 On behalf of the Vice Chancellor, I'd like to welcome those of you who are visiting the Australian National University, but those of you who are students and staff here, welcome to the China and the World Centre if you've not been here before. This is a very special place, our newest building and I think is more and more used every moment. Just before I launch into introducing the event you will notice that there is a camera over there and I've been instructed to alert you that this session is being filmed so you should be aware of that and if you do not give your consent to being filmed then you perhaps can cover your face like this right now or you can leave, you can make a choice. This discussion this afternoon is a follow-up from a discussion that Brian Schmidt, our Nobel Laureate, initiated in a public lecture at University House about eight months ago where he articulated a different future for ANU. It's one of a number of discussions that have been going on across the campus and in a way that's not surprising because ANU is an institution that's devoted to innovation, both in its education and its research. As you travel the length and breadth of the campus and you and we just talked with Amy about going across to Western Creek or you go to Koyol or you go up to the Northern Territory, this place is brimming with ideas and it makes sense if ANU is to navigate what is really a very interesting, perhaps the best way of describing its situation in the federal politics at the moment around the funding of higher education, models for education, but not just the dollar's talk but also the future of higher education, its contribution to the economy, to society and to new ideas generation. Then of course we would draw upon that enthusiasm, that innovation and that brimming over of desire to chart a bigger future, an exciting future, building on the past of ANU that events like this will take place. As I've been part of the executive travelling around the campus, hearing from staff in all parts of the university, there is no shortage of views and this is what excites me about today's event is that as part of really a much wider discussion in which we're encouraging staff and students to really get out there and tell us what it is you think ANU could be doing. There's what ANU could be doing in the shorter term but as I think you'll agree it's the longer term future and the bigger picture that we are just as excited about. So this afternoon, Brian Schmidt will be kicking off the discussion, he tells me that he will not have much power point which I'm very, I'm just wishing that to be the case, Brian, not much power point. He'll be joined by Professor Stephen Howes, Dr Amy King, Dr Nicholas Farrelly and Shiro Armstrong, Dr Shiro Armstrong and so without further ado I'm going to welcome Brian Schmidt to hop up and to get the ball rolling. Thank you, Brian. Thank you, everyone. This started off with Peter Drysdale saying I just want you to come over and talk to a few people. So okay, glad to see everyone here. So what I really want to talk about and this is meant to be a conversation and it's not going to start out with a conversation, it's going to start out with me shouting at you I guess and then I want you to shout back and what I'm advocating is we ensure that we do not become just another university because that is one path forward if we're not careful for this university, not necessarily due to what we're doing internally but due to external things which change the landscape of how ANU, I guess the external landscape that ANU sits in. So let's think back, we're a very young university. We were built from nothing, started in 1946. We were meant to be a national university with a difference and in very short order we delivered on a great scientific legacy, a great legacy in humanities as well. We have, we think about it, we have, we are the university that has done three out of five Nobel Prizes in the history where the work has actually been done in the country. 60% and that was done literally in our first 50 years. That is a remarkable achievement for a university. But it doesn't mean we're guaranteed to keep on doing that in the future. As I said, the the prizes of Nobel Prizes and Kyoto prizes and things goes way beyond the few individuals. You sort of get lucky. These big prizes are really about people being at the right place at the right time, doing good work. But in order for someone to win a prize, you got to have a thousand people doing great work. And so that's why these prizes are sort of used as surrogates to describe how good a place is because it isn't just one person. It's really a thousand people doing good stuff and things happen when you do good stuff. My discovery in this tapestry was me doing good work, but just being really at the right place at the right time to discover that the universe was doing something that shouldn't have been. So it's something that we can't take for granted that it will continue on. But we have a great legacy. We have a legacy of politicians. Lots of them. We have diplomats off the page. We are, you know, business people. We forget about all the billionaires that we've produced. We have produced more than a few. And with all of this, you might ask yourself, then why are we having this conversation? And the reason we're having this conversation is because not everyone sees the world in the same rose colored glasses that I've just showed you. For example, if you are a university vice chancellor from another university, for example, Glenn Davis was a reasonable guy. This is a letter he sent me just before I wrote when I'm just before when I was writing this talk eight months ago. And I was discussing about how the world was changing around A&U. And he said, far from being disadvantaged by present policy, the A&U receives substantial research funds available to no other Australian university. And that is true. In 2012, this amounts to about $180 million from the National Institute's grants. The special funding has been provided to the A&U for decades. And I would argue the reason we have been different is because of that funding. Many in, and this is the important part, many in the sector would welcome the debate about the important role of the National University. There is, however, a tough question often asked about the A&U. Given generations of privileged funding, why is the institution not already the elite institution you propose? And I was referring that A&U was not the elite institution now that it was. We were arguably, given where we started from, the elite institution. The elite institution that I think A&U needs to be. Given the resources available, A&U from the 1940s to the 1970s became exactly what it should have been. And it was Australia's most prestigious university, one of the great universities of the world. And we are still a great university. But we do not have the status that