July to take up a new appointment as Dean and President of the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale and Professor of Anglican Studies at Yale Divinity School. It's a day of mixed emotions (with more to come); the two formal announcements follow.<br />
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From Trinity:<br />
<blockquote>
A message from the Chairman of the Board of Trinity College<br />
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I wish to inform you that late last week Professor Andrew McGowan tendered his resignation as Warden of Trinity College, in order to take up the role of Dean and President of the Berkeley Divinity School—an Episcopal (Anglican) seminary founded in 1854 and affiliated with Yale since 1971—and an appointment as Professor of Anglican Studies at the Yale Divinity School. Whilst obviously disappointing for Trinity, this is an exciting opportunity for Andrew, and he will leave us with the College in a very strong position from which to manage the transition to a new Warden. <br />
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Yale has requested that Andrew commence at the beginning of August 2014, to coincide with their academic year, and the Trinity Board has agreed to this timing. An international search for the eighth Warden of Trinity College will now commence, and a subcommittee of the Board has been appointed to oversee the process. Mr Campbell Bairstow, the Dean and Deputy Warden, will be acting Warden in the interim, a role he has filled previously, while Andrew was on leave for a semester in 2012. I have every confidence that that the College will be in good hands during this time of transition.<br />
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Over the next few months, we will have a number of opportunities to acknowledge and celebrate Andrew’s very significant contribution to the life of this College, both as Warden over the past seven years, and earlier as Director of the Theological School. Andrew and his senior colleagues have led Trinity to a position of financial security and strong demand for its educational offerings. This positive base has enabled the Board to set more ambitious targets for the College, and pursue its goal of providing a world-class, transformative education to as many able and talented students as possible. <br />
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Under Andrew’s leadership, Trinity’s achievements have included the creation of the Centre for Advanced Studies and the Careers and Further Studies Office, the restructuring of the Theological School with the ambition of direct affiliation to the University of Divinity, the renovation of the Dining Hall and a number of residential buildings, and the securing of a formal agreement between the University of Melbourne and the College regarding our Pathways programs, the first such agreement since Foundation Studies began almost twenty-five years ago.<br />
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I know you will join me in wishing Andrew the very best for this next chapter in his career as a senior academic and leading educator, and in extending those same wishes to Andrew’s wife, Dr Felicity Harley McGowan. Andrew and Felicity have served the College very well indeed, and we shall miss them.<br />
<br />
Mr Jim Craig
Chairman of the Board
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And from Yale:
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<blockquote>
Contact: Jared.Gilbert@yale.edu<br />
For Immediate Release: April 7, 2014<br />
<b>Yale appoints Andrew McGowan as Dean of Berkeley Divinity School</b><br />
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New Haven, CT— Andrew McGowan has been appointed President and Dean of the Berkeley Divinity School and Associate Dean for Anglican Studies at Yale Divinity School. McGowan is currently Warden of Trinity College at The University of Melbourne, and will join the Berkeley administration on August 1, 2014.<br />
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An Anglican priest and historian, McGowan studied Classics and Ancient History at the University of Western Australia, Theology at Trinity College, the University of Melbourne, and Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity at the University of Notre Dame, where he received his Ph.D. He was a lecturer at the University of Notre Dame Australia, and was Associate Professor of Early Christian History at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, MA. In 2003 he became Director of Trinity College Theological School, in which he is also Joan Munro Professor of Historical Theology. He has been Warden of Trinity since 2007, and is currently a Canon of St Paul's Cathedral, Melbourne.<br />
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“I am thrilled that Andrew will be joining us. He is a talented scholar, a capable and experienced administrator, and a dedicated priest,” said YDS Dean Gregory E. Sterling. “He and his wife Felicity will enrich our community and help to build bridges to the Episcopal Church in the US and the Anglican Communion worldwide.”<br />
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McGowan’s scholarly work focuses on the social and intellectual life of early Christian communities. His most recent books include Ascetic Eucharists: Food and Drink in Early Christian Ritual Meals (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999) and God in Early Christian Thought (Leiden: Brill, 2009), as well as the forthcoming Ancient Christian Worship (Baker Academic, 2014).<br />
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Berkeley trustee Stephen Carlsen, who chaired the search committee, stated, “Andrew brings together first class scholarship, practice and service in the global setting of the Anglican Communion. In our interviews we found a personable, articulate leader to advance the vision of Berkeley Divinity School.”<br />
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The search committee began its work in September 2013 led by Carlsen, with close support of Dean Sterling. A draft vision statement of the BDS Board of Trustees, which prioritizes vibrant community, ecumenical learning, and innovative models for ministry, guided the committee.<br />
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David R. Wilson, the incoming chair of the Berkeley Board of Trustees, explained, “Andrew is a visionary with the skills and drive to take the vision of Berkeley Divinity School, refine it, and then turn it into action that can be transformative within Berkeley, the Episcopal Church, and the Anglican Communion.”<br />
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McGowan will join the divinity school at a time of great challenge and opportunity for the global church, and theological institutions are called upon as leaders in navigating these changes.<br />
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“McGowan recognizes that the integration of Berkeley with YDS and Yale makes this place a remarkable resource for the institutional Church as it faces major change,” commented Carolyn Sharp, Professor of Hebrew Scriptures.<br />
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McGowan succeeds outgoing dean Joseph H. Britton, who served 11 years in that capacity.<br />
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Founded in 1854 as a seminary of the Episcopal Church, Berkeley affiliated with Yale Divinity School in 1971, and is the only Episcopal seminary to be fully associated with a major research university. For more information about BDS or YDS, please visit: berkeleydivinity.yale.edu and divinity.yale.edu.<br />
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<br />Andrew McGowanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01304601214734931518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7169819620817028600.post-71081129709522282502014-02-11T09:09:00.001+11:002014-02-11T09:09:48.638+11:00Frank Patrick Henagan (1933-2014)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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One of those alumni of the College who sent us reflections on Frank Henagan's time at Trinity was honest enough to observe that there had been those students and staff who initially sneered at or dismissed Frank. Frank did not, after all, possess the gifts which are most clearly valued in an academic community - or at least did not seem to, because in fact as we have already been reminded Frank had more by way of formal educational achievement than most people knew, having matriculated and studied at RMIT. Nevertheless his unprepossessing demeanour, and the predominantly manual labor to which he unstintingly applied himself at Trinity, did not fit the most prevalent conceptions of wisdom and education or its fruits.<br />
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Wisdom and knowledge are not the same thing however; nor are wisdom and education, even if they are related. Most of us came over time to see that Frank was a wise man. This was true not only in regard to the practical wisdom that was easy to see in his great love of sport and in matters of physical fitness; it was also the case with regard to various larger and smaller matters of human endeavour and character - his pithy assessments of people, ideas, and projects were always worth attending to. I remember the time when at a Senior Management Team, confronted with some imponderable matter, Don Markwell suggested “Let’s ask Frank!”. And we did.<br />
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Wisdom is more than an attribute about which to celebrate or eulogise Frank, however. Wisdom is something which points to the deepest truths of our reality. It is the subject of a set of writings in the Bible’s Old Testament in particular, including parts of the Psalms as well as the books of Job and of Proverbs, not so well known perhaps because they are not stories, and are focussed not on the miraculous or the other spectacular manifestations of the divine in human life, but on those things learned from experience and from observation of creation itself, accessible to all, if only grasped by few. Wisdom, we are also told, comes from God and has something of divinity about it.<br />
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The model human being in this Wisdom Literature is not the prophet, priest, or king, but the sage - the wise man or woman who understands the realities of life, not least its limitations and its vicissitudes, makes choices accordingly, and so not only lives well but fosters the well-being of others.<br />
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Psalm 90, which we have heard sung today somewhat laconically representing this view, reminds us that we are like the quick-growing grass of summer, and that our years number "threescore years and ten” or for the strong perhaps “four score”, and praying “so teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts to wisdom”.<br />
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Frank of course, happily for us, was strong enough indeed to get his four score; but for a community like this one, focussed on excellence and suffused with privilege, Frank Henagan was indeed a sage, a living reminder of what true wisdom is, and of how different it might be from the mere accumulation of learning or the glib rhetoric of success. The apostle Paul in today’s first reading claims that "God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” George Herbert speaks of the recognition that the simplest, least glamorous activity could, when God was seen in it, and when done for the sake of others, become “drudgery divine”. Wisdom and its attendant divinity consist not of the spectacular, but of the real.<br />
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Many were challenged to emulate Frank’s self-discipline, or to count their blessings, or by heeding his advice learned numerous other sound and practical things about themselves and life. The most abiding lesson of Frank’s wisdom to us all however might be theological - a reflection of the insight that Wisdom is not merely benign or even precious, but relates us to the mystery of God in creation, which although we experience it in many ways and through many good things, is never to be confused with them.<br />
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Frank quietly but surely placed his own faith in this claim - and proclaimed it more than once in this Chapel as an unlikely but profound preacher. The gifts that he shared with us belong to and point to a truer wisdom, a more profound beauty, and a more ancient love than any we yet know in full. As we pray that we too may so number our days that we may apply our hearts to wisdom, we commend Frank, and ourselves, to this eternal love, this transcendent beauty, and this holy wisdom.Andrew McGowanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01304601214734931518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7169819620817028600.post-20486300646915656312013-05-01T15:50:00.000+10:002013-05-01T15:50:59.016+10:00Would Jesus Tweet? A Guest Contribution from Dr Damian Powell<br />
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Many of you will know the story of the good man and the parrot. The good man, being lonely but full of love for others, bought a parrot from the pet shop, and brought him home full of promise. The man had been told that the parrot was not just an excellent mimic, but capable of extempore and indeed independent thought, and might be drawn into serious discourse with the right approach of affection and sound stimulus. So the good man began to coax the parrot to talk. <br />
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At first he tried simple things - a bell, a wooden frame for the parrot to wander up and down, and he kept the cage clean and tidy. But sadly the parrot did not respond. Indeed it seemed, to the good man, to have taken on a slightly melancholy countenance in the week since leaving the pet shop. Unperturbed, the good man determined to shower love and affection on the parrot, and to stimulate the much longed for conversation. A bird walking wheel was carefully placed inside the cage, and then a mirror for the parrot to admire itself in. To the man, however, the parrot only seemed to grow more morose, more forlorn, day by day. Eventually, in desperation, the man became angry at the parrot. His love and care rejected, he quizzed the parrot on his lack of gratitude. ‘I have tried so hard to give you everything, to keep you busy and happy and content. And yet never once have you seemed happy to me. You have not uttered one word. I don’t understand – what is it that you want? ‘<br />
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The parrot looked at the good man, and uttered his first words. The parrot said this: ‘I want… FOOD’.<br />
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How do we find food for the journey? As educators in residential colleges, how do we feed our people, not just in the literal sense, but also in terms of their minds and their hearts and their vision of themselves, of others, of what can be redeemed and what is truly valuable? What in modern life gives us food for the soul? What distracts us?<br />
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As my friend and colleague Andrew McGowan reminds us in this place from time to time, the Bible is a series of books, written over many centuries and then gathered together - with some surprising inclusions, and in slightly different versions. From the stories and songs, the meter and rhyme of the psalmist, through the national, pseudo-historical narrative of the book of Samuel, through prescriptive Pauline urgings to form just communities in cities such as Ephesus, the word prevailed. And as aural traditions were redacted and refined in writing, in copper, papyrus, vellum, paper, copied and collated, bound, and printed, this book of words was always at the cutting edge of technology. The collection of books, the Bible, sits on the lectern, and for believers it has carried the load of collective memory in its stories, for over a thousand years, in much the same way. A book as a vehicle of communication is a reminder of an age when the university rank of reader (now sadly largely dissolved into that of associate professor) was literally that – a person who would read from a book to an audience of students, when the primacy of the book itself as a vehicle for the dissemination of ideas, over distance, was almost undisputed.<br />
