Ambition and commitment

The National Press Club
11 April 2000

There is a tale of a fellow walking down an Oxford street in World War II. He was one of those bumbling chaotic types, of indeterminate age between 35 and 55, patched sports jacket, scruffy hair and a pile of books. One of those formidable sharp-tongued older women they seem to clone there, arrested his progress. “Young man, why are you not out there fighting to save our civilization?” “Madam”, he replied, “I am the civilization of which you speak.”

My claims today will be somewhat more modest – but only slightly. What Australia needs is a good dose of aspiration. I am indebted to the Manchester United footballer who put it so elegantly. “If you have the courage to look far enough ahead, you too can see the carrot at the end of the tunnel.”

I started arranging my thoughts for this presentation about 40 years ago and I am still an incurable romantic. I started putting words together about two weeks ago and was delighted to find in that morning’s copy of the Financial Review two articles which seem to come from a similar viewpoint.

One of these was a review by Alex Sanchez of Mark Latham’s book, “What did you learn today?” The other piece by Thomas Barlow was called, “Science friction in the knowledge nation”. Inevitably, by the way, this was pseudo-corrected to “Science fiction in the knowledge nation” by at least one press monitoring service.

Barlow notes with distaste that “research lobbyists have learned to preface every reference to basic science with the redeeming epithets “precompetitive”, “enabling” or “generic”. He notes that the Australian Research Council now describes basic research as “a strategic investment in realizing national goals” and he observes “that our politicians so effortlessly make our nation appear culturally moribund: a place where education is merely a way of galvanising our populace for the workforce, where knowledge really is just a resource that will make us richer so that we can eat more and shop longer, and where nobody really understands a scientist’s motivation for doing basic research”. By contrast, he claims, foreign scientists visiting the United States still find an implicit belief that the quest for scientific discovery remains valuable for its own sake. The US, of course, is not unproductive.

Sanchez, in view of the book he reviews, directs his advice to the ALP, but his comments are of wider application. He quotes with approbation two important goals: to re-energise Australia’s passion for education and learning; to open up our thinking on the options for education policy. Sanchez notes that “education helps in the management of diversity, encourages participation in political and civic life and, importantly, renews our faith in the institutions of society.”

His review begins with two quotes from Benjamin Disraeli. The first comes from a speech in Edinburgh in 1867, “Change is inevitable in a progressive country. Change is constant.” The second was a statement in the House of Commons in 1874, “Upon the education of the people of this country, the fate of this country depends.” Let me add a third Disraeli quote from the previous year in the House: “A University should be a place of light, of liberty and of learning.”


It was I suppose a good 30 years earlier that Viscount Melbourne remarked to the Queen, “I don’t know Ma’am why they make all this fuss about education, none of the Pagets can read or write, and they get on well enough.” Do we want to be Melbourne or do we want to be Australia?


This is a good moment to acknowledge the presence of my colleague from Monash University, Professor David Robinson and to remind you that as well as the University of Sydney and Monash, the Group of Eight comprises the vice-chancellors from Adelaide, ANU, the University of Melbourne, the University of New South Wales, the University of Queensland and the University of Western Australia.

The G08 has been operating as an informal network for some 4 or 5 years. Last year we established a national office here in Canberra and appointed an Executive Director. We have three key aims. First we seek to liaise with our elected representatives in the Federal Parliament to assist in the process of public policy development in higher education. Secondly we cooperate and benchmark together in order to optimise the teaching and research excellence created by our eight universities here in Australia. An important third objective is to promote Australia and its leading research universities internationally.

The theme I have chosen for my address is “Ambition and Commitment.” We are ambitious for Australia, all Australia, and we believe that leading universities should lead. That requires close cooperation with parliamentarians, with business and industry. It requires cooperation with the media and I am deeply grateful for today’s opportunity. We believe that universities should engage with society and that that must involve speaking in such a way that we are heard. It is not simply a matter of scholarly citation.

Here is what I intend to do. I will attempt to advocate what I would like to see as shared aspirations. The repeated intrusion of the personal pronoun here is deliberate. Some of what I say will be agreed G08 policies but other comments will no doubt be idiosyncratic. It is important that my colleagues can denounce such views.

After that I will describe the dangers and the frustrations which threaten these aspirations but will go on to demonstrate the G08 commitment to self-help and to helping others.

Before we set off on that three stage journey let me take a moment or two to present our credentials. We are the self-designated Group of Eight. Do we really cut the mustard or do we merely huddle together, hallucinating?

We undertake 70% of all research conducted in Australian universities. When it comes to fundamental research we produce over 50% of Australia’s total from any source. We dominate university research links with industry, undertaking 54% of all applied research and 61% of experimental development.