we had 30 years ago. And we can argue that point. But I will win that argument, I think, because I will just bring external people in, and they will tell you what I am saying. We are not what we were 30 years ago. And that's before I got here. But that greatness is one of the reasons I came here, because of that reputation. And so we still are living on that. So why, I should also say, the other things we have produced is, for example, Melbourne's last two vice chancellors, both did their degrees here. So we're help out on all things. It is Australia's best interest, in my opinion, to ensure that A&U is as solid a university as possible. So when I was giving this talk the last time, I walked out, and you never know what's going to happen. Peter kind of surprised me having more than a few people here. And I walked out and saw this at my local newsstand. I was like, A&U no longer wow, that was not really the point of what I was saying. However, so it's not that we're no longer great. I don't think we're as great as we once were. And we need to think about why that is. In my opinion, the A&U was installed in the 1980s and 90s, largely because of our success. The whole point of A&U was to build up a capability of research so that the nation could have research. And we did that. And all these people went out and became vice chancellors and professors at other universities. And our progeny became our competition. That was why we were born. That's why the A&U was made to exist. And we succeeded at that. And we did a really, really good job. But during that time because of the competition, I think the way we lost our way is we became very competitive with the other universities. And instead of really being what I would call this national university trying to reach out and help everyone, became very competitive with them. And people began to despise us, I think, was the way I would describe. When I meet people over the age of 60 in other universities, there is just venom and vitriol there towards us. The 50s, they just say, why do they hate you so much? They don't get it. But boy, that 60 crowd, there really is widespread. It doesn't matter where you go, it's everywhere. So, you know, that resentment is there from that period of time. And those people are getting old and retiring. We're losing that baggage. But as I'll show you in a second, one of the big things is because of that and other factors, the thing that makes us different, that our block grant, that National Institutes grant, has eroded to inflation hugely. And so the thing that allowed us to be great, which is to have money with you could go through and control, has been gradually taken away. And of course, that money with the difference allowed us to build up a huge group of superstars across the university from the 50s and 70s. And those people have been aging. And I can tell you, I'm not as, at the age of 47, as productive as I was at 37. And you become wiser, but less productive as you age. And so you need a mix of those things. And I think because of the funding and the nature of the organization, it has been harder to recruit the young superstars to replace the old. In 2002, we, at sort of gunpoint, gave up 20% of the block grant to get access to the Australian Research Council and the NHMRC. So we got more money from that. But we also lost that autonomy to really figure out how you're going to spend the money yourself. Because when you do get money from the government through grants, you really are playing a game where other people decide what you can do. And you have to sometimes be less strategic than you want to be. And that is one of the things we have to think about as this university, how we get the most out of the ARC and the NHMRC of RC. It's no fun having other people decide which research you can do. It means you tend to write grants to do research you've already done. At least that's how I do it. And everyone else does as well. Sorry, we don't need to have that on camera. So let's ask ourselves, what makes a great university? Well, it's research in all of its forms, and I think breadth in research is incredibly important. It's your students past and present and the past, the alumni of an organization are incredibly important. If you look at all the great universities around the world, they're defined probably more than anything by their alumni. And those connections aren't particularly fair, they're not democratic, but they are seemingly related to what a university's impact is on the world stage. And then there's engagement, engagement with government, engagement with business, engagement with the community. You're having an impact. People know you're there having the conversation. So let's look at our income. I arrived in ANU in 1995 and our budget and this is in real $2012. So they're inflation, they're not, you know, they, these are really real, you know, dollars that are, you can compare with each other. And so what you can see is the ANU is substantially grown by about a factor of 50% from that 1995 target. But what has changed, that money has all come from essentially funding other than our block grant. Our block grant has gone down from 50% of our budget to 18%. And that's a major change to how we do business. I want you to ask yourself, as we have grown by that large amount, has that made us a stronger, better, more elite university or not? I don't really know the answer to that question and I have to think it through. But I think that's a question we should all be asking ourselves. And I'm going to be arguing later on that bigger is not necessarily better. We get almost all of our money from the Commonwealth. That's not unique to us. That's pretty well across the board, across Australia, you get your money from the Commonwealth. And so it's not like we're going to go through and suddenly raise money from, you know, some other activity. It's going to be very difficult to do that. And when you're looking at something like this, I think it's important to realize that this is true of universities around the world. Let's take Stanford. Stanford's research income, and it's, I think, the largest, essentially on average, the largest in the world, $87 million in 2012. 