The University of Western Australia

Attributes of international excellence: issues in global higher education

Speech by Professor Don Markwell,
Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education), The University of Western Australia,
at the UWA Leadership Retreat,
Rendezvous Observation City, Scarborough,
Wednesday 7 February 2007

Colleagues –

It is a delight to be with you, and I hope you will forgive me for beginning on a personal note. In 1984, when I was a post-graduate student at Oxford en route to a year’s fellowship at Princeton, I had the great pleasure of coming to teach at the University of Western Australia for a few months, living for those months at Currie Hall. It is no exaggeration to say that I loved my time here – it was rewarding both in teaching and in research, and for friendships, several of which endure to this day. In the intervening 22 years, for all the improvements and changes here at UWA, two things have not changed – the beauty of the campus, and the friendliness of the people. I am delighted to be back at UWA in this role focused on enhancing the student learning experience, including this year overseeing the consultative review of course structures, to which I hope everyone in this room will make a contribution.

I have come from nine years of heading an institution, Trinity College in the University of Melbourne, whose first Sub-Warden, or deputy head, was, like its first Warden, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin - John Winthrop Hackett. That was before he became wealthy, and also – I used to lament but now celebrate - before he became one of the greatest benefactors in the history of Australian education.

At Trinity as in Western Australia, Hackett was keenly interested in what we in Australia could learn from the leading universities of the world. The University which Hackett founded is today a very fine university, finer than the world yet knows, and one which is rightly – and I hope without complacency - focused on ‘achieving international excellence’. Alan has asked me to speak, along the lines of a speech I gave at the University of Queensland last year which attracted some media and ministerial attention, about the attributes of the world’s leading universities and issues in global higher education. I am sorry if you have heard or read all this before, but it may nonetheless – I hope - spark a fresh thought or reflection, or two. I will not try myself to apply what I am saying to the UWA context – you know far more about that than I do – but I hope that this will help us all to think afresh about how to take this fine university, in the words of an important book, from ‘good to great’.

Thinking about this University and about Australian higher education generally in its international context, and by comparison with the highest international standards, is essential if we are to think seriously about the future.

In a sense what I want to say is a report on study leave which I had in late 2005 and early 2006. During my study leave, as well as completing the manuscript of my book on John Maynard Keynes and International Relations, I spent over three months visiting universities and colleges in the United States, particularly Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, Princeton, and Amherst, as well as other universities and liberal arts colleges; the UK, particularly Oxford and Cambridge; and China, namely Fudan and Shanghai Jiao Tong universities. Necessarily what I have to say will be impressionistic and partial, and based on my own personal experiences and encounters, but I hope it may nonetheless help us to think about UWA in international context.

I cannot hide the exhilaration of discussing research on democratisation in China with scholars at Jiang Zemin’s alma mater in Shanghai; or watching as Oxford’s Congregation, the parliament of the dons, of which I used to be a member, debates John Hood’s governance proposals; or seeing – in company with women students - how Wellesley College in Boston works to educate what it calls ‘women who will make a difference in the world’ – its alumni include Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright.

On the day I left Australia on this study leave, in September 2005, The Economist published a survey of higher education which argued, and I quote, that ‘the most important recent development in the world of higher education has been the creation of a super-league of global universities that are now engaged in a battle for intellectual talent and academic prestige’.

My visits to American, British, and Chinese universities seemed to me to confirm this.

For all their imperfections, which are real and some of which I will mention later, leading American universities remain

• magnets for faculty, staff and student talent;
• with immense and ever-growing resource, private and public;
• with a high degree of freedom of action;
• with clear focus on the quality of education and of research, and also of service;
• committed to equity and diversity as well as to excellence;
• with the vigorous and generous support of their alumni and other supporters, often including in business and government; and
• with a well-proven model of liberal undergraduate education and professional post-graduate education – a model found in the leading US institutions but less characteristic of the US system as a whole than once it was.

The leaders of the top American universities and colleges seem highly conscious that they operate in a national and increasingly global competition, but – ever vigilant – are generally comfortable but not relaxed about their place. They are highly conscious of the social purpose and public, as well as private, benefits of higher education for a civilised society and a competitive economy – from its role in social mobility to its role in economic innovation. When I asked the head of one leading US university – a prestigious and well-resourced state university - whether higher education institutions faced greater risk and uncertainty than before, his response was crisp: ‘That’s a particularly Australian perspective.’ More accustomed than we are to the anxieties of competition, and with greater resources, including from student fees and philanthropic support, to withstand those anxieties, leading US universities are focussed on powering ahead. For the traditional cohorts of students in their late teens and early 20s, they do not see the rise of new education providers – online, for profit, or from overseas – as a serious risk to them. On the other hand, they also, of course, do feel their own financial limitations, even vulnerability – even the largest endowment is never enough for the huge and ever-growing costs of high-quality education and research - and they are conscious of widespread public criticism of many aspects of American higher education, from its cost to its alleged political correctness to the over-commercialization of intervarsity sport.