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But can this be said to be true today? As a late adopter of many of the new technologies, I am very aware that I am increasingly unrepresentative on anything. My students tweet, post, skype, update, upload, blog, and poke - while my children move fluidly among the multiple realities of experience inhabited by the very young. In a blink of an eye they click from the sound of a friend in North Melbourne to an image of a friend in Finland, then to a cartoon, then to the Boston bombing, and from there to a love song. So one might ask: if Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase ‘the medium is the message’ means, in part, that we are what we do, then what is to be made of all this doing? <br />
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In a recent article entitled ‘MOOCs of Hazaard’, Andrew Delbanco pondered what changing methods of communication mean for the university, where in his words ‘online courses are particularly well- suited to the new rhythms of student life.’ ‘On traditional campuses,’ he tell us, ‘many students already regard time offline as a form of solitary confinement. Classrooms have become battlegrounds where professors struggle to distract students from their smartphones and laptops. Office hours are giving way to e-mail.’ Leaving Delbanco, I find my own struggle with the eternal inbox has changed forever the way I think about a college day. I still make it to breakfast to talk with students most mornings, but I can easily imagine a world where a desire for more and more communication might overwhelm those last remaining spaces in which we come together, as any college should, just to sit and talk. In the college space, we leave the world of narrow university instruction, for what Ralph Waldo Emmerson called ‘provocation’ – the chance to be challenged, and changed, by another point of view, face to face. <br />
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But what face are we able to present in a world where everybody projects a perfect self? I’m not sure, but something inside me still wonders if we are letting Mr Zuckerberg take us on a merry dance, with little thought of where we might end up, in our hearts and in our relationships with one another. Sadly, I know that many a university student, just as some of my middle aged friend, is broken inside but posting endless glories on facebook. It might be therapeutic to do so; I just don’t know. We have to remember that the Luddites who smashed machines in the British midlands at the onset of the industrial revolution were not scared of technology per se – they were scared of what it would do to their communities, to their sense of community. And, maybe, they had a point. The changes forced on agrarian communities by the industrial revolution were not all bad, but few people had much choice in what happened to them. The technology drove the change, and society changed in turn. My questions about the equally dramatic revolution now in full flow, one which places social media at the front end of more and more social communication, is that people don’t feel empowered to get off or step back. My fear is that we are rapidly entering an age of endless distraction. My fear, in short, is that we might become a society which favours endless, largely pointless communication over social communion. This is a state of being which one song called ‘living in my United States of Whatever’. The lyrics could be a paraphrase of a conversation overheard on a street in Toronto, or Melbourne, or Ballarat. ‘Then this chick comes up to me and she’s all like “Hey aren’t you that dude’ and I’m like yeah, whatever!’ It’s a style of communication on endless repeat around the planet as we speak – which is ok as long as a vocabulary still exists to imagine a the finer grain, the warp and weft, of the world in which we take our part. <br />
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Now if, as John brilliantly imagined it, in the beginning was the Word, then the force of language to shape our minds and break our hearts was ever thus. Words redeem us and can destroy us all, and our ability to take them seriously means that we must enjoin the idea of communication to our need for communion. I sit in meetings more and more often where people are watching two screens at once, walking out to answer phones which are emails and reminders and calendars and text messages and which never allow us to be together any more. We all run the risk of always being, even if just slightly, somewhere else other than where we actually are. In a more primitive technological age back in the last century, I remember myself penning a mental email to a tutor, when it dawned on me that the person to whom I was working up my text was sitting just opposite me at High Table. I was so busy working through my endless inbox that I had stopped being present. People used to stop to gather in places like this to listen to stories in a book. People used to pause and gather to break bread at the end of the day and share their stories. This was part of the rhythm of life over the course of their lives. What of the rhythm of our lives, or our students, or our children’s? To what personal, to what social, to what theological end, are we opting for change? I am deeply grateful that in my college we still dine together, and tell our stories – but I am also aware that we are a deeply privileged group, and perhaps increasingly disconnected from the norm. As I sometimes tell my students, maybe the only chance you will get to sit down like this with a hundred other people after college is if you end up in prison – which by the way I don’t wish for them, or for any of you. What I do wish for us is time and space to share what we have in common, time and space to think deeply about our lives, with gratitude for what we have and for each other.<br />
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Would Jesus tweet? Of course I don’t know. But I do fear that like the parrot, pampered and preened and distracted near to death, we might be offered everything all at once and yet not what we need. Not food for the journey, just endless distraction parading as content. Not communion, but endlessly distracting communication, much of it well meaning and much of it essentially pointless. How we place this set of books, how we place this space, and how we place ourselves and our traditions within this brave new world is a challenge – but more importantly it is a choice, which at least deserves a conversation as we conduct this massive global experiment.<br />
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[<i>From a sermon given in the Chapel on April 21 2013</i>]<br />
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Andrew McGowanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01304601214734931518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7169819620817028600.post-91780258960695519002013-04-17T11:35:00.001+10:002013-04-17T15:30:46.303+10:00A Long Way From Greece and Rome: The John Hugh Sutton Collection<span style="font-size: x-small;">[<i>Remarks from the opening of an exhibition from the John Hugh Sutton Collection at the Ian Potter Museum of the University of Melbourne</i>]</span><br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.art-museum.unimelb.edu.au/assets/images/2013-Exhib/xl-John-Hugh-Sutton.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://www.art-museum.unimelb.edu.au/assets/images/2013-Exhib/xl-John-Hugh-Sutton.jpg" width="161" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: #474747; color: white; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;">John Hugh Sutton (1906 – 1925), </span><br />
<em style="background-color: #474747; color: white; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">The Fleur-de-Lys magazine</em><span style="background-color: #474747; color: white; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;">, 1925. </span></td></tr>
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To live and work in a University involves many privileges - even if we are this week in the familiar territory of looking to decide <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/national/university-sector-to-be-hit-in-gonski-reforms-20130413-2hry2.html">which 2% of them we can dispense with</a>... Not the least of these is the company of talented students, whose potential teachers and other staff have the opportunity to catalyse, but from whose energy and insight we gain as much as we give.</div>
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Occasionally however even such an apparently invincible community of raw talent and energy experiences tragedy, as ours did with the recent deaths of two students of the University in an accident on Swanston St. When John Hugh Sutton died after being thrown from his motorbike in the grounds of Trinity College in March 1925, the event certainly struck hard not only among his friends, but among teachers. </div>
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It was not such a remarkable thing at the time for the most accomplished students to be reading Classics, as he was. Trinity, not uniquely among the Colleges I admit, had great strength in the area; my first predecessor Alexander Leeper who retired just before Sutton came up, had won the Berkeley Gold Medal for Classics at Trinity College Dublin three years before Oscar Wilde did the same; Leeper's translation of Juvenal's <i>Satires</i> is still available - for your Kindle, even!</div>
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Sutton had been widely regarded by those who taught him at Melbourne Grammar School and here as one of the brightest minds of his generation. There is even a small body of written work which gives some hints of that - peppered with classical allusions, but focussed on modern themes. <i>In nuce</i> at least Sutton was the embodiment of that classical scholar of the time, who read the works in the original languages but was ready to apply their insights in contemporary terms. My picture of the John Hugh Sutton we never knew was thus not a successor to Cecil Scutt, but an essayist, a rival to Vance Palmer or Donald Horne perhaps, someone who knew how to think about the present in the light of the past - a "graduate attribute" in which this or anyUniversity should delight.</div>
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The commemorative gift that laid the foundation of University's collection of antiquities which we delight to see tonight was itself a bridge between past and present, but also between continents and civilisations.</div>
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We are, after all, a long way from Greece and Rome. </div>
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Ancient authors were more interested in the Antipodes you might expect, but did not imagine us or Australia's inhabitants of the time in very complimentary terms. Authors like Herodotus and Ctesias among the Greeks and Lucian and Seneca among the Latins drew images of the Antipodes and its inhabitants as inversions - sometimes literal, standing us on our heads as it were - or moral or ethical, as people whose views and habits were the reverse of those valued and practiced in the world of classical order.</div>
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<i>Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt</i> (Horace, <i>Ep</i>. 1.11) is closer to the truth; "those who race across the ocean change the sky, not their being". Few budding classicists in this part of the world have failed to wander through these references with some amusement or curiosity; but the Europeans who did arrive here may have been influenced, as colonists were in other parts of the southern hemisphere, by notions well embedded in schoolbooks from the renaissance that those who lived in these parts were not simply culturally other, but something worse. It is well for us to have acknowledged also this evening the traditional owners, whose own rich culture is now far better appreciated and studied.</div>
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Of these challenges there is much more to say; but for now the generosity of Sutton's family and of others, some with us tonight, has enabled many students to connect with the ancient world with an immediacy that has a unique quality because of its unlikely character. </div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.art-museum.unimelb.edu.au/assets/images/2013-Exhib/xl-1929.0007.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="280" src="http://www.art-museum.unimelb.edu.au/assets/images/2013-Exhib/xl-1929.0007.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><em style="background-color: #474747; color: white; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">Convex pyxis with lid</em><span style="background-color: #474747; color: white; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 14px; text-align: left;">, Corinthian, c. 590–570 BCE, 11.1 x 13.2 x 13.2 cm. The University of Melbourne Art Collection, John Hugh Sutton Memorial Bequest, Classics Collection. 1929.0007.A&B </span></td></tr>
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<div class="p1">
The collection was a sort of MOOCS of the early 20th century; containing not only a number of very significant ancient artefacts, but casts of sculpture and electrotype copies of coins, it had a sort of "virtual" quality and sought to provide the antipodean classics student with a sense in image and form, not just in words, of one of the worlds which has spawned our own.</div>
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So this exhibition offers us a view of at least two things; that ancient world where Sutton had begun to learn to think about the modern and distant one where he lived; but also how those a century ago thought about those things. We need not be uncritical of either; but many of us I suspect believe that we have much more to learn, about western culture itself but also about beauty and truth and justice, from the study of these objects and those who made them. With thanks to the Potter Museum and all those whose work and generosity has made this possible, It gives me great pleasure to declare this exhibition open.</div>
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Andrew McGowanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01304601214734931518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7169819620817028600.post-38916199406232113932012-10-19T15:14:00.000+11:002012-10-19T15:14:27.533+11:00Welcome to the Hall!Welcome to the Hall!<br />
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You may think there are many interesting faces on the wall - the truth is that while there are extraordinary faces on the walls - Governors general, prize winning scientists, leaders of Church and state - and that they were created by Australia's leading art its - Boyd, Pugh, Olsen and others, they would all say the most interesting and exciting faces were yours; they were once you, and one day you will be them. Take them in, by all means; but those faces closer to you matter even more.<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoI0TW2IDwhBu0V1kuyvIfQdJO31IWf_GnRL7KjP-lQpA5w7lprstY_59PUN034AsKc8eNs1UFhdUt7sXdUMT1Fhxj0U7Eg7xejTZ9nOwDc_1C8kkk8IF48zfqt1FnGRlXuUhyphenhyphenvBI8OLI/s1600/8101173275_0f6ef78c1b_c.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoI0TW2IDwhBu0V1kuyvIfQdJO31IWf_GnRL7KjP-lQpA5w7lprstY_59PUN034AsKc8eNs1UFhdUt7sXdUMT1Fhxj0U7Eg7xejTZ9nOwDc_1C8kkk8IF48zfqt1FnGRlXuUhyphenhyphenvBI8OLI/s320/8101173275_0f6ef78c1b_c.jpg" width="320" /></a><br />
You may think this is a place to eat; dining together is indeed an ancient tradition, but its value lies not in its mere antiquity, but in its deeper reality. The truth is, this is a place to hear things you have never heard, to meet people unlike those you have ever met, to say things you never thought yourself able to - to change your mind, make and break your heart, and inspire your soul. Eat and drink here, by all means; but what you absorb with eyes and ears and mind will be more enduring.<br />
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You may think we have brought you to the Hall - the truth is, you brought the Hall with you. Those with whom we break bread are those who matter to us; and over dining tables ancient and modern, near and far, lasting friendships, great hopes and transformative plans have been made. Welcome to Hall - some of us worked hard to bring you what you see, but what you have brought tonight matters most of all.<br />
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<b>Benedic, Domine, nos, cenationem nostram, </b><br />
<b>et dona tua quae de largitate tua sumus sumpturi,<br />et concede, ut illis salubriter nutriti<br />tibi debitum obsequium praestare valeamus,<br />per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen</b><br />
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[Bless, Lord, us, our Hall, and these gifts which we are about to receive,<br />
and grant that whosesomely nourished by them,<br />
we may render you due obedience,<br />
through Christ our Lord. Amen.]<br />
