Newly Installed Vice-Chancellor of The University of Sydney Gives His Inaugural Address. (July 23, 2008)

The Media release reads:

In his inaugural address Vice-Chancellor and Principal, Dr Michael Spence says that Sydney's mission is to be an elite but not elitist university.

"In a time of change the University needs a clear vision of its mission and core values."

Speaking tonight before a packed audience in the University's Great Hall, Dr Spence said those values are truth, education and self-government.

"We probably need something more as well. And we are lucky at Sydney because we have it in abundance. We need a commitment to the place, and a strong belief in what we do," he said.

A graduate of the University of Sydney with First Class Honours in English, Italian and Law (BA (Hons)'85 and LLB (Hons)'87), Dr Spence has spent the past twenty years at Oxford where he served as head of the Law Faculty at the University of Oxford and most recently, was Head of the Social Sciences Division, one of the four Divisions that make up the University.

Dr Spence is the 25th Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sydney.

The following excerpt is provided by The Australian

But times of review are uncertain times. We could just as easily undermine our rich inheritance. To flourish in a time of change, we need a strong sense of our core mission and our core values.

Sydney is a world-class research university that is also a provider of quality education across a very wide range - a range far wider than that of many of our international competitors. But our mission is not just to be broad in our range of activities. It is also to be a standard setter in both teaching and research. Sydney is an institution unashamedly committed to excellence. This is an elite, but not elitist, place.

If our mission is to be an elite, but not elitist, university, engaged in a broad range of teaching and research, what should be our core values?

In the area of research, our core value should be truth, however contested that concept may be. The ultimate criterion by which we assess our work should be whether it tells us things that we believe to be true. All other metrics, necessary evils though they may be, are ultimately distorting. Counting pages privileges the prolix over the succinct. Counting research income privileges the empirical over the theoretical. Counting citations privileges the sciences over the humanities. A university administrator keeps an eye on these metrics, but must remember that they are only poor proxies for quality.

If truth should be our core research value, it should not be the only one, simply the priority. Consider the value of relevance. We must certainly engage with our community in the urgent and practical issues that we face together, issues that need immediate solution like cancer, climate change, poverty and economic and social development. No one would doubt it.

But relevance is dangerous if it blinds us to our distinctive place in the innovation process. An important function of the university is to answer the questions that our community has not yet thought to ask, that it does not know will be important. We must never forget the distinctive contribution that we have to make in the advancement of fundamental understanding. Our distinctive place in the innovation chain is right at the beginning.

In the area of teaching, our core value should certainly be education in its broadest, in its moral sense and not merely instruction. First, we should be honing fundamental intellectual skills, we should be training, and not merely filling, minds. We should be honing these skills in environments in which understanding is not simply disseminated, it is also created: environments in which able students can be in close proximity to those engaged in fundamental research. Second, we should encourage our students to participate in all the activities that the university has to offer. Coming from very different communities, with different experiences, they have at least as much to teach one another as we have to teach them, not only in the classroom, but also in the wide range of activities that make up the student experience.

Finally, governance. Here the core value has to be accountable self government. A university is a federation of self-governing academic communities. This governance process is built on the idea that excellence is achieved when clever people are given the freedom to do what they do well. The same principle applies in the sector more generally. Governments can be tempted to the micro-management of the university sector. But we need simpler public funding mechanisms with more self-government by the university, appropriately audited around quality in teaching and research. The model that I advocate for the individual university works well for the sector as a whole.

Another answer is for universities to wean themselves off their considerable dependence upon government funding. And we do need greater independence.

We need to have some difficult conversations; with industry about more funding for basic research than Australian universities have known; with our communities about the need for greater levels of philanthropic support, and with government about ways in which that philanthropic support could be encouraged. We also need to talk with government about ways in which higher levels of contribution from students who could afford it might be compatible with needs-blind admission and with generous packages of financial support for students who could not.

Unless we begin to explore some of these options, Australian universities may never be able to achieve either the levels of funding or the freedom that they require to achieve their world-class potential.

The full speech is available via this link