"Maintaining Universities' raison d'etre: Meeting the challenge

Abstract

University chancellors in Australia are a rather unique species. Unlike our counterparts in the UK where the office evolved, and in most of those Commonwealth countries who have inherited and retained it, we have a serious role to play in university governance, chairing as we do our universities’ governing councils or senates – not just dressing up in gorgeous robes to utter sonorous banalities on grand occasions. In the UK by contrast, the chancellor – when not a television personality usually a royal, or some other long-past-it old buffer – rarely does much else.