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">An address, followed by a special grace, welcoming resident students to the renovated Dining Hall on Wednesday October 17 2012</span></i>Andrew McGowanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01304601214734931518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7169819620817028600.post-56320863118980588722012-09-04T09:57:00.001+10:002012-09-05T13:52:27.461+10:00Towards 2022 - Trinity Seeks Needs-Blind Admissions<span style="font-size: x-small;">[<i>From an address given at the 140th Anniversary Gala Dinner at the Melbourne Museum, August 25th 2012</i>]</span><br />
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Trinity can be seen as many things: a place, a tradition, a set of beliefs. But above all Trinity is people; a community, whose diversity is one of the reasons for its excellence. The faces you see around you - and of course many others we recall - are the reason we are here. Tonight, for these few hours, Trinity is right here.<br />
<br />
Trinity is a larger and more diverse institution than at any time in its past; in addition to our residential life, the work of our Foundation Studies program, the Theological School, and Young Leaders' programs for school students all provide unique educational opportunities for students from diverse backgrounds to fulfil their potential and impact the wider world, <i>pro ecclesia, pro patria</i> as our motto states.<br />
<br />
We do this work in the context of the University of Melbourne, recently confirmed as Australia's, and indeed one of the world's, leading research universities; in that very large community, the resident students of Melbourne's colleges and not least of this one are those who most clearly enjoy an experience comparable to those of the world's leading educational institutions.<br />
<br />
Our reality is now global, as well as local. Our students and their ambitions reflect that; and so do those of the College. But the global reality always has a local and a human face; and I invite you to meet a few of these members of your College now.<br />
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Those current and recent resident students whose faces have just seen include young people from urban and regional Australia, and from Europe and Asia. They include an indigenous Australian, and an Iraqi refugee; they are young people who are already having impacts in the arts, in scientific and medical research, and in the worlds of ideas and education, and of social service and community leadership. They all received substantial scholarship support, and all of them have had remarkable opportunities because they were at Trinity and the University of Melbourne.<br />
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Our success in bringing them to Trinity has depended on the support many alumni and friends have offered, and I thank you for that support.<br />
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But now we want to take Trinity's capacity to transform lives to a new level. We intend to take a step so far unique in Australian higher education, and to make our resident community <i>genuinely needs-blind</i> - that is, to offer the opportunity of Trinity's outstanding education and other experiences to the students best-qualified to benefit from it and contribute to it, regardless of their background or financial need. We wish also to increase substantially our ability to offer scholarship support in the Theological School and in Foundation Studies, to make these outstanding educational opportunities increasingly available to new generations of students from various backgrounds.<br />
<br />
Although this cost of this vision will change historically and vary from time to time, we believe that we should be seeking to raise an additional endowment of 25 million dollars in today's terms to achieve it. I am delighted to announce that goal to you tonight, and invite you to help the College attain it.<br />
<br />
This challenge starts tonight. My hope is that when we gather in ten years time to celebrate the sesquicentenary of the College, we will be able to celebrate this achievement and many more stories, and more faces, whose lives reflect that commitment to excellence, community and diversity which makes them, and us, Trinity.Andrew McGowanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01304601214734931518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7169819620817028600.post-9652502582420572272012-06-27T00:22:00.001+10:002012-06-27T00:22:23.611+10:00New Haven Diary: Yale and its CollegesFor the past five months I have been living, reading, writing, conversing, and occasionally speaking publicly, in the environment of Yale University and its community of New Haven.<br />
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There are many contrasts between Yale and New Haven on the one hand and Melbourne and its oldest University and College on the other, but lots of points of recognition as well. Both parallels and differences have been useful things to observe along the way. Although most of my time has been taken up with writing projects I have been able to speak with some senior leaders, faculty, and students and acquired some sense of how they perceive the institution and the wider community.<br />
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One area of real similarity is the importance of the college system at Yale. All first year undergraduates are allocated randomly to one of twelve residential colleges (Melbourne has eleven). Although Yale is much older than Melbourne (1701 to 1854), Trinity is older than Yale's colleges which were established in 1921 in conscious imitation--like Trinity--of the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge.<br />
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Much of the college experience would be familiar to Trinity residents; although they don't wear gowns for dinner, students live and study in communities roughly comparable in size to ours, play enthusiastic intra-mural sports, get to listen and converse with leading scholars local and visiting, and the intangibles that come with this sort of experience.<br />
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During my time here I was privileged to be included in the Fellows events of Timothy Dwight College, one of the twelve. Master Jeff Brenzell was a gracious host and I was able to meet and talk with many alums, faculty and other distinguished locals who gather monthly for lectures, events and conversation.<br />
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The 'TD' Fellows and equivalent groups at the other colleges at Yale are somewhat larger and broader than Trinity's or the Oxford/Cambridge versions, and provide a sort of meeting point between the College and its wider constituency of friends. They get rich fare intellectually (and otherwise); speakers this past semester included Pulitzer Prize winning historian Debby Applegate, whose book <i><a href="http://www.themostfamousmaninamerica.com/">The Most Famous Man in America</a></i> tells the fascinating and verging-on racy story of leading 19th century cleric Henry Ward Beecher. Another evening with the Fellows was a privileged behind-the-scenes look at Yale's <a href="http://peabody.yale.edu/">Peabody Museum of Natural History</a>, whose Director, Derek Briggs, is a Fellow of Timothy Dwight College.<br />
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Yale students have similar possibilities at events like "Master's Teas" which may have a close equivalent in Trinity's "fireside chats"; leading lights of academic and other spheres not only hold forth but are available for real conversation--one of the hardest things to find in the modern public university.<br />
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Of course the Yale undergraduate cohort is much smaller than Melbourne's, more like their collegiate resident counterparts in Australia. Although residence is far more normal in the USA, there is also increased reflection in this country--not so much at Yale itself--on options for commuter and distance education models, given increased costs and the desire to make at least some version of degree-level university experience widely available. Not that Yale isn't engaged in expanding its educational horizons or distance learning, but that's for another blog. But at Yale the residential college is firmly at the heart of the experience, so much so that two new colleges are currently being built.As often in the past, I have been led to think of the collegiate aspect of the University of Melbourne's life as like that of a US liberal arts college embedded within a large public university.Andrew McGowanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01304601214734931518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7169819620817028600.post-47185913758071079132011-11-12T17:50:00.000+11:002011-11-12T17:50:10.862+11:00Yes, but what kind of University? Considering the new MCD University of Divinity<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>[From the keynote address at the Melbourne College of Divinity Staff Day, November 2 2011] </i></span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijmsngta_pCYQIOi6iadutlr9Kz0QiaGljJU2y3Jl3xhdMMdOdl8jAwBCeDnrnp2uALgPw3sodvj_Hw4fx8kmsPr8d1JJwH9ZsPycaVEEc0MnKneyomzikAyAfN93cDMfJbrtlQtBC5XU/s1600/AMcG+talking.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="193" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijmsngta_pCYQIOi6iadutlr9Kz0QiaGljJU2y3Jl3xhdMMdOdl8jAwBCeDnrnp2uALgPw3sodvj_Hw4fx8kmsPr8d1JJwH9ZsPycaVEEc0MnKneyomzikAyAfN93cDMfJbrtlQtBC5XU/s200/AMcG+talking.png" width="200" /></a></div>Many MCD faculty members here undertook a first degree in Australia, most at an institution that was called a University, in an era when that title made a particular statement about the character and quality of the teaching and learning experience, and its relationship to research. Across Australia, students riding on a tram on Swanston St in Melbourne, or in a bus on Stirling Highway in Perth, had the same expectation of taking part in a comparable, fairly uniform, high quality, and relatively exclusive experience.<br />
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This changed with John Dawkins' Higher Education White Paper in 1988, and the consequent reforms which, with a few strokes of the pen, expanded Australia's university sector dramatically. Some of this was badge-engineering, but there was a new intention that the former institutes of technology and colleges of advanced education, as well as both new and historic universities, function as research-focussed institutions, as well as maintaining high standards of teaching. <br />
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The general tenor of higher education policies then and still today assumes a relatively uniform, but larger and hence more accessible, set of experiences, standards and outcomes. Viewed from far enough away, there is some truth to this; we may affirm that the educational bottom lines for Australian universities are generally good, and most have some high-quality research being undertaken too.<br />
<br />
But up close the reality is different, and more like that former world than some wish to admit. The recent Excellence in Research For Australia (ERA) exercise was one indicator. In terms of research, the Group of 8 universities plus a few others succeed in research funding and outcomes across a broad range of disciplines, but most Australian universities succeed in fewer and more specific areas, and a few languish without areas of apparent research excellence. University of Melbourne researcher Simon Marginson observed that this signalled the <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/no-link-between-discovery-and-teaching/story-e6frgcjx-1225997712126">failure</a> of the research-teaching nexus.<br />
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On the other hand, the experiences of teaching and learning may not really be as comparable across institutions as some imagine either. It is sobering that the institutions which get highest ratings for teaching from their graduates in a measure like the Good Universities Guide are usually a quite different group from the research leaders identified in measures like the Shanghai Jiao Tong ratings.<br />
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All this is to say that membership of this group called "universities" says something, but not nearly everything, and not nearly enough to substitute for answers we will have to find ourselves now that the Melbourne College of Divinity has been approved for university status.<br />
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There are however some ways university status can and will affect us, which we must seize as challenges and opportunities. Two things worth considering are the research-teaching nexus, despite what I have just noted, and the public character of the university.<br />
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Among the many institutions teaching theology in some form in Australia, university status is not overly common, and of course there is no other specialized university at all. Under today's regulatory and policy frameworks however, university status does not in and of itself say that we are necessarily better than non-university "providers".<br />
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What university status for the MCD does affirm is that we embody the research-teaching nexus that is supposed to characterize Australian universities generally, which is the one distinctive that Australian higher education policy claims, or aspire to, for entities using that title.<br />
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The ways this really works for many universities has been questioned above, but this is something we in the MCD actually do quite well, and have been confirmed as doing by the recent VRQA panel in ways that some public universities might actually find it hard to match. Whether or not the VRQA or its replacement TEQSA see it in these terms, it means not only that we have a good research profile (according to the ERA a smaller but better one than the average achievement of most Australian universities, in fact), but that we teach with skill, committment and passion, and inform that teaching by our scholarship. <br />
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I think this is one thing that really may be unique about us among specifically-theological institutions, and we ought not merely to celebrate its recognition by VRQA, but consider how to defend and strengthen it beyond what an outside quality assurance process sees. Their approbation is valuable, but not enough.<br />
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I also noted the question of a university's public character. We have been a public institution in a sense, since being established under an Act of Parliament in 1910, but it is clearer that a university is by its nature and name a public institution. The MCD has a strong and established ethos of serving the Churches and religious orders, and our individual students regardless of their religious affiliations, but we now have to ask how we serve the Australian public. <br />
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We stand historically at a point where Australia's religious illiteracy is increasingly manifest, as we lurch between poles of aggressive secularism and rising fundamentalism in public discourse. We have a massive opportunity and imperative to foster conversations about religion that has the virtues of moderation and circumspection that we tend to assume, but which so many others cannot perceive at present. To fail in this may cost us dearly as a nation.<br />
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This means that we need to look hard at the way the MCD is using its extraordinary resources, which for instance could more clearly be seen not just as for vocational or ministerial formation (lay or ordained), but as the basis for a form of "liberal" education, fostering critical thinking and knowledge of cultural traditions. There are many other potential students for us out there, who might undertake bachelor's degrees for such purposes, and who could through that experience become not only religiously, historically and culturally-literature persons, but trained in critical thinking in ways that could serve them well in many forms of employment and service.<br />
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So there are some things that could come to us, or be strengthened for us, in gaining university status. There are also some things that we need to consider that are distinctives of our own history aside from that status, and which we must protect and nurture.<br />