87 million. So that's 8.7 percent of our budget. They've got recombinant DNA patent that's just coming off the boil. They have some of the biggest patents in the history. They formed Google, you know, out of there. They didn't get much patent stuff. They did get $1.03 billion that year in revenue from alumni donating money back. So Stanford's business model is definitely making money from rich alumni, not making money from getting contracts and stuff from government. And that's true across MIT is the same deal. It's true across the board. No university is going to pay their bills from research income. And this is one of the reasons why I think CSIRO has such a hard part, because they're supposed to be making money from, you know, returns, their models to make money from returns from industry. And that is no university in the world can do it, and they actually do it better at some fraction of income than anyone else does. It's quite distortionary how they approach their, what their business is. So if you look at where universities earn their money, this is the number of students that various universities have. Now you can see of the G of 8, A and U really stands out like a sore thumb of having smaller numbers of students. And this is important because, as I'll show you, students are what pay for a university in Australia right now. And so not all students are the same. It turns out students in this part of the university are actually very valuable, because you don't cost much compared to a science student. So science students are really expensive. I don't think we quite know what a science student really cost. It's roughly neutral, I don't know. That seems to be the indication I have from the executive, but it's, they're sort of, you sort of break even. Law, commerce, overseas students provide income to the university typically. And so if you look at the total research income that the various universities have, A and U has a lot of research income compared to its student income, and this is problematic because the full cost of research in this country is not supported. Every research dollar we earn needs to be underwritten with approximately 66 cents of funds. You can argue about that. I've talked to various people. That's the median of all the numbers I've gotten from all the G8 people I've talked to. Now we underwrite that with our block grant and with the small number of appropriate students we have compared to other institutions. Other universities underwrite that with overheads of teaching lots of students. Monash, 70,000 undergraduates. Sydney, 46,000. Melbourne, 38,000. A and U, 10,700 or something. What's the number this year? Pardon? 10,000. So we don't have that ability to cross subsidize. That cross subsidization I find problematic because it doesn't make, it's not something that other universities do in other parts of the world. That is not a sound thing. Students are paying for an education and what they're doing is lots of their money is paying for research. And when you want to go through and deregulate for example, you're going to set quite an interesting dynamic up where students are paying for one thing and getting something else. And I personally think that I think we need some form of deregulation in this country. It's a way for A and U for example to get paid for providing the great experience we do to our students. But the government proposal I think does not tackle the key systemic issue which is the cost of research is not paid fully by the commonwealth and that we need to cross subsidize that. And so you get this funny dynamic. So to me you can design a cost-neutral solution to pay for full cost of research, deregulate fees with a cap and you can make it all come up and balance out and that would in my mind at least be a more sensible way forward. The reason I think you need a cap is for equity which is the HEX system or the help system as it's now called. The whole feature of it is that people pay for the value of their education in a way which essentially makes it so that the demand doesn't really have much elasticity to the price. So if you're poor, if you're rich, you're both you're happy to do this. But in a market the prices will go up and if you believe it's an open competitive market, which I strike it would be, then the prices are going to go up until the demand is lessened by price and that is I think by definition going to affect the poor people more than the rich people. So the whole help system will break down. We can go talk to Bruce about this but he sort of nodded when I talked to him about this and so I do worry about equity under the proposed thing. Doesn't mean I don't think we need deregulation. I think we do need some form of it. The other thing we need to realize is that you know within science, government priorities have shifted to medical research and actually humanities. They've shifted away from humanities. So it's very hard to get money out and so when you look at ARC income it's flat. For example the ANU and all of the G8. There's just no more money. We're very successful at it but there's no money to get. NHMRC it's rising but of course we don't we just sort of have a fixed relatively small contingent of people who are eligible for NHMRC and so we're missing out on all that income. That's an issue that I don't have a magic bullet to fix. So that means that Melbourne which has a huge amount of medical research or UQ their revenues going up and ours is flat and it's not because we're doing worse. It's because the government priority has changed around us. When you look at where all the action is in terms of research then citations per paper citations per FTE we are now not the top of the tree. We were five years ago and we're way ahead 10 years ago and so money like it or not is what makes research excellence. I mean ultimately you pay for what you get and we haven't had as much money. Melbourne has more money because they got 30,000 undergraduates to dump into research money and so you can actually see that the total revenue from all sources per FTE we were well ahead in the past but we're not now and I believe Melbourne has passed us in this measurement. I don't have past 2009. I should say that Ian gave me these figures last year. So you have to ask yourself if you're not at the ANU why have a national university? Our total research output per Commonwealth dollar appears to be the same by their measures they're looking at. UQ and U Melbourne our biggest competitors in excellence are aligned to government priorities and medical research and they're producing more student degrees per Commonwealth dollar spent compared to us. So their argument is why not just give the money to us? So I think the answer has to be is that we are gonna we have to be different. We have to be usefully different. We have to differentiate and be a national university and not just another university. So for research we have absolutely in my opinion have to be focused on quality not quantity quality that is what made this university great and I think as we have expanded our quality is not as good as it was in the past. I'm not saying there's terrible things but it has to be the focus and I will give an example in my own institution when I was here before we had a visiting committee made up of the best people in the world. Every two years they came. They told us what we did well but we didn't do well. We don't have that anymore. We haven't had it since 2004 and every place used to have those. We're not focused on quality the way we used to be and it's not just the current it's it's been the last 15 years. This this view