2012 Alumni Awards
The 2012 Alumni Awards were held in early September, with five distinguished Australians honoured on the night.
Australia’s former top bureaucrat, Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet from 2008 to 2011, Terry Moran AC, and respected author and speechwriter Don Watson have been awarded La Trobe University’s highest honour – the Distinguished Alumni Awards for 2012.
They are joined by the architect of Australian industry superannuation and pioneer of clean energy investment Garry Weaven and Melbourne conservationist and Director of PNG’s Tenkile Conservation Alliance, James Thomas.
Dr Hala Raghib, a medical researcher who has developed a prize-winning system for animal-free drug testing, has won the University’s coveted Young Achievers’ Award.
Professor John Dewar spoke at the event:
I want to start by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we are meeting, the Wurrundjeri people.
I also want to acknowledge our special guests here tonight – our alumni, including the winners of our Distinguished Alumni Awards for 2012 and the winner of our Young Achiever Award for 2012.
A university’s reputation is built on the success of its graduates and the stories they tell the world. We have graduated more than 154,000 students since our beginnings in 1967, and I think it’s time La Trobe stated publicly its immense pride in their achievements.
Can you join me in giving them another big round of applause? [Applause.]
We’ve changed a lot since some of those earlier award winning alumni enrolled back in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
That was back in a different time, and certainly well before high-achieving high school graduates developed obsessions with that magical 99.95 ENTER score and their love affairs with the high prestige commercial professions.
No doubt to the dismay of their parents, students back then had somewhat different priorities.
It’s customary when talking about the ‘Sixties to do so to a soundtrack of protest songs, interspersed with helicopter noises. So I’m going to do the same.
I’m a music lover as well as a Vice-Chancellor, and I think the musicians of those far-off days can tell us something about what they were like.
When he first hitch-hiked his way to New York on the cusp of the 1960s, Bob Dylan fell into what you might call ‘bad company’ – the folk singers, beat musicians and poets of Greenwich Village.
These were the people you saw on the edges of the early series of Mad Men – the ones Don Draper secretly wanted to run off with and join, and actually did for a while. Through such people Dylan got introduced to the great folk singer Woody Guthrie and some top music producers, and the rest, as they say, is history. If you read the early chapters of his 2004 memoir Chronicles you will be struck by the creativity those rebellious people excited in him.
Anyway, Dylan says something fascinating about those people, which seems somewhat unusual today but which I think really tells us something important. Whenever they met other artists they never asked them how much money they’d made. Money wasn’t their measure of artistic success. The only thing they asked was: “what have you got to say?”
What have you got to say?
I think in some ways that’s the most important question we all have to face as educated people.
And it helps explain what the early La Trobe was all about.
It wasn’t a place where your prestige rested on your potential earning capacity, but on what you stood for. What you had to say for yourself.
Those early students stood for a lot.
Frequently, it has to be said, they sat for a lot too – in sit down protests and in the back of divvy vans as they were hauled off to the police lock up shouting “officer, what are the charges?”
I sometimes think that when the true history of La Trobe is written, the major source will be top secret ASIO files.
When I showed the list of our distinguished alumni award winners to a friend with strongly conservative beliefs who has recently returned from living in Sydney, she said to me: “Yes, distinguished certainly. But did they all have to be communists?”
I told her that they weren’t all communists. Some might have been Trotskyists. It’s hard to tell.
Actually, most ended up associating with the right wing of the Victorian ALP – which I guess for someone from Sydney may as well be the Communist Party. That’s one thing I’ve discovered in the past few years, Melbourne is different to the res of Australia.
Let’s put it all down to youthful excess. But what’s un-arguable I think is that even after growing up, our alumni retained quite a bit of that early idealism.
In his wonderful speech to the recent ACTU Congress, Bill Kelty said something that I think sums up what I’m trying to say here. He said people who want to change the world needed to be “romantic warriors”.
I like that idea. I like the idea of La Trobe as a place that imbues young people with the desire to go out into the world to do good. Not to be “do-gooders”, but people who really can change things.
Bill’s speech reminds us of something we all learn as we get older: that knowledge and its applications can change the world, but that they’re more likely to do so if their proponents have a strong moral purpose to serve.
