A New Stage in Ecumenical Theological Education

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.

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.

Changes in the Colleges
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.

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.

Independent Students, Dioceses, the University
The environment in which we do the work of theological education has also changed in a number of ways.

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.

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.

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.

What Now?
These changing realities led to different responses among the member Colleges of the UFT.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

From Trinity to Yale

Today 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.

From Trinity:

A message from the Chairman of the Board of Trinity College

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mr Jim Craig Chairman of the Board

And from Yale:

Contact: Jared.Gilbert@yale.edu
For Immediate Release: April 7, 2014
Yale appoints Andrew McGowan as Dean of Berkeley Divinity School

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.

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.

“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.”

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).

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

“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.

McGowan succeeds outgoing dean Joseph H. Britton, who served 11 years in that capacity.

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.

Frank Patrick Henagan (1933-2014)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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.

Would Jesus Tweet? A Guest Contribution from Dr Damian Powell

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.

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? ‘

The parrot looked at the good man, and uttered his first words.  The parrot said this:  ‘I want… FOOD’.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

[From a sermon given in the Chapel on April 21 2013]

A Long Way From Greece and Rome: The John Hugh Sutton Collection

[Remarks from the opening of an exhibition from the John Hugh Sutton Collection at the Ian Potter Museum of the University of Melbourne]

John Hugh Sutton (1906 – 1925), 
The Fleur-de-Lys magazine, 1925. 

To live and work in a University involves many privileges - even if we are this week in the familiar territory of looking to decide which 2% of them we can dispense with... 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.

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. 

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 Satires is still available - for your Kindle, even!

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. In nuce 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.

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.

We are, after all, a long way from Greece and Rome. 

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.

Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt (Horace, Ep. 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.

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. 

Convex pyxis with lid, 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 

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.

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.

Welcome to the Hall!

Welcome to the Hall!

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.

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.


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.

Benedic, Domine, nos, cenationem nostram, 
et dona tua quae de largitate tua sumus sumpturi,
et concede, ut illis salubriter nutriti
tibi debitum obsequium praestare valeamus,
per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen

[Bless, Lord, us, our Hall, and these gifts which we are about to receive,
and grant that whosesomely nourished by them,
we may render you due obedience,
through Christ our Lord. Amen.]

An address, followed by a special grace, welcoming resident students to the renovated Dining Hall on Wednesday October 17 2012

Towards 2022 - Trinity Seeks Needs-Blind Admissions

[From an address given at the 140th Anniversary Gala Dinner at the Melbourne Museum, August 25th 2012]

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.

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, pro ecclesia, pro patria as our motto states.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 genuinely needs-blind - 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.

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.

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.

New Haven Diary: Yale and its Colleges

For 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 The Most Famous Man in America 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 Peabody Museum of Natural History, whose Director, Derek Briggs, is a Fellow of Timothy Dwight College.

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.

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.

Australia's First Specialized University (of Divinity)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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:

Education and Training Reform Act 2006
APPROVAL FOR THE MELBOURNE COLLEGE OF DIVINITY TO OPERATE AS A SPECIALISED UNIVERSITY

1. Authority 

This notice is issued pursuant to section 4.3.30(1) of the Education and Training Reform
Act 2006. 

2. Definitions
Melbourne College of Divinity means the Melbourne College of Divinity continued as a body corporate under the Melbourne College of Divinity Act 1910.
3.    Approval of institution to operate as a University
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’.
4.    Period of approval
The approval herein remains in force for 5 years commencing on 1 January 2012.

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.

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'.

 

This is an important step not only for the MCD community but for Australian higher education - Australia's first specialized university has (almost) arrived.

O-week, Lent, and the Gift of Time

[extracted from a Sermon for Commencement Evensong, Feb 28 2010]

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!

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.

Others, however, have faced even harder challenges this past week.

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.

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.

On a Thursday night many years ago, and much further away, another young man faced death:

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.’

