Vision of The Future for the University of Sydney

Written by Dr Alan Fekete in October 1998.

Mission Statement

The University of Sydney should have a clear, widely publicised aim, whose value can be appreciated by the wider community. I would like that aim to be

The aim of solving hard, important problems emphasises knowledge creation and knowledge application. It is therefore broader than the current concept of "research". The problems being solved might come from academic, commercial or community sources. Note that this aim is quite different from the traditional Sydney concern for preserving and transmitting knowledge (as reflected, for example, in Andrew Riemer's "Sandstone Gothic").

The expectation of having impact is much more demanding than the mindless quantitative measures of university output, which count publications that aren't widely read, or lectures that don't change the lives or work of the audience. Impact is qualitative, and can be shown in many ways. Academic impact is when researchers elsewhere build on one's results, answer questions one has posed, or adapt methods one has introduced. (This is how tenure is decided at the best US research universities: not number of papers, but letters from major figures explaining how their research changed because of your work.) Commercial impact can be new companies founded to make profit from one's ideas, or existing companies changing their manufacturing or organisational processes because of one's work. Community impact can be a wide audience discussing one's book, or a profession that changes its practice because of one's suggestions, or a political movement that adopt's one's principles.

The best hope for teaching students to solve hard important problems, is to involve them in that process while they are students. This carries "problem-based learning" or "active learning" to its logical conclusion: working on problems that are real, not merely realistic. It also aids in making students participants in a "learning community", with the other people (staff, students and perhaps clients) who are cooperating to solve problems.

A Possible Organisational Structure

The current structure of the university is very hierarchical, and thus intrinsically conservative and divisive. Working on important problems requires flexible interaction and rapid response (change in weeks, not in years). I suggest a two-fold organisation for the University, combining stable and innovative elements. The key is for the hierarchy to remain, but complemented by a diverse collection of "clusters" or specialist centres, each focussed on a particular sort of problem.

The Hierarchy

There are many valuable aspects of the current hierarchical structure, with staff working on continuing appointments in discipline-based Departments in Faculties in Colleges, under direction from a chain of command starting at the VC. This is a powerful way to maintain the knowledge base, so that a coherent understanding of the field is available when a problem becomes important where this discipline is relevant. I would like to see this structure maintained, with some changes.

The most important change is that I believe staff should have continuing (secure) appointments for only part of their workload. I suggest that the norm should be approximately half-time positions in departments, and the other half would be "at-risk" employment in the clusters. This compromise situation removes the current complacency of tenured staff, who have little personal incentive to extra effort or to alter their work in response to trends in the field, in industry, or in the community. However it avoids the worst of the stress found on staff in "soft-money" research centers, where life-planning is impossible due to the likelihood of shifts by funding bodies, or the winds of fashion.

Another change would be a prominent shift from lecture-based teaching. As more and more medium-quality content transmission can come via IT (eg videodisks with lecture series from intellectual stars, interactive simulations, etc), the department's teaching will emphasise the small-group interpersonal interaction, where students can engage in respectful, critical dialogue with staff and other students. I also expect that teaching will be in smaller modules, aimed mainly at "non-majors", unlike the present arrangements where most courses are designed as part of a full sequence for majors. As the majors will do much of their learning through participation in clusters, there will be less reason to design a whole syllabus for them. Instead, teaching will be aimed at those in other fields, who find a need (especially arising from their own cluster-based participation) to pick up specific topics from related fields.

I also expect that summative assessment will be separated from teaching. For many students, especially non-majors, the need for knowledge of a topic does not come with need for certification. Social recognition, through summative assessment, will be needed more at the level of the degree, than for individual modules or units of study.

The Clusters

I hope to see each cluster as an independent specialist group, dealing with a focussed class of important problems. Staff would work in the clusters on a short-term contract, or even on a casual fee-for-service basis, to supplement the work and salary from their departmental appointments. Students would participate as members of problem-solving teams, and gain academic credit towards their degree.

I expect new clusters would arise continually in response to perceived opportunity, and old ones would fade as funding dropped or essential staff left. I hope there is no bureacratic obstacle to any staff forming a cluster when they see a niche; indeed I hope the University offers seed funding for the most promising ideas. I expect that this University would not have a cluster in every possible topic, but rather that we would have (at any time) some areas in which we had special expertise; we might have a cluster for optical fibres, but not for membrane technology; we might be a centre for intellectual property law but not for taxation law.

