SourceUNIVERSITIES are big places and it is easy to lose your way. We have taken to placing maps at strategic locations to help people navigate their way around the campus.
One map was the victim of graffiti. Right under the orientation arrow and the words "You are here", someone had written, "But why?"
Universities are also wondering why they are here. I would like to tell you about one that knows. You can see it when you drive to Chicago from the airport. It has modern low-rise buildings, lecture theatres and state-of-the-art computing facilities.
The university employs professors from many countries and it has a branch campus in Hong Kong. It also plays host to a large number of international students.
The courses offered by the university are focused on business. In fact, they are focused on a single business: running restaurants. Students learn how to organise and motivate staff, manage accounts and how to scale up a business to make it grow.
The American Council on Education recognises the university's courses as eligible for tertiary credit.
If you haven't already guessed it, the name of this university is Hamburger University. It's the management training facility for the McDonald's restaurant chain.
Hamburger University: sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? No one is likely to confuse it with a real university. But why not? How does it differ from a real university, like the ones we have here in Australia?
One difference is the narrowness of its curriculum. Most modern universities are what Clark Kerr, the doyen of American university presidents, called multiversities: institutions that bring together many different disciplines.
But there are exceptions. Carnegie Mellon University in Adelaide offers only three masters courses. It has no science, no medicine, no engineering and no English.
There are many well-respected universities in the US and Europe that are also highly specialised. An educational institution can be a legitimate university even with a narrow curriculum.
So, if it's not the diversity of their courses, what makes our universities different from Hamburger U?
At one time we could have said that most Australian universities are public bodies, contrasting this with Hamburger University's private ownership. But this distinction no longer works. Notre Dame, Bond and Carnegie Mellon are all private, yet no one disputes that they are all universities. So why isn't Hamburger U a real university?
One place to look for the answer is in research. Universities seek truth; their aim is to discover, preserve and disseminate knowledge.
Hamburger U does this, too. For example, it discovers and preserves knowledge about how to cook consistently great chips.
But let's be honest, Hamburger University's academics are not high-flying researchers, unlike our university academics, who are all scholars.
This is what we would like to believe, but is it really true?
There are thousands of academics teaching in Australian universities. Are they all scholars conducting research? A Griffith University study found that 44 per cent of Australian academics published exactly nothing in a particular year. In other words, when it comes to research, many Australian academics are no more active than the staff of Hamburger U.
Actually, even as I say this I can hear that I sound more pessimistic than I should. It may be a minority pursuit, but groundbreaking research is taking place in Australia and not only in universities. But how can research be the unique defining characteristic of universities when many academics don't do any and when excellent research is found outside universities?
Perhaps it is not research in general but a particular type of research that defines universities. Because we seek to discover and disseminate the truth, university research is driven by curiosity and the findings are shared freely with scholars across the world.
This is clearly not true of Hamburger University. But, here again, times change. According to Robert Dynes, president of that mighty research colossus, the University of California, curiosity-driven research is an outdated concept. To quote Dynes, "We're not here to do the stereotypical ivory tower, navel-gazing, curiosity-driven research. That is not what a modern public research university is all about."
So what is the modern public research university about? Industry-relevant research, of course. And don't worry about sharing the findings. In this day of patents and confidentiality agreements, it is routine to keep research results confidential.
Perhaps I am going about this from the wrong direction. A university is not defined by its campus, its range of courses, its ownership or even its research. What is important is what it teaches and what its students learn.
Hamburger University is a vocational enterprise. Perhaps this is where it differs from our real universities? John Henry Newman, whose 19th-century description of an ideal university continues to thrill members of senior common rooms across Australia, was adamantly against vocational courses (and research, for that matter). For him, universities were enclaves, separate from the everyday world.
Much has changed. Today, employers, taxpayers and politicians all want universities to prepare students for jobs. Australian universities have certainly taken up the challenge. The diploma in event management, the bachelor of applied science in naturopathy and the bachelor of arts in advertising are clearly not what Newman had in mind. We claim our courses supply students with high-level communication and problem-solving skills, but when it comes right down to it, it is difficult to see any significant difference between the bachelor of arts in catering management offered by an Australian university and the curriculum offered by Hamburger U.
So where does this leave us? It is self-evident to all of us here that Hamburger University is not a proper university -- as McDonald's would agree -- yet there does not seem to be any unique way in which it differs from our universities. So why are we sure that it is different?
I recently read an article by Anthony Kronman, a professor at Yale in the US who believes that a university education should stimulate students to think about the meaning of life and how they should live. A university education should help students to answer the question posed in the title of his article, which was: "Why are we here?"
I used the same title for this talk but, unlike Kronman, the we I have been talking about is not students or staff but universities.
In Australia, we usually identify three purposes: teaching, research and community engagement. Our politicians, journalists and businesspeople typically view each of them in utilitarian terms.
Teaching is important because graduates get better jobs, become more productive and make Australia richer. Research is important because it leads to discoveries, which lead to new products that make Australia richer. Getting into the spirit, vice-chancellors demonstrate community engagement by hiring consultants to calculate their university's economic impact on the nation. In other words, community engagement is another way of making Australia richer.
Now don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with being rich. But making graduates and the country richer cannot be the purpose of universities because, unless you are a miser, making money is not an end in itself, it is a tool.
We need money to achieve our goals, but first it's necessary to have goals. This is why the Dearing inquiry into British higher education in the 1990s identified not three but four purposes for universities.
In addition to teaching, research and community engagement, Ronald Dearing said universities should "play a major role in shaping a democratic, civilised, inclusive society". Grand ideas, I'm sure you will agree, but what does Dearing mean? How can universities shape democracy? The answer is they strengthen the voluntary social groups that make up civil society.
Trade unions, professional associations, churches, political parties and business groups not only meet the needs of their members, they also provide a vital counterbalance to the power of the state.
Such a balance is necessary because when the state becomes too powerful, liberty and freedom can disappear. But a strong civil society cannot be taken for granted. It depends on a solid foundation of education. As Epictetus said, "only the educated are free".
Civil society needs doctors, lawyers, schoolteachers and many other skilled people. They come from education. We live in a world of constant change; our society depends on our having skills to adapt. They come from education. Civil society needs clever business people. They, too, come from education.
Many studies have found that graduates are likelier to vote, to give to charity, and to volunteer their time. In other words, education is the vital ingredient on which civil society depends. So here is the real reason we need to have a sound economy. We want the country to thrive because we need money to provide the education on which our freedom and liberty depend.
In a "democratic, civilised and inclusive society" (to use Dearing's phrase), all citizens should have the opportunity to reach their potential, to go as far as their abilities take them. This is not only good for those who are educated but good for the rest of us because educated people help strengthen civil society.
So here, at last, is the difference between Hamburger University and real universities. Real universities are the engines of economic growth without which civil society would wither and social justice would be impossible. Hamburger U adds value to McDonald's employees.
Why are we here? We are here to increase the freedom of everyone.
Yeah, nice idea, not really executed well...someone sack his ghost writers.
