• 'Trinity’s Challenge: Advancing from Good to Great'. Full text of the Chairman's Toast

Colleges 'at the heart of educational experience': Installation of the 7th Warden

Sunday 4 March 2007

I, Andrew Brian McGowan, duly elected as Warden of Trinity College, promise to uphold the purposes for which the College was founded, as a place of learning and faith, in which the finest qualities are nurtured in a community of scholars; to hold in trust the rich inheritance received from those who have gone before; to hand it on faithfully to those who come after; and to exercise my authority as Warden justly, so that all who live and work and study here may flourish and excel.

With this declaration, and the blessing of the Archbishop of Melbourne, the Most Revd Dr Philip Freier, the Revd Dr Andrew McGowan was this evening formally installed as the College’s seventh Warden. His Rite of Installation, which took place during a Choral Evensong service, was based on that used for the preceding three Wardens.

In addressing a packed Chapel, Dr McGowan referred to the history of the University of Melbourne, which although secular by constitution, provided land for each of the major religious denominations of the day to establish Colleges ‘marginalised on the northern perimeter’.

‘Any geographical truth in that statement seems to have been overtaken by the growth of campus and community. But the conceptual significance of being placed on the margins may be more difficult to overcome,’ Dr McGowan said.

‘The presenting issue for thinking of the Colleges marginally at Melbourne has usually been the religious part; the absence of allegiance to any one religious tradition in the University is the appropriate cost and benefit of excluding sectarian rivalry from the heart of the University’s life. But there has been a cost to the University beyond the distancing of the religious traditions and claims associated with the Colleges.

‘Australian Universities, like others, argue within and among themselves about the respective importance of research and teaching, or of emphasis on vocational or liberal elements of the curriculum. But in those great institutions to which we look for models and inspiration the margins have been differently drawn, rich forms of community and particularly residential life for students and teachers alike are assumed.

‘Our own University is moving into a period of rapid and fundamental change which offers exciting possibilities both for deepening and for broadening knowledge; but we are also, I think, asking what actual forms of life are necessary, not simply for delivery of information or training in skills, but to the existence of a University comparable with the great educational institutions of the world.’

Quoting John Henry Newman’s view of a University as ‘the assemblage of strangers from all parts in one spot’, Dr McGowan highlighted the importance of ‘community before curriculum’.

'While the Colleges are not the only means to realise a sense of community for students and scholars, an adequate understanding of the University itself places what a College is and does, not at the margins of an educational experience, but at its heart,’ he said.

‘I am proud and humbled to be entering into leadership of one College,’ Dr McGowan said. ‘This is an institution which across its various programs seeks to embody that sense of community, where education is always in relation, and has a human face.’

At a dinner following the Installation, the Chairman of the Board – and son of the third Warden – Mr Bill Cowan – proposed a toast to ‘the College and its future under Andrew’s leadership’, declaring that ‘tonight we are at the beginning of an exciting new phase of our development’.

He admitted that the Board’s job specification for the 7th Warden’s position had been described by the senior partner of a leading executive recruitment firm as ‘aspirational’, the implication being that ‘we had no hope of finding anyone to meet our stated requirements.’ After interviewing Andrew, the executive not only changed his view but ‘wanted to send all his six children to Trinity – as long as Andrew was the Warden’.

Bill Cowan also outlined the areas being looked at by the Board in endeavouring to take the College from ‘good’ to ‘great’ by 2022 – its 150th anniversary. These included:

• increasing scholarships to enable the best students to come to Trinity even if they cannot afford the fees
• improvement of heritage buildings, gardens and grounds
• providing better facilities for our Theological School, for a growing number of graduate students, and for our administrative team
• fostering the Arts and Music
• working even more closely with other Melbourne Colleges and the University itself
• staying more closely in touch with the Trinity Community here and worldwide.