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Lifting the Lid on Real Colleges

A recent story in the Sydney Morning Herald reminds us that residential Colleges are not all or always sweetness and light. Alexis Carey's negative experience at Sydney and her recollection of Germaine Greer's much earlier 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.

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.

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.

One is that colleges actually achieve things for their members educationally that are harder to come by otherwise.

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.

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:

• Students in resident life are as likely or more likely to participate in active learning and enriching experiences and in interacting with staff;
• Over time, college students become more engaged in their experience relative to others;
• College residents receive great levels of individual support with resulting improved retention;
• Resident students' learning, development and satisfaction is greater than for other students.

This also means that college life is or ought to be a great opportunity that can be accessible to more, and more diverse, students.

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.

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.

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.

A Cosmopolitan University?

The recent University of Melbourne Refining Our Strategy 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Harvard Diary: Doing the Business of Change

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.

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.

The course was the fulsomely-named Strategic Perspectives in Nonprofit Management, 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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

Engaging Students

Based on extracts from the Morpeth Lecture 2008, given at Christ Church Cathedral Newcastle for the Anglican Diocese and the University of Newcastle, April 17 2008

Australian higher education is undergoing what has been described as a “revolution”. Its precise form is so far unknown, but the Federal Government is undertaking a fundamental review whose consequences might be far-reaching.

Not all the challenges the universities face have been fully or publicly recognized. There is a wide recognition that under-resourced campuses and crowded lecture rooms do not always really match the qualities and aspirations of the students and staff who inhabit them. Yet there is a related challenge that goes deeper than facilities, to the heart of the educational process and its aims.

There is an emerging national conversation about issues labelled "student experience" or "engagement". The results of a survey released by the Australian Council for Educational Research just last week make an important contribution to that discourse. The Australasian Survey of Student Engagement examines "what students are actually doing, highlights the most critical aspects of learning and development, provides a ‘learner-centred, whole-of-institution’ perspective, and gives an index of students’ involvement in study".[1]

Principal author of the report was Dr Hamish Coates, a former resident tutor and President of our Senior Common Room at Trinity College. The report, Attracting, Engaging, Retaining, contains some very positive data about how students experience Australian university education. It also suggests that there are areas, such as significant interaction between teachers and students, and enrichment of the educational experience through broadening activities outside the classroom, where measures of Australian students’ engagement with the university experience lags significantly behind their American peers’.

This is a particularly interesting and significant area to reflect on from the Collegiate perspective. Having begun life as a residential College community, Trinity has sought to maintain a sense of community where teachers and students are ultimately colleagues, "members" of the College as our constitution puts it. And since our purpose has always been broader than the provision of curriculum, activities beyond the classroom have always been crucial to the learning experience.

While we should be encouraged by the emergence of a serious discourse in Australia about student experience. it is less encouraging to see it being presented under a title “Attracting, Engaging and Retaining” students, indicating perhaps that many leaders and policy makers do not yet see engagement and experience as the heart of education, but adjunct to it, or even just as a means to maintain enrolments. In fact an educational vision that is unashamedly and primarily focussed on quality of student experience is ultimately more likely to succeed at attracting and retaining, as well as engaging.

Yet this is a challenge for us at Trinity too. There is no doubt that what we are able to offer students in the Collegiate environment is exceptional. Perhaps the challenge we face, together with the University and other Colleges, is how to make this kind of educational experience more widely available, and less the preserve of an exceptional and privileged few.

---

[1] Attracting, Engaging and Retaining: New Conversations About Learning (Camberwell, Vic: ACER, 2008)

From Sudan to St Paul's

Going to Church at All Saints’, North Footscray is a remarkable experience. The congregation arrives by the mini-busload over a period of close to an hour, from well before the service begins until well after. From the buses spill unlikely numbers of laughing children, women elegantly attired in colourful prints, and men in suits and ties. All of them are black.