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The change of name does not change our polity; but the things it exposes us to almost inevitably will. We cannot go on acting as though we are, even in teaching MCD awards, independent entities linked by a quality assurance process, as we are sometimes tempted to do now. And we cannot, on the other hand, abandon the distinctive qualities of our constituent learning communities.<br />
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Some will be concerned about creeping centralization, reasonably enough. Is "recognition" (as in the current terminology of the MCD Act, which refers to "Recognized Teaching Institutions") enough to express the relationship between the parts and the whole, however? We need to find new language that affirms our distinctives as a "federated" university but which acknowledges a strong or even organic set of relationships between our learning communities.<br />
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The other striking thing we have amid this diverse higher education sector belies our rambling polity, namely a common cause or values base. While it is often hard to discern a deeper vision in particular universities or in Australian higher education generally than the training of foot soldiers in a battle (or the forced march) for greater economic prosperity, the MCD has a strong capacity to engage in conversation about justice, inclusion, faith and other goods which are both spiritual and social. <br />
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We thus have a unique opportunity to do one of the things a university should, but many find hard - to serve by asking persistent awkward and deep questions bout the nature of our society and its purposes. Our specifically Christian commitment is something we should treat as an asset, not just in itself but as the basis for an educational process which can be open to all, but takes ultimate questions seriously, and thus inspires and transforms lives, rather than merely offering training.<br />
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University status is not the answer, but a new and important question. It does not define who we are, but offers us a set of opportunities to contribute to the Church and to Australian society. I believe the MCD has the commitment, the resources, the history, and the hope, to do that well.Andrew McGowanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01304601214734931518noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7169819620817028600.post-89046938980776148952011-08-29T17:02:00.000+10:002011-08-29T17:02:11.923+10:00Australia's First Specialized University (of Divinity)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://online.mcd.edu.au/theme/trinity/logo+textcolour200.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="146" src="https://online.mcd.edu.au/theme/trinity/logo+textcolour200.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>For some years the staff and Council of the Melbourne College of Divinity have been discussing the possibility of seeking University status. In Australia this has quite specific implications; the use of the title "University" is heavily regulated, and carries not only certain quality assurance regimes but the implication of a strong research capacity supporting its teaching and learning processes.<br />
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The MCD is one of Australia's older institutions of higher learning, founded in 1910 partly to complement The University of Melbourne, which had been constituted specifically so as to exclude degrees in theology. The colleges (including this one) of that University however were set up as religious foundations, partly to provide theological studies in the university precinct and community, without the problems of determining or examining adequate or orthodox religious knowledge.<br />
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The formation of the MCD as a degree-granting body took some time, but was led by local Church and college leaders; the signature of Trinity's first Warden, Alexander Leeper, is on the deed creating the MCD. It was for the time a remarkable ecumenical endeavour, bringing together Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist and Congregational and other groups. The Roman Catholic Church, Churches of Christ, Salvation Army, Orthodox and Lutherans have all since been added to the MCD structure in teaching and/or governance terms.<br />
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In its first decades the MCD functioned, as did some Universities, primarily as an examining body rather than as a concrete community of scholars; it assumed the communities and work of the Melbourne University colleges and their theological schools, and subsequently of others too. Students could sit for the degrees of the MCD - primarily the graduate Bachelor of Divinity degree - without being part of any of these, however. All depended on a set of 3-hour examinations.<br />
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The major step towards being something more of a "real" than a virtual college took place in the 1970s when the MCD recognized some specific colleges and consortia as teaching a degree on the basis of continuous assessment (coursework) rather than exams. This Bachelor of Theology became and remains the mainstay of MCD teaching and learning, and is administered through recognized teaching institutions including the United Faculty of Theology, of which Trinity is a constituent.<br />
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When in the late 1980s a fairly diverse set of Australian higher education institutions were turned into universities, the MCD was in an anomalous position. Older than most even of the earlier universities, it was not one itself, at least as then understood. It was private (there are only two other private universities in Australia), and taught in only one field, but had an enviable reputation here and abroad. For some time then the MCD remained as a sort of high-quality anomaly, but has benefitted from research funding provided through the Australian Federal government (and performed at world standard, and well above many named "universities", according to the recent Excellence in Research for Australia exercise).<br />
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The idea of a "specialized University" was mooted in Federal policy some time ago but has never been acted on until now. The MCD leadership determined a few years ago to seek that status, which reflects its logical - and unique - place in Australian higher education. Today we learned of the recommendation from the state authority that oversaw a review of the application, which is positive. The Victorian Government Gazette dated today contains the following:<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Education and Training Reform Act 2006<br />
APPROVAL FOR THE MELBOURNE COLLEGE OF DIVINITY TO OPERATE AS A SPECIALISED UNIVERSITY</i></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>1. Authority </i></span></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>This notice is issued pursuant to section 4.3.30(1) of the Education and Training Reform</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Act 2006. </i></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>2. Definitions</i></span></b><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Melbourne College of Divinity means the Melbourne College of Divinity continued as a body corporate under the Melbourne College of Divinity Act 1910.</i></span><br />
<b><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>3. Approval of institution to operate as a University</i></span></b><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Pursuant to section 4.3.30(1) of the Education and Training Reform Act 2006, the Victorian Registration and Qualifications Authority (VRQA) approves the Melbourne College of Divinity to operate as a specialised university under the specialised title of ‘MCD University of Divinity’.</i></span><br />
<b><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>4. Period of approval</i></span></b><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>The approval herein remains in force for 5 years commencing on 1 January 2012.</i></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>The common seal of the Victorian Registration and Qualifications Authority was hereunto affixed on the 25th day of August 2011 as authorized by it pursuant to section 4.2.1(3) of the Education and Training Reform Act 2006.</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i></i></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i></i></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><br />
</i></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">The name 'MCD University of Divinity' will allow the existing reputation and recognition of the MCD to be carried forward into the new entity (although I suspect it will make explanations of the institution harder internationally), somewhat as the former Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (popularly known as RMIT) became 'RMIT University'.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">This is an important step not only for the MCD community but for Australian higher education - Australia's first specialized university has (almost) arrived. </span><i><br />
</i></span></div>Andrew McGowanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01304601214734931518noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7169819620817028600.post-22670835349447026552011-07-29T16:12:00.001+10:002011-07-29T16:32:23.599+10:00What Makes a World-Class University?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://armstrong.chem.ox.ac.uk/OxfordCrest.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://armstrong.chem.ox.ac.uk/OxfordCrest.gif" width="167" /></a></div>Professor Andy Hamilton, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, was guest speaker at a recent event run by the University of Melbourne's Grattan Institute, where the question was ostensibly "How to Create a World Class University".<br />
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Hamilton made four clear points about the task, although it was not so much the creation as the preservation of the world class university - his own, to be precise - that was foregrounded. They are worth noting, but I will expand a bit more on two.<br />
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First, he said, <i>outstanding people</i> are needed. University leaders have to recruit world-class academics - Hamilton used the case of Oxford's recent recruitment of Sir Andrew Wiles, prover of Firmat's Last Theorem, back to the U.K. from Princeton. The greatest motivator, Hamilton suggests, is the presence of (other) world class people. Not many less than half of Oxford's academic staff are from overseas - interestingly Australians are sixth on the list of expats, which isn't bad.<br />
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Students of outstanding ability are also important, he said, noting the importance of the Rhodes Scholarship scheme (headed by my predecessor at Trinity, Don Markwell) and of the postgraduate Clarendon awards. All Oxford students have undergone an academic interview, not merely had their A-levels checked off.<br />
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Second was <i>research excellence</i>, already implied by the first. Hamilton acknowledged that other institutions can also do important research, but praised the "curiosity-driven character" of university research as advantageous.<br />
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Third came <i>excellence in teaching</i>. Oxford's remarkable tutorial system where students meet with leading researchers, regularly and often singly, was singled out, as well it might be. I would add that the educational implications of hiring great researchers as the faculty could also be very different, when this is as clear an expectation of their presence as is their research agenda.<br />
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In the highly-specialized structure of the Oxford degree Hamilton also noted the importance of students belonging to two academic communities: the department, and the college. The former is the academic locus in a stronger way that has been the case even with traditional Australian degrees, because a student at Oxford reading (e.g.) engineering studies only that. Hamilton, formerly Provost at Yale, was careful to say this was not the only defensible model, since liberal arts curricula can achieve many of the same basic objectives. These, as he recounted them, were commendable: it is the ability to think and to communicate that reflects educational excellence, however those capacities are taught.<br />
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In the latter case, of colleges, students have peers across all disciplines. His strong suggestion that, in a "large university of 20,000", it was important for students to have such a community of a few hundred to belong to, made interesting listening for hearers whose institutions are now considerably larger than that, but where few students have those opportunities.<br />
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Fourth but not least was <i>money</i>. Hamilton was refreshingly straightforward about how the rest depends on it; he spends considerable time raising it. <br />
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As already noted Hamilton's talk was not really about how to make a world class university at all; it was about how to be Oxford. This in itself was worth hearing. I suspect that the question of <i>creating</i> a world class university is being asked more actively elsewhere at the moment; perhaps by the creators of the <a href="http://www.nchum.org/">New College of the Humanities</a>, but particularly by educational leaders in China and in India. Watch out for them.Andrew McGowanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01304601214734931518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7169819620817028600.post-68798352525856112712011-06-06T16:48:00.007+10:002011-07-29T12:22:04.577+10:00Another Idea of the University: From Newman to Grayling<style>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"> <span style="font-size: x-small;">[<a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/letters/uks-new-college-may-help-us-see-afresh/story-e6frgcox-1226079800805">A version of this piece was published by The Australian on June 22 2011</a>]</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">The recent announcement by A. C. Grayling that leading intellectuals in the UK are forming a "New College of the Humanities", where the likes of Grayling, David Cannadine, Richard Dawkins will teach humanities and social sciences to small classes, raises some pointed questions about teaching and learning in universities, both there and here.</span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhD5lztD1ZUvGhobAW0bk5r8QoLjBhMq1NbdKsluqkl__kQDYlmkYuLGDvws1OdQ2NBfa2ShbTLyzZmVPALW1f9fROfmON9a6YEg96i9Q2-zV4RYC_XdnuDpTwgoqzxh6rUTI5LSyCZjk8/s1600/Newman.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhD5lztD1ZUvGhobAW0bk5r8QoLjBhMq1NbdKsluqkl__kQDYlmkYuLGDvws1OdQ2NBfa2ShbTLyzZmVPALW1f9fROfmON9a6YEg96i9Q2-zV4RYC_XdnuDpTwgoqzxh6rUTI5LSyCZjk8/s200/Newman.jpg" width="178" /></a></div><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br />
Last year University of Melbourne Vice-Chancellor Glyn Davis said correctly that Australia only has "one kind of University", referring to the enshrining in policy and practice of the "research university". This model is intended to support national interest through pure research first and foremost, ideally supporting teaching on the strength of that research.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br />
Yet the place of education itself has become an increasingly uneasy one in such a university. In the vision of Wilhelm von Humboldt, usually seen as godfather of the research university model, the student was a junior partner or peer of the researcher in the uninhibited pursuit of knowledge.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br />
However, the mass educational systems of modern research universities can hardly aspire to offer such an experience for undergraduate or professional education. There is a widespread sense that the educational element of higher education has often come off second best. Many Australian university courses are run at a loss to the institution, which must cross-subsidize them from other activities. Academics know their futures depend not on outstanding teaching or mentoring but on certain measures of research performance; departments stand or fall less on undergraduate interest than ARC grant success.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br />