has faded because we've been distracted by what's going on externally. I think we need to look at every academic area and say you know is it a top 20 place in the world is it really really good and if the answer is no and that's true for most places what's the strategic plan to get it there and if the answer is it's completely hopeless then I really think it's probably not the thing to do at a national university. Now that's not going to make people happy who suddenly are realized that our place that's not a place to be competitive and I should say that some things it's not just being the top 20 in the world it's being also relevant to Australia. So we have a specific place of doing things in Australia that are national or of national value and we have to also look at things is it really in the national interest as another part of things to consider. If we do this this will make us different than other Australian institutions they have to train a huge number of people. The reason they're running is because they're putting through 40 or 50 thousand students and that is a huge distraction and we should not assume that life's easy at Melbourne or Queensland or whatever it's tough. They're right on the edge of you know coming apart at the seams with this juggling act of cross-subsidization cross-subsidizing their research from the students not easy. I think we have to ask ourselves how on earth if we're going to have so much money going to NHMRC how are we going to take advantage of that. That's a tough. For my sense you want to go in and start small and really really good and build from that remembering that you know the John Curtin Medical School has two as a third of all the Nobel Prizes that Australia has done you know where Australia has done it so you know we've done it in the past we can easily do it again. One place that we really are out in front is on the student experience and I think we forget that here. A&U was built without an undergraduate program but across the world all of the great universities and go through every single one of them they all have great undergraduate programs. As do we. This is satisfaction what students think when they leave this place. Well if you are at Melbourne and you're trying to get 36 or 38,000 students through the doors with almost the same number of faculty as we do you're going to have less happy students and that's a big constraint on them. For us it's a great opportunity. We are already doing a good job in this space but I think we can do better and further differentiate. We have amongst the best students. I was shocked I hadn't realized how good our undergraduates are. I've seen them up close and personal through the Tuckwell program. You know when I look at that range of scores I don't know if I want to even have any better than that. I want to have people who really want to be here with those ATAR scores and so I think we need how to think to get the best people but I don't think we actually need a bunch of people running around with 99.9s around campus. A few of those are good but having to teach them all the time I can tell you you wouldn't want the entire institution to be them. I'm not advocating for us to become Caltech. The one thing we need to realize is that A&U is only a small university in Australia. We are big compared to almost any of other great universities. I go to the great universities here. We have more undergraduates than Harvard and Stanford, that MIT, Berkeley is bigger than us, Cambridge is roughly our size, Princeton half our size. You just go through them. The reason Berkeley can be so big is they got a lot more research dollars for those students than we do. I think trying to be big it may be a financial necessity in the short term but if it destroys your reputation in the long term it's probably the wrong way forward. So to my mind we need to really look at having fewer undergraduates and that's where deregulation can help because you can be paid for providing them a great education. Now if we don't have deregulation we can't do it because we can't simply afford it. But I would argue that having a really high-end undergraduate program and is a good way to potentially feed the research programs because there's so little mobility in this country, the reality is unless we train them here as undergraduates we're not going to get them here as graduate students. But by training them here we can give them the best undergraduate experience we have and the students are mobile right out of out of high school compared to as near as I can tell after their undergraduate experience. So you know since 2004 it was suggested we have about 6,000 we've grown to 10,500 we've done that out of financial necessity and I'm saying I think we need to think back about that strategy and try to figure out how to earn money other ways. It's not easy. We have this Tuckle scholarship program I already talked about really getting in there and interviewing people and getting people who really want to be here. With a range of ATAR scores, high ones but as again my experience is 99s aren't any better than 95s. So as I said I think we can be a place to be different in the space of undergraduates. Excellence in undergraduate teaching would be something we could do. We have the staff the student ratio to do it. Tutorials involving our graduate students, involving tutorials like great universities around the world do. An expectation that people will teach not a lot, a little bit. Why? It's part of being at a university. It's part of what makes a university interesting. And then we have to think about engagement. Now Crawford School which a lot of you are from is upping the ante on how we engage with government but we also need to learn how to engage with business and this is industry funded research income and you can see it's we're pretty woeful. It's not a great measure of activity because of the the ways I've described to you. It's a very lumpy funny measure but we're not good in this space and we can and need to do better. We lack a culture of engagement with industry. There are no real incentives at this point and no one's doing this very good in Australia and it's a place where if we do it well we will immediately be out in front and we can have our role as a national university and show the rest of the country how to do it better than we are. So I really think we need to look at our alumni as I said alumni are really important to the esteem of university we have great alumni. We did a program a couple weeks ago where we brought a bunch of people from outside to talk about possibilities. I really think we need to do that all the time. I think we need to ask industry what can we do for you and our our goal needs to be making industry rich rather than worrying about the returns to the university directly. I think we'll get more money by making people rich than we will by trying to get royalty and come