The central ethical premise of universities has changed fundamentally. The
discovery and dissemination of knowledge has been replaced by the desire to exploit it. Can anyone today imagine a university giving a valuable vaccine away?

In fact, the government encourages universities to do just the opposite - to patent our discoveries and capitalise on our intellectual property. One famous university has just spent a large amount of money on lawyers trying to prove to a court that it owned the rights to a successful drug.

The university lost the case and paid out a fortune in legal fees. Was the institution sorry it took the matter to court? Far from it. As one senior staff member explained, had the claim been successful, the university would have made millions.

Please don't get me wrong. I am not against patents, or capitalism or getting rich for that matter. I agree with the screen siren, Mae West, who said, "I've been rich and I've been poor and, believe me baby, rich is better."

There is nothing illegal in universities trying to exploit the commercial value of their intellectual property. And heaven knows, universities need the money. Oscar Wilde said that he could resist everything but temptation. Well, sometimes it feels as if vice-chancellors can resist everything but money.

We must recognise, however, that commercial transactions carry their own imperatives, and these may not be compatible with traditional academic values. Let me give you an example.

A Stanford University study found that 98% of research papers sponsored by drug companies report that the drugs are effective. In contrast, only 79% of non-company-sponsored research papers report positive results.

When the results of scientific experiments depend on who pays for them, it is not surprising that people have become sceptical about the pronouncements of medical scientists.

I have been using examples from medicine and science because that is my background. But those of you here tonight who are not scientists should not feel too smug.

Scientists are not the only ones whose ethics require scrutiny. The financiers whose fast and loose behaviour has caused financial distress and misery to families around the world included some of the brightest graduates from the world's leading universities.

It is hard not to become cynical. Just because something is legal does not make it right. Nor is it right because everyone is doing it. As the American comedienne, Lily Tomlin, said, the trouble with joining the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.

Instead of taking a stand, universities have kept quiet. This is because they no longer have a moral role, they have given it up for one that is strictly utilitarian. This year's federal budget papers make this starkly clear.

The purpose of universities, say the budget papers is (and I quote) "to grow the knowledge-based economy". Don't you just love the cliché "the knowledge-based economy"? Is there anyone here tonight who can name an ignorance-based economy?

The budget papers go on to describe the university as a "key contributor to ... economic progress". Invest more in higher education, say the budget papers, and the result will be more wealth for everyone.

The former Australian Chief Scientist, Robin Batterham, in his report, The Chance to Change, was not content with such low-key rhetoric. He cranks up the volume to screaming point. According to Batterham, money invested in higher education has gigantic payoffs because universities are "dynamos of growth [and] huge generators of wealth creation".

As a Vice-chancellor, I would really love to believe this, but I am sorry to say that it is grossly exaggerated.There is no automatic correlation between the amount of money spent on universities and economic growth.

Consider Switzerland, for example. It is a wealthy, high growth economy, yet it invests less of its national wealth in higher education than does Poland. France, a wealthy country, invests less than Chile, a developing one.

Brazil, one of the 10 largest economies in the world, has achieved strong economic growth while spending less than any OECD country on its universities. India is a similar case. Hong Kong has had high GDP growth for most of the past 50 years with only a tiny university research base.

Despite the discrepancy between the rhetoric and the reality, many universities happily accept the idea that their purpose is to contribute to the economy. They boast about how their graduates make more money than non-graduates, trying to convince students that universities are the marshalling yards for life's gravy train.

Some have tried to demonstrate their value in dollars and cents. The Lord, being merciful, has sent economists to help them. These spuriously precise studies, and there are many others like them, demonstrate, once again, the wisdom of the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins who famously said that reality is a nice place to visit but no one ever wants to live there.

Don't get me wrong; I am not suggesting that universities do not contribute to the economy. Of course they do. So does Shakespeare. Tourists to Stratford-upon-Avon spend millions of pounds per year on hotel rooms, meals, not to mention coffee mugs with quotes from Hamlet.

