I'm clocking up my 15th year as a vice-chancellor and it's now 23 years since I first became a deputy vice-chancellor. That's close to quarter of a century at the pointy end of our higher education sector - and that was in four very different universities. My 23 years have seen a lot of changes - some of them good, some not so good.

Among the not so good was the erosion of regard and ultimately the erosion of trust between government and universities. It was a two way street and in my view did not serve Australia's interests at all well.

What the cause of that was, we'll never really know but I'd wager that a not insignificant element in the equation was that universities, playing their proper role in society, operate in a way that does not (at least should not) make them meekly subservient to the whim of the government of the day.

Universities and their staff will, indeed must, stand up and use their expertise to critique issues, directions, policies, to comment on the state of the nation. And they shouldn't just do that privately or keep it within the cloister. We must put our expertise into the public domain so that the public can be better informed - and make better decisions when they need to.

Our university leaders must stand for values and strategies and their institutions, not just (or not only) tactical opportunism. We will make mistakes and we will be criticised; but in my view it is better to try, than not to try at all. And it is better to stand up for values - and academic freedom, institutional autonomy and responsibility are some important ones - than to roll over.

I find it hard to imagine universities not playing this role. I cannot conceive that you can educate if you don't challenge accepted wisdom and try to develop it through research and scholarly work that take it to new levels. If you don't challenge what we know in order to discover what we could know - how will any society ever advance?

Maybe the fault is partly ours. After all, we pretend that all our outputs and standards are equivalent. We consent to a system of quality assurance that is akin to saying we have clean and comfortable trains because they run on time - or, as my colleague Fred Hilmer has said "...there's never been a consequence - so it is just red tape".

Of course, it helps to avoid the really hard and potentially embarrassing question: how good are you?' We have accepted funding formulae that disperse student-based funding widely rather than to support true differences in outcomes and costs.

We accept it when the Australian Research Council funds just 60-65% of each successful grant to keep the success rate up near 1:5 - meaning the more your institution 'wins', the more it costs you - or worse, you watch the quality of work that can be done diminish. And so we cross-subsidise from teaching.

But we are now in another era. There is a chance to change. The government is moving to deliver on the excellent higher education policy that it took to the last election. It is a policy that I endorse. It sets a scene, it identifies aspirations and we know what they hope to achieve.

In the last budget, the government put money behind it. And there is a golden opportunity to rebuild trust. On both sides.

Within the context of government policy and the broad directions it indicates, the real issue before us is how we provide Australia with the quality and range of universities that will serve this country best.

What do we need? I start where the ANU started - in 1946.One of our founders said in the Parliament that the ANU "by taking its place among the great universities of the world.... would bring still further credit to our country. We have a duty to the world at large (he said) which we must recognise if we are to be accepted as a world power... (Through) the establishment of (the ANU) Australia will have taken one more step to align itself with the great and enlightened nations of the world".

They were important words. They are still important words. They meant that Australia had to have some (more than one, now) universities up there in the world's first division, not just the second, or the fourth, and they meant that our being there would contribute to Australia's international profile and facilitate our place at the table along with the nations of the world with which we wished to align.

We expect it of most other institutions and big organisations: we draw great national comfort from our sporting pinnacles and we like to think that success tells the world a lot about us. We like that our banking system appeared remarkably sound during the economic crisis - better than the rest; and that our mining companies operate at world's best practice.

Education is no different. We must never be content with outcomes that do not include some that are comparable with the world's great universities. I would also argue that this must mean purposeful differentiation and respect for the differences that evolve. Other countries achieve what they do with structural differences and focused funding.

We have taken a different tack. We only have 'research' universities - by definition. The National Protocols require that, for an Australian institution to carry an 'unmodified' university title, it must (along with other things) offer research degrees (masters and PhDs) in at least three broad fields of study.

The Bradley review of higher education goes further: "a comprehensive university should undertake....sufficient research in at least three broad fields initially and overtime in all broad fields in which course-work degrees are offered... and in all narrow fields in which research degrees are offered".

I do not believe that research activity should be the defining characteristic of a university. If it is, and unless we are more careful than we have been for a long time, we will have no research institutions in the world's first division - as we spread thinly whatever resources are available.

Australia with 39 Harvards or 39 MITs is one thing; Australia with 39 pretenders is quite another.

I do not think we should stop institutions from conducting research and research training. While I do believe that we need to equip Australia with some comprehensive universities that can at least sit at the same table as the 'world's greatest', we must also build others with more specialist or focused provision when, and where, there is the right intellectual environment for research and research training.

And they can sit at the table with their type of university. We must build different relationships between our universities so that strengths can be shared and developed - without simplistic replication, duplication, smeared focus or name calling.