from them. Certainly that's true everywhere else in the world. I think we need to be looking at joint appointments and other innovative things joint projects, joint students, leave arrangements. Right now if you want to go do a startup there's no formal policy to go through and say you get a year off without any questions asked. You want to go work in you know for the government for a year well that would be a good thing for ANU people to do. But again we we you can go through and ask the vice chancellor for you know a process to accommodate you but it should just be part and parcel. We do it so often we have a process about it. So I think these are all areas we can look at. But ultimately the government has to be willing to reward quality and the reality is policy currently does not really reward quality. It rewards quantity of students. And in the end I think we have the future of the ANU to make ourselves. I think in the future the ANU can be greater or lesser but I'm afraid if we stay the same my view is we will lose the Brock block grant. And if we lose the Brock block grant then ANU will become a good regional university not dissimilar to New Castle or Wollongong because we simply do not have the student numbers that the other big universities have. And so we can shrug our shoulders and say I don't want that to happen but if we don't want that to happen I'm advocating making change while we're still a great university rather than letting poor external policy force us in becoming a mediocre university where we have no ability to do that change. And I think that change is being smaller, better and having every person at the university have more resources because ultimately I'm sorry money is what allows people to be great probably more so than any other thing else. I'll stop there. I'm sure I've gone way too long. Thank you very much Brian. Thank you for expanding on your talk from last year. A lot of issues you raised and so I'm sure Armstrong from the Crawford schools I said before. This panel I think we put together from a few conversations with a few younger academics we've had who share the same interest in the future of ANU that you do Brian and was really triggered by your talk last October and we mobilized Peter Drysdale to get to you and thanks for everyone for turning up. So as Brian said I'll leave a lot of time for everyone to shout back at Brian and engage in a conversation. First I'll just introduce the panel members. So to my left here is Professor Stephen Howes Professor of Economics my boss I'm the director of the international and development economics program in the Crawford school and director of the Development Policy Centre and so Stephen and his centre have been very busy lately with a bigger newer sparring partner in DFAT. Now that AusAid has become WasAid so Stephen and his centre are very active Stephen did his masters here at ANU for going to LSE for a PhD and an illustrious career at the World Bank before seeing the light and coming back to ANU. Amy King to my right here is a lecturer in the School of Strategic and Defense Studies in the School of International Political and Strategic Studies and focuses on international relations in the Asia-Pacific and Nick Farrelly a Dr. Nick Farrelly is a research fellow in the same school I believe and focuses on Southeast Asian politics and society and Amy and Nick are Rhodes scholars and the sort of superstars that Brian mentioned that I think we ANU should have you know should be the first choice for when you graduate and if you're thinking about an academic career as a Rhodes scholar or even a stint at a university before going on to make a difference in Australia. So we've got a panel here of people I know very well who put a lot of time and effort and extra energy into investing in the ANU and who go beyond the call of duty because you wouldn't find a better group of people who are invested in the university so I'm very pleased you guys could join us. Now if you're wondering about my credentials for chairing this I started here in 1999 as an undergrad and I've been here since and I even had my wedding reception at University House in the great hall. So given the time I won't ask my question to Brian but I might get Steven to start and maybe respond your thoughts to Brian and ask Brian a question if you will and then I'll get Amy and Nick to do the same before I throw it out to you guys. Okay well thank you very much sure thank you Brian is honored to be here I was a bit reluctant I'm a bit of an imposter I only became an academic about five years ago but it is such an interesting topic I couldn't resist invitation and you know I certainly agree with the aspirations you've expressed Brian that we should focus on quality and to be a great university I've got to say at the end I'm not entirely convinced right by the argument if in the end of the day greatness follows money I don't see how we're going to get more money if we're going to deregulate but we're going to reduce the number of students I don't see where that's going to come from I'm it was very illuminating to be at the top I was a Melbourne Uni student and I think we had maybe 17,000 students there and yeah now they've got 38,000 I mean no wonder they Melbourne Uni has shot to the top so I mean while our block grant is being cut so I can see why we've been we've come back to the pack I'm not sure exactly how we're going to get in front again but I thought there are lots of good ideas you've got I'll just express one I guess caution which is you know from where I sit I mean just you know you talked about engagement but I mean I think you do have to be careful how you measure greatness and we think where I come from Crawford you know John Crawford and other people you know who I've looked up to as mentors Peter Drysdale, Roscano, H.E. Coombs right these are people who would not have scored well on the various or probably don't score well you know on the various indices of academic publications right but they are clearly superstars and that people we're very proud of have they excel in the engagement they excel in addressing public policy problems and the other aspect I'd have with Crawford school you know we have a large number of students right postgraduate students and I mean I don't want to let the side down but I mean these are not all superstar students I mean they're good students but a lot of them come on odds-aid scholarships we don't really choose them and again let's be honest a lot of them don't have English as their first language and however whatever you know cut-offs you've got you know I mean these people are incredibly clever to be able to speak two or three languages but they are at a disadvantage not having English as a native language so I also feel you know but we're very happy to have them not only they pay our salaries but they you know it's our this is about our role in Asia right and and