Leading researcher Simon Marginson has called teaching and learning the “empty space” in the modern globalized research university, noting also that “student disengagement is a constant of the OECD countries” and that much learning actually takes place outside the classroom. So far there is uncertainty about the way to improve what is at best an uneven set of experiences for Australian students.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br />
Does Grayling’s model have any promise here? Occasionally there is talk of a “teaching only” university as a possibility in the Australian future, but the implication has usually been that under-performing research institutions could be released into this category more as an act of kindness, than that education itself could become an activity attracting the same energy as research, or commensurate resources. We seem to lack, so far at least, the imagination to consider that teaching could be the point of some outstanding universities, and research a complement to it.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br />
However, a university where teaching was central, and research also undertaken to support a vigorous community of learners, is an idea that deserves more attention in Australia. It is a model like some of the most prestigious liberal arts colleges in the United States, such as Smith College in Massachusetts, once headed by expatriate Jill Ker Conway, and numerous others. These institutions cannot replace the functions of the research university, but they can complement them.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br />
Grayling’s nascent New College and those established US examples are all much closer to John Henry Newman’s famous Idea of the University than any Australian university. No-one imagines any longer that Newman’s is “the” idea; what is remarkable is that Australia’s burdensome accreditation and quality assurance processes would not accredit Newman’s ideal institution as a university at all, because it would not be focused primarily on research.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br />
The problem, then, is not the research university per se but its sole claim to the field, and the inadequate resources it typically has, in Australia as in the UK, for its educational purposes. A second kind of university, or a regulatory and funding environment that could foster different ideas of the university, is needed. Australia may not see anything quite like the New College of the Humanities soon, but we would do well to watch its progress.</span>Andrew McGowanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01304601214734931518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7169819620817028600.post-2186362346093546682011-05-29T11:34:00.007+10:002011-05-30T11:06:48.842+10:00Looking Through Things: Some Thoughts on Religious Education<i>[From a sermon at the "Century Celebration" Eucharist for Ballarat and Queen's Anglican Grammar School, May 29 2011] </i><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.bgs.vic.edu.au/images/frontpage.centenial.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="145" src="http://www.bgs.vic.edu.au/images/frontpage.centenial.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>A century ago Bishop Arthur Vincent Green, alumnus of my College and one of the founders of Ballarat Grammar School, gave a series of lectures on the Gospel of John. Bishop Green said that he had an “extraordinary power of spiritual vision, this recognition of things as they are”, and that he “looks through things” to see the inner truths.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=7169819620817028600&postID=218636234609354668#Green"><sup>1</sup></a><br />
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You might think this was precisely the sort of thing fundamentalist preacher Harold Camping and his unhappy disciples were claiming for themselves last weekend as they shared secret knowledge of calamitous events to roll around the globe. But the alternative to "looking through things" is just that kind of existence that refuses to see further or deeper, whether it is clothed in religious or secular garb; any world-view that makes people into mere objects, and nature into mere commodities. To see with the Spirit, as John's Gospel puts it, is to “look through things”, and thus discern their deepest truth, and the character of our life as divine gift.<br />
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Religious education is a contentious matter at the moment, and while a debate in the Victorian community largely concerns state schools, there are lessons for all of us in it. It is equally unhelpful in educational contexts to see the faith dimension opportunistically, as a mere excuse to gain converts on the one hand, or to ignore it as irrelevant to our existence on the other. <br />
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The religious dimension of education does involve teaching and learning about history and culture, about the Bible and the sacraments, but it is also about seeing that deeper possibility in everything and everyone. The scriptures and the other elements of Christian tradition are gifts which, like other things in our world, can be misused, especially if students are mere cannon fodder for proselytizing; but they are also capable of helping us to see meaning not only in them, but in the world. And this deeper potential in the world Christians see as itself God’s own activity, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, that aspect of God’s being that suffuses all things and leads them to what they can be.<br />
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This is why education and faith, properly understood, are such intimately linked realities. The cultivation of that possibility of insight is thus the most genuine form of religious education. While there is an inescapably personal element to religious experience, a mystery to be explored rather than a puzzle to be solved or proposition to be taught, much of what is true about God is generally available to those with eyes to see; it does not depend on claimed special knowledge, but on the capacity to recognize beauty, truth and love all around us.<br />
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Any school can impart facts, and even skills; but what every school must also seek to do and be, whether or not it has a religious focus but certainly if it does, is to encourage the pursuit of truth, meaning and values.<br />
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All around this community, this nation and our whole world, we can see people "looking through things", seeing past the apparent to the real with the aid of the informing Spirit. A woman in Saudi Arabia courageously driving a car; students in Ballarat calling on leaders to exercise leadership over climate change;<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=7169819620817028600&postID=218636234609354668#higgs"><sup>2</sup></a> each of us responding to one another as sources of beauty and truth.<br />
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Where teachers see students and recognize the potential they have to lead and serve they are “looking through things” in the Spirit’s power; where students who see the possibility and fragility of the world and want to save or change it for good, they are doing the same.<br />
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=7169819620817028600&postID=218636234609354668" name="Green">1.Arthur Vincent Green, The Ephesian canonical writings; an elementary introduction to the Gospel, Epistle and Apocalypse commonly attributed to the apostle John. (Moorhouse lectures, 1910; London: Williams and Norgate, 1910), 124-5 </a><br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=7169819620817028600&postID=218636234609354668" name="higgs">2. http://www.breaze.org.au/action-groups/engaging-govt/media-rel/582-bgsaug10</a>Andrew McGowanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01304601214734931518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7169819620817028600.post-88109988075324746162011-01-29T09:20:00.000+11:002011-01-29T09:20:06.530+11:00After the Perfect Storm: The Future of International Education in AustraliaDoes Australia's struggling engagement with international education have a future?<br />
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News media have reported widely on something of a "perfect storm" over the last year or so for institutions dependent on international enrolments, particularly from Asia. The combination of events has been problematic: reputational damage from racist incidents in the Australian community, exchange rate shifts making Australia a more expensive destination, increasing activity in marketing from the UK and the USA, and new restrictions on Australian visas for certain countries. Together these have made life tough for Australian colleges and universities.<br />
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Going deeper however, the news varies a great deal according to the kind of institution and the sort of courses students are seeking to undertake. New figures from Australian Education International show, unsurprisingly, that Indian students seeking VET courses fell most dramatically in 2010, by over 20%. Probably for a different set of reasons, English-language courses were similarly hit.<br />
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On the other hand, the number of international students enrolling in Australian university courses actually grew in 2010. Part of the difference has to do with time-frames; students often come to higher education through feeder programs, including English-language courses or Foundation Studies programs like that at Trinity. As a result their decisions are really made a year or more before their University enrolment, and the consequences of changes in preferences and patterns take longer to appear. Close to home for instance, Trinity had a particular good year for recruitment in 2010, and the University of Melbourne will thus have a good one in 2011. We expect 2011 to be solid but less spectacular, and similarly therefore the University might expect to have slightly lower demand from international students in 2012.<br />
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"Slightly" less demand and "solid" performance is indeed the order of the day for Australia's most desirable institutions and high-quality programs in higher education. Others do clearly have (even) greater challenges. Talk of "crises" and "crashes", however, results from clumsy aggregation of issues, as well as of statistics, in a sector whose diversity now makes it increasingly unhelpful to consider it as a single whole for most purposes. True, the net impact on the Australian economy of the downturns in VET and some other sectors is serious; but ironically the tendency to treat the sector as a coherent whole, and to make policy (e.g., over visa restrictions) as though it were so, has compounded the problems faced by some institutions.<br />
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Public policy and public discourse over higher education have long been mesmerized by the bumper crop of international students and their capacity to close funding gaps for public institutions and send cash into Australian communities. This undeniably important opportunity has been seized both creatively and clumsily, depending on where and what we are considering. The unedifying stories of fly-by-night providers exploiting students from India constitute an extreme case; but any institution, however venerable, that sees international students merely as an answer to a funding problem is not only acting dubiously relative to its own mission and values, but riding for a fall with regard to that very part of their activity.<br />
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Students from Asia have been attracted to Australian institutions because of the quality of our offerings and the reasonable cost of obtaining them (we should admit that the attraction of permanent residence is often potent as well, but that's another story). The survivors, in VET and higher education and elsewhere, from the "perfect storm" will be those best able to demonstrate that quality and value, and necessarily therefore a deeper sense of their own educational mission and identity.<br />
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Without a bigger picture - a sense of how our contribution to these students' education connects with the mission of a university and its role in contributing to a global public good - we risk not only failing the moral challenge of a shrinking world, but undermining the quality proposition of the original offering.<br />
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If we have passed the "high water mark" of the recent rich tide of enrolments, as it has been suggested, all the more reason to ensure now that we have firm ground to stand on, and make sure we have a high-quality future to offer both Australian and international students.Andrew McGowanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01304601214734931518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7169819620817028600.post-13858763853152349932010-11-16T13:43:00.003+11:002010-11-16T17:38:02.695+11:00What Makes a University Great?<a href="http://www.theage.com.au/national/education/unis-locked-in-the-great-debate-20101108-17kba.html">In the Melbourne <i>Age</i> recently a number of Australian Vice-Chancellors (University Presidents, for international readers) were asked what might make a University great</a>.<br />
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There were some astute observations - these are intelligent people, after all. There were, however, some clangers. Most obvious was the statement attributed to Ian Young, head of Swinburne University and shortly to succeed to leadership at the Australian National University in Canberra.<br />
<blockquote>...if you ask people on the street to name great universities, they would roll off names such as Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard.<br />
<br />
''It is undoubtedly because of their research performance,'' he says.</blockquote>I could hardly disagree more, at least with the reasons given. People on the street are aware of these places because of their enormous contribution to education: to the formation of thinkers, scientists, artists and leaders. Some of these institutions have come only fairly recently to what is usually thought of as "research" in Australian higher education policy.<br />
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Throw-away lines are not the basis on which any of us would want to be judged, but I will at least take this as a sort of Freudian slip for the sector as a whole. Australian higher education, or at least its bureaucratic superstructure, has convinced itself that research is its real reason for existence, and in the process has imagined itself a past in which this was always the case (another sign that we need more resources for the study of history!).<br />
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Students, however, want education, and so they should. They come hoping to be trained, but also inspired; they come seeking opportunities for fulfilment of goals and dreams, but also still forming them. <br />
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Research is not the enemy of this function; there is nothing more inspiring than being taught by scholars of great erudition or scientists who have made great discoveries. This research-teaching nexus has been adopted as the model for Australian universities by our policy-makers and funders, and it is admirable. <br />
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There are two problems with it, however, at least in the current form. One is that it is imagined as the only real model. Here as so often the imposition of uniformity has become a proxy for, and indeed the enemy of, real excellence. Australia does not seem ready to sustain liberal arts colleges along the US model, but no state university has been given the means to become or create one. We may hope that fuller implementation of the Bradley Review of Higher Education, which envisages funding following students according to their institutional choices, rather than allocating it to Universities along "command economy" lines, will be a positive influence.<br />
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This could mean that students gravitate to institutions which offer quality based on current educational programs and outcomes, not merely those that trade on past glories or present research. It will be interesting to see whether, in time, the offering of degree-level education by historically-VET-sector providers, and by private players such as religiously-based colleges, may threaten the complacency of the larger institutions.<br />