Our award-winning alumni have succeeded in doing this not just because of their knowledge of history or of industrial law or of public administration or of finance, but because they put it all to the service of society. They hadn’t lost that idealism they got from La Trobe in 1967 along with their qualifications—they simply leaned how to put that idealism to more effective use.
Our newer alumni illustrate this perfectly. James Thomas’s conservation efforts in New Guinea, and Hala Raghib’s groundbreaking cardiovascular research – which she did to address her own family’s history of heart troubles – show what happens when you combine scientific knowledge and moral effort.
I want La Trobe to be that sort of place again.
I want it to be a place that engages the full intellectual and emotional needs of its students. The place to be. The place where people ask you what you’ve got to say for yourself. I want it to be what La Trobe was originally – a campus on the edge of town, a place that draws people into it to learn and debate, before sending them back out into the world to make a difference.
In other words, I want to make La Trobe a bit more like La Trobe. To rediscover its founding ethos and use it as the basis for building a stronger future.
I want these qualities and depth of engagement with students to shine through, not just in classrooms and in libraries and labs, but on campus generally.
And I know we will have succeeded in this goal when students feel the desire to come to campus even on the days when they don’t have lectures, or tutorials or pracs to attend. Which is why our plans for our campuses involve investing more in our public spaces like the Agora and in enlivening our student unions, bars and halls of residence.
The University has to change. There’s no escaping that. The relentless pressure of modernity, with its need for performance measurement in return for funding is a Frankenstein none of us here tonight has the power to control.
But within certain constraints, we can choose our own destiny.
So what does becoming more like La Trobe mean today?
For a start, it means ensuring our university teaching and research addresses the big issues of the times.
For the generation we are celebrating tonight, those issues included women’s equality, ending Apartheid, progressing Third World development, and promoting reconciliation with Indigenous Australians.
In fact it’s one of La Trobe’s proudest boasts that Paul Keating’s famous Redfern Address, which did so much to encapsulate the moral issue at the heart of reconciliation and the Stolen Generations story – the fact that “We took the children from their mothers” – was written by one of our graduates, Don Watson. [Applause.]
Seldom do individuals get to leave such a lasting mark on a nation’s moral constitution. Seldom is the value of an Arts Degree made so plain.
Today there are other issues that this generation have to face up to if they want to be taken seriously as citizens of the world. Pressing issues affecting the future of human societies and their environments have to be confronted: global warming, the ageing of our population, the coming Asian Century, and the revolutions underway in the medical sciences and information technology, with their profound implications for how we live.
La Trobe University graduates have to understand these forces and play a role in shaping them.
Our current research strengths are right on the money here: biotechnology, agriculture, water ecology and water economics, people movement, and the training of nurses, rural doctors and medical staff in numerous fields.
There’s a great story to tell.
We have over $500 million of new research facilities under construction right now. These include Agribio, the Centre for AgriBioscience and the La Trobe Institute for Molecular Science.
The Australian Government’s 2010 Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) rankings recognised La Trobe as the leading University in Australia for research in biochemistry and cell biology.
We need to build on this work, and we have a plan to focus even more of our investment effort and business partnerships on these crucial areas in the future.
La Trobe has to meet important local responsibilities too.
Our home in the northern suburbs of Melbourne is crying out for more university places as its population expands and government equity targets increase. We were founded to be the university of the northern suburbs and we will continue to take that role seriously. We have developed excellent scholarship and outreach programs with local secondary colleges and local Indigenous communities to do just that.
We’re the biggest provider of education to Victoria’s rural community, and we take that responsibility seriously too.
Our $75.9 million La Trobe Rural Health School is close to completion and is set to revolutionise the way rural healthcare education is delivered and address the shortage of rural health professionals.
We need to keep making our mark in the nation’s democratic discussions.
Our public intellectuals continue to be the best in the nation. The Monthly and Quarterly Essay were largely the brainchild of the public intellectuals over in our School of Social Sciences. Where would Australian public debate be without the likes of Robert Manne, Judith Brett, John Hirst, John Carroll, Dennis Altman and others? Much poorer, is the answer.
So we are going to keep our focus on being the leader in vital national debates. As these prominent public intellectuals reach retirement age, they have the task of replicating themselves to keep the La Trobe tradition alive.
We need to keep delivering the best teaching in the country.