this is we have that role in Asia right that we are reaching out to these Asian students and that is a very positive mentoring role we have so I guess I it while I agree with lots of what you said it just I would want to reflect to sound out a caution when we think about the role of ANU and how we measure greatness would you like to respond? Yeah absolutely I agree and so especially in non I mean the if we get into humanities and economics you need to make sure you have as I said it's it's it's about being in some areas great internationally but it's also having that strategic national role so within the Crawford school you're training people from the region who are going to become the future leaders I mean one of the great things if you look at ANU is that it trained a lot of the leaders of Southeast Asia through exactly that process you talked about and that is an important great thing and as long as we're doing that you know as the place in the region at the very top level that's great if suddenly we find ourselves you know second or third at doing it in the region then I think you have a problem and so it's a matter of of being great at what you do and having a very disciplined specific idea of greatness I agree in terms of total money my sense is that it is the total dollars per researcher if you look at what makes places great around the world it's not the total dollars it's the dollars per researcher and that's why being smaller and a fixed amount of money out there I think has some possibilities was the way I see is raising quality so that's that's why I advocate that I don't I think Melbourne is at a disadvantage of having 38,000 students but they have the advantage is having very few faculty teaching them and so each one of those faculty members actually gets a fair bit of income then from all those students they're running through but it's not an ideal way I think for Melbourne to do business and I think if you talk to Glenn he would rather have fewer students and more money per student Amy? Well thank you very much and thanks for inviting me to be here I feel like again like a bit of an imposter having only been at the ANU for 18 months but I guess coming from experience as a student and then a graduate tutor at Oxford for me what you're saying is incredibly appealing you know having small small class sizes is is rewarding both the student and for the teacher and happily I think you know for a number of people I think like Nick and myself the ANU was the first place the first sort of choice you would make as a university but that's partly true because we are Australian and I don't think enough international superstars if you want to call them that would look at the ANU as a destination partly because it's a very long way away from the rest of the world so we're going to have to find ways I guess to overcompensate for that by making it easier and as appealing as possible for for non-Australians to want to come here to and whether that's thinking about things like spousal hires and and other ways of attracting people here research money is obviously part of that story as well I guess I wanted to sort of touch slightly on the the international student side of things as well because I don't know about the United States but certainly in the Oxbridge system international fee paying postgraduate students cross subsidize these elite undergraduate programs and so that's something we're going to have to think about I think for the ANU and there are obviously tensions there I mean ramping up an international postgraduate program comes with challenges so I'd be curious to sort of to hear your thoughts on that the other thing I guess is you know I think I think it's fascinating to hear you talk of this this peak of in the seven in the sort of sixties and seventies when the ANU saw its competitors as being the the world's best international institutions or at least that's where it set its sights and now we look domestically the challenge I guess and my question is how in the next five years do we shift our gaze back internationally how do we resist the pressure that will inevitably come to focus on the domestic game and I guess more bluntly what things do we need to do in the next five years to shift that story back to an international one well okay so I guess I'm going to do the I guess my sense is on the the second thing is that if we remain domestically focused then we're not a national university we're not different and that's a guaranteed losing proposition so we are focused right now and that's a problem so we have to differentiate and think globally about what we're going to be able to do with our block grant and a hundred and seventy three million dollars is equivalent to a four billion dollar endowment so when you start thinking of that way it doesn't sound so bad but that's the income if you had four billion we have another billion in endowment so we have a five billion dollar endowment equivalent right now it's a matter of spending that money really really well and you know it's the financial situation of us and a university like Princeton is surprisingly similar it's there's is better than us but it's not late years better than us so I think we need to think of it that way international postgraduate so Oxford can Oxford and Cambridge can do that they have a great brand we have a great brand here and so as long as we're the best at it then I think it's what we need to be doing and we should be proud I think what's happening in Crawford is great it's it's what exactly the types of thing that is a national university we need to be doing but we do need to make sure it always remains at the not just a revenue stream we really need to be out there saying the reason we're really doing this is to empower Asia to make sure that you know those guys get the best possible education and with an Australian point of view is obviously see strategically important for us into the future I guess what you're saying about changing ourselves and changing the model is is half the battle or most of the battle really but an important part is is changing the environment and what others think so you know being able to convince the Vice Chancellor of the University of Melbourne or the politicians setting the environment how would you rationalize increasing the block grant or even indexing the block grant well you if you're gonna if you're gonna convince them that they are going to index the block grant you have to convince them you're giving them value for money and I think we do give them value for money but not nearly as much value for money as we used to and so I think if you provide a let's say you provide an undergraduate program that streets which is streets ahead everything else is not hard I mean Melbourne I'll give you an example Melbourne's physics program has four times fewer faculty members than ANU's and produces four times more students it's 16 