Brian Schmidt on the double-edged sword of leadership

“At the same time, you realise that every single one of us is ultimately human. We have weird quirks that can screw us up.

“I see such talented people do amazing things and amazingly stupid things.”

World-beating ideas

Among the list of amazing things that people can do is a list of spin-offs that put a spotlight on the brilliance of the research happening at the university and the entrepreneurial spirit that drives so many academics.

Among them are Samsara Eco, a world-beating technology that breaks down waste plastics to the core molecules with the promise of infinite recycling and zero waste. It’s raised $54 million to date.

There’s Instaclustr, an open-source data management and workflow platform incubated at the ANU was acquired by Netapp, one of the world’s largest software companies, and Quantum Brilliance, which is on track to create the world’s first room temperature quantum accelerator driven by synthetic diamonds.

And don’t forget VAI Photonics, which has been developed over the last 15 years and will help vehicles, whether in space or on Earth, navigate independently of GPS. Its applications range from electric vertical takeoff and landing systems for flying taxis to space exploration.

Schmidt is being brutally honest when he says being a research intensive university in today’s climate is tough. ANU has always been ranked among the best of Australia’s universities on international league tables, but on recent years it has started to stumble.

It’s still a hot contender in the world top 100, but in the past year has slipped from 79 to 83 on the Academic Ranking of World Universities; from 30 to 34 on QS and from 62 to 67 on the Times Higher Education ranking.

The fact ANU is competitive is a function, in part, of the national institutes grant it alone receives from the federal government to help it achieve its mission to be a world-class university.

The way universities are funded in Australia, with money for research largely competitive, and for teaching dependent on the number of students, means that size equals scale.

Smaller is better

And Schmidt’s vision to keep ANU at about 20,000 students has proved to be a problem when it comes to revenue.

ANU is small by Australian standards, where the big sandstone universities have student enrolments exceeding 60,000. ANU’s size puts it alongside Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard but significantly bigger than Yale and Princeton.

It does, however, give ANU a unique flavour in a monochrome higher education system. It is Australia’s only truly residential university where every undergraduate is guaranteed a place in one of its colleges.

“Only 15 per cent of our students are from Canberra,” Schmidt says. That is the opposite of all other universities where students tend to enrol in the university nearest to their home address.

That creates a self-selecting cohort – the kids who are bold enough to choose to leave home and live in college in a city far from home.

“That’s one of the great strengths of our student base,” he says.

As word of mouth has filtered through the wealthy schools of inner-city Melbourne and Sydney, the university is still trying to get more public school kids from the outer suburbs and regions of Australia to consider it as an option.

“If you are a kid living a long way from a town who is not super rich, it’s a big deal to move interstate and live in Canberra,” he says.

That’s where scholarships come into the picture, particularly the generous Tuckwell variety named after businessman and alumni Graham Tuckwell and his wife Louise. The program, which hand-selects up to 25 allrounders each year, is now in its 10th year.

Similar to the US’s Ivy League institutions, Schmidt says his goal would be “to provide a scholarship to anyone who needs support to live in Canberra and you just automatically get it when accepted”.

Financial support for poorer students “is the only way we are going to get equity without government support”, he says.

While residential colleges provide ANU with its singular offer, it comes with a downside. The issue of sexual assault became one of the defining themes for the higher education sector in 2023.

The issue has been floating around since 2016 but finally became a political hot potato after a senate inquiry into sexual violence zeroed in on universities’ unwillingness to deal with the issue in an open and transparent matter.

Residential colleges are, of course, at the centre of much of the appalling behaviour, which put ANU in the line of fire.

Schmidt, however, is somewhat defensive when the issue is raised.

“Everyone was always trying to do the right thing,” Schmidt says.

Former ANU student Camille Schloeffel became a lightning rod for the issue when she and colleague Sophie Aboud approached independent senator David Pocock about the issue.

After they aired their grievances, Pocock invited them and other advocates to meet him and members of the crossbench in Canberra who, in turn, took them to meet education minister Jason Clare.

Within days Clare had announced that university governance, including welfare of students and staff, was a key priority, and he had appointed a working group headed by Patty Kinnersly, the CEO of Our Watch, to develop concrete plans on how to address it.

While Schloeffel says it was almost impossible to get senior executives at ANU to take their complaints seriously, Schmidt argues they were heard but were hitting “procedural brick walls”.

“I really do believe that because of her frustration we are doing a lot better. We weren’t intentionally trying to do bad things, we were trying to do things the correct way. That had to evolve because the correct way is not always the right way as it turns out.”

Which brings us back to his original point. That on a campus of 23,000 brilliant students and staff, as the figurehead each day he witnessed first hand the very best, and the very worst, of humanity.

“I’m quite an emotional person and I feel these things acutely,” he says.

Next year, it’s back to the lecture theatre and his much-loved lab at Mt Stromlo. The transition won’t be easy, he says, what with having to relearn a whole stack of deeply technical stuff that is out of the league for mere mortals like the rest of us.

“I’m really proud of the university. Genevieve Bell [his successor] has an outstanding vision for what comes next.

“I will certainly be doing everything that I can to be a great professor who helps her with her mission. And I’ll try not to be too much of a problem.”