 Hi, I'm Gavin Smith from the School of Sociology in Cass Research School of Social Sciences. I'm very honoured to be alongside Professor Michael McRobbie, who is among many things the 18th president of Indiana University, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an honorary fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, an officer of the Order of Australia and significantly the ANU alumnus of the year 2015, which is fabulous. Professor McRobbie, welcome back to the ANU and many congratulations to you on your receiving this prestigious award. Thank you very much, Gavin. It's a delight to be back at ANU as always. Fabulous. So you graduated from ANU with a PhD in philosophy 35 years ago or so. Can you perhaps describe in brief terms the key events that have propelled you to your current role as president of IU, a university that has over 7,000 faculty and nearly 115 or maybe up now over 115,000 students? So I'd just like to ask you some of the key events as you see them that's led to this. Oh, I think one of the key events was that right towards the end of my PhD research here, I started to get interested in the application of certain computational techniques in the work that I was doing. There were a number of other people who were working in related areas who had just started to use computational techniques in other ways as well. One thing led to the other and basically my career moved into information technology very rapidly. And when I came back here as a faculty member in 1983, I really started to pursue those areas and I got involved due to a request from the then deputy vice chancellor Ian Ross, a man who I have an enormous opinion of and very sad he passed away some years ago. But he was a great mentor to me. But Ian really asked me to take on some significant administrative roles in building up information technology. And then the other piece of great fortune was I became very close friends with Robin Stanton, who I think his last position he was as provost chancellor, one of the truly great servants of ANU. And he and I became extremely close collaborators for the rest of my time at ANU. And I think there were a number of things that we accomplished there. So I was more and more involved in aspects of information technology and some of the things we had done here it attracted the attention of people in the United States and in particular at Indiana University where I had connections for other reasons going back many years. And when the position was created of chief information officer I was invited to apply which I did and was appointed actually at the end of 1996 but I took up the position at the beginning of 1997 so for nearly 20 years now I've been at Indiana University. Thank you very much. Let's return to Sunny Canberra for a moment if we may. Can I ask what were some of your fondest memories from your time at the ANU? What are some things that really stand out about what makes ANU such a fabulous place to study? I mean the intellectual atmosphere at ANU, I mean I can't speak about every Australian university I haven't been a degree at Australian University but the intellectual atmosphere here is as good as the best American universities in my experience. The time when I was an undergraduate there would be one legendary speaker after the other in different fields and I would take advantage of it when you're a graduate student you at least have some free time to do these things to go and listen to people and rather feel. So for example I heard Paul Dirac, the famous physicist then alive since passed away, come and give a number of lectures here. Sir Ozair Berlin was a resident here I think for a couple of weeks so I heard him give through four lectures and it just went on like Roger Penrose was here for a period. So people like that would come through all the time and I think the ability to be able to see people of that quality in a whole range of different disciplines was wonderful. Also I think because of I don't know whether they still exist but the ANU PhD scholarships which I had one which were used to attract very good students from around Australia and around the world I think attracted really extraordinary students here and I had the great fortune of working with some then students but people who went on to do good things in their careers and just the quality of the faculty here really was the case that in the Institute for Advanced Studies where I was by and large the people who were faculty there were just world class figures and had many cases world class reputations. So all of that made this just a superb intellectual environment and on top of that it is and I'm happy to say this on here it is the most beautiful campus in Australia it really is it's stunningly beautiful campus I walked around this that afternoon for a few hours and it is just as beautiful and has got some really interesting innovative architecture and all credit to those responsible for pushing the architectural envelope a bit. Thank you very much. College of Arts and Sciences of Indiana University and ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences have recently extended this very exciting exchange agreement for faculty and students. What are your thoughts on the importance of exchanges between university, something I know from looking into your biography, this is something you're a proponent of, internationalisation, these kinds of outreaches and what can people coming to Indiana University expect in terms of Bloomington as a place to work to study and to live? Well Bloomington Indiana is the quintessential American college down. I mean there are dozens probably hundreds of college towns like Bloomington Indiana. We of course are a very very large university we're a member of the what's called the AAU, the equivalent of the group of eight in Australia. So student coming to Bloomington goes to a large university extremely high quality university we've had eight Nobel Prize winners there including recently the first woman to get the Nobel Prize in Economics. And so they have this really outstanding intellectual environment as well with again the same kind of enormous diversity that ANU has. But you get in a small town in the rural Midwest which is a very different environment than being in a big city, even Canberra certainly than being in a place like Sydney and certainly being in a big American city, Chicago or Detroit or New York or something like that. And that I think has proven to be just enormously attractive to students to have that experience. It's an experience frankly not unlike that that you have at Oxford or Cambridge. It's that kind of an experience where by and large you're in a relatively small city in a kind of rural environment. That sounds very attractive. You have a background in both computer science and the liberal humanities. Could you maybe talk a little bit about the role and significance of interdisciplinary and trans institutional scholarship in a world that's becoming infinitely more connected and complex? Well, I just, I'm a huge supporter and proponent of interdisciplinary multidisciplinary studies. I just think that many of the most interesting problems and the most creative solutions to problems come out of multidisciplinary collaborations. But having said that, I always want to emphasize that you still need the disciplinary pillars. People still need the deep education in one or more areas. But then have the flexibility and the breadth of interest to be able to consider the techniques and knowledge and expertise that they have in the context of broader problems that may involve dozens of other people. I mean it is, I know it's a feature here of many programs that I knew. It is certainly the feature of many programs at IU and of course many other great American universities. Looking forward prophetically, how do you envisage the university