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.

Trinity Moves

Based on remarks at the Gala Dinner of the Union of the Fleur-de-Lys in the Great Hall of the National Gallery of Victoria, August 11th 2007

It may seem a bit surprising to find a Trinity event being held somewhere other than on Campus, even in as remarkable and inspiring a space as this. Yet our being somewhere else, and here in particular, seems to encapsulate something important about the College as well. In a variety of ways, Trinity moves.

We move individuals, offering them opportunities for growth and transformation. The transition from School education, with its highly-structured and ordered reality, to University education does involve a great step into freedom and responsibility. The value of that freedom depends on the choices available and the resources and influences at hand. This place, which has such a wealth of artistic beauty, exemplifies that process for us. Collegiate education affirms that it is crucial to offer significant cultural, social, sporting and intellectual activities in community life to allow that. We don't judge the success of being at Trinity by whom or what we bring in, but by whom we send out, and how they may have changed.

Second, Trinity itself moves, it changes. To pursue a tradition of excellence across a long period of time necessarily means change as well as continuity. To be justly proud of the College in the future we should not expect it to resemble the College of the past in all respects. I am proud of long standing customs and connections at Trinity; I am also proud of new ideas and practices, of a more diverse student body that reflects our commitment to this experience and to making it available to students on the basis of their ability to gain from it and contribute to it, not their personal economic resources. I am proud of our connection with a world-class University engaged in its own process of change, in which we are partners, seeking to provide experiences the equal of any in the world. I am delighted we have families connected with Trinity across generations, and also students who are indigenous Australians or who have been refugees. The only thing I want you to be prouder of than Trinity's past is Trinity's future.

Finally, Trinity moves because we take it with us. Despite coming here to a different place, being of many different eras in the College, hundreds of us tonight are again immediately "Trinity". We believe that there is something important - about excellence, about community, about values - that moves with us. We are here not just because it was important for 2 or 3 or 4 years once in the past, but because we take something of it with us wherever we go. Thank you for being part of Trinity's past - thank you also for being part of its future.

Singapore Diary (I): With the Academy of Principals

On July 5th I addressed a gathering of the Academy of Principals of Singapore, a peak body and professional development organization covering all Singapore schools. What follows is a precis of my remarks.

There are many differences between school and University education, and not all are to do with curriculum or level of achievement. Regimentation must give way to a kind of freedom or space, a benign “educational vacuum” as it were, which can draw out the potential of students to fill it.

Yet it is not sufficient to provide that absence of imposed order. Students must also be given a rich set of resources, experiences and choices, the wherewithal to construct their own set of skills, interests and values. Autonomy and capacity for critical thinking are only as useful or as adequate as the context in which they are formed.

Remarkably, while there are some University programs where great emphasis is placed on an aesthetically-rich physical environment, the provision of cultural activities, sporting and social opportunities and more besides, others have none of these. The role of a University in inculcating values and pursuing a particular ethical mission is also entirely variable.

Perhaps this variation is an unavoidable element of the Higher Education reality, but there is a real tension between some versions of it, and what a group like this might actually assume education is – not just the inculcation of knowledge or even of skills, but the formation of creative, capable individuals, through a variety of processes and experiences.

My sense is that educators in countries such as Singapore and Malaysia are quite conscious of the challenge of fostering critical thinking and creativity among their students.

However there is still, both in Australia and in countries like Singapore, a sort of supposed “common sense” which sees the purpose of University education as to equip the student for success in a particular vocation or career, and hence holds that it should focus strongly on a specific set of professional skills.

Yet in a rapidly changing economic world, students need to acquire generic or “soft” skills – those of creative and critical thinking, and of effective communication. Specific vocational training may meanwhile quickly become redundant.

When we think of great Universities, we know we are not simply talking about outstanding lecturers and libraries. These are communities characterized by excellence and diversity, where there is considerable scope and responsibility given to students, but also personal attention and mentoring; where there are inspiring elements of environment as well as of curriculum, and where profound conversations take place in dining halls, as well as or perhaps even more than in lecture halls.

Leadership for that educational world means giving attention to curriculum, but also to more. In the increasingly competitive and differentiated Australian educational environment, the question of whether tertiary education is understood to include the development of the whole person, and preparation for leadership in society, will be one of the crucial tests of a genuinely outstanding educational experience.