In every designated field of research the G08 produces between 60% and 80% of internationally recognized Australian research publications. In the large, we produce over 80% of internationally cited university research from Australia.

We contribute over 75% of the Fellows of the four learned academies – the Australian Academy of Science, the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences, The Australian Academy of the Humanities, and the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences. We employ every university scientist in Australia who is a Fellow of the Royal Society.

We employ over 80% of the university researchers awarded citation laureates by the Institute for Scientific Information.

Does this mean we neglect teaching? It is harder to produce objective data for that. Certainly we do much better in gaining national teaching awards than our staff numbers would warrant. If you look at the, misleadingly named, Student Progress Rate we do very well. For a given unit of study this is the percentage of students who pass. Average this over all students and all units of study to get the Student Progress Rate. The G08 average is 89. The average for the remainder is 84. Unfair comparison you may exclaim. The G08 universities consistently attract the best students. Good point! We do consistently attract the best students.

A recent study showed that Australia Rhodes scholars topped the league table of nations for subsequent performance at Oxford. It also showed that around 95% came from G08 universities.
For each of the last 3 years a team of Australian students has won the World Student Debating Championships. They have all come from G08 universities.

These are some of our credentials to demonstrate our legitimacy in seeking change. We do NOT seek special or preferential treatment for any group of universities. Indeed our plea is for the exact opposite. We advocate a policy environment in which the same basic rules apply to all higher education providers, with some transparent exceptions being made, from time to time, and only when justified for specific policy reasons.

Let me now speak of aims and aspirations, for these are the stuff of universities.

The first principle is that every individual, independent of means, should have access to the richest possible cultural and intellectual environment from which they can benefit. That is not a selfish statement of personal rights against public good. The fact is that society benefits from the educational investment in many ways and the ideal should be to increase access and improve opportunity at all times.

I believe that, generally speaking, we are consistently too conservative about estimating academic potential. Throughout history old men have muttered and tutted and bemoaned lowering of standards. On the contrary, I believe that we must still work hard to increase access. Nevertheless it is true that there are ‘different strokes for different folks’ so that diversity of opportunity is desirable.

It is also inevitable that there will be resource constraints and these will bring rationing. In almost every course in the G08 universities it would be possible to lower entry requirements without having to drop the level of the material taught.

Let me recap that first principle. Every individual should be assured of access to the finest and most stimulating intellectual environment from which they can benefit. That should be “means blind” and is society’s investment in the quality of all our lives.

The second principle is that Australia’s universities should provide for the human infrastructural needs of our business and industry. That is a much more lofty goal than training people to fill some presently identified slots. It involves predicting the future by inventing it, it requires the nurturing of creativity, adaptability and intellectual self-sufficiency. It requires also hard-core technological training on today’s equipment, it needs universities which are pushing into territory ahead of industry standard, not limping along behind, curating obsolescent machines.

All of us with any sense of history, and that includes everyone here, all of us agree that the nature of university has changed dramatically over the centuries. Although they are amongst the most stable institutional entities, that stability is due to continuous re-invention. Taking a Western perspective, how could I pretend to do otherwise, I would remark that the medieval universities began to change their early character as creatures of the Church as they began to serve the training needs of what were essentially the City States. In the mid to late 19th century the new idea of the research university was being created in Germany, in many ways to serve the needs of the Nation State. It is really the Humboldt model which most of us accept today as the traditional model of the University and there are those who have predicted its demise, even diagnosed its death, because, they say, the global economy has killed the Nation State.

Another way to state my second principle therefore is to insist that Australia must meet its own high-level training needs in a global environment.

You will be relieved to learn that I require just one more principle. That will make three and ensure that this talk is truly trivial in the medieval sense.

The third principle is that the modern economy depends fundamentally on universities for innovation. This is particularly well understood in the United States. There we see both the investment and the networking which drives the virtuous cycle, the virtuous cycle of research, development and commercialization which is followed by reinvestment, research, development commercialization. We were told at the inaugural Ericsson innovation dinner in Parliament House a few weeks ago that Stanford University receives 90% of its research funding from government. Stanford is the successful private university around which Silicon Valley grew, but it receives 90% of its research funding from government.

It is important that industry and higher education go together to government in this area and there are powerful lobbying alliances in the U.S. In Australia, cooperation is more fragile. It seemed to me that healthy networking was part of the success of both Robin Batterham and David Miles in feeding into the innovation statement, “Backing Australia’s Ability.” On the other hand, I felt that on this occasion the incentives to industry were less evident than those to the universities.