Some clusters would resemble current research centres or CRCs. However at present these centres have little power in the University, and they usually do not involve active participation by undergraduate students. I see a great diversity in clusters, so I offer some examples. These are chosen just as illustrations, without any specific awareness of the current strengths of our staff, nor of the areas of greatest future importance.

A Centre for Astrophysics. This is an example of a cluster dealing with academic problems in a single discipline. It would be funded by government research grants, on the basis of its exceptional international reputation. Most of the students involved would be at Honours level or above, and would be doing research in a traditional sense.

A Centre for Early Music. The staff would be from a single department, but the impact would be both academic and community. Funding would include some research grants, but also fees from performances, or for writing cover notes for CDs. Students would be involved as performers, in gathering scores from libraries, and in research.

A Centre for Robotics. This would be funded by a mixture of research grants and industry-funded consulting projects. It could involve staff from several related departments, including Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Applied Mathematics. Students could participate from early in the degree, with roles such as testing or documentation. Higher year students could do design work.

A Centre for the Study of the Italian-Australian Migrant Experience. This could combine a wide range of disciplines, including language (tracing modification of dialects), history (oral history and genealogies), geography (development of concentrations in suburbs) and sociology (career paths for second and third generations). Funding might come from the ethnic community, and from fees for services such as tracing and recording family history. Students could participate in all aspects, including searching documents, translating, analysis of data.

A Centre for Cancer Treatment. This could integrate research in the tradition of scientific medicine, with community-based action such as lifestyle-changing. Staff and students would come from medicine, nursing, and social work. Funds would include government research grants, support from the pharmaceutical industry, and fees for services to private hospitals. Some pro-bono work should also be done.

First Steps

Besides the specific actions I describe below, which can enhance our focus on having impact, there are many essential changes which every business, government department, hospital must take in order to become a "learning organisation", which gives staff room to try new approaches, to learn from both successes and failures, and to share that learning widely.
  1. Break the current monopoly held by departments and faculties on approving new units of study for degrees. Allow existing centres and research groups to propose units, especially those based on project participation rather than predefined syllabus. Have these approved by a "board of studies" with wide academic and stakeholder representatives, rather than by a funding competitor such as a Faculty. The presence of project-based units of study will serve many valuable ends. They will give Sydney graduates valuable experience in a learning community and a unique competitive edge over those educated only in lecture-based courses. The EFTS from these units will also provide a funding source for centres which can attract students. Finally, the removal of the "captive supply of EFTS" for Department-based units will provide incentive for departments to improve the quality of teaching.
  2. Budget cuts or unfunded salary rises should be met be reducing all staff to fractional appointments (say 0.9 in the first instance), rather than, as currently, by freezing vacancies or not renewing fixed-term staff. Forcing fractional appointments does not remove the necessity to reduce the work done, or to do it more efficiently, because fractional appointments will work less hours than full-time staff. However, this approach shares the burden, rather than placing it on junior staff, and it allows departments to have a more even seniority profile. Indeed the loss of junior staff is the most serious immediate problem facing the university. This approach also begins to provide incentive for staff to work on problems of importance that can attract funding.
  3. Start seed funding for clusters whose focus is community impact. At present, academic research can be seeded by a sequence of university, small ARC and large ARC grants, while industry-based projects are seeded by SPIRT grants. In the US, there are philanthropic foundations (Carnegie, Ford, etc) which support work of potential social benefit which won't attract commercial support; in their absence, the Sydney University endowment should provide a substitute.

Our Advantages

This university has a head start over others in Australia, in becoming a university with impact. Our competitive advantage includes our diversity, our traditional emphasis on Honours degrees, and our central location.

The University of Sydney has a special heritage, in that it combines an academic tradition from a strong research university with professional associations from strong CAEs. Most other Australian campuses are dominated by one viewpoint or the other. This mixture is especially suited for the cluster-based structure I described.

The University of Sydney has still a substantial range of expertise in the humanities and social sciences. Almost every other university in Australia has decimated these areas. For clusters with impact on communities, these fields are essential.

For several years now, the University of Sydney has accepted that its graduates need generic attributes. Many parts of the university already include problem-based learning and projects as major parts of the educational experience. Similarly, the generalist faculties have long offered special Honours or Advanced study (with special projects or discussions) to research-bound students, from the early part of the degree. Thus we have experience that is close to what will happen when students participate in clusters for academic credit.

The location of much of the campus, close to the city centre and to the Australian Technology Park, means that we are easily accessible to the clients who could provide the hard important problems for us to solve.