The top British universities, Oxford and Cambridge, have some but not all of the attributes and advantages of the top US universities, with high calibre academics and students, and well-proven models of education especially at the undergraduate level, with still-strong college and tutorial systems. They remain quite exceptional institutions, maintaining near-top positions in the global rankings. But - less well endowed financially, with less well developed philanthropic programs, and far less freedom of action on student fees, and generally more heavily regulated by government – they are feeling more at risk in the global competition, especially from the top US universities. Their leaders strongly feel the need to become better able, in governance and other ways, to think and act coherently to maintain their international position. There has been and is much debate about the changes that this involves.

In China, universities that recognise that their own global position is more modest are determined to remain or become part of a Chinese super-league that is increasingly competitive with the world’s top universities – aiming for their university to become one of the finest in the world. The Shanghai ranking of world universities was, in the words of its creators, developed ‘in order to find out the gap between Chinese universities and world-class universities’. The Chinese universities I visited seem

• eager to learn from western, especially American, models, including degree structures and curriculum, from freshman college to schools of public and international affairs;
• hungry to attract western staff, and keen on faculty and student exchanges, degrees taught jointly with western universities, their researchers publishing more overseas (especially in citation index journals) and undertaking joint research and conferences;
• focussed hard on research priorities greatly influenced, if not set, by government priorities in ‘key research centres’; but
• constrained by various factors, including the limits to academic freedom in a country and in universities still dominated by the Communist Party, and by the uneven command of the English language, which they recognise is, so to speak, the lingua franca of the academic world.

At both Fudan and Shanghai Jiao Tong universities, I asked colleagues what the big strategic issues were for them, and at both universities they responded: attracting and developing top-quality faculty, and resources.

This reference to American, British, and Chinese universities in competition makes it all sound a bit like the Tri-wizard Tournament in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, in which the competitors seek both the Tri-wizard Cup and, not merely what the University of Melbourne calls ‘growing esteem’, but ‘eternal glory’. There are similarities between the Tri-wizard and university competitions:

• the stakes are very high;
• it is not possible to back out of the competition alive;
• some competitors will do anything to succeed, while there is also scope for co-operation between players; and
• it may be that it can in time be won by the youngest entrant – the Harry Potter of the university world.

But, unlike the Tri-wizard Tournament,

• the competition is open to anyone, and there are many competitors from many countries;
• the competition is never actually won, and never ends; and
• perhaps above all, the competition is not fiction: it is for real.

Many of us academics do not like aspects of this. Personally, I lament the huge international attention given to global rankings which are, in my view, methodologically questionable, if not unsound. Isn’t it bizarre that UWA should in one year rank 80th in the THES index, and the next year rank 111th, alongside Wake Forest University, North Carolina, which the previous year had ranked 199th? Or that the University of Queensland ranked – like UWA - between 102nd and 150th in the Shanghai index, but 45th in the THES ranking in which we ranked 111th? Or that the Melbourne ranked 22nd in the latest THES ranking, but 78th in the Shanghai index? And all of this so soon after Alan Gilbert and others stated – with no voices I heard in contradiction - that, ‘in resources-per-student or resources-per-researcher, Australia has no university in the first 100 in the world, and our competitiveness is slipping’.

For all their imperfections, the evidence is mounting that rankings influence behaviour in what is increasingly an international competition for students and staff of high potential and performance. Newsweek has now developed its own global ranking of universities, and if the ever-growing number of rankings of US universities and colleges, based on differing criteria, and at the heart of the student admissions industry in the US, is any guide, we can expect the development of further global rankings, some more plausible than others. I hope there will also be much more work, such as is undertaken at the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems in Boulder, Colorado, on – for example - how to assess institutional effectiveness in promoting student learning – an important topic for Australia, and for us at UWA.