To get there, we have much to do: there are some hard questions that need to be asked and difficult decisions to be made. We must move beyond our traditional approach: a zero sum game where you feel the need to bring somebody down to create space for yourself.

As President Kennedy once said in the entirely different but recently revisited context of the ambition for a moon landing - we do it not because it is easy but because it is hard.

To paraphrase that statement in our context we will do it, not because it is easy but because it is essential - if Australia is to sustain a place in the world of knowledge where it counts - at the leading edge - as we also provide opportunities for people to secure an education for personal and national advancement.

Our ANU founders knew that. They understood that prior to 1946 Australia had been a mendicant at the table - we contributed little and we got the little that others wanted to give us. That was no place for a country like Australia to occupy then - and it will be no place for our country to go back to.

The present government knows this and has announced major reforms to our university system to ensure Australia can meet the challenges of the next century. The reforms are not just about money, important as that is, they are also about change.

As Innovation Minister Kim Carr said in March this year: "...we must be ready to push for structural reform and cultural change...let me lay the agenda bare. The government will use any additional funding as a lever to drive structural reform within institutions and across the sector".

We need purposeful change so that we can be sure that Australian universities do all that is necessary for this nation, even though they each may play a different part.

Since the mid to late 1990s, preceding the Howard years but exacerbated during them, we experienced a period of under-investment in universities and drift in public policy relating to higher education and university research.

The double-whammy of policy drift and under-investment resulted from a lack of will and lack understanding in Government. It has left Australia vulnerable in the global knowledge society.

During the period 1995-2005, Australia's annual research output went from about 13,000 to 20,000 papers in Natural Sciences and Engineering, well behind Canada, Spain and Italy. China went from an output of about 9,000 to 50,000 during the same period.

Australia produces about 7,000 PhD graduates per year; Germany produced more than 20,000 in 2005 and China is on a vertical climb with an estimated 35,000 or so in 2005 (The Graduate University of the Chinese Academy of Science alone has about 60% of the number of PhD students in the entire Australian sector).

Our citation impact over the period 2001-2005 is reasonable in that we are mostly just above, or just below, average. In the biosciences, over the same period, our citation impact is behind the UK in every field. I would argue that this is a consequence of the chronic partial funding of everything so that we give everybody something.

It is imperative for Australia that we lift our sights and lift our game. We must rebuild our capacity to perform alongside the world's best in the fields of education and research that matter to us, so I welcome the commitment of the government.

The vehicle through which the government intends to drive that reform is through mission-based funding compacts between individual universities and the government. For compacts to be an effective instrument of change, however, universities must be active not passive participants. They must be clear about their goals. They must be open to new opportunities.

Each institution will need to know what it stands for, what its distinctive purpose is, and how well it performs, and be able to convince others of its convictions through evidence and argument.

It is important that we earn trust; with trust and executed well, compacts will enable Australia to fit all the pieces of our higher education and research system together in a way that supports local, regional, national and international needs.

We already have a spectrum of institutional characteristics covered by the university title. According to 2007 data, one university admits more than 50% of its school leaver commencing students with tertiary entrance rank scores above 95, while another admits more than 50% with a tertiary entrance rank scores below 50.

One university has 90% of its academic staff active in research while another has less than 3% active in research. The proportion of academic staff with a doctorate in 2008 varies from a low of 33% to nearly 82% at the highest, with the average near 64%.

One university devotes in excess of 85% of its budget to research-related activities while another spends less than 5% on research. One university has 30% of its enrolments in graduate programmes and 15% in research higher degrees, while another has 7% in graduate programmes and less than 1% in research higher degrees.

A handful of Australian universities are recognised consistently on international measures of excellence while others that don't compete on the international stage play important national and regional roles.

These differences are not trivial. They reveal different institutions in terms of their mission, culture, capacity and performance. In Australia, we call them all universities - regardless of what they do or the balance of their activities - elsewhere they would do it differently. I don't think that matters. What does matter is that between us all we do for Australia what needs to be done. Executed well, compacts could lead to that outcome.

As a community, we should celebrate the universities that consistently attract students who are the first in their families to enter and complete higher education. A better educated population helps Australia understand the world around it and cope with the challenges that face it. We should support the universities that help local communities cope with adverse circumstances in their regions and raise their skills for solving problems.

We should encourage the universities that translate research results in ways that are useful for Australian firms. And we should celebrate research-intensive universities which do many of these things and are also able to mix it with the world's best.

