ANU Vice-Chancellor Offers a Piece of Advice to Those Jockeying to Lead the Nation. (September 10, 2007)

The Australian National University's quietly outspoken vice-chancellor, Ian Chubb seems to have taken the opportunity with the federal election looming to offer a quick 500 words via The Sydney Morning Herald today.

Essentially he's asking both the Coalition and Labor to quit messin' about universitywise and had words of praise for the federal Minister for Education. Science and Training. (perhaps with a wee tinge of cynicism?): "It was pleasing to see recently reported comments by the Education Minister, Julie Bishop, who said that not every university could expect money from the endowment fund, which she declared to be a mechanism to get more Australian universities into the world's top 100 and maybe two in the world's top 10."

Professor Chubb concluded with:

Australia is not big enough, and maybe not rich enough, to have all its universities operating in what we implicitly assume to be the world-class way. We need to understand and accept that world class has a number of dimensions, and that some are more expensive than others. To spread inadequate funds across universities is quite simply to average down to some middling level. How could that be good for Australia?

The Coalition and Opposition should not resile from their commitments to a sector in which institutions are different in nature and quality - different in what they do and how they do it. They need to support those differences with appropriate and selective funding, to take the big steps necessary to ensure those differences are real and enduring, and to ensure that all institutions can contribute in their own way to a sector of which we can all be justly proud.