Inside the Church a faithful remnant of Anglo-Celtic locals, as well as Asian and Pacific Islander members, join with this predominantly Sudanese group in a liturgy that has a wildly eclectic set of rituals, music and moods. Players of drums and electric guitars alternate with a surplice-clad organist who produces the 16^th-century tones of Merbecke’s settings for the Book of Common Prayer. Incense and candles adorn the sanctuary, while hands and voices are raised unpredictably in spontaneous prayer.

Until two weeks ago, the Vicar of the Anglican Parish of Footscray was Donald Edgar, a Trinity College student in the 1960s who was greatly influenced by Barry Marshall, chaplain and lecturer in the Theological School at the time. Don also went on to study from and emulate the Worker Priest movement, which in France around that same time had been leading clergy to move their attention from Churches to factory floors. In more recent times he had come to Footscray, and led the parish to a high level of engagement with the new arrivals from the southern Sudan. He has just retired after a remarkable and fruitful ministry.

I saw Don today at St Paul’s Cathedral, where the largest group of candidates ever has been ordained as deacons in the Anglican Diocese of Melbourne. The size but also the diversity, age and talent of this group of people sit awkwardly with widespread assumptions that the institutional Church is on its last legs.

Among those 27 was one Sudanese refugee, the aptly-named Chaplain Soma Jackson, who was a parishioner at All Saints’ and who has been engaged in study at Trinity’s Theological School since 2004. Although other Sudanese Anglicans have been studying or ordained in Australia, we believe Chaplain is the first Sudanese theological student who has completed the entire process of selection and discernment here as well as obtaining a recognized tertiary qualification.

Chaplain’s is a remarkable story in many respects. He and his family escaped persecution in the Sudan – he himself was arrested on multiple occasions, and subjected to detention, interrogation and torture – and then like so many others, faced the enormous challenges of refugee and migrant families on the other side of the world. Having been educated partly in Uganda and thus with more English language experience than many other Sudanese migrants, Chaplain was able to seek employment and to undertake study.

Don Edgar encouraged Chaplain and other leaders in the Sudanese Anglican community to come to Trinity and study theology at a level well beyond what civil war and lack of resources had allowed them and their peers in the Sudan. It has been a challenge for us and a challenge for them, but today is a great celebration of what this partnership has achieved.

It is also, I believe, a powerful statement about the capacity of a comprehensive and generous Anglicanism to flourish in Australia and elsewhere. The members of the Theological School community such as those ordained deacon today - Sam, Philip, Raffaella, Dorothy, Matthew, Ian, Deidre and Rosemary, as well as Chaplain - are a microcosm of global Anglicanism. They are racially and ethnically diverse, from more catholic and from more evangelical backgrounds, theologically and politically varied. Yet they manage to co-exist, and more than that they prosper, because they are committed to each other and to openness as well as to the foundational expressions of our faith. As at the international level, the only thing that could stop us growing together is the refusal of some to do so.

The Theological School’s character is also a reflection of what we might call “Collegiate” education – education that values community as well as excellence. Across all our programs Trinity College seeks to embody this ethos, the rich inheritance of our past, and to give it fresh expression.

The Boys - and Girls - of Summer

Trinity rarely sleeps. Although our resident students are gone for the year, other groups and programs continue or begin as the year draws to its end.

This week, the campus is covered with a younger and (even) more diverse group than usual. Trinity has been running Summer Schools for High-School age students for some years, focussing on Science and on Creative Thinking. These two have now been combined into a “Young Leaders” program which adds Leadership Development to the two existing streams. So in these first two weeks of December we have 168 students, along with mentors and instructors, engaging in an intense, and intensely enjoyable, program at the College.

Most of the Young Leaders come from overseas; we have targeted the program carefully in the countries where we recruit for Foundation Studies, as well as on the subcontinent, which is not a large Foundation Studies market but where students are eager to take up the Summer School experience.