Crude rankings cannot determine what it means to be ‘one of the finest universities in the world’, and I hope that Australian institutions will neither be lulled into complacency nor discouraged into lack of ambition by their places in the global rankings. Although the obstacles are formidable and are perhaps overwhelming, it is my hope that Australia’s leading universities – such as this university – will work, year in and year out, aspiring to rise ultimately into the very highest echelon of the world’s universities - part of what The Economist called the ‘super-league of global universities’. We should aim this high because it means that the education we offer, the research we do, the knowledge we transfer and the service we perform is of the highest possible quality. As Sir John Medley said in 1943, ‘A university if it stands for anything stands for quality’.

Is this too ambitious? Some aspects of the global competition appear more like the Red Queen’s world in Lewis Carroll than they do the Tri-wizard Tournament. The Red Queen pointed out to Alice that it is essential to run faster and faster simply to stand still – and if you actually want to get somewhere, you need to run twice as fast as you possibly can – something Alice naturally found somewhat perplexing.

Strategists at the Stanford Business School have developed interesting analyses of what they call ‘Red Queen competition’ in the business world. But for me, revisiting Stanford University after not having been there for over 20 years, the most striking thing is that its extraordinary rise - from a farm in 1891, to a ‘middling regional university’ in the mid-20th century, to indisputably one of the great universities of the world today – shows how it is possible for an institution to rise dramatically through the ranks. There is much to be learnt from Stanford’s particular blend of innovation and entrepreneurship, its ethos that anything is possible, and its intimate connection with Silicon Valley, a prototype of course for other regions – of which there are a growing number - of intense interaction between university research, commercial development, and other knowledge-based activities. We learn that wise public policy-makers and wise business leaders deeply value the role of universities. But perhaps above all we learn that, although it may be necessary to run hard just to stand still, it is also possible really to go places. The striking rise of New York University in the last 30 years, and especially of its Law School, which I briefly revisited, makes the same point. And there are many other examples around the world.

It is possible for a university to make itself, over a period of time, one of the great universities of the world. Might UWA’s place in the sun ultimately be to be the Stanford, or perhaps the Berkeley, of Australia? Why not?

As Australian universities and colleges aspire to become among the finest in the world, we will need to focus sharply on what the attributes are of the finest universities, and learn from them. I have for many years argued that we have much to learn from undergraduate education in the top US and British universities and liberal arts colleges, and I have to say that my visits a little over a year ago confirmed that conviction. Let me simply list, as a sort of ideal type, the attributes that I identify in the finest undergraduate institutions in the world – remembering, of course, that there is diversity among the leading institutions of the world, but recognising that the world’s finest institutions also have many attributes in common.

They have concentrations of the very best students from around their country and indeed from around the world. Generally these students come together in a residential college community, usually in a campus of considerable beauty. Students benefit from individual mentoring or advising from senior academics. There is a high quality of academic tuition, with – because the best education is interactive - an emphasis on small group teaching and individual attention, by high-quality academic staff, who – whether in research-intensive universities or the leading liberal arts colleges – work, sometimes with great difficulty and sometimes with great benefits, to combine research and teaching. At its best, this teaching stresses genuine mastery of material, independent thought, and clear communication. Face-to-face teaching is, of course, increasingly supplemented – but not replaced – by online provision. The focus is generally non-vocational at the undergraduate level, providing some form of liberal education. (Incidentally, I was impressed by the emphasis placed on science in leading liberal arts colleges.)

In the institutions I am describing, there is a sense of engagement in a rich intellectual and public debate outside the classroom, strong attention to student welfare and pastoral care, and concern for the development of character and values. There are rich opportunities for extra-curricular activities of a high quality – be they in sport, music, theatre, politics, religion, community service, or more – from which students gain much in their personal development. This is helped by the strong sense of cohort – of belonging to the Class of 2009, or whatever it may be – sharing its journey together through university years. All this generally takes place in a university or college considerably smaller than the typical Australian university, and with far fewer students per academic than we now have.

It is interesting that, in 2005, its centenary year, Fudan University established Fudan College, with – as it was described to me – first-year undergraduates at Fudan doing a course of general education - including English, physical education, and liberal arts - prior to more specialised study in their later undergraduate years and, for some, in post-graduate courses. This addition of general or foundational education to the traditional stress on professional education is seen as better educating students, including in all those topics that require an inter-disciplinary approach, and which benefit from understanding their wider context. It enables students’ choices of specialised studies to be informed by their first-year exposure to a range of subjects. Mentors help students in their subject choices.

