As the inaugural Vice Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Sydney, Professor Sophie Gee’s (BA ’96) mission is to deepen public conversations around the value, identity and purpose of universities.
A writer, researcher and educator with 25 years’ experience teaching and researching at Harvard and Princeton Universities, Sophie’s interest grew from the recognition that the arts and humanities are uniquely capable of showing us how to live wisely with uncertainty and instability. She shares three insights for a renewed vision for the future of universities.
1. Why do universities matter in a changing world?
“Universities matter because they bring different voices, disciplines, perspectives and ways of understanding the world in to one place and teach students how to become rigorous and brave problem solvers. Historically, universities are communities where knowledge is created collaboratively through respectful debate and unguarded discussion. And in these times of overlapping crises – economic, political, environmental, and social – these methods for making knowledge have huge value.
The crucial thing about universities is that they’ve historically been places where uncertainty and ambiguity are valued. Many people, across age groups, value-systems and cultures can work together with the freedom to experiment with big ideas.
It's critical that universities can keep doing this. We also must forge real, reciprocal relationships with the wider communities outside our campuses. One way for universities to do this is by teaching new generations of young people to embody deep values, which they’re arrived at through their own study, and to seek to make a difference. Another is to strengthen civic life by teaching students to disagree generatively, to make better decisions.
Recently I was part of a group selecting the writer-in-residence for the Charles Perkins Centre. The CPC works on combatting chronic disease and improving global health. That sounds like a task for scientists and doctors. But we've learned that being creative, telling stories and hearing imaginative ideas is crucial to making knowledge breakthroughs and giving compassionate human care. Which is why CPC has this incredible writer in residence program. Universities can bring scientists, creative artists, engineers and conflict experts, etcetera, together every day - and students can learn from seeing this. That doesn't happen in other places.
2. What is the value of the humanities, arts and social sciences?
It’s tempting to think that solving challenges like climate change, AI, or global inequality, is now mostly about STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). These disciplines are so important. But human-centred thinking matters more than ever. In short, if we want humans to survive, we need humanities to make it happen.
The humanities – history, literature, law, philosophy – teach us to pay deep attention, make good arguments with incomplete information, and to understand how emotions work, such as fear, anger and envy. The arts teach how to make care and compassion fundamental starting points for all good change. They also teach us that we are united in our human feelings and that difficult as these are, they are also the way we will move forward collectively.
A few days ago, I was in a room with researchers in many disciplines, anthropology, archaeology, history, music, art history, literature and philosophy. We were talking about what rituals and performance teach us about being human. We realised that they’re crucial ways for us to understand time, place and change. Looking through many different lenses at how humans have made communities that can cope with intense changes and difficult feelings over millennia teaches us deep truths about how to tolerate uncertainty now.
Scientists and doctors are increasingly seeing how important creativity and the humanities are when applying research to make change happen. There is no more powerful way to create change than to tell a story in a vivid and new way. We know there are deep connections between the arts, healthcare, medical research and creativity, which we see with the amazing Arts Health Network and new projects in between the Sydney Policy Lab and the School of Public Health, and with work in Education and Social Work on the neuroscience of reading.
The University’s Net Zero Institute and the Biomedical Accelerator are thinking in bold ways about how to combine STEM and humanities to create trust and hope so that we can take the big leaps needed to address big problems courageously. Science is immensely powerful, and scientists draw on humanities disciplines including music and philosophy to find how knowledge can create real change.
3. How can universities and communities build meaningful relationships?
Universities and communities have a lot to teach each other; the question is how to make it happen. Some of the most exciting research in universities right now is community-led, which means that students and teachers are using advanced research skills to work with communities. There are a lot of unmet challenges and aspirations both among academics and community members, and neither group has been able to get far enough on their own. Working collaboratively, they each see their own problems differently. I'm involved in and learning about collaborations with schools, hospitals, First Nations communities, advocacy organisations, rural communities etc, where new ideas about co-design and community-led research is making a difference.
This also presents powerful opportunities for philanthropy, helping universities to pursue long-term civic goals and to rethink what we want our social landscapes to look like. It’s about redefining what it means to be human in an age dominated by non-human technologies.
We’re all living rich human lives in complex times. The project I’m co-leading, Campus Collaboration, starts from the idea that the challenges we're most worried about as humans and community members have a big overlap with the pressing questions university researchers and teachers are tackling. Interconnection and mutual respect are key. There are extraordinary groups of thinkers all over the university. From nursing to education, to engineering to law to music to philosophy there’s a depth of knowledge and expertise and the question is how to share these meaningfully so many communities feel the abundance and sense of collective capacity.
The superficial perception that universities are vending machines for degrees or places where researchers patent discoveries to “fix” things is a very thin understanding of the depth and richness of a university, which is really a community of communities. The most cutting-edge work across all disciplines right now involves research teams combining humanities with the sciences and professional schools, going into communities and learning what makes them happy or unhappy – and then coming up with solutions where academics and communities are contributing their own strengths and abilities.
To me, community-engaged research is how universities will sustain a sense of purpose and connection going forward. Which doesn’t mean we throw away historically important disciplines, like ancient history or literature. It means that we rethink how we use our knowledge of the past to make a difference in the present.”
Campus Collaboration is co-led by Professor Sophie Gee, Dr Kate Harrison Brennan (BA ‘05, LLB ‘07), Sydney Policy Lab and Professor Danielle Celermajer (BSW Social Work ‘91, BA ‘94), Sydney Environment Institute).