system of 2050? What do you anticipate to be the key dimensions, structures and features of higher education delivery to move through the 21st century? Difficult question, but I just love to gather your thoughts on that. It is an interesting question. I'm a great believer that the best predicted to the future is the past. The university system we have today and the structure of universities, although modified immensely in all kinds of different areas, is not that different to what it was a thousand years ago. It consists of people who are acknowledged expertise in some field of study. They profess certain views and beliefs and do so with a great rigor and a great level of depth. And then students who wish to acquire that knowledge for their life experiences work with those professors to achieve that. And that's been the model going back, in fact, 25 centuries to when we have the earliest records of the first universities. And it hasn't changed a enormous amount. What you can think of as the infrastructure has changed, we now have pervasive information technology. We have completely secular education at least in most institutions. We still have academic freedom, certainly in many universities, certainly in the United States and here in Australia, sort of guaranteed by tenure and so on. But I think the basic experience is still the same. So I still think the university of the future is going to be similar to what it is today. Now online education is touted as maybe going to revolutionize that. I'm skeptical of that, although I certainly acknowledge that the impact of technology as it gets better and better and as the virtual experience gets better and better is going to incrementally increase the role that it plays. But I don't see ever the talking head, no matter how good the technology ever really replacing firstly that direct connection between the student and the instructor. Or in any way really replacing the interaction between students themselves as I said before is just such an important part of a student's education in the kind of residential experience that you get here at ANU for example. That's a fabulous answer and I fully agree with your sentiments there. Last topic if we may, you and I evidently share a mutual interest in the emergence of big data as the new oil of information rich societies and your last response has beautifully led us on to this. And as a resource that is increasingly used profile, social life and activity, I might understand that you see the use of digital technologies and the preservation of digital knowledge as a solution to some of the economic and social problems currently burning America and global society and thinking here of issues in health education and security context. Can you perhaps tell us what role you see information technologies and digital infrastructure playing in the educational realm in particular and you have mentioned some of these things. But in society more generally, how can the university use these kinds of platforms to really engage and mobilize communities more broadly? Well, I think one of the most important things that what is called generically big data has enabled is to be able to aggregate the mass data on such a scale that you can actually start to extract useful information from that data. I think there was a point where databases simply didn't have enough information in them to be able to extract interesting new information. Obvious stuff could be extracted. That's what they were set up for in the first place. But it's when the unexpected connections occur or when you're actually making genuine sort of discoveries based on big data, no matter what the field, that's where I think it can be really impactful. I know that one of the motivating arguments about the future of online education is that the amount of data that will be collected monitoring the online learning experiences of students can in turn be mined for ways in which that experience can be improved. And I think up to a point I think that's exactly right. Whether those improvements are other than incremental or whether there's some people would claim sort of seismic directions forward there, I think is yet to be determined. But there's no doubt that that will have an impact on learning in ways that probably aren't even clear completely at the moment. But I'm also interested in another problem, which is not at all glamorous, and it's the problem of the long-term preservation of data. And I'm not talking five years, ten years, or even 20 years, I'm talking 50 years, 100 years, 200 years. And most of the formats in which data stored today are highly perishable. Data is thrown away or is inaccessible for a whole range of reasons, and frankly I think at an alarming rate. So in the US we set up a number of years ago an organization called the Digital Preservation Network, which I chair the board at the moment, which is focused on this issue of the ultra-long-term preservation of data, so that one starts thinking about data in the same way that one thinks about the preservation of books from medieval libraries. And that's the kind of model here. But why did the Platonic Dialogues, or how did the Platonic Dialogues still exist today, given they were written 25 centuries ago, and all the tumultuous events that have taken place between now and then? And how can we ensure that the very best work that is now only available digitally, as you know in many of the sciences, all new data, is only being generated digitally? How can we ensure that that is around petabytes of it, exabytes of it? How can we ensure that that's around in another 200 years? That's a fabulous thing to think about, and you make a very good point about the Platonic and the maintenance of particular forms of knowledge. And I think that's a fabulous way to end, think about how the university might be the custodian and the archive of that kind of knowledge in the future, and how we can use these digital technologies very productively in order to achieve that end. Gavin, would you mind if I just came back as I realized there was a question earlier that I didn't fully give you an answer to, and that was when you asked me about the collaboration between IU and ANU. Let me just say just a couple of words about that too. About five years ago, the then Vice-Chancellor, Professor Ian Chabonay, agreed to set up what we called a Pan-Asian Institute. And this institute basically takes the whole of what we call Pan-Asia, which really goes from Turkey through to the Pacific Islands. And it tries to leverage our complementary expertise. For example, ANU is very strong in Southeast Asian studies, probably maybe if not the best, one of the best places in the world for Southeast Asian studies, Indonesia, Vietnam, et cetera. We are very strong in particular in Central Eurasian studies, the stands into China. And we teach languages that are hardly taught anywhere else in the world, the languages of Central Eurasia. And of course you have expertise in the languages of Southeast Asia. So the goal of the center really is for us to access your expertise, in particular in Southeast Asia, but in other areas, and for you to access our expertise in Central Eurasian studies and so on, where we're among the top three or four places in the United States in that area as well. And it has been, in my view, very successful. We've had multiple exchanges between our institutions. We've had a number of joint conferences. A lot of publications have come out of it. We've had students visit both institutions. And because of that, because of its success, Chancellor Young and I are signing an extension for a further five years of that agreement this afternoon. That's a fabulous way to end. Thank you so much for your time Professor Michael McRobbie, and congratulations again for you being the 2015 ANU alumnus of the year. Thank you very much. Thank you.