You will not be surprised that there have been organisational or management issues, as well as, of course, difficulties to resolve between Fudan College and specialist colleges, such as the medical school, which naturally want students with a strong foundation in their fields. At the same time, as in some Australian universities, there are advocates of general education for longer than a single year – advocates of, say, a US-style 4-year liberal arts undergraduate degree, followed by professional graduate study.

Fudan College is also residential, with first-year students living together - in quite modest conditions - on campus in so-called ‘academies’, with living and taking classes together deliberately integrated. I was told that Fudan College consciously borrowed from Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and especially Yale. The initiative had received wide attention in China, and was depicted by the University President as a step for Fudan to become a ‘first-class world university’.

In the institutions which I visited, six themes seemed to me to recur. At one level they will seem unsurprising, but they are all often pursued with vigour, intensity, and imagination in the kinds of institutions I have described, helping to strengthen further the attributes which make them the world’s finest. You will be relieved to know that I will mention but not expand much on these six recurring themes.

First, what the management consultants McKinsey, controversially but I think without exaggeration, call ‘the war for talent’ – the competition to attract, develop, and retain the most outstanding faculty and academic leaders, and students, anywhere in the world, including increased recognition of family circumstances as a factor in career decisions, and renewed emphasis on developing one’s own junior faculty members. The world’s finest universities seek the very best people in the world, and invest in them. What I think of as ‘the Harvard question’ – who is the very best person in the world in this field, and how do we get them? – should be our question.

Secondly, the need for ever-greater resources, which governments are unlikely adequately to provide, and so need to be drawn increasingly from student fees, especially domestic student fees – wherever possible combined with scholarships and loans – and from major philanthropic support from actively-engaged alumni and other benefactors. Philanthropic support is proving crucial in Britain and in China, as well as in the US. For example, Li Ka Shing, the richest person in Asia, has created a university in southern China. As one does.

I am pleased that the federal minister has commissioned a study – like that commissioned by Tony Blair’s government in the UK – on how to encourage philanthropy towards higher education in Australia.

Thirdly, partly driven by developments in science, technology, and globalisation, there is review of the areas in which the university teaches and researches, most especially to ensure an inter- or multi-disciplinary approach where it is needed, as indeed it is from stem cell research to neuroscience to the study of global poverty to non-traditional security and beyond – all topics, and there are many others, that require expertise from across a range of sciences, and social sciences and humanities, including ethics. An interesting case is the need to understand various world religions if current international conflicts and cultural diversity within countries are to be understood, and the advantage in this to those institutions, such as several leading American and British universities, with strength in religious studies. How to balance the need for strong research within disciplines with the need to encourage and remove obstacles to multi-disciplinary research is demanding careful attention. How to refresh for the 21st century the traditional vision of liberal undergraduate education, weakened in the United States by creeping vocationalism and other forces, is a major focus for many leading educators and institutions, many of whom believe the need for such liberal education has never been greater than it is today, in a world of rapid change, global forces, polarization of opinion and inadequate tolerance and humility, and pressures for instant action rather than sustained reflection.

You will be aware that in Australia today there is growing focus on curriculum review, most conspicuously with the move at Melbourne to a model of generalist undergraduate degrees followed by professional post-graduate degrees, but also including curriculum review in a number of other universities, including of course our consultative review this year at UWA.

Fourthly, partly in response to criticisms in the US – including from such figures as Derek Bok - of the alleged decline in quality of university education, there has been renewed focus on the academic and broader student experience, be it through reducing student-to-staff ratios and class sizes, or curriculum reform, or improving students’ writing skills, or re-strengthening out-of-classroom connections between faculty and students, or providing high-quality campus centres for students, or increasing online support, or increasing the emphasis on students engaging in community service, or encouraging student engagement in a variety of extra-curricular activities (including trying to achieve balance in what can be – should be - the very positive role of sport in universities), or enhancing the performing and visual arts in students’ lives – for example, with a recent $101 million benefaction at Princeton – or grappling – for the most part unsuccessfully, I think – with problems in student culture and behaviour.

Let me add a word on two aspects of this. The first is that Harvard has only two weeks ago published a major study by a professorial committee entitled ‘A Compact to Enhance Teaching and Learning at Harvard’. It argues:

By more effectively combining world-class research with the vigorous pursuit of pedagogical improvement and excellence in teaching, [Harvard] can enrich student learning, make the lives of faculty teachers more interesting and enjoyable, and distinguish itself even further in the ranks of leading research universities.