to 1 is the ratio now I think we can provide a better education we need to have the people of parliament dying to send their kids here and we want it so that some of them can't because their kids didn't do well enough that's what we need that's how you have relevance Nick thanks very much Sharon thanks to everyone involved in organizing such as stimulating event and in particular thanks to Brian for giving us so much really relevant food for thought I've got two quick responses to some phrases at least that you throw into the mix and then perhaps I'm going to throw out a broad rhetorical aspirational question and I'd like to get your thoughts on that the two quick responses to points that you made the first is about the usefully different status that the ANU should aspire to and it strikes me that that is absolutely crucial in fact when I when I heard that and thought back to why I came here once upon a time as an undergraduate that's precisely my justification I could I assume have gone to basically any university in Australia and if I'd been really bold and my parents had remortgaged their house I probably could have gone to any university around the world but being at the ANU being involved in my case in the serious study of Southeast Asian politics and society was just a huge drawcard because there was critical mass at the ANU that I could even recognize as a 16 year old that was so enticing and I'm I suppose proud but also happy to say that that useful difference is something which still seems to echo down the years and it's there that I suppose I get to a second point about the relevance of this institution to Australia and that's probably the reason why I've stayed here to be very frank because I find that the ANU's mission is incredibly powerful for those who hope to see this particular country and its grand experiment flourish and the ANU is a pretty crucial part of that puzzle that brings me to perhaps my question and it's a question that I'm going to phrase in the context of your own great achievements and the sort of reflected glory that they give our institution I did having never shared a podium with Nobel Prize winner before do a little bit of research in preparation for this session here this afternoon and I looked at the countries of Southeast Asia and I don't think it would surprise most people in this audience to learn that there have been no Nobel Prize winners in the sciences from across the Southeast Asian region there have been two peace prize winners one of whom actually declined the prize the other of whom received an honorary doctorate from this university only last year that's reasonably slim pickings in a neighborhood right on Australia's doorstep with let's just say roughly 600 million people and all of their talents and entrepreneurial zeal and everything else at their disposal you rightly pointed out that the ANU has trained a great number of leaders for Southeast Asia and for other parts of the world but I'm wondering what you would say to the provocation that perhaps a goal for the ANU is to be training Nobel Prize winners from Australia's immediate region how would we go about doing that and how would that get us past some of the obstacles that you've outlined here today well that's interesting clearly you need to develop the region and make sure you get really good people coming here and you know the region is developed a lot compared to 20 years ago so I think the the possibilities of doing that are better and better but ultimately it's it's it's training people in a great environment and as I said you know Nobel Prizes are not the smartest people they're people doing good work at the right place at the right time occasionally there's someone who gets one for you know just being outlandishly smart they're very that's very rare so it's about providing people the right environment and training as many people in that you know who are really good in the right environment as possible so how would we do that I think that's that's exactly the type of thing we want to do uh you know in Australia we have 23 million people to choose from from Southeast Asia I'm going to include India and China I got three three billion right and well India's had Nobel Prizes China has not in the sciences and that causes them no end of consternation uh they don't particularly seem to like their Nobel Prizes in peace as well as the science uh so I think it's it there's there's no magic formula it's doing things well getting the right people here getting people who really want to be here for the right reasons and and so that's you know that's part of how you admit people right so uh ANU is out interviewing 700 we we had 700 applications I'd like to see every person that comes to the ANU go through a an application process which is more than just an ATAR score I want to say if you come here why you want to come here you want to do research why are you excited about the ANU if the answer is I don't know you're a good university have a good enough ATAR go to Melbourne that's good we want the people with 88 so really keen to be here rather than people with 95s who aren't um and another thing we need to take in a I think is really important is that ATAR is so coupled to your socioeconomic status and we provide points I think you just need to subtract off the regression line right because the the tightness of the SES score with socioeconomic advantage is just so tight it's just outrageously tight within the ACT I did the little I could go through and do it and the dispersion was seven times smaller than the end of the end of the average of the schools in the ACT now the ACT is the most homogenous place in the nation it doesn't have much range and already you can see it there you know so I think we need to come in the way what we get the right people here and it's not just how well you do on schools look we've pretty much run out of time but I do want to open it up to the audience we'll go a little bit over I'm sure no one's gonna that's because I talked much I'm sorry but um look we'll take two or three questions starting with Mark and then down here got Mike's coming around so please introduce yourself and keep it brief yeah hi I'm Mark I'm a student and a staff member at Crawford um a lot of the panel talked about the need to differentiate ourselves in terms of the teaching we provide I think that's a very good point I'm wondering if anyone has any comments about how we might do that in greater detail so in particular research and teaching are perhaps separate skill sets um is there any way that we could incentivize good teachers to stay on in a teaching capacity rather than a research capacity is there any scope for that sort of thing I'm particularly interested in Steven's point of view because I found Crawford to be really outstanding on the teaching front great we'll take the question just in front of you Mark um and then we'll get you