In the interest of harmony I said this on more than one occasion and wrote that one did need to make sure there was a big enough D in R&D. I still believe that in a straightforward sense but I now realize that I stumbled, accidentally, into a different, more sophisticated debate.

The point at issue is the following. If one plans cooperatively and very effectively in the R stage then one saves costs in the D stage which is typically much more expensive. Thus, and obviously I over-simplify, the name of the game is to make sure that the D in R&D is as small as possible.

In summary, we must make sure that the D is as large as possible and we must also make sure that it is as small as possible, and it all depends on context. Vice-Chancellors are particularly good at such announcements.


Three desirable goals flow from the three principles which have now been enunciated: Intellectual inspiration for the individual, infrastructure as human resources and infrastructure for innovation and invention. There is yet another word beginning with “I” which must overlay them all – “International”. Australia must aspire to achieve all these at the highest international level, we do not have the luxury of setting our own comfortable standards.


That brings me to frustration.


At this moment every Australian university is doing it tough. The basic problem is, of course, a matter of resources. Government funding to universities for general operating purposes has been cut by 6% in real terms since 1996. Moreover, there has been very little additional provision for necessary salary increases in that period. The resulting resource gap is commonly estimated at 15%. That means we have had to find savings or raise additional income to cover a loss of capacity of over one fifth.


It can be argued that any salary increases are our own willful fault. Remember, though, that we are the ultimate knowledge industry, our greatest asset lies in our staff – both those directly engaged in teaching and research and those whose work provides the necessary support for those core activities.


The quality of the experience we can provide for our students must deteriorate, yet they have suffered increased charges for HECS. Almost nobody seems to understand that we collect this tax for the government and only a portion comes back to the university. That fact seriously distorts statistics about our income because that part of HECS which does find its way back to us is often described as government support. All the G08 universities are proud public institutions but the reality is that, if you treat HECS as a private contribution, and I can tell you the students feel it is, then our direct government operating grant is only about 30% of our income.


Because students already pay so much through HECS as judged by international comparisons, there is not a great deal of scope for increasing income from that source. On the other hand the current system gives almost no financial incentive to a university to achieve. Except for an adjustment taking account of the different costs of teaching certain disciplines, clinical medicine is obviously more expensive than law, all universities receive the same, based on a frozen snapshot taken many years ago.

This is not entirely bad! The system should receive core government funding, evenly distributed to ensure stability. What the G08 advocates is a policy overhaul that allows something on top, a diverse system in which different universities can develop their natural advantages to everyone’s benefit. It is no easy task to design such a policy.

What drives me to despair is a rhetoric that there must be complete equity over all universities so that a student who accesses any branch of the Unified National System can be assured of an identical quality of experience according to Principle1. Those who support this position believe there is no window of opportunity unless 38 vice-chancellors can scramble through it together.

A few weeks ago some figures were produced to show that government funding per student at Sydney University exceeded that at the University of Western Sydney. When the alleged social evil was explained by different patterns of teaching, a higher proportion of PhD students, the existence of medicine, vet science, dentistry and engineering at our place, I imagined the furphy exposed. In fact there next appeared a letter in the Telegraph arguing that it was social discrimination to fund medical students at a higher rate than others.

Some years ago it was fashionable for those who could afford it to leave Australia and undertake undergraduate study overseas. It is still true that many opt for postgraduate study abroad, and that is a healthy phenomenon if enough return. If we aspire to 38 universities of even standard then we aspire to create an outflow of our best young citizens.


We have problems in developing both human and technical infrastructure. In the first place there is an extraordinary notion that any intercourse with industry is corrupting and that the ultimate guarantee of independence is total reliance on government.

The truth is that my own University, although founded in 1850, first began to make its mark when the Challis bequest was received in the 1880’s and the curriculum was broadened from liberal arts. The professions as they have come of age have given back to our universities through voluntary tuition and other support. That was and still is true of medicine and dentistry, a little later of veterinary science and now of computer science and engineering. The law profession, especially through funded chairs, has also given valuable support.

Currently, however, one reads accounts of named chairs and cooperative arrangements as if they constituted a roll of shame and not of honour. Recently we gave an honorary degree to a distinguished contributor to the pharmacy profession who also has a long record of public service in local and state government. The citation also mentioned his help in raising funds for a Chair in Pharmacy Practice and the latter became the focus for a shallow article in the Herald with the unworthy implication of “degrees for sale”.

Our own staff are sometimes suspicious of links with industry, particularly since they effectively took a vow of poverty to achieve intellectual freedom. You should be aware that we have Senior Lecturers who have studied an additional 4 years, say, to achieve a PhD, have perhaps been a post-doc for another 3 or 4 years, then have taught and researched for another 5 or 6 before gaining promotion. It is normal practice in many fields that one or more of their graduating students – and I mean first degrees – gain a starting salary greater than theirs.