The proposed ‘compact to enhance teaching and learning at Harvard’ focuses on five goals:

• ‘Concrete measures to foster a more collegial teaching culture, in which faculty regularly share course materials and discuss teaching goals and practices.
• Greater support for pedagogical innovation, including funding, administrative assistance, and a review of current course scheduling practices.
• Improved systems of accounting so that faculty achievements in teaching and advising can be more fully recorded and more meaningfully used by individuals, departments, and administrative offices.
• More consistent and explicit linking of good teaching to salary adjustments, faculty appointments, and career advancement, and
• Increased visibility for exemplary teaching methods and achievements, as an educational tool and an incentive to teach well.’

In welcoming the report, which they initiated, Dean Jeremy Knowles spoke of the report as focussing attention on how Harvard faculty teach rather than what they teach, and as encouraging a shift of culture with the potential to improve the educational experience of every undergraduate at Harvard; and President Derek Bok spoke of its addressing more comprehensively than ever before what he called ‘our core academic business – teaching our students’.

Although focused on one university – Harvard - this report is a noteworthy step in the increasingly global focus on enhancing teaching and learning, and the all-round student learning experience. I am sure that some of us will want to study it – considering it in the context of the existing remarkable quality of Harvard education - and consider its lessons for us at UWA, including the many things it shows us we are already doing right as well as what it challenges us to improve.

Less encouragingly, let me add a word also about problems in student culture and behaviour: there is growing awareness in the US that their jock equivalent of what I call ‘the three Fs’ – excessive and inappropriate focus on Fosters, football, and fornication – has very damaging effects. A woman student writing in the student newspaper of one of America’s most prestigious institutions wrote that rape, often in a fog of alcohol, is – quote – ‘the most severe problem on our campus’. I was urged to read Tom Wolfe’s novel I am Charlotte Simmons, about a bright woman undergraduate, which portrays the dissipation of intellectual aspirations in a sex-obsessed jock culture. And a recent book on US student culture is called Binge: Campus Life in an Age of Disconnection and Excess. Though we in Australia are often more conscious of the problem of disconnection of students from campus life, the truth is that issues of excess, such as alcohol abuse and sexual harassment, are or should be recognised as issues here also.

Fifthly, and related to this, there is in the universities I visited a strong emphasis on equity and diversity, including efforts, of uneven seriousness and success, to promote gender equality, ethnic and religious diversity, socio-economic diversity, and equal rights for LGBTs – the widely-used term for lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgendered. Very many co-educational institutions retain essentially masculine cultures, and have not yet achieved the thorough transformation needed to have cultures of genuine equality. Some have embarked on wide-ranging programs of profound change: for example, Duke University under the leadership of Nan Keohane embarked on its widely-admired Women’s Initiative, but last year indictments for rape – later dropped - against three members of the men’s lacrosse team and the continuing controversy around this complex case have highlighted unresolved issues of gender, race, class, the role of sport, and jock culture. There is also much concern in the US that, despite strenuous efforts and the expenditure of much money on scholarships and financial aid, top universities and colleges often remain too much, as the president of one of them described his own to me, a ‘rich people’s place’.

Sixthly, one encounters a strong focus on internationalisation and globalisation, including seeking to develop a coherent strategy for all the rich dimensions of global engagement, not simply – as in some Australian institutions – as a cover for the recruitment of students as a source of revenue, crucial though that is to us. Internationalisation increasingly means taking a global perspective on all matters and acting as an international, as well as a local, state, and national, institution – including

• setting high international standards in everything,
• encouraging international, intercultural and inter-faith awareness throughout the university community,
• ensuring a culture in which people of all backgrounds feel equally welcome,
• seeking faculty and students from around the world,
• encouraging language studies,
• encouraging international experience by students and staff alike,
• curriculum that genuinely reflects international experience and global issues,
• international community service projects,
• alumni activities around the world, and more.

There is much focus on the study and debate of issues related to globalisation, and also seeking to ensure that universities have expertise on all major regions of the world, including specifically China, India, and the Middle East, and on major religions. While some universities are interested in teaching overseas, many are very cautious about overseas campuses. Ad hoc and desperate expedients for international student recruitment which risk the reputation and quality assurance of the university, sometimes promoted in Australian universities, are not how the world’s finest universities operate.