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The second problem - not an easy one - is how to make the research-teaching nexus work. The same <i>Age</i> article gave examples of how students can be inspired to become researchers, but that's not really the point. They need to be inspired to become leaders and thinkers in whatever field, not just to supply the succession plan of a research culture. Most university teachers are conscientious, as well as intelligent; but many are encouraged to regard teaching as a necessary evil. There are no all-staff congratulatory e-mails related to teaching that compare to the hushed silence awaiting a new round of ARC grants that offer the chance <i>not</i> to teach. While the AQF battles the demons of minimum standards through the anachronism of uniformity (again!), the pursuit of excellence in teaching is not given the same emphasis or the same resources.<br />
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A great university would, I suspect, have great research and great teaching going on. This probably won't get much disagreement. We do have moments of such greatness in many of our universities. What remains deeply and sadly unclear is whether and how policies and funding priorities are fostering that much-valued combination, or merely hoping that the teaching benefit will emerge through benign neglect. Whether we should be seeking our own Oxford or Harvard remains to be seen - but under current circumstances, the horizon may well remain bare.Andrew McGowanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01304601214734931518noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7169819620817028600.post-61537216951663171062010-09-30T08:22:00.000+10:002010-09-30T08:22:34.066+10:00The Crisis We Had to Have: The International Education 'Sector' Pauses for ReflectionAccording to some, Australia's international education sector is in crisis. Exchange-rate shifts, concerns about violence, newly-enthusiastic competitors in the US and the UK, and changes to visa requirements for international students have conspired to make enrolment numbers stagnant, and many institutions nervous. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4DiKfs70WS8ujmYQz5RR_e3M0Cbx683w2tDSlbUjefx9HjEFNrEC-1HJVFxElGBLuT8svjZ42nfDVaPUiqFxyq86uLR7-J3jH9T7TzJ00OgXX-uBooMmW66y5TFvdhRSZ9IVdcoLXmWw/s1600/CHEW8294.sized.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4DiKfs70WS8ujmYQz5RR_e3M0Cbx683w2tDSlbUjefx9HjEFNrEC-1HJVFxElGBLuT8svjZ42nfDVaPUiqFxyq86uLR7-J3jH9T7TzJ00OgXX-uBooMmW66y5TFvdhRSZ9IVdcoLXmWw/s320/CHEW8294.sized.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>Under these circumstances, the prominence in Australia's public conversation of the international education "sector" is worth examining more closely and critically. The "sector" may be a useful category for accumulating statistics about total revenue and economic impact, but less helpful for understanding the programs and institutions, the students and staff who participate in them, or the specific challenges they face.<br />
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More specifically, generic sector-level discourse about international education tends to be driven by the commonality of financial scale, rather than the more elusive but more fundamental issues of inherent quality and value, which are more varied. Revenue is what they have in common - but that tends to hide rather than reveal what must now be given attention.<br />
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Policy and strategy constructed purely on the commonality that international students pay fees dislocates the necessary place of education itself as the foundation of strategic vision for colleges and universities. It objectifies students as 'clients', countries as 'markets', colleges as 'providers', and makes education itself as inspiring as making widgets. <br />
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If any more engaging vision is obscured by such language and by anxiety about revenue, should we then wonder why Australia seems vulnerable to perceptions of racism, or that we struggle to persuade some prospective students that we are offering an experience of the highest quality?<br />
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The great opportunity offered by the current crisis might be for reflection. If business as usual is not possible in some places, it's time to ask what the business is, and what it is for.<br />
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The most valuable thing would be for the balance to swing to the specifics of education itself. This will involve above all an openness to diverse strategies, whose commonality is based on the pursuit of the high quality. Quality, varied as it necessarily is, is the real common selling-point of Australian education for genuine international students. <br />
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Pursuit of quality needs to be supported by a policy and regulatory framework flexible enough to allow such diverse strategies for quality to emerge and flourish, and not merely by attempts to make institutions mark to a common bottom-line. <br />
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The irony of a public conversation and policy framework which start with the money is that they are less likely to achieve or sustain financial results. A shift of focus regarding international education, from generic revenue goals to the more varied ones of education excellence, is required for Australian educational institutions to assure their inherent quality, and hence to be capable of contributing economically as well.Andrew McGowanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01304601214734931518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7169819620817028600.post-39993231922930551922010-04-24T16:01:00.002+10:002010-04-28T20:00:40.985+10:00The Taxi Driver's Guide to International Education<span style="font-size: x-small;">[<i>From an address given at the Dean's Dinner in the Hall of Trinity College, April 24 2010</i>] </span><br />
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If you go to Washington or Canberra, cab drivers are reknowned as pundits and sources of political rumour. In New York, a taxi may be a source of informal reviews of Broadway shows or restaurants. In Melbourne however taxi drivers are a rich source of information about quite different things: cricket, Hindi and Urdu popular culture, Indian restaurants, and international education.<br />
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As both locals and visitors may have realized, a large number of Melbourne cab drivers are current or former students, very often from India. They are in my experience a rich source of anecdotal information about local Universities and technical education providers, especially about courses in IT, hospitality and business. They are impressively well-informed and educated people, who have taken on one of the least well-paid or supported positions in local service industry, for the sake of their goal of making Australia a home for themselves and their families.<br />
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There were 516,000 international students in Australia in June 2008. Around 33% of Victoria’s post–secondary students are from overseas. Although many of these are in the vocational sector, The University of Melbourne’s international enrolment – just under 25% of about 45,000 students – is not the highest among the Group of 8 universities. <br />
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The fact that Australia has a significant number of international students is, in the first instance, to be celebrated. It suggests Australian higher education is well-recognized internationally, it provides means for building networks of cooperation in both formal and informal ways, and is of course important to the economy. <br />
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Yet the numbers are widely, if not very publicly, acknowledged as problematic. These very large absolute and relative international enrolments in Australian universities are typically driven not by desire for partnerships in development, or even by strategic concerns about Australia’s place in the Asian economy. The numbers in some cases defy even commercial logic; they expose the institutions concerned to huge risks if events such as another SARS or regional economic crisis were to emerge.<br />
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There are few Australian higher education institutions that really have a strategy around internationalization that goes much deeper than the revenue international students bring. This myopia has of course been catalysed by the problems of funding higher education; because a University typically loses money on domestic undergraduate enrolments, there is a very deep institutional temptation to set targets for international (and full-fee paying) enrolments that balance the ledger. In a sense, the Universities have had little choice. <br />
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During last year’s debate about the safety of international and particularly Indian students, the importance of that economic impact was never hard to see. It was as easy to find articles in the press by searching “$16 billion industry” as by searching for tags more clearly related to higher education or violence against students. <br />
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The conversation in the press thus tended unwittingly to reflect a problem, as much as consciously to analyze it. A public conversation about the safety of international students that presented their value and contribution solely in dollar terms reflected an objectification not much more edifying than that exemplified in the tragic and violent events that provoked the whole conversation.<br />
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What should we do? The fact of a substantial international enrolment in this and other Universities is a positive thing. These students will play a part in helping Australians understand other countries and cultures, and will take with them, if they return, a deepened sense of Australian culture. All this we may hope will lead to better international relations and partnerships of various kinds. <br />
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Yet we should also hope for new funding models in higher education that allow and indeed challenge Universities to take internationalization seriously as an ethical and educational issue, not merely a financial one. Australia’s strong education and research tradition can assist the promotion not only of prosperity, but of civil society itself, in the region. It can also assist Australia to position itself more adequately for coming changes; not only and most obviously the economic power of emerging powers in the region, but even the growth of their respective higher education sectors, which will eventually meet the demand currently driving many students from places like China to Australia.<br />
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Australia should also be glad of many of those who will stay, rather than return, such the Indian students undertaking vocational programs. Yet the connections between residence and such programs have been profoundly flawed and need to be reconstructed. Some of the current detours, via taxi ranks and programs students have little real interest in or need for, must give way to programs that international students with ambitions to migrate really want, and Australia really needs.Andrew McGowanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01304601214734931518noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7169819620817028600.post-30383151873670903542010-03-01T07:29:00.005+11:002010-04-24T16:00:00.745+10:00O-week, Lent, and the Gift of Time[<span style="font-style: italic;">extracted from a Sermon for Commencement Evensong, Feb 28 2010</span>]<br />
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There is something painfully awkward about the fact that in our hemisphere Lent, a time of fasting, penitence and self-denial for Christians, tends to coincide with the commencement of the academic year. Sure enough, the first week of Lent this year was also O-week, not a time renowned for restraint or abstinence. However much you have been told about the importance of academics, well-being and proper conduct, I suspect the importance of mortifying the flesh has not been uppermost on your minds!<br />
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But O-week has not all been a time of euphoria and self-indulgence. All of you have learned new things, some of them challenging. Some of you are missing friends and family, however welcomed you feel in College. Others may not have felt completely included or absolutely comfortable with everything you have experienced, and are working out how say so. So there is a time of testing here along with the fun, that makes the conjunction of these seasons a bit less bizarre.<br />
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Others, however, have faced even harder challenges this past week.<br />
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On Wednesday night at a College not far from here, a young man died. Jarrad, a student at Glenn College at La Trobe University and until recently at Gippsland Grammar School, was a friend and schoolmate of people here this evening, some of whom feel his loss keenly. By all accounts Jarrad was bright, outgoing, well liked, and eager to engage with his chosen field of animal science. And his time has come and gone.<br />
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Jarrad’s death is a tragedy all the more shocking because of it happening now, when we are celebrating new beginnings; it seems to exacerbate this contradiction of what the present time means.<br />
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On a Thursday night many years ago, and much further away, another young man faced death:<br />
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<div style="font-style: italic; text-align: justify;">He came out and went, as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives; and the disciples followed him. When he reached the place, he said to them, ‘Pray that you may not come into the time of trial.’ Then he withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, knelt down, and prayed, ‘Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done.’</div><br />
Jesus was about the age of many resident tutors in our Colleges; not old enough to have fleshed out his CV properly, let along to have fulfilled the career potential of a major religious leader that others foresaw for him.<br />
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He realized however that, in his unique circumstances, the most life-affirming and world-changing thing he could do was to offer his life completely and fully to people who would not honour the gift, but abuse it. And we do not judge his achievement or the gift he was to us by the length of his years, but by the character with which he lived, and died.<br />
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This is the story at the heart of Lent. Lent certainly focuses on the difficult aspects of human existence—suffering, mortality itself—because it is a time for Christians to enter into the story of that young man facing death. We seek to do so partly because of the significance his death, as well as his life, have for us, as the epitome of a life lived fully for others, and which brings life to us all; but we do so mindful of our death, asking what difference it makes to our life now.<br />
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So Lent and O-week do have this much in common at least – that they place before us the challenge and opportunity of just how we want to live this time we are given.<br />
