The People’s Republic of China’s first premier, Zhou Enlai, when asked for his views on the impact of the French Revolution, reportedly replied: “It’s too early to say.”

No such caution is necessary for an assessment of the Enlightenment. Without it, it is inconceivable that modern societies with all their benefits (and, yes, their problems) would exist as we know them.

The Enlightenment is a useful catch-all term, but in reality there were a number of “Enlightenments” that took place in different countries at different times over the 17th-18th centuries.

Each, however, had certain common characteristics: a belief in reason, rationality, the scientific method and, as Peter Watson says in Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud the investigation of human nature and people’s relationship to society.

Those in higher education have reason to be grateful for the Enlightenment. It was during this period that the university as we now understand it began to take shape. As Watson points out:

"It was a time when many of the modern ‘disciplines’ that we recognize today – language studies (philology), law, history, moral and natural philosophy, psychology, sociology – either came into existence fully formed, or as proto-subjects, which would coalesce in the 19th century."

As the Australian historian John Gascoigne makes clear in The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia, many of the other notions we take for granted today – for instance, human rights, equality before the law, equality of the sexes, universal education – have their heritage in the Enlightenment.

None of this is to say that Enlightenment-informed thinking leads ineluctably to the broad sunlit uplands of a perfect world. We will always face challenges, but we will never resolve them by consulting our horoscopes or by yearning for some mystical golden age.

As a writer in The Times put it last week:

"To condemn the Enlightenment, in short, is to condemn so many foundations of the modern world that it is effectively meaningless."

- Steven Schwartz

"I was accused once of being an enemy of the Enlightenment," he said. "I felt proud of that. The Enlightenment started over 200 years ago. It might be time to think again whether it is really effective in today’s conditions."

Giles Coren, in the Times, noted that the Enlightenment did lead to the demise of many of Prince Charles’s royal ancestors - in Russia, especially - so you can see why he might hold a grudge.

Nevertheless, as Charles is next in line to become our King, is it worth thinking about reviving the Republican movement?

- Steven Schwartz

Autism was defined narrowly in those days and was considered to be very rare. One child I recall well was Howard. He was what would we now call "high functioning". That is, he could speak, sort of look after himself, had a great memory and could even do some maths puzzles, but he hated change, repeated commercials verbatim and never looked at you when he spoke.

Howard also had the odd habit of speaking formally. For example, he would never describe himself as "tired" but would say that he was "footsore and weary". He learned these phrases from movies and TV and figured out how to apply them in proper situations. Howard never was able to live alone; he always needed help.

Fast forward to 1998. That was the year that Andrew Wakefield, a British doctor (and 12 other authors) published an article in the prestigious medical journal, the Lancet. Based on 12 children, the article suggested that autism was connected to the triple-vaccine given to children to prevent measles, mumps and rubella (MMR).

According to the article, the vaccine may have caused inflammatory bowel disease, which, in turn, produced autism. How the MMR caused bowel disease and how bowel disease might cause a child to dislike change, avoid eye contact and speak in a peculiarly formal manner was never explained. Nor was it obvious how this hypothesis applied to children like Howard who grew up well before the MMR was invented and whose bowels were completely normal.

None of this mattered. Fueled by extensive media coverage, the Lancet article set off a tsunami of panic whose effects persist to this day. Parents were frightened and many remain afraid to immunize their children. The result was the return of measles - not to developing countries where the incidence has been falling, but to developed countries that were previously free of the disease.

Measles is not a benign illness, it can be fatal, particularly children. It is entirely possible, in fact almost certain, that children lost their lives because of the fear generated by this article.

Over the years, 10 major studies have failed to confirm any of the Lancet article’s claims and 10 of the original 13 authors have retracted their contributions to the article. It was also revealed that Wakefield accepted money from the Legal Aid Board to carry out his research on behalf of a group of parents who were preparing a lawsuit against the manufacturers of the MMR vaccine