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Five
minutes with our new Chancellor
17
May 2007
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Dr Finkel
has established a world-class supplier of electronic and robotic
instruments, invented a device that was successfully commercialised to
speed drug research, and co-founded the award-winning science magazine
Cosmos. Now Dr Alan Finkel, who received his
doctorate in Electrical Engineering at Monash University in 1981, will take
the helm as Chancellor of Monash University in 2008. He spoke to Monash
Magazine about his plans for the future.
Congratulations,
you are the first Monash Graduate to be appointed Chancellor. Are you
surprised it took 50 years for this to happen?
Not at all.
The first students from Monash University graduated in the mid 1960s, a
touch over forty years ago. If one assumes that there is an unwritten law
that says that a Chancellor has to be at least 50 years old, the first
Monash graduates to reach this threshold would have done so in the 1990s.
Thus, effectively, it has only been ten to fifteen years since the prospect
of appointing a Monash graduate as Chancellor became practical. Even less
if you assume an older threshold in the unwritten law.
How
much has the University, and the sector for that matter, changed since you
graduated?
When I
started at Monash in 1971 university fees had recently been abolished. The
only international students were the children of diplomats or business
people on international transfer. Monash itself already had well
established faculties of law, medicine, engineering, arts and others, but
the trees were still small and the campus looked like it was populated with
Lego blocks. Importantly, the academic staff were
extremely enthusiastic about their work, although their enthusiasm for
their job was dwarfed by the enthusiasm of the student representative
council for political action during and at the end of the Vietnam era.
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New Chancellor in 2008 Dr Alan Finkel
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Since then the Dawkins reforms created a much larger number of
universities, fees have been re-introduced in various ways, international
students are a substantial and vibrant fraction of the university, compulsory
student union fees have been banned and the sector is faced with continual
changes to its financing. There is genuine and increasing diversity in the
range of courses and course structures that are offered, opportunities for
exchange study abroad are more common and research is vibrant. Are these
changes all for the better? Yes and no, but most importantly as a result of
some of these changes universities are now able to offer a richer variety of
courses and research positions that are appropriate to our times.
What
prompted you to 're-join' the Monash family?
I tend to be
driven by issues and the chance to make a contribution. I spent most of my
working life either living in America or running a US corporation from
Melbourne, relying on a combination of frequent travel, telephone conferences
and email to make my job possible. During that time, my closest associations
with universities were with those that were "local" to my interests:
Stanford University, University of California San Francisco and California
Institute of Technology, as well as a few Australian universities with whom I
had a special relationship. For example, I participated in small ways, such
as academic advisory committees, at the John Curtin School of Medical
Research, the University of Queensland and Monash University.
Since I
retired from my business interests in California approximately two years ago,
I have been able to re-engage with the Melbourne community. Professor Leon Piterman, at the time the Deputy Dean of Medicine at
Monash University, invited me to join the advisory board of the National
Research Centre for the Prevention of Child Abuse. I knew nothing more than a
casual reader of the newspapers would know about this field but I agreed
nevertheless and it became a means to "re-join" the Monash family
and contribute to supporting research into an obviously important problem in
our society.
What
do you see as the role of Monash University in the higher education sector
and some of the governance issues that may be ahead?
Universities
such as Monash have a responsibility to train the future sensible citizens of
our society. That is, in addition to walking out with a professional or
generalist degree, through their participation at university students should
learn how to analyse the complex political and scientific issues of the day,
they should know how to study and research issues in addition to remembering
a broad range of facts, and they should know more than just what it takes to
be a professional.
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Drs Alan and Elizabeth Finkel
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The university trains the future leaders who will help to
solve the primary social, economic and environment issues faced by
Australia. The ability of the university to provide such relevant training
is made possible by the strong linkage between research and teaching.
In
addition, the university can contribute to the training its prospective
students receive in secondary school. For example, the rate of science
participation in secondary schools has been declining steadily despite the
fact that technical jobs and scientific issues in our society continue to
be extremely important. Monash University can contribute to understanding
the reasons for this declining participation and based on its research advise governments, educationalists and professional teaching
bodies on the most suitable remedial action.
