Queensland will benefit from a new international consortium of world-class research-intensive comprehensive universities.
Three leading Australian universities, the Universities of Queensland, Melbourne and New South Wales, are founding members of the new, prestigious grouping which allows members to work together to enhance their functions, status and capabilities.
Membership of the new association, to be called Universitas 21, will be limited to 20 institutions internationally.
University of Queensland Vice-Chancellor Professor John Hay said the fact that the three Australian universities were part of the arrangement reflected very well on the universities and upon international perceptions of the standing of higher education in Australia.
He said it was important for Queensland to recognise that one of the three Australian universities in this historic new consortium was the University of Queensland and that the University's membership would present the state with enormous advantages and opportunities economically, culturally, intellectually and socially.
'The University of Queensland is benchmarking itself, is identifying best practice from leading universities around the world, so that we are continually offering the highest possible opportunities to students in this state,' he said.
The three Australian vice-chancellors agreed at a Melbourne meeting this week of the international vice-chancellors that the new association was a significant step in equipping universities to meet the challenges of the 21st century, and in meeting the imperative for Australia to maintain its share of world-class universities.
Professor Hay said that while there were many bilateral arrangements among small groups of countries and arrangements within Europe and within North America, the world-wide nature of Universitas 21 was distinctive.
'This consortium includes Western Europe, North America, South-East and East Asia, and Australasia and it gives an opportunity for very similar, research-intensive, comprehensive universities to establish benchmarking and best practice processes.
'This will allow member universities to measure ourselves against not simply what is best in their own countries but what's best internationally and maintain those sort of levels,' he said.
'So when Australia says it has world-class universities, or when Brisbane does, or when the USA or Canada does, we have mechanisms to ensure that this is not just empty rhetoric.
'All universities are clearly not the same. We have different levels of aspirations. We have different bases of comparing ourselves, each with the other, and it's our view in Universitas 21 that other groups of universities may well emerge that will be different from us and will be comfortable with those differences. There's clearly no future in maintaining the myth that all Australian universities are the same as one another or can be evaluated as if they were.'
Professor Hay said while some universities could feel apprehensive about the new consortium, within Australia the Group of Eight had already emerged, and the Australian members of Universitas 21 were a subset of the Group of Eight. The British universities were a subset of the Russell Group, a group of 17 major comprehensive research-based universities and the Canadian members are from the Canadian Group of Ten.
The founding members include three universities from Australia, four from the UK, three from Canada, one from the United States, one from Singapore, and one from New Zealand.
Universities from the United Kingdom are: the Universities of Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Nottingham. Universities from Canada are: the Universities of British Columbia and Toronto and McGill University. Other members are: The National University of Singapore, the University of Auckland, and the University of California at Berkeley. Invitations to join the founding group will also be extended to leading universities in the Peoples Republic of China and Hong Kong, and the United States of America.
The new association will assist the capabilities of its members to become global universities and to advance their plans for internationalisation. It will provide a framework for exchanging best practices and benchmarking of performance of its members in areas including administration and teaching. It will also assist in development of arrangements for student and staff mobility, and establish a program of Universitas 21 fellowships.
A Universitas 21 secretariat will be established, and will be based at the University of Melbourne for the first three years until 2000.
For further information, contact Professor Hay, who is available for interview in Melbourne until Saturday am at the Sheraton Towers-Southgate, telephone 03 9696 3100, fax 03 9690 5889.