Remarkably however we also have, among the Australians taking part, 22 young indigenous students. They come from metropolitan areas, regional towns and far-flung communities; from most states and the NT; from strong educational environments where many students continue to post-secondary education, and from small poorly-resourced schools where staying until the end of Year 9 is a victory. Some are from communities and institutions where we have been building networks over the years; from Minyerri in south-east Arnhem Land, where resident students and staff have visited over a number of years to learn and share experiences, or from Nightcliff in the suburbs of Darwin, where Trinity has built links with Nungalinya College working with teenagers through Drama.

The Summer School is a great example of how Trinity is seeking to extend and give fresh expression to the Collegiate experience. Some of these students, Australian and international, will one day return to Melbourne for Foundation Studies and/or for University study. Others will proceed to University programs elsewhere. We hope that each of these groups will be enlarged by the intensive residential experience they are sharing now.

Summer School is a sort of microcosm of College life, a concentrated burst of the transformative experience that can come with studying and living in community, and from considering questions and problems beyond those related to a single discipline or set of skills. I understand from the program leaders that much work and much fun is being had, and maybe not a lot of sleep – but that’s Trinity.

California Diary (I): El Camino Real

In November I spent just under two weeks in California, meeting alumni in San Francisco and Los Angeles and attending the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in San Diego. My own contribution to the SBL meeting is covered in my other blog, Andrew’s Version.

This trip took me the length of what was historically known as El Camino Real – the Royal Highway – that ran between the various Franciscan mission stations from San Diego north to San Francisco. Dotted along the way – every thirty miles or so, representing an achievable day’s journey – were missions, often now towns with names familiar even to Australians from references in popular culture, derived from saints important to the Franciscan friars who blazed the trail. Three times in four days I rode the rails between LA and San Diego, seeing familiar names like San Juan Capistrano fly past on one side, and familiar-looking beaches on the other.

Los Angeles itself is shortened from El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora de los Angeles de la Porciúncula – the town of our Lady of the Angels of the Little Portion. The “Little Portion” refers to the famous Church at Assisi where Francis worked and died, where a fresco depicted an apparition of the Virgin with angels. The eighteenth century Spanish expedition that mapped the Los Angeles River did so on a feast day connected with Francis and this Church.

In both San Francisco and Los Angeles I met with alumni, from the 60s through to the 90s; they included Americans who had visited Trinity, and Australians currently “seeking their fortune” in the US. The attraction for Australians of the concentrated resources in human, social and economic terms in the US is increasingly clear. The West has particular attractions for those engaged in the Arts and Media, as well as the other strengths related to academic research familiar in the Northeast.

In Los Angeles I was welcomed by the Australian Consul-General, Innes Willox, and his wife Ms Jennifer Conley, current Trinity parents. Their pleasant villa backs onto the property of extraordinary Getty Center, where I spent a couple of hours looking at medieval and early modern art and generally feeling as though on Parnassus, wandering around this marvellous hilltop monument to culture. A few days later I was back in LA and went to its sister pilgrimage site, the Getty Villa, a partial replica of the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum, and an extraordinary collection of Greek and Roman antiquities. Both of these are free to the public – testimony to the strength and importance of philanthropy in that country.

As a former resident in the United States I am well aware of the extraordinary richness and diversity – and the striking contrasts – that characterize that country. California itself is a sort of microcosm, distinctive in its history and geography, massive in its own scope, and full of its own contrasts. LA is yet a further concentration of contrasts, more a sprawling zone than a community, with pockets of brilliance (and tawdriness) set in a maze of freeways and suburbs. It is no Australian dream, but plays host to the dreams of many, from close by and far away.

To Make an End is to Make a Beginning

"The end is where we start from" (T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding)

At this time of year "Valedictory" begins to appear as a way of describing events around the College. Resident students triumphed (at least over boredom) in "Survivor: Bulpadock", their imaginative approach to Valedictory Day activities, two weekends ago. An End of Year dinner provided a somewhat more formal setting for celebration, and last Sunday the End of Year service was the most reflective opportunity for departing resident students to mark this transition.