There are, of course, other issues or trends in leading universities one could discuss. One is debate about the proper relationship between universities, the marketplace, and entrepreneurship. Another is debate, especially but not only in the United States, about whether there is a prevailing orthodoxy – what its right-wing critics call a politically correct or ‘liberal’ (in the American sense) orthodoxy – which biases the whole university environment to the left, and which – for example - sustains a pet hate of rightwing commentators, affirmative action. Personally, I regard most discussion I have seen of this in Australia as fairly sterile and irrelevant. A more relevant lesson for us from leading universities is how much attention some of them are giving to their electronic presence and aggressive electronic projection, as part both of their focused communications strategies, and their thinking about how to use IT for external and internal projection as well as for enhancing education – for example, ensuring all faculty members and senior administrators have full CVs on their websites, with links to all their publications that are available electronically; using email for regular and attractive communications with alumni; ensuring their websites are of such quality and easy navigability as befits what is the University’s most important publication by far – as well as, of course, and amongst much else, using a portal within the institution as the electronic embodiment of the University’s all-round educational offering to its students. I cannot help thinking that all this is highly relevant to us at UWA.

While there are many other topics that could be traversed, the six themes I have identified - the war for talent; the need for more resources; review of areas of teaching and research; enhancing the all-round student learning experience; equity and diversity; and internationalisation and globalisation – seem to me the most salient. It is true that Australian universities generally are in various ways addressing each of these six themes. But the focus and energy of the world’s leading universities on these themes represents a challenge to us, and leaves me with several questions. I deliberately address most of these questions, not specifically to the UWA context, but to Australian universities generally, and also to the wider community and to our public policy makers.

• Are those Australian university leaders who aspire to have their university counted in time among ‘the finest universities in the world’ sufficiently ambitious and sufficiently clear about what they mean by that, and about how we measure our progress towards that?
• Do we give enough stress to attracting the most outstanding intellectual talent from around the world, and more generally investing in our people?
• Don’t we need massively more resources if any of our universities is to have any chance of being truly ‘one of the finest universities in the world’?
• Do our governments sufficiently recognise the crucial social significance of universities – including for educational opportunity for students, and innovation in the economy – and the need for greater public, as well as private, resources?
• Don’t we also need to be far more ambitious than most universities have been about obtaining philanthropic support, both from alumni and potential friends of our universities and colleges, both within Australia and overseas? Our aim, I believe, must be to build on past foundations – most obviously for us the generosity and vision of John Winthrop Hackett – to create a much broader and deeper culture of educational philanthropy in this country than has ever existed before. Philanthropic support is needed for endowing professorships and other academic positions, for research projects, providing new buildings and other facilities, and general endowment, as well as – crucially - for scholarships.
• When student fees – students contributing to the high cost of their education - will I believe unavoidably need to grow as a source of university revenue, are we – either in government or in universities - giving enough attention to having coherent and comprehensive approaches to student financial support, including scholarships and financial aid, loans, and student employment, all allocated on a fair and equitable basis?
• Do we give enough weight to issues of equity and diversity, including ensuring within universities and colleges a reality of educational opportunity, and a culture of genuine equality of respect, for women and men of all backgrounds?
• Have we thought freshly enough, and what can we learn from the curriculum and course reforms of others, about what we teach, and how we structure our course offerings, as well as about how we teach?
• Within our resource constraints, and given the relatively large size of most Australian universities, do we think and act cleverly enough to achieve the rich environment of student engagement, within and beyond the classroom, which – for all their imperfections – are achieved at generally very high levels within the world’s leading universities?
• Do we give enough attention to the way in which studying in a residential academic community can enhance the learning experience, curricular and extra-curricular, of our students? That is, do we take seriously enough the role and potential of our residential colleges within the University? As I have mentioned, the very finest universities of the world are predominantly residential in nature – seeing education in a rich collegiate setting as the finest they can offer.
• Do we - or indeed any Australian university - have or are we developing an international strategy that genuinely covers all aspects of the University’s global engagement, thinking it through from first principles as to what a University which focuses on ‘achieving international excellence’ should do?
• Finally, have we given enough attention to the ways in which universities have risen and fallen in quality and standing, and what the factors are that enable a university, like the case of Stanford which I have mentioned, to rise and rise? And what are the risks to guard against?

To use the imagery of this leadership retreat - Stanford and, across the bay, Berkeley have found their places in the sun. As I asked before - can we be the Stanford or perhaps the Berkeley of Australia? What can be our place in the sun, and what do we need to do to get there?

At very least, I hope that we will continue to learn, both from the weaknesses and from the strengths of the world’s most outstanding universities, both old and new, as we continue to work at ‘achieving international excellence’.

Attributes of international excellence: issues in global higher education - Professor Don Markwell.