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.

‘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.

The (Other) Idea of a University

I am beginning this Trinity-related blog by posting a version of a talk also published in TrinityTODAY a few weeks ago...

Debates about the nature of a University usually involve contrasts between the “liberal” model represented by John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University, and a more pragmatic ideal that emphasizes the needs of society and training for the professions.

University education usually needs both (the Growing Esteem strategy for the University of Melbourne establishes a place for each. Its new undergraduate degrees will emphasize “breadth and depth”, including requirements for interdisciplinary study, while professional and research degrees, geared solely to graduates, will serve for vocational outcomes).

Yet an alternative pair of “ideas” of the University might be suggested. In Newman’s era, there were two quite different aspects of the University. One was the experience of “going up” to Oxford or Cambridge, living as a member of a College and reading particular subjects. The other was examination and attainment of a degree, which not all students sought or were even eligible for. This measure of accomplishment assumed, but did not replace, the fundamental experience of being a part of the University and its life.

When Newman asked the question “What is a University”, he emphasized community rather than curriculum; the University is “the assemblage of strangers from all parts in one spot”. Australian Universities, however, have tended to assume the reverse, thinking of the University as defined by examinations more than experience, by curriculum more than community. Educational achievement, and University degrees in particular, are supposed to reflect the examination of knowledge or skill, but say little about the particular experience that might have led there. The degree itself has become a supposed guarantee of standards, a mechanism that promises the supposed parity resulting from widely (or even wildly) different experiences, rather than symbol of one held in common.

One reason for this separation of examination from experience in Australia has been geographical isolation. We have been particularly adept at finding ways to deliver information across great distances, long before the internet ushered “distance learning” or “flexible delivery” into the vocabularies of educators. The need to organize and recognize such forms of teaching and learning added to the distinction between experience and examination Australians inherited from the English tradition.

Another distinctive Australian factor is the unevenness of Collegiate or community life. Since the forms of common life that distinguished Colleges once seemed necessarily religious, they provided a means for the “sandstone” Universities to assert their essential secularity, while dealing with religion in a “co-curricular” fashion. The cost of this approach was the marginalization of community life and the emphasis on experience that Newman and the other great figures of nineteenth-century University theorizing, such as Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Eliot, took for granted.

For Australians, University education thus became the inculcation and examination of a body of knowledge, not the experience of being a community of learners. To an extent that would not so readily have been countenanced in the UK, the USA or Europe, University education in Australia came to be seen as focussed on the lecture hall alone and on the absorption of a canon of knowledge, rather than also on the dining hall and the exchange of views across disciplines and perspectives.

Recent developments in Australian Higher Education have underlined the problem. I myself went through undergraduate education, about twenty-five years ago, without the benefit of a Collegiate experience. I did have access to community life through an active Student Guild, and I was also in the Honours program of a relatively small department where students knew one another, and the most senior academics as well. Now, increases in class sizes on the one hand, and the gratuitous VSU agenda on the other, have threatened the broader forms of community life as well as the narrower academic collegiality necessary to the formation of would-be scholars.

American poet and teacher John Ciardi said that “a University is what a College becomes when the faculty loses interest in the students”. In the American context these words have a slightly different meaning, but there is a message for us here too. A University that does not understand what educational community provides has lost more than just an interest in students. Colleges may yet be part of the answer.