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Life is a gift every day. The value of what we will do with the gift does not depend on the amount of time we have spent, but on how we spend whatever time we are given. So we should live not merely with a view to future opportunities for achievement or fulfilment of ambitions, however worthy; today, now, is the time when we must learn to be who we really are.Andrew McGowanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01304601214734931518noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7169819620817028600.post-87743665563432006582009-09-16T12:13:00.012+10:002009-09-17T16:03:28.939+10:00Lifting the Lid on Real Colleges<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoCmyxb3nJJLO0sykDVNZt1HlB2-LHhhyphenhyphennRHI2U1bEL2lK2gdBI30kUo7MDaA7j59Gc8S3PvhoVPjTAgSWOUAAftvVpYRpN3UOwQ7QRP1vxXxuGr1QRp9L7MMDlSnKdHC8ojXX0-zkyTk/s1600-h/Age+front+page.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 202px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoCmyxb3nJJLO0sykDVNZt1HlB2-LHhhyphenhyphennRHI2U1bEL2lK2gdBI30kUo7MDaA7j59Gc8S3PvhoVPjTAgSWOUAAftvVpYRpN3UOwQ7QRP1vxXxuGr1QRp9L7MMDlSnKdHC8ojXX0-zkyTk/s320/Age+front+page.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5382312862289403810" border="0" /></a><br />A recent story in the <span style="font-style: italic;">Sydney Morning Herald</span> reminds us that residential Colleges are not all or always sweetness and light. Alexis Carey's <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/lifting-the-lid-on-college-life-20090915-foli.html">negative experience at Sydney</a> and her recollection of <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/executive-style/executive-women/hissy-fits-are-over--a-womans-in-charge-now-20090824-ewlg.html">Germaine Greer's much earlier</a> should not be ignored too quickly. Yet they do not adequately describe the reality in many University college settings, or address the potential of residential life as a means for change.<br /><br />Trinity and the other Colleges at Melbourne have also faced their share of challenges when individuals or groups act in ways that involve bullying, harassment, or exclusion based on gender or race. Too often in the past, and sometimes still today, colleges have been centres of privilege characterized by monocultures. Greer's experience of an all-male bastion is rarer now, but women have also been objectified in co-residential environments.<br /><br />Yet there are reasons to pause before imagining Carey's experience and comments about "Lifting the Lid" represent a fair picture of what you generally see when looking hard at college life.<br /><br />One is that colleges actually achieve things for their members educationally that are harder to come by otherwise.<br /><br />The contemporary large public university can be a bleak environment for students without local support networks, or whose cultural background has not equipped them well to flourish as adults in a new setting. Attrition of tertiary funding generally, and the gratuitous abolition of student amenities fees, have helped create situations where the already-privileged can do well, but those with additional needs for pastoral support and personalized academic help flounder.<br /><br />Carey is simply wrong claiming that 'professors [are] disheartened by college student's general lack of commitment to study'. Whatever anecdotes lie behind this judgement, the evidence suggests Australian college students are at least as engaged in their education or more so than their non-resident peers. A recent survey by the Australian Council for Education Research suggests:<br /><ul><li>Students in resident life are as likely or more likely to participate in active learning and enriching experiences and in interacting with staff;</li><li>Over time, college students become more engaged in their experience relative to others;</li><li>College residents receive great levels of individual support with resulting improved retention;</li><li>Resident students' learning, development and satisfaction is greater than for other students.</li></ul> This also means that college life is or ought to be a great opportunity that can be accessible to more, and more diverse, students.<br /><br />So for instance Trinity has sought to become a more diverse and a more inclusive place. We have worked with other colleges and the University at Melbourne to recruit and engage indigenous students, and now have 15 current residents out of a resident population of just over 280 from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island backgrounds. Colleges around the country are also likely to provide the means for students from rural and regional Australia, systemically less likely to have University degrees, to participate in higher education.<br /><br />This diversity is also a means of combatting the exclusive tendencies that can emerge when students from particular schools or backgrounds dominate a college population.<br /><br />Not every aspect of every College's life is ideal. Some may really need the overhaul Carey suggests. All of us engaged in working with young adults know the challenges, and we are not inclined to romanticize them. We need to keep working to improve college life in all its aspects; but we also know that when we lift the lid there are actually many remarkable and exciting stories, and lives being transformed in the process.Andrew McGowanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01304601214734931518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7169819620817028600.post-40842454719832075542009-08-02T16:02:00.014+10:002009-08-11T20:20:39.744+10:00A Cosmopolitan University?<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.trinity.unimelb.edu.au/conference/Bishops7a.jpeg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 240px;" src="http://www.trinity.unimelb.edu.au/conference/Bishops7a.jpeg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />The recent University of Melbourne <a href="http://growingesteem.unimelb.edu.au/about/refining_our_strategy"><span style="font-style: italic;">Refining Our Strategy</span></a> document raises a number of important questions about the international character and mission of the University. A theme of the "cosmopolitan" is discernible in its reflections on how to deepen this international engagement. Melbourne itself is known as a cosmopolitan city, whose diversity is a great strength and attraction; the University of Melbourne should aspire to reflect this character.<br /><br />Although the University is justly proud of its high international student numbers, it is sobering to admit that current numbers are driven as much or more by financial need than by more strategic and educationally-based targets such as international benchmarks for excellence and diversity, or specific relationships and partnerships. So long as the University loses money on domestic undergraduate enrolments, for which fees are capped at an artificially low level by government, international students are inevitably an attractive source of revenue as much or more than partners in achievement and cooperation.<br /><br />Historically, the same dependence on international undergraduate enrolments has also led to a preponderance of students from a few countries which most readily provide them at present. Could these issues be separated? To have even the same number of international students as at present, but to bring them from a more diverse set of countries and cultures, would make the challenges and prospects vastly different. Pedagogically and otherwise, this would mean a richer experience for all students, domestic or international. It is also, interestingly, reminiscent of the idea of an “assemblage of strangers from all parts in one spot”, as Newman defined the University itself.<br /><br />The construction of a community of learning out of a diverse constituency has a corollary, namely that the various participants in the University are brought into a shared experience. The University of Melbourne has made a strength of its locale, and this has become a point of difference relative to other major Australian institutions. While there is no reason to avoid specific offshore activities and venues (in, say, the way Harvard has done, without in the least diluting its own strong sense of location), the University should continue to work to the specific strength of being in Melbourne.<br /><br />A “cosmopolis” is literally a world city, or universal city. To pursue the “cosmopolitan” as a more robust way of developing the international character of the University implies the extension of its “public-spirited” character also. While the University has a specific responsibility to its local and national community, it also has a role in a wider world. This is a moral question, but one of immediate practical significance. An Australian higher education sector that treats international relationships primarily as revenue streams is likely to risk their sustainability.<br /><br />The University, and Trinity Collge with it, can reflect further on how our international engagements should be developed to reflect more fully our mission of pursuing knowledge and serving the common, global, good.Andrew McGowanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01304601214734931518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7169819620817028600.post-44785635944027373082009-07-23T00:11:00.006+10:002009-07-23T00:16:23.638+10:00Harvard Diary: Doing the Business of Change<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWPSS2fMJzLWvD-GkipVDY7xykHSLvFPNrY3TQRuTV2vaFbmK2aCHBQQ-Ztn4BampX44zofbQHL2IN01wsyzbW9evQyGt7-_HSKn9udQswccY4fcYDOMNxYh45fCSZESPTsbsSKFwnj10/s1600-h/BakerLibrary.gif"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 295px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWPSS2fMJzLWvD-GkipVDY7xykHSLvFPNrY3TQRuTV2vaFbmK2aCHBQQ-Ztn4BampX44zofbQHL2IN01wsyzbW9evQyGt7-_HSKn9udQswccY4fcYDOMNxYh45fCSZESPTsbsSKFwnj10/s320/BakerLibrary.gif" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5361287865161230034" /></a><br /><!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal">While there are some things in life we should approach as though today were the last day of our lives, education deserves to be treated as though we might live forever. We are never done with learning, and a rapidly changing world demands continued growth and change in skills and ideas.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p>I practiced what I preached recently by going back to class at the Harvard Business School. The venue raised a few eyebrows among my associates, as did the mere fact of this academic going back to class – but this was a very relevant experience for someone like me trying to lead an educational institution.</o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p>The course was the fulsomely-named <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Strategic Perspectives in Nonprofit Management</i>, run by the Social Enterprise Initiative at HBS. About 150 participants came, from across the USA and around the globe – a third were international, and of those, Australians turned out to be the largest component (17). One of the happy if odd benefits of being in Boston was some excellent networking opportunities with people who happen to live a tram ride away from me…</o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p>SPNM brought together a group most of whom were chief executives of not-for-profit institutions: charities, schools, advocacy groups, welfare providers, foundations, arts organizations, churches and a synagogue. Each had in common a desire to serve a greater good through their particular mission. </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The course used HBS’s characteristic Case Study method, where the curriculum emerges not from abstract concepts but from real situations and the dilemmas that faced decision-makers. Across the week we dealt with cases related to three hospitals, a college, a school, charities and foundations and more. We focussed on the need to make our distinctive missions the driving force of our work, and on how to develop strategies to achieve outcomes appropriate to those missions, including how to improve our own performance.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">For many people – and I suspect for Australians more than some others – it is counter-intuitive to think of organizations working to transform lives, create social change and work with the neediest in society as “businesses”. Indeed some of the most important critiques of our economic system must and do come from advocates of the marginalized. Yet there is a dangerous and ironic tendency for those who consider themselves critical of wider economic and social realities to be lulled into conservatism about their own institutions and processes. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">If the world is worth changing, it is worth doing the work of change well. An institution like my own is well served by staff who have committed themselves not only to doing well at our existing tasks, but to seeking improvements that may be necessary to serve our students and our wider stakeholders – Church, University, alumni – as well as they all deserve. I can’t and won’t exclude myself from any such need to grow and change. John Henry Newman said that “in a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.” Indeed.</p> <!--EndFragment-->Andrew McGowanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01304601214734931518noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7169819620817028600.post-90072895806309699362009-06-12T16:13:00.039+10:002009-06-25T19:31:50.789+10:00International Students: More than Money<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVHkpCgSmisjw-YbNRLA79BRyD1WI_10s0ewWQ4Mn6nu8qhCceOFB5Fcln4zQ0cYPTIokh89QWIr3vl0sE8IOhhUirrR5XGXwp0quiQsmPXkxDhu5O4n01jV_jvHyw2W1fRmmm4m4MhE8/s1600-h/CHEW4491.sized.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 213px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVHkpCgSmisjw-YbNRLA79BRyD1WI_10s0ewWQ4Mn6nu8qhCceOFB5Fcln4zQ0cYPTIokh89QWIr3vl0sE8IOhhUirrR5XGXwp0quiQsmPXkxDhu5O4n01jV_jvHyw2W1fRmmm4m4MhE8/s320/CHEW4491.sized.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5346380872947774322" border="0" /></a><br />Stories about recent violence against Indian students in Melbourne and the international response have emphasized the importance of international education to Australia in purely quantitative, dollar-based terms; the phrase "$15 billion dollar international education industry" seemed to be pasted formulaically into every article. None asked whether there was a value to Australia, or to international students, beyond that calculation.<br /><br />Unwittingly, the press as well as the political leaders who are properly concerned about the situation, doubtless benign in and of themselves, are revealing but not addressing the fundamental cause of the problem.<br /><br />In the last analysis, there is not such a great difference between opportunistic acts of petty crime in the outer suburbs which target international students, and opportunistic educational policies and practices which target international students. In the last analysis, a government which will not grant international students concessional public transport fares has only shaky ground to stand on when it condemns attacks on those who ride trains and buses late at night. Each objectifies the students concerned, and each involves a short-sighted desire for immediate gain whose ramifications for all involved have scarcely been thought through. When you reduce the talent, the needs and the aspirations of thousands of young people to an industry that generates a certain number of dollars, you treat the individuals involved as less than who and what they are.<br /><br />Australia is justly proud of its institutions of higher learning, some of which are of world class, and others of which at least do well in providing skills and generating ideas which can serve the greater good, here and further afield. International students have an acknowledged place in them, given Australia's developed institutions and strong traditions of academic quality, which may be hard for many to access, in the developing world particularly. There is no need to be coy about the fact that this engagement has economic benefits for Australia, as well as for students' home countries, when they are able to return and maketheir various contributions with new skills.<br /><br />Yet the basis for any educational enterprise must be more than economic; or rather the "economics" of education have to be more wholistic, concerned with how the production and distribution of resources can be carried out so as to serve the common good, as all economics should be. The economics of anything by this definition concern the fundamental well-being of all the participants. This recognition is necessary even for the financial definitions of success to be met; a "$15 billion dollar international student industry" is no draw-card; only a desire for excellence, and a vision that education can transform lives, can undergird a sustainable<br />education sector.<br /><br />Violence is not the only cause for concern for international students. Can we sustain the institutions and the educational experience we offer, when selling them seems to be the only public concern? Will we convince anyone that the security of individuals matters to us when we are obviously looking harder at "metrics" to do with Australian advantage rather than real people or the needs of developing countries?