And then there are the jobs created printing Shakespeare's plays, selling copies of his sonnets and acting in Shakespeare productions. Just the wine sold during the intervals at the Globe Theatre is worth millions of pounds to the economy. There is only one problem. Shakespeare's value has nothing to do with any of these things.

Are we Australians proud that Gardasil, the cervical cancer vaccine, was developed in Queensland because of the money it will make? Is the bionic ear, another Australian invention, important because of the amount it adds to our GDP?

Not everything of value can be expressed in dollars and cents. Universities demean and diminish their work when they construe their purpose as simply making money. Education is, or should be, a moral enterprise.

As one university leader put it more than a hundred years ago, education's primary aim is to help people to fashion "a life worth living".

I am not a hopeless innocent. I know that many, indeed most, students go to university because it will help them get a better job. There is nothing wrong with this; a fulfilling occupation is part of a good life.

But even jobs are not just about money; work also has moral value. In the words of John Ruskin: "The highest reward for man's toil is not what he gets for it, but what he becomes by it".

From its earliest classical origins, education has not just been about acquiring work skills--its real purpose was to build 'character' so graduates could take up their role in their society and contribute to the good of everyone.

As Plato said, "If you ask what is the good of education, the answer is easy - that education makes good people and good people act nobly".

The original universities took it for granted that their main job was to mould the character of their students, usually by inculcating religious precepts. The first European universities, founded 800 years ago, were all grounded in Christianity--Bologna, Oxford, Cambridge and Montpellier all operated under the authority of a Papal Bull.

The idea that the purpose of education was to forge character persisted for almost 700 years. As recently as the 19th century practically all universities still understood that this was their mission.

Cardinal Newman, writing in 1854, described a professor as "a missionary and a preacher". Like priests, dons in Newman's day had to be celibate. For those of my colleagues in the audience who may feel a little uneasy about this idea, I want to reassure you that my quest to re-moralise the university will stop short of requiring celibacy.

Nineteenth century American universities such as Harvard and Yale also had moral aims. Attendance at chapel services was mandatory. In addition, all students were required to enrol in a course on moral philosophy and all were required to adhere to detailed codes of conduct.

The Harvard code of conduct contained no fewer than 40 pages of rules and regulations. The purpose of this strictly enforced code was to inculcate habits of self-control and self-discipline - the building blocks of good character.

Australian universities were different. Unlike the first American and British universities, which were either private or independent charitable trusts, the first Australian universities were public institutions established by acts of parliament and supported by annual appropriations from the government.

They were deliberately not religious. Our first universities were established at a time when religion was being challenged by Enlightenment ideas - Darwinian evolution, rationalism, Marxism and Socialism - and by the rise of science.

Interestingly, Australian universities never actually renounced their goal of developing character. No university came out and said, "that's it, we're out of the character business, from now on it's all about how to rake in the big bucks."

Australian universities still claimed to build character, not by teaching but by osmosis. The idea is that students exposed to academics who were committed to seeking the truth would emulate them. Following Socrates, Australian universities hoped that knowledge of the good would automatically lead to a commitment to the good.

Beginning in the 1960s, however, even this non-religious approach became suspect. The Vietnam war and civil rights movements fomented campus unrest in the USA, which spread to Europe and eventually Australia. The result was that not just students but also their professors increasingly perceived truth seeking as futile.

The very idea that there was a 'truth' worth seeking became suspect. Postmodernists sneered at the achievements of the West and universities slowly sank into the morass of moral relativity.

All views came to be considered equally valid and the belief that some things are right and others are wrong, that some things are better and others are worse, that some things are true and others false came to be considered as nothing more than the repression of minority viewpoints.

Moral relativity rendered universities unable to make judgements; they could not even decide which subjects students should study. Today, students are allowed to choose from hundreds of options with no subjects considered more important than others. The result is that our universities teach students, but they do not even pretend to make them wise.