Do we do what needs to be done? With a big population base, a large number of institutions and a mobile student population, it is a fair bet that what needs to be done is being done somewhere. The United States has around 4,500 higher education institutions. Of those institutions, only a handful are world-renowned research institutions (the Association of American Universities has 60 US members).

But not only are their best the best in the world, their 4,500 cover every imaginable part of the academic spectrum. With us it is different. We can't be so certain here. We are not big enough to 'guess' that everything that should be done is being done, every discipline that should be prosecuted is being prosecuted, every student can get to wherever it is that offers what they want to study, that our PhD students are focused in areas where there is real research expertise. We can't guess; we must know.

From what I can envisage of the next 20 years, the growth in Australian higher education will take place overwhelmingly in institutions that are set up to respond to the demand of new participating student cohorts, and to the practical needs of employers, businesses and communities. The institutions that address those missions should be valued in their own right.

We should put an end to the upward pressure on institutions to be other than what they are. At the same time, we should cease the levelling-down of flagship universities to be less than they could be. To do so diminishes Australia.

While expanding and diversifying the higher education system, Australia needs to rediscover the value of its flagship universities and recommit to their unique role. Can you imagine a United States without a Harvard or a Yale? A United Kingdom without Oxford or Cambridge? A Singapore without the National University of Singapore?

The difference between elite (best) and elitist (privileged) has been blurred. Except, of course, in sport.

Mass participation in higher education calls for new forms of provision to meet more diverse student needs and circumstances. But mass participation does not mean that future leaders no longer need to be cultivated and the 'able young' can be forgotten. Opportunities should not be the exclusive preserve of any group.

Australia has the capacity to structure opportunities to ensure they are open to talented individuals whatever their origin, wherever and into whatever circumstances they were born.

A research-intensive university (in its ideal type) is a community comprehensively searching for knowledge in a culture of discovery and in systematic ways that are open to scrutiny and contest. As a consequence, research universities are major sources of new discoveries, highly trained personnel and expertise. They make significant contributions to society but in many ways they do so indirectly.

Today there are great expectations that research universities will help the community address many complex problems, economic, social, health and environmental, whether on a local, national, regional or global scale. It is crucial that universities contribute actively, and it is essential that they preserve the conditions that enable them to do so.

The concept of university autonomy has substantive and operational dimensions. Substantively it is about giving space for the exploration of ideas and the discovery of knowledge, and exercising discretion in decisions over: student admissions; staff appointments; curriculum and pedagogy; research content, methods and publications; student assessment; and the award of qualifications.

Operationally, it is about self-governance, flexibility in the generation and use of resources to achieve results, and room to move in the formation of domestic and international alliances, internationally and domestically.

The government's policy decision to remove funding caps on the total number of student places and the mix of enrolments across fields of study should increase the responsiveness of the sector and give universities greater flexibility in the courses they offer and the students they admit.

While welcoming this reform, not least for its administrative simplicity, we have to understand and accept the government will need complementary arrangements for protecting fields of learning that may not be sustainable in the more deregulated environment and on the basis of student demand alone.

On the one hand, student demand can be fickle. It can reflect changes in demographic and labour market conditions, as well as fads. On the other hand, universities can be opportunistic. They may seize the chance to exit from expensive fields such as physics to expand more profitable offerings such as business.

So I for one do not believe that universities should be left entirely free to decide matters in their own interests to close particular courses or open new ones. Nor do I regard higher education as a commodity, where learning is incidental to the purpose of gaining a degree as a currency, and where tuition prices are set at what 'the market' will bear.

There is a public interest in the continuity of scholarship in areas of national importance and the balanced supply of graduates to the labour market, alongside regard for fairness and inter-generational equity.

Similarly, with regard to research degrees, I do not believe that universities should be totally free to initiate new programs or expand funded enrolments without having to demonstrate their capacity to provide such programmes of an acceptable quality. There is a public interest in safeguarding the reputation of Australian qualifications.

It is impossible to provide quality research training in an institution that is not performing quality research. Yet we have allowed the bar to be lowered for the PhD without question, even without policy discussion. To let this drift continue will be to damage our reputation internationally - and be less than useful nationally.

University decision-making needs to be inclusive of community interests, taking a longer-term view, consistent with its mission. Universities not governments must chart their course but they need to do so by ways and means, visible to governments, that have regard to the public good and the national interest.

I suggest that the compacts, negotiated between each university and the government, have the potential to sharpen the exercise of responsible university autonomy. Such a differentiating course will diverge fundamentally from the dominant approach of the past two decades of sameness. It will require a nuanced approach that builds upon the recognition and validation of particular strengths, together with a willingness to concentrate investment in those fields and institutions with the capacity for the best performance, wherever they may be found.