<br /><br />While critical attention is fortuitously being given to some of the "bottom feeder" private teaching bodies of the shopfront kind at present, the problem is not just a lack of "quality assurance". When Australia's universities are themselves under-funded and enrol international students based on balance-sheet needs rather than any broader strategy of international partnership and engagement, a whole branch of education policy is revealed as bankrupt. At the high end of the quality spectrum as well as the low, we risk objectifying students and jeopardizing the very thing that makes Australian education attractive: a quality that arises from commitment and from values deeper than those of balance-sheets.<br /><br />The world we inhabit is not a set of closed systems, but a deeply-interdependent network of communities. Australia is a relatively small player in this small world, but it has privileges and resourcesthat bring great responsibility and some hope of a positive role in a very different future. A country that could speak of that responsibility, and of the need for international partnership and understanding as a basic element of education policy, would have a better chance of being a country that could show partnership and understanding to individual Indian students, present and future, too.Andrew McGowanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01304601214734931518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7169819620817028600.post-90583681443707483242009-05-15T15:13:00.005+10:002009-05-15T15:19:20.608+10:00Truth and Reconciliation: A Trinity alum leads in the SolomonsTrinity alumnus the Very Reverend Samuel Ata, a priest of the Anglican Church of Melanesia, has just been appointed to chair the new Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the Solomon Islands. This is the latest of a number of such national tribunals which have brought the idea of "restorative justice" to bear on lingering pain and bitterness after long periods of violence and oppression within nations.<br /><br />The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which functioned primarily between 1995 and 1998, brought to world attention not only the atrocities of the Apartheid era which it was constituted to address, but fundamental issues concerning the nature of justice and the conditions necessary for reconciliation. Although its origins and work were in some respects unique, the Commission’s activities embodied what has come to be called restorative justice, and has contributed to thinking in different settings about judicial processes and their effectiveness.<br /><br />“Restorative justice” refers to a set of practices and principles now widely employed or tested in many parts of the world: in juvenile justice systems in numerous Western countries, in revived or renewed local systems for conflict resolution among indigenous peoples and in traditional cultures, and in public or national tribunals such as those concerned with the aftermath of Apartheid in South Africa, of civil unrest in Peru, and of the Rwandan genocide. The Canadian Government has created such a commission as part of the Indian Residential Schools Resolution process. This instance involves a potent and painful conjunction of racism and sexual and other forms of violence involving children, with particular reference to Church-run schools.<br /><br />Common to most of these is a focus on the crime or injury as a breakdown of relationship within a social fabric, and consequent emphasis on the victim or victims and their needs and concerns. A characteristic element of that focus has been opportunities for those affected by crimes to speak publicly about their experience. The possibility of giving voice to the experience of suffering has proved significant in itself, as well as potentially an important step towards reconciliation or resolution. Offenders may also be given opportunities for action as participating subjects, rather than simply being made the object of either punitive or rehabilitative action. These processes have involved the telling and hearing of previously unknown stories of the crimes or injuries in question, as well as opportunities for making some form of restitution.<br /><br />These may be contrasted, up to a point, with conventional or retributive criminal justice systems that view a crime as an offence against the law itself, and the state as the party with whom an accused person is engaged adversarially in a trial or tribunal, without necessary reference to victims. Where in the conventional case justice consists of determining and executing a sentence deemed appropriate to the offence, a “restorative” approach means that the needs and desires of the victim are inherently more significant than meting out a particular penalty on the offender, and that the damage to social relations is what must fundamentally be addressed and restored .<br /><br />The contemporary movement for restorative justice has a variety of substantial, although by no means exclusive, connections with Christian tradition and theology. Principles comparable to those of restorative justice, emphasizing restitution and reconciliation, are identifiable across the canon of Scripture, from the Mosaic Law to the Gospels. Advocates and architects of restorative justice have included numerous Christians and Church-related bodies, including the Mennonite Central Committee and Prison Fellowship International. The roles taken by Church members and leaders in the South African tribunal are well-known, and its Chairman Desmond Tutu has referred in his memoir to the “heavily spiritual, and indeed Christian, emphasis of the Commission”.<br /><br />Sam Ata's role is a further recognition of this important connection. We offer him our prayerful supportAndrew McGowanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01304601214734931518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7169819620817028600.post-63467011550744129822009-05-08T14:31:00.007+10:002009-05-08T14:37:27.450+10:00Crisis and Opportunity: Philanthropy and Australian Higher EducationEven before the global financial crisis, there was a growing awareness in Australian universities of the need to look past existing sources of funding. Given the impact of the crisis on the government’s capacity to carry out its desired funding ‘revolution’, educational leaders know that private money will become crucial to the ability of a university to do much more than eke out an existence. It may become necessary even for that.<br /><br />With the demise (for the present) of domestic full-fee places and the pall cast over on-the-side revenue ventures like Melbourne University Private, philanthropy is attracting more and more attention. The growing number of senior appointments in the higher education sector intended largely or wholly to oversee fundraising is eloquent testimony to this trend.<br /><br />There is some vestigial scepticism in Australia about massive fundraising campaigns like those familiar for colleges in the USA, but the evidence from Canada, the UK and now here too suggests that individuals, as well as trusts and foundations, will support higher education when a case can be made. This is the resumption of an Australian tradition rather than something entirely new. Despite the dominance of the public purse since the mid-twentieth century, universities like RMIT, Sydney and UWA owe a great deal to early benefactors like Francis Ormond, John Henry Challis and John Winthrop Hackett.<br /><br />The real difficulties are subtler and more deep-seated than a mere unwillingness on the part of Australians to give. During the last half-century Australian universities have tended to portray themselves as schools for skills, driven and funded by taxpayers as essential services, like roads or pipes. Students participate not so much to change their own or others’ lives, but to take their place in an economy needing high levels of expertise and knowledge. This understanding is reflected in the bland economistic language of government policy, where no higher vision for universities is presumed than that of equipping graduates – if now a larger and more diverse set of graduates – to participate in the production of wealth.<br /><br />This is not quite the stuff of dreaming spires, or even of the wider social good, and presents a difficulty for those who have to commend universities to philanthropy. Prospective donors might expect benefactions not merely to support a system under strain, but to make important differences for students and society itself.<br /><br />This lack of vision also affects the unspectacular but important process of gaining support from a mass base of alumni. While in recent decades many graduates have left Australian universities with well-honed skills and critical abilities, fewer have left feeling debts of gratitude for inspiring or transformative experiences. Such a functional or transactional understanding has been exacerbated by the introduction of the HECS scheme; students who have or will make a fairly significant contribution to the cost of their education are even less likely to conceive of a moral debt to the institution, regarding the transaction as complete when the ATO has signed off.<br /><br />The universities have often seemed content with this. The fact that many have recently had to start alumni programs from scratch illustrates how ephemeral the experience of study and of connection to a university was assumed to be. With its eye on the recurrent public funding that would accompany the hopes of students of the future, higher education has paid scant attention to beneficence from those of the past.<br /><br />The existing pressure on resources in the sector is a Catch-22 for alumni programs and the sense of relationship with the institution that they require. With larger numbers of students, living and working under greater economic pressure, studying in less adequate facilities, and with poorer services, there has often been less and less about the university for which the graduate might be grateful. This is why the need is great, but a former student of recent decades may wonder about the newly-discovered causes for nostalgia that their alma mater suddenly wants to recall.<br /><br />This problem arguably cuts deeper than the mere funding challenges of recent years. The former government’s VSU agenda, a contributing factor to the lack of student services, was viable precisely because the level of commitment or understanding in the university sector to student experiences beyond the classroom was at best uneven.<br /><br />Without signs of a serious dialogue about what a university is for, the efforts of the new fundraisers will often be greeted with understandable scepticism by their targets. Yet this is an opportunity for universities to strengthen more than their balance-sheets. They will have to think more deeply about why higher education really ought to be supported beyond the reasons with which the public purse concerns itself. Perhaps they may still exist to change, and not merely supply, graduates. Perhaps they may exist to generate visions, and not only skills. Perhaps they can foster independent thought, and not merely competence. Fresh (yet very traditional) answers to these questions might be an even more important result than raising money, as well as a necessary condition of raising it.<br /><span style=""><span style="font-family:bookman old style,new york,times,serif;"></span></span>Andrew McGowanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01304601214734931518noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7169819620817028600.post-91358123859560922392009-03-08T20:20:00.038+11:002009-03-11T10:43:56.178+11:00The End of "Going to Uni"<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfne5Q6yzR5DiVX8R1dVG4OTxVDf86LyzIMwdL7AHysppceUcCOC38wrJsYbyLOWgZZ0HyKDYzrmYOoDI56s32LYNR4XjUyD-yXlnDLH2TlE_KrXA01htzuFiDUFTfrDooA4MEwIVj97w/s1600-h/students+to+uni+CHEW2052.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 214px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfne5Q6yzR5DiVX8R1dVG4OTxVDf86LyzIMwdL7AHysppceUcCOC38wrJsYbyLOWgZZ0HyKDYzrmYOoDI56s32LYNR4XjUyD-yXlnDLH2TlE_KrXA01htzuFiDUFTfrDooA4MEwIVj97w/s320/students+to+uni+CHEW2052.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5311708956961451666" border="0" /></a><br />Some readers will remember "going to Uni". This was an experience shared by a small number of Australians, who were academically very able as well as financially secure, or assisted by Government. "Going to Uni" meant participating in an elite experience, where personal connections with peers and sometimes with professors were highly significant; where both cultivation and critique of western and other intellectual traditions and other forms of pure learning were usually entertained, beyond recent fashion or current demand for skills; where the texture of life usually involved other demands or pursuits, whether social activities or social activism, beyond the lectures and the jobs necessary to maintain the mere facts of studying and staying alive.<br /><br />"Going to Uni" has been languishing for some years, and Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard just last week proclaimed the epitaph drafted for it by Professor Denise Bradley's recent Review of higher education in Australia. Part of this proclamation is just the description of reality. As the DPM put it in her <a href="http://www.deewr.gov.au/Ministers/Gillard/Media/Speeches/Pages/Article_090304_155721.aspx">speech last week</a>, the changes of the last few decades have seen the transformation of "a tiny, boutique higher education system into first an elite, then a popular, and finally a mass system". "Mass" will mean 40% of Australians completing degrees. Elite, it is not.<br /><br />The DPM has noted the transformation of the system; perhaps it would be more accurate to say we have seen the actual emergence of a system, from what had previously been just a small collection of institutions and communities. Those "Unis" of old, small, elite and largely comparable, have now been joined by an array of other institutions with varied histories, claims and missions. So now instead of a small set of institutions we have a system which, despite the generalizations made or implied in much policy, involves vastly different experiences and outcomes.<br /><br />Doubtless there are things to mourn about the end of the old model. There is a more profound vision attached to the idea of a "university" than current policies reflect. There is far too little involved in the student experience of many attending Australian institutions of higher learning, beyondfrom their formal classes and qualifications.<br /><br />There were also things about the old model not to mourn, such as a social elitism which made it hard for students with great potential, but less capital, to enter or flourish. And the value of having a greater number of Australians from varied backgrounds having access to <i>some</i> form of higher education is not to be underestimated.<br /><br />Yet we would deceive ourselves if we imagined that the retention of the word "university" meant that the hypothetical 40% will have access to all the word once meant. "Going to Uni" no longer means anything more than that someone is undertaking a post-secondary course. As the system itself seeks to do more and more, just being in the system will come to mean less and less. What means more now and in future is the specific place, the program, the people.<br /><br />In the United States, to draw a comparison, it is only vaguely informative to say that someone is "going to College" (translating to their idiom) . What is really significant is <i>where</i> they go to College. "College" covers a huge range of institutions and experiences, with little in common beyond beyond the fact of further education in some form. It means relatively little to say even that one has a particular kind of degree; what matters is demonstrated high achievement in that field, stemming from a well-resourced environment where there are outstanding peers and teachers.<br /><br />The use of the term "university" for the new mass Australian system as a whole may be unfortunate, but is now a given. The challenge for those of us involved in Australian higher education, and who remember what was good about "going to Uni" - as well as what was not - is not to allow the less-than-inspiring character of the system itself to distract us from the opportunities to do worthwhile things within it. "Going to Uni" will mean all sorts of things now; but within the system there will continue to be communities of learning where experiences of uncompromising excellence are made available to those who can benefit most and contribute most, for the good of the learning community and the wider community.Andrew McGowanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01304601214734931518noreply@blogger.com0