In his inaugural address as rector of St Andrews University in 1867, John Stuart Mill said the object of universities was "not to make skilful lawyers, or physicians, or engineers, but capable and cultivated human beings".

Mill was right. Here at Macquarie University, we have decided to see whether it is possible for a secular institution to teach more than job skills but to actually educate the whole person.

We began with the idea of an ethical community. We have not reintroduced the 40-page Harvard code of conduct but we do have rules that apply to both students and staff. It is essential to include staff because we cannot expect our students to behave ethically, if we refuse to act ethically ourselves.

Our rules begin with the basics - insisting that staff and students alike respect others, behave civilly and meet their obligations. We have also established a set of operating principles for managers, which form part of all new employment contracts. These are taken from the Nolan report into standards in public life.

All new managers must agree to act with integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness and honesty. We have also asked our academics to set good examples. To meet classes on time, return assignments promptly and mark fairly.

We require our academics to stay active in their fields, ensure their teaching materials are current and to ensure that they use the most effective teaching methods. And we assess each academic on these things every year.

At the institutional level, Macquarie also seeks to set a good ethical example. We have strictly enforced policies that reject bogus research, sloth, racial intolerance and sexual exploitation. We carefully regulate conflict of interest, plagiarism and acceptance of gifts from commercial firms.

We direct our scholarships and bursaries to those who really need the money rather than students whose high entry scores will help us to move up league tables. All of these policies are designed to ensure that Macquarie University is an ethical organisation, one that sets an example for our students. But we have not neglected our curriculum.

Although we can no longer go back to teaching religion-based prescriptive ethics, we do want our students to live up to John Stuart Mill's vision of graduates of cultivated people. We believe that a university education ought to produce educated men and women who understand the world and their place in it, who can write and speak coherently, who know what a poem is and who can tell a symphony from a jingle.

For this reason, our new undergraduate curriculum does make judgements. Our Provost, Professor Sachs, calls our new curriculum the three "Ps", People, Planet and Participation.

All of our students, no matter what course they are enrolled in, will be required to study People subjects (exposing them to the arts and humanities) and Planet subjects (so that they can understand how science works).

But being cultivated is not enough. We also want to go back to education's purpose and build character. We want our students to live up to the Delphic Oracle's command to "know thyself".

How are we going to do this? This is where the third "P" for Participation comes in. All Macquarie students, whatever course they pursue, will undertake a community or work project outside the university, in many cases outside Australia.

Working with our partner, Australian Volunteers International, and with local agencies, we will be asking students to help tutor disadvantaged children, teach adults to read, build community infrastructure, work in shelters and in prisons.

What do we hope to achieve by this? After all, working in a prison will not help students learn the laws of physics, tutoring disadvantaged children will not show them how to balance accounts and working in a shelter will be of little assistance in learning the law of torts.

Still, I believe that these experiences will teach our students other things that are just as important. These experiences will give them the chance to develop self-confidence and self-knowledge by testing themselves in difficult circumstances.

These experiences will give our students the chance to work in teams, perhaps to become team leaders. Students will have to learn to communicate with those from different backgrounds, learn how to organise their time and how to work toward goals. They will learn about trust, honesty and fair play.

Most important of all, their experience will help them to develop a concern for others, and a concern for others is the essential foundation of all ethics. Macquarie University is re-moralising.

We are implementing a new curriculum that is expressly aimed not just at the state of the art but at the state of our students' hearts. We understand there may be objections. Parents have told me that higher education should be about career preparation, not volunteering, which students can do later, if they want to. Some have challenged the whole idea of character building - who are you to judge right and wrong?

It would be all too easy to surrender to such challenges. But that would be wrong. I think our goal is worth the effort. Macquarie is trying to go back to education's ancient roots. I hope you agree that this is the right thing for us to do.

* Steven Schwartz is Vice-chancellor of Macquarie University in Sydney. This is an edited version of the Vice-chancellor's Oration he gave at the university.

Comment:
This article is visionary and inspirational!

Julia Wheaton,
Eynesbury

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