Similar activities are in mid-stream in the Theological School and yet to come for Foundation Studies students.

All these festivities mark departures. I have noted before that a College such as this exists to send people away - hopefully after years of work, play and reflection, with deeper experience and higher aspirations.

One particularly important departure is Peter Tregear's. After two years of outstanding service to the College as Dean, Peter is to step down early in 2008 to pursue his academic research and teaching. In 2006 and 2007 Peter has initiated and overseen key events and programs that have expressed the highest aspirations of the College. This year's Caldwell Lectures were in quite different areas, exploring history, art and law; yet the presence at Trinity of world-class historians Richard Evans and David Starkey was also a sign of Peter Tregear's imagination and commitment.

Other of his initiatives have been musical, not surprisingly - the initiative of making the prize-winning TinAlley String Quartet our "Quartet in Residence" is an obvious example. Peter's immediate attention will go to his continuing role as a Fellow in the Faculty of Music at the University of Melbourne.

I know you will join me in wishing Peter and our departing students well, even as we strive to maintain the standards of excellence and imagination they have set for us. Farewells are inevitably tinged with sadness, but it is good for us to celebrate them as we do. They are, after all, really beginnings. I also know well from experience that Trinity has a way of calling us back!

‘Where is the real University experience?’; Or, ‘Brisbane, Banff and Beyond…’

Last week I attended a national gathering of University College heads in Brisbane. One highlight was an address by John Hay, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Queensland whose Colleges were our hosts.

Professor Hay had been here at Trinity just a few days earlier, attending a Symposium on Philanthropy and the Humanities that we had sponsored in conjunction with other sections of the University of Melbourne. Attendees at the Symposium here were entertained by the TinAlley String Quartet (‘TASQ’), Trinity’s Quartet in Residence, who have been making use of College facilities (appropriately enough in the old Kindergarten, now a Performing Arts building adjacent to Tin Alley itself) and inspiring students with their musical prowess. Professor Hay referred to Trinity’s relationship with TASQ as a model of the way Colleges can engage the aspirations and imaginations of students.

TASQ’s progress this year has in fact been stunning, capped by their winning the 9th Banff International String Quartet Competition earlier this month. Next year they will have a residency at Banff and tour North America and Europe.

Another and more general point made by Prof. Hay was less specific to Trinity but just as important for us. Colleges, he said, are where the real experience of University is now to be had.

This observation, both encouraging and sobering as it is, seems to me to have a number of implications for Colleges. It is a reflection of the great potential of using residential life as a basis for the educational experience, but also involves a difficult if accurate acknowledgement of how varied – to put it fairly positively – student life can now be in Australian Universities.

First, we do have an enormous responsibility to make the more positive element of Prof. Hay’s observation entirely justifiable. Are we managing to provide a “real” University experience? I am confident that we do so at Trinity, and the TASQ example is a wonderful sign of that, but I have not the slightest complacency about this. I am also more conscious, after the Brisbane conference, of how varied the aspirations of different Colleges and Halls of residence are. It is crucial that we keep raising our sights and encouraging others to do the same.

Second, if we are providing not merely a convenience or service (as “accommodation providers”) but something fundamental to the real or richest University experience, then the rarity of that experience must be mitigated by diversity, and by imaginative extension of College life to others. As to the former, Trinity is working to make what we offer available regardless of financial resources, to those who will contribute to, and benefit from, the College experience the most. On the latter point we will shortly be engaging, along with colleagues from other Colleges at this University, in a process of considering initiatives such as renewing non-resident programs – of which ours at Trinity is one of the few active remaining. This is a very promising possibility.

Third, if we are really seeking to provide something so fundamental, this “real” University experience, there must be clear willingness to speak not merely about vocational outcomes and the acquisition of skills for professions, but also about meaning and values. This is part of the reason for Trinity’s existence. And it is, I think, part of what any “real” University experience ought to involve, wherever it takes place.