guys to respond to both hi I'm Steven Hyde from Research School of Physics um I've been here for a long time and one factor that I don't hear discussed at all which has changed enormously over the past two decades I guess is in the past in my department for example in applied mathematics a huge proportion of our graduate students were from overseas and that made an enormous difference in terms of research quality because they were driven to come here for various reasons mainly because they knew about the place because of its research excellence now because of political changes essentially that's become well that's dried up to nothing that seems to me to be a real problem for us looking ahead and I wonder if anyone's got any comments about whether there's any hope of repairing that loss or how do we make up for that loss in other ways maybe we'll take one more if there's another question somewhere no so look um let's get some responses to those who would like to go Steven yeah I'm happy to talk about that I mean I was interested to Brian said everyone should teach at least one course a year so Crawford we teach too you know you have to and that's because we live off our teaching as I said in fact I mean just a little you know it kind of illustrates what you're saying internally within the ANU I mean why did Crawford set up with this model right why which previously NCDS Helen Hughes because she couldn't get her hands on the block ground right so she said okay we'll finance ourselves from teaching sets up NCDS becomes Crawford you know what happens the irony Crawford absorbs the old research school of Asia and Pacific Division of Economics right which was the body that had the block grant right but you know they just stayed flat well in fact there's you sir and they must have declined over time whereas because we had this teaching income it rose over time so it's just a interesting story but anyway I don't know how do you encourage good teaching I I guess you have to just emphasize it and for us it is our bread and butter it's what we have to do if we don't teach well we won't get as many students and so I think you know we've yeah from Tom Compass down we're really told to to teach and yeah so I'm not sure I imagine that's the same elsewhere in the university but perhaps it's not the link is not as tight and if I can just digress onto one like related point I think one thing we could do more at the ANU since Marnie's here is you know we can also get our admin better organized and we can reduce some of the burden and one thing I've noticed as director of the program we have so many good teachers are always applying for teaching awards and the college is teaching awards the vice chancellor is teaching awards and every year the application process gets more and more complicated and now I feel it's not the best teacher it's a person who has the best application right who'll get the award and it's ridiculous I mean who can tell who actually is the best teacher right we can't really tell all we do every year we reward someone who's outstanding and all you need is a committee to get together and decide okay this year we're going to give it to this person so I do think sometimes we are our own worst enemy in the bureaucratic processes that we set up so I think certainly at Harvard the culture is as part of being a professor and that's Harvard's where I was graduate students where I know well is if you want to be a professor you're supposed to teach a class and the professors feel it is part of you know part of their status is how many people they compete how many people want to take their class it's it's very much status driven and if you only have to teach one it's fun and you put a lot of effort into it to make sure it's really good and not everyone's going to be a great teacher and you do you get them to do other things but the point is you raise the status you give people bonuses if they want to teach if they teach well you know you really make financial incentives because a lot of income comes from the students so I think you incentivize it like anything else certainly works at other places just briefly on the teaching point as well size matters here just using the example of where I work in the school of international political and strategic studies this week we had our master's students participating in a consultation on the defense white paper with academics who are writing and contributing to the defense white paper we have our students participating in war games led by the former chief of the defense forces these are things that you can't do if you've got 700 undergraduates in your class you can do them if you have 50 or less and it develops that cohort and those students get to participate in things beyond the textbook you know beyond what they can find online and making those experiences happen here in Canberra in ways that you know you can't do in other cities in Australia is absolutely crucial but I think you know size helps small size helps I agree with all of that just a very quick observation from my end I'm as I think some of you in the room know are currently in non-teaching status I have an Australian research council fellowship we're all supposed to give our right and or our left arm to avoid the classroom it struck me since the early years when I became aware of this pattern of at least some of the incentives around a very research intensive focus in an academic career that this isn't in the best interests of students and certainly in my case at least I'd love somebody to tap me on the shoulder and say could you teach a course next year so that's it so I had the same type of fellowship and I was forbidden from teaching and I taught anyway and I said to the ARC I said I'm doing this if you want to take me on fine but it will go to the press good luck so they said no that's okay and they've changed it so you can now which I'm looking forward to that's a nice place to end what about the PhD question the external PhD the second question so I think it's a matter of priority of quality at RSAA we cannot get the students domestically we want half of our students come internationally and we pay for them out of the block grant because it's that important to us so I think it's a focus of a question and you can try to get the government but they've just made it so future fellows have to be Australian to come here so you know I that's going to be beating your head against the brick wall there but I think focus on quality students are cheap relatively speaking and you pay you pay you have fewer faculty members fewer students but you have better ones that's part of the quality of those okay sorry for going over time and I'm sure there's much more to discuss I hope this is an ongoing discussion I'm sure it is an ongoing discussion so look forward to engaging you again Brian and others here please join me in thanking the panel and Brian Schmidt