Obiter dicta by Professor Gavin Brown AO

International players

5 July 2002

Last week I had the opportunity to issue yellow and red cards in Japan. The soccer fantasy arose when I co-chaired a session of a conference dedicated to establishing a new network of universities - and I was determined to keep proceedings on time. The previous day had been less disciplined, as 25 university presidents made presentations to the people of Nagoya, several thousand of them, in the Toyoda Auditorium. On that earlier occasion the University of Sydney was chosen as one of the five leading keynote institutions and, thanks to alphabetical order of country, I began the show.

We have agreed to form part of an eight university steering group with Nagoya, Warwick, Michigan, Shanghai Jiao Tong, Chulalangkorn, North Carolina State and the École Nationale de Ponts et Chaussees. The last of these is one of the Grandes Écoles of France, founded in the 17th century. As well as fostering student and staff exchange and information on research profiles we will engage in benchmarking with a view to raising the quality of all participants' performance. The network has adopted the name AC21.

The Nipponese meeting followed a hurried trip to Berkeley where that campus of the University of California hosted the latest meeting of APRU, the Association of Pacific Rim Universities, of which ANU and Sydney are the Australian members.

As well as attending the preliminary steering committee meeting, I made a presentation on the distance learning conference which the Australian partners hosted this May. That initiative was one of several splinter group activities sponsored by APRU during the last year.

Both organisations are exploring the possibility of holding forthcoming plenaries at the University of Sydney. This is important confirmation of our international visibility and we must continue to be unafraid to distinguish ourselves within Australia.

Having learned that the budget of the University of Michigan football team comes pretty close to our total annual university budget, I was delighted that our first grade rugby team won its first game of the year's premiership over Norths. We were missing four Wallabies, one injured and three playing in Australia's win over France, and two under 21 internationals playing in South Africa in the Australian team which lost narrowly in the world final. That is a propitious background for our season's prospects.

The segue from academic activities to sport is not unnatural. In both cases we have similar aspirations. Our University sets about outdistancing local rivals by competing at the highest possible level. This, we believe, is insufficient unless it is measured by international standards.