The concentration of public investment in university strengths can only be justified on the basis of demonstrable performance. Clearly, some of the strongest areas of Australian research are to be found not only in the more established universities but also, in particular fields, at Swinburne, Wollongong, Newcastle, James Cook, University of South Australia, Charles Darwin and others. They are important leaders of the overall Australian effort and they deserve to be supported properly.

Without doubt, we should foster emerging strengths. But potential does not grow without roots. New areas of strength have historically tended to emerge on the back of a track record of performance validated by academic peers. The inaugural professors at ANU who pioneered disciplinary breakthroughs in Australian research, were all recognised in their fields before their appointments - as well as after.

If compact negotiations are to deal with these matters the processes will need to be transparent - and trusted. The onus falls necessarily on universities to propose how they can best meet student needs, contribute to equity goals, contribute to the national innovation agenda, contribute to our international standing and develop their capacity to fulfil their mission and serve the broader community.

Clearly it would be impossible, as well as undesirable, for government officials, whose skills are in other areas, to try to form judgments about narrow disciplines for teaching and research, and engage in negotiations with universities about such specifics. The universities must take the lead.

So how can we proceed? In terms of education, one approach would be for universities to bring forward their mission statements and strategic plans, ahead of bilateral consultations with government officials, identifying the main changes in direction they intend to pursue, drawing particular attention to growth and decline by field of education and field of research.

Declines in one area by one institution might well be offset by growth on the part of other institutions. The officials would have the opportunity to identify emerging gaps in overall provision. Subsequent compact discussions could focus on the justification for changes and their likely impact in those fields where activity could be curtailed on a national basis.

In managing changes to teaching provision, it would be useful for the government negotiators to have tools for mitigating adverse consequences. One approach would be for different universities to be paid a form of retainer for continuity of scholarship in fields of national interest.

In terms of research the key decision is where to fund postgraduate research places. Here the decisions are more complex and controversial, and I think the most appropriate approach is the reverse of the one I have outlined for education. That is, universities should be asked to demonstrate that they have adequate threshold capacity to commence or continue to offer PhDs in particular fields. In other words, there could be useful differentiation around the PhD - comprehensive selective and case-by-case.

The outcomes of compact negotiations over fields of teaching and research training should provide a basis for further consideration of inter-university collaborations. If well developed, these collaborations should open up channels for students to move up, through and across different institutions in order to pursue their interest and achieve to their potential.

Research universities have a particular responsibility to be major participants in this endeavour. That responsibility arises from the fact that these universities attract the large share of intellectually talented young people.

Research universities should make every effort to draw in able students from disadvantaged backgrounds, and support them strongly through their studies. They are also obligated to contribute to the achievement of the nation's equity agenda in more indirect ways.

Similarly, we should appreciate the many indirect contributions that universities can make to the national innovation agenda. There has been an over-emphasis in policy development, since 1989 and particularly pronounced since 1999, on the direct application of university research for commercial purposes.

Consequently, basic research in Australia's universities - the search for understanding of the nature of things - has fallen over the past 20 years from two-thirds to one quarter of total research effort. For a country that is so dependent on being able to access the 97% of world knowledge generated outside Australia, this is definitely a dumb approach.

It is essential that Australia has the know-how to apply knowledge creatively and cost-effectively, and there are many institutions - universities, CSIRO and others - that can do so.

The capacity for basic research is scarcer. Serious consideration needs to be given to shoring up Australia's capacity for basic research, much of which is to be found in the research-intensive universities.

There is no equivocation in Canada. Basic research is seen to serve an important function as a national strategic reserve - making available the expertise needed to address unexpected events when the occur. The Canadian approach is a balanced, analogous to a financial investment portfolio.

And so for 'compacts with teeth'. I see them having five elements:

1. Core agreement based on the mission of the university;
2. Continuity of scholarship in designated fields of education;
3. Provision of quality research training in validated fields of research;
4. Contribution to the national equity agenda;
5. Contribution to the national and international innovation agenda;

What will give compacts teeth? In my view, nothing short of sound judgment based on experience and hard evidence. And the teeth will be sharp if there are consequences so that my colleague won't be able to lament again in a few years that: there's never been a consequence - so it is just red tape...

Hence, I think the government should give serious attention to supplementing its teams of departmental compact negotiators, at least for the initial phase, with respected academic authorities and university leaders.

Get this right and we can realise the opportunities that are available. Get this right and we can halt the slide of Australian higher education and research further down the international ladders. To get this right, we will have to take the hard decisions.

To get it wrong would be to leave an unthinkable legacy.

*Ian Chubb is Vice-chancellor of the Australian National University. This is an edited version of an address he gave to the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney last month.

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