Balancing priorities in a research university
Tsinghua University
China
28 April 2001
It is both a great honour and a great pleasure to salute the 90th birthday of Tsinghua University. The research progress of China’s leading universities is swift, profound and much to be admired. Tsinghua University is certainly a leader and I am privileged that our institutions have strong cooperation.
We are all speaking about research universities aware that the concept is a relatively new one and aware that some people have already proclaimed its death. Although my University lies to the East of Beijing, I belong to what is often called a Western intellectual tradition. For me, the first universities arose in Europe in medieval times and were very much part of the church.
It can be argued that the very first monastic institutions engaged in pure spiritual enquiry – a form of research – and that descent to practical things took place under the church and were caused by the church. The point is that training of clerics soon became part of the job.
I like to think that the next evolutionary step was in response to the needs of the city state, training particularly for the professions. It was not lost on the merchants that a university was an asset, as the students consumed wine and food, bought clothing and the community did not send funds elsewhere to support its own local youth in study abroad.
It is argued that the German 19th century model of the research university, the one which is still largely adopted as an ideal, was designed to serve the nation state. It has high principles but practical roots, although in its purest form it is very expensive, as we all know.
That argument runs that globilisation has destroyed the nation state and therefore the Humboldtian research university lies in ruins. It is merely its memory that we preserve.
One thing seems certain. Universities are very stable entities and their stability comes from continuous re-invention. The research university is not dead but it is undergoing experiment and redefinition.
In the best traditions of the medieval trivium and the sacred trinity, I describe the functions of the modern university in three parts. All of them depend on research, all of them must be conceived by international standards and, of course, the categories overlap.
First and foremost the university should provide the individual with the most stimulating intellectual and cultural environment for personal growth. That is not a selfish statement glorifying the “me” generation, it refers to the public good that universities provide. The ultimate goal is not merely a prosperous society but a humane and civilized one.
Let me note in passing that the desirable teaching and learning environment is the campus as a whole. Student societies, sport, general interaction are every bit as important as the classroom experience. That is why the internet will never make university campuses redundant.
Secondly, we should prepare young people for the workforce. That could be misunderstood because I do not suggest training students to fill certain predetermined slots. The task of the research university is to nurture the creative and adaptable mind which will meet new challenges as they arise. That does, of course, require universities which are investigating the latest technology ahead of industry - not limping along behind using obsolescent equipment.
Thirdly the research university must create new knowledge and innovate. Just as it is essential that we engage in basic research so too must we be unafraid of commercial developments. One of the pleasures of this visit for me is that tomorrow I will visit a factory manufacturing solar collector tubes. One thousand people are employed there and a significant part of the applied physics was developed by a Tsinghua scientist while visiting my university.
These are the theories. Does the practice correspond? I can speak best of the University of Sydney. We are the oldest university in Australia, now 150 years young, but in 1995 we were rated around 4th and slipping amongst Australian research universities.
When I became Vice-Chancellor in 1996 I took $10 million per annum from the top of the budget for direct investment in strategic research activities. That scheme called U2000 was to take us through to the beginning of this year.
Measured by success in winning competitive research grants we are now very clearly number one in Australia. In the latest round of new Australian Research Council grants four universities won more than 40% of the funds available to Australia’s 38 universities. These were Sydney, Melbourne, UNSW and Queensland. Moreover we did 46% better than our nearest rivals Melbourne, 62% better than UNSW and 91% better than Queensland.
Just in case you think this is pure research at the cost of industry cooperation, let me mention the Business Higher Education Round Table awards for success in commercial developments. Of thirteen awards last year, six had the University of Sydney as a partner.
The U2000 scheme has lapsed but we have committed to a new scheme over the next decade so that we celebrate our 150th anniversary by committing $15 million for each of ten years.
This may sound like a simple success story and I have told it that way, but there are obvious tensions in balancing our priorities. In the same period as our research has leaped ahead our student numbers have increased. In 1995 we had 30,000 students, last year we had 40,000. The big increase is in undergraduate places up from 22,000 to 30,000.
This is good for staff inasmuch as their jobs are secure and we have led the way with salary increases (wages throughout the sector remain far too low). It is bad for staff inasmuch as workloads have increased. It cannot improve the environment for students as tutorial numbers have increased and classrooms become more crowded.
The indicators are not necessarily negative. We have won several national teaching awards, our students won this year’s world debating championships and we had 21 athletes in the Olympic Games with four gold and one bronze, and we regularly win the Australian University Games. As I said earlier not everything is provided within the classroom.
There are many ways in which I would like to invest still more money in our research. For example, we have only very limited funds for the early development phase when we seek to take research to the market. Nowadays there exist more venture capital funds even at the earliest stages and, of course, the best situation is when we contribute intellectual property to a joint venture and someone else provides all the money. The danger is that we do not achieve an optimal deal if we have no cash investment of our own. I would also like to contribute more than we do already to international research cooperations. This is one area in which I believe information technology will shrink the world to our advantage and there are many exciting experiments about how we can make best use of the opportunities.
Nevertheless, I have made a deliberate pause while we take explicit efforts to balance our priorities. In particular we have funded centrally a scheme of new blood lectureships. Each year for three years, we will allocate 15 additional three year positions to those areas of the University which have successfully restructured and which make a good strategic case. This strengthens the teaching environment and also improves our capacity for training the graduates that the country needs. In a related special initiative we have committed $1 million per year for the next three years to develop new strengths in computer science and related information technology teaching and research.
We have also made IT infrastructure – management information systems and delivery systems such as payroll and student enrolment – an essential component of our capital management strategy. Where previously we though of capital development as relating only to buildings and grounds, we are now regarding IT infrastructure as a fundamental part of this planning.
Despite these efforts to balance our priorities there are still those who deny that such development are progressive. Most of the dissidents are in the Arts Faculty and they believe that $10 million per annum would be better spent on reducing tutorial numbers and allowing staff to concentrate on student interactions rather than writing research papers or even worse, preparing grant applications.
They should be taken seriously. The humanities and social sciences have suffered both financially and in status in the recent past. We must make sure that academics in these fields feel a treasured part of the enterprise. Perhaps the greatest challenge is to find an effective process for balancing the priorities. On the one hand we need to recognize commercial reality, swift response to opportunities and the fact that research universities are themselves large businesses. On the other hand we have a strong tradition of collegially based self-governance. How do we combine these?
It is appropriate to a university forum to end with a question.