From the Vice-Chancellor

Volume 8 Number 11 November 12 - December 9 2012

The University as host: knowledge-sharing and discovery

The University has hosted two very different Orations in the past month: the Menzies Oration on Higher Education and the NARRM Oration. Though the events have markedly different foci, they both saw national thought leaders come to Melbourne to share their knowledge and experiences with the University and wider community. 

Professor Janice Reid AM, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Western Sydney delivered this year’s Menzies Oration. Titled Menzies, Whitlam and Social Justice: A View From The Academy, Professor Reid spoke about the influences these two figures had on higher education, traced the threads which linked their visions for Australia’s universities and ventured some thoughts on how they relate to higher education today. 

Hosting events like the Menzies Oration gives the University an opportunity to act beyond its traditional role as a place where researchers seek knowledge through research endeavour and then share it with their students. 

By creating forums for engagement with the community and acting as a facilitator and curator, the University can foster learning in a different way, bringing together some of the nation’s and the world’s leaders to nurture the growth of mutual understanding and the sharing of knowledge across different borders, be they literal or metaphorical. 

This knowledge-sharing also extends across cultural and social borders. The annual NARRM oration, (NARRM refers to the country of the Melbourne region) series profiles leading Indigenous thinkers from across the globe in order to enrich ideas about possible futures for Indigenous Australians. First held in 2009, the event brings the University and the wider community together to reflect on Indigenous issues and their global significance. 

This year, Dr Megan Davis, UN expert member of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples, Professor of Law and Director of the Indigenous Law Centre at the University of New South Wales, spoke about how the right of self-determination, particularly as it has operated in international law, Australian policy and Aboriginal politics, has been unable to facilitate Aboriginal women’s capability to freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.

And the University is now planning its third Festival of Ideas, its free festival of learning which will see it play host to an international guest list that will deliver keynote speeches, debates, performances and other activities on the theme, The Art and Science of Wellbeing.

Leading Australian and international academics, intellectuals and thought leaders will engage audiences and participants on the themes of these keynotes, inviting input and discussion about science, health and society. 

It is by facilitating these kinds of events and bringing thought leaders and the local, national and international community together that the University meets its responsibility to help foster new knowledge and ideas. Or, as Professor Reid concluded her Menzies Oration, all universities have “the duty to use knowledge for social benefit, to strive to remove barriers to equality of opportunity, to create the grounds for productive engagement with our communities and to pass the baton of responsible citizenship to the generations which follow us”.

Glyn Davis
Vice-Chancellor