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Financing
this important work in the changing milieu of the higher education sector is
clearly one of the biggest governance issues today and in the future, but so
too is the ongoing effort to ensure the relevance and quality of our courses,
to ensure that our researchers address the most pressing issues faced by our
society and to ensure that governments and the population at large continue
to recognise and support the role of universities in creating the high
calibre and number of graduates necessary for Australia to achieve its goals.
Research
is a key part of your career. How important is it that innovation, be it in
any subject area -- arts law or science, continue to be encouraged at Monash
University?
Innovation is
the lifeblood of research and its benefits flow directly not only into the
community at large but also from the research arm of the university into the
education arm. In a recent talk by the president of the Indian National
Science Academy, Ramesh Mashelkar,
he defined innovation as "doing different things and doing them
differently". It does not matter whether your field is teaching, law,
science, arts or commerce, whatever you are doing you can be sure that there
is a way to do it even better, and that there is a novel way that you can get
there. We must all aspire to creating innovative solutions to the challenges
in our lives. Great universities like Monash can and must show us by example
how true this is. If Monash ever rested on its laurels it would cease to
provide the stimulus that every student deserves to receive.
You
spent time in the United States, commercialising research, what is your
message to the current crop of researchers working on 'the next big thing'?
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The first message is that anybody contemplating
commercialising the results of their work must recognise that there is an
enormous difference between technology and products. Consumers don't buy
technology, they purchase products. Many companies in the past have been
formed on the basis of a hot new technology but failed because there wasn't
enough patient money available to fund them for the many years required to
convert their technology into saleable products.
The second
important message is that commercialisation success is most likely when the
products are the result of the confluence of the passion of the researcher
with the relevance of the field. If one is driven to commercialise it is
essential to work in a field that is relevant to our social, economic or
environmental benefit, and that is also a field in which one has sufficient
passion to burn the midnight oil and dream about innovative solutions.
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Dr Alan Finkel, astronaut Buzz
Aldrin and Cosmos editor
Wilson da Silva.
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Is it
a big step, moving from the creation and growth of a successful international
neuroscience company to looking after the governance of Australia's largest
university?
Universities
and companies are both sophisticated organisations. They depend on their
external relationships, an effective management structure and a nurturing
Council (Board of Directors) to provide supportive governance and financial
acuity. But most importantly, they depend on people. I always employed the
most enthusiastic and best- educated people I could find and our company was
amply rewarded. Monash University has excellent staff throughout the
organisation and I expect that they more than anything else will make my step
from corporate governance to university governance agreeable and successful.
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You've
booked a space flight on Virgin Galactic. Why?
This
"why?" question always intrigues me because the most immediate
answer that comes to mind is "Why not? Who wouldn't fly into space if
they had the chance?" It turns out that for many or perhaps most
people this would not be their answer so I will elaborate. I have always
been fascinated by science and technology. The things that intrigued me as
a child were the human body, electronic circuits and space travel. As a
teenager I read everything I could about the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo
manned space missions. The crisp photographs published in National
Geographic and Scientific American of spacecraft floating against a blue
earth and black space burned indelible memories in my mind. The possibility
of being an astronaut never struck me as realistic but mine was a prepared
mind nevertheless
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The Virgin Galactic prototype spacecraft
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In October
2004, when I heard that a private company had won a prize for being the first
private corporation to fly a human being into space not just once but twice
within 14 days, I immediately trawled the internet looking for a way to
participate. I was probably one of the first people to sign up on the Virgin
Galactic website. I saw this as such a significant opportunity that I also
signed up Wilson da Silva, the editor of the
popular-science magazine Cosmos that Wilson and I co-founded with my wife
Elizabeth and Wilson's partner Kylie Ahern.
Not only is
flying into space a perfectly appropriate and desirable thing for the editor
of a science magazine to do, it also captures the spirit of my approach to
business. That is, there are two reasons to be in business: fun and profit.
One without the other is insufficient. The same applies to education and
research, although in those cases the mantra is fun and learning, or fun and
outcomes, respectively.
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