This brings us back yet again to resources. The recent innovation commitment was a step in the right direction and I strongly welcome John Howard’s personal involvement. An enormous amount remains to be done.

In the lead-up to the release of the Innovation Action Statement there was some criticism of the G08 for our paper, Research and Innovation: Australia’s Future, because it made claims for what were seen as unrealistically high amounts. In fact we argued that for Australia to remain competitive with OECD countries would require an additional $13 billion over five years, made up of $4.2 billion from business, $6.75 billion from the Commonwealth and $2.7 billion from other non-Commonwealth sources.

Somebody must have the courage to point these things out. These huge numbers would simply bring us back to the OECD average of R&D expenditure as a percentage of GDP. That average is over 2% but Australia has fallen from 1.7% in 1996 to 1.4% today.

Finland has made a commitment to have a minimum spending on R&D of 3% and many other countries are closer to 3% than the average 2%.

Here are some more international comparisons. In 1998 the United Kingdom announced a research funding increase of 1 billion pounds to which was added a further 400 million pounds from the Wellcome Trust. Further funding of £1 billion has been announced for 2002/03 and 2003/04. That is a funding boost in excess of $3.5 billion over three years.

The Canadian government has announced the Canada Research Chairs Program which will provide 2,000 new professorships over the next five years. For each chair the host university will receive both salary support of $200,000 (or $100,000, depending on which of the two tiers of achievement applies) and also $125,000 infrastructure support per chair. The distribution will be according to how much federal granting agency funding a university has received, so they will go on a competitive basis to the leading Canadian research universities. I cannot resist remarking that the Australian government recently decided to devalue by a factor of 2 the significance of success in national competitive research grants when allocating our research quantum.

The National Science Foundation budget in the US was increased by 7.1% in 1999 and 6.9% in 2000. Between 1982 and 1989 there were 37 information technology patents from Australia registered in the US. That compared with 53 IT patents from Israel, 12 from Taiwan, 4 from South Korea and 1 from Singapore. Between 1992 and 1996 everybody improved. Australia moved from 37 to 80, Israel moved from 53 to 258, Taiwan from 12 to 1,007, South Korea from 4 to 1, 629 and Singapore from 1 to 82.

If we use 1997 figures, the latest I have, Australia produced 2.7% of the world’s internationally recognized scientific publications, and shared 1% of world trade. That position is not sustainable without dedicated investment of resources and of human will power.

What will the G08 contribute? In the first place we surely offer a contact point for any national discussion of the aspirations of higher education. China is determined to have at least some universities of true international significance but sometimes Australia seems to be afraid of success. You can count on the Group of Eight to have the courage to achieve.

What about tangible contributions to back up our rhetoric?

There are Australian overseas initiatives at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington DC and at the Menzies Centre at King’s College, London. Both received $5 million from the Government last year and are bipartisan initiatives. We support the London venture and have made a special commitment to Washington.

In November last the G08 and Georgetown University co-hosted a major Asia Pacific Round Table which was organized on our behalf by the Global Foundation. This attracted significant players from our region and had major input from the World Bank and from the International Monetary Fund. It offered the kind of second-tier opportunity for diplomatic contact that, in my opinion, Australia is so well placed to broker.

Today I can announce an important additional G08 commitment to Washington. The G08 universities are funding a chair of Australian Studies at Georgetown University. The professor will teach budding American diplomats in the School of Foreign Service and will act generally as an intellectual ambassador for Australia in the capital of the United States.

I am pleased to announce moreover that the first scholar to occupy the G08 chair will be Professor Bettina Cass, who is just completing a term as Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Sydney.

As you know, Bettina is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. She is a respected analyst of social policy and will provide her audience with a perspective on important international challenges for governments as seen through Australian eyes.

I have another important announcement to make. Too often we hear chants to keep out the “rich and thick”, when the real challenge is bring in the “poor and bright”. The G08 is uncompromisingly elitist in its academic standards but is strongly committed to equity of access. Accordingly we have agreed to set up a system of G08 equity and merit scholarships. More than 100 undergraduate scholarships will be awarded to applicants from low SES backgrounds on the basis of academic merit and so that they may study at a G08 university. What this means is that each university will offer four new scholarships each year and we will facilitate transferability across the G08 network. The scholarships will be worth $2,500 per annum for the duration of the holder’s course. We believe in putting our money, limited though it is, where are mouths are.

I thank you for listening.