Michael Spence Takes Over at The University of Sydney and Offers a Few Generalisations Certain to Garner Mixed Reactions. (July 16, 2008)

Professor Michael Spence has now taken over from Gavin Brown as vice-chancellor of The University of Sydney and hasn't been slow in stating his viewpoint, speaking generally, on several key issues of academic governance.

A bit of recent history:

Assumed vice-chancellorship University of Sydney, July 2008

Accepted appointed as University of Sydney vice-chancellor October 2007

Head of the Social Sciences Division, University of Oxford (from October 2005)
Chair of the Law Board, University of Oxford (2002-2004)
Chair of the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford (2001-2002)

The Australian's Stephen Matchett reports that Professor Spence considers the "academic unions' national wage claim of 27 per cent over three years, 'fiscally irresponsible'", while agreeing: "Internationally there is going to be financial pressure on salaries, that is the law of supply and demand and it is something we need to face."

He went on to say: "more diverse and less dependent on direct government funding" was essential. "In the UK the notion that education is solely a government responsibility is not as deeply entrenched as it was 10 years ago. It is possible Australia might see a similar culture shift... [Nevertheless]we need to talk to government about more public support than there is at the moment."

Professor Spence indicated he is eying off the philanthropic sector.

On the other hand it's worth remembering that the United States' most prestigious public research university, The University of California, Berkeley has an endowment of just on $3 billion about twice that of The University of Sydney but less than one-tenth that of Harvard.

 Certainly an extra $1.5 billion would be a very welcome gift but it's going to take a lot more than that to make Sydney an antipodean UC, Berkeley.

Professor Spence told Mr Matchett that it's: "an exciting time to be in higher education in Australia... The zeitgeist has changed, the Bradley review demonstrates the Government is prepared to think in a fundamental way about higher education."

He also emphasised that institutions like Sydney University "have the mission of being elite but not elitist, but nevertheless he had "willing ears and an eagerness to engage the academic community here in Sydney in a discussion on strategic issues".

Then alluding to the proposed Research for Excellence in Australia (REA) mechanism for distributing significant sums of public funding for research: "Anybody engaged in high quality research should be able to compete for public research funds... Metrics for research quality are proxies and they are always only proxies. Counting pages rewards the verbose. Counting research income rewards the empirical over the theoretical. Counting citations rewards natural sciences over the humanities. They are important proxies and we have got to use them, but we have got to remember that in the end the criterion by which we should be assessing our research is whether it tells us new things we believe to be true." 

And he opined what appears to be a remarkable view remembering the ructions last year at Oxford between vice-chancellor, John Hood on the one hand, and the Oxford congregation on the other: "Dr Spence said he wanted the university to be 'a federation of self-governing academic communities'."

Finally he told The Australian that there was one group he was willing to advise: his colleagues in the Group of Eight elite institutions.

One of the things that is peculiar in coming from overseas is to see the competition among the major Australian research institutions. They are all fine universities, they receive year on year not wildly variant shares of public funding and the challenges they face are shared challenges so they have much more to gain from co-operation with one another than they do from fierce competition. A little bit of competition is not a bad thing but fierce competition is not constructive.

As the newbie, how that's going to go over with his fellow Sandstoners is a moot point, but of course he's been an Oxonian for twenty years.