Robert Manne made the observation recently that because our highest-profile academics still lecture and give seminars and tutorials, La Trobe students actually get better teaching than students in more prestigious universities. He’s dead right.
You may not know, but iTunes now runs a sort-of virtual university on the net, which features the best lecture series on given subjects from around the world. Recently, a course on ‘The Principles of Physics’ by La Trobe’s Dr David Hoxley attracted over 35,000 subscribers, nearly half of whom watched the whole 20 lectures in his series. In the first semester of this year, there were 2.3 million downloads of lectures and reading materials from just six La Trobe subjects. So we’ve got great teachers who can attract and keep global audiences.
One thing that I want to do as Vice-Chancellor is get the best out of our staff, whether their strength is teaching or researching. The inspiring lecturer is the heart of any university. It’s the great lecturers who taught us that we remember from our undergraduate days. I certainly do. The idea of the teacher-scholar not just the specialist researcher is a great one and one I’d like to see given prominence.
And we need to keep attracting young people who have a passion for changing things. Just like we did in the ‘Sixties and ‘Seventies.
This means devising a recognisably La Trobe curriculum that can produce a recognisably ‘La Trobe’ graduate. It’s my belief that whilst students must specialise to gain a true command of their chosen subject matter, there’s still a place for the big picture.
I’d like La Trobe graduates to stand out, to be different from others, in that they are ‘citizens of the world’. They should be able to conceptualise their own place in the global scheme of things and grasp how their knowledge and skills can best be used.
And it’s for this reason we are now working on a plan to require all students to study units specifically designed to broaden their perspectives – in subjects like regional and global history and politics, technology, innovation, healthy populations and other areas.
And it’s also why we are aiming to create new degrees in subject areas where we can clearly claim to be the best in the country, like food security, water and sustainability, design, innovation and creativity. To study in these subjects you’re simply going to have to come to La Trobe.
I think this is a terrifically important new direction for the university.
But of course it’s going to involve quite a bit on change in how we do things. As I’ve said, the powers that be won’t allow any university to continue doing things the old ways. They’re cruel task-masters. With even crueller accountants.
Sometimes, I have to tell you, being in charge of a university can feel like being a slave on a Roman Galley, with the folks from DEEWR speeding up the drumming. In a totally de-regulated university environment we have to respond to student demand or get rammed by our opponents and drown, chained to our oars. It looks easy. The moral choices look simple. They’re not.
We don’t have a choice about addressing such demands, but I believe we can turn them to our advantage. This makes it vital that the university has a clear understanding of its own future and the distinctive nature of teaching and research.
There is, I think, a dumb way and a smart way to address such change.
The dumb way is to impose some sort of management consultant-led revolution, characterised by the sorts of jargon that Don Watson has lampooned with such lethal effect.
Don, you will be relieved to hear we’re not doing that.
The smart way is keep the university’s essential character in tact.
Our alumni here tonight are living proof that this is the best way.
Think, for instance, how Elizabeth Proust, Terry Moran, Bill Kelty and Garry Weaven confronted the big changes in politics, economics and society of the last thirty years. They responded in ways that preserved the essential aims and purpose of their organisations. Meeting the changing public service needs of citizens. Maintaining the living standards of union members during the restructuring of the economy. Building an industry superannuation system to give union members a decent retirement and a stake in Australia’s wealth. None of it was easy, but they did it.
We have to do the same.
We’re going to expand, but we’re not going to jettison what we stand for.
Perhaps I can end by going back to where I started, with the ‘Sixties and Dylan.
Dylan famously upset the folk purists when he picked up an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Even Peter Seeger got upset. But we know now that Dylan hadn’t ceased to be Dylan, he’d preserved his original musical spirit from the ‘Sixties era. What he did was recognise that the way his music had to be expressed was different.
And he keeps selling albums to this day.
I believe that as La Trobe University changes we can retain our old self, too, at least in the ways that really matter. We can retain our reputation as a place that, where necessary, stands at an oblique angle to society. We can improve our teaching and research. We can even move up the university rankings.
And I hope that as we take that journey we can draw upon the strong support of our business partners and our old students.
As you pass La Trobe campuses in the years ahead, and hear of La Trobe’s successes and our contribution to the world, I hope you will sometimes pause and think with just a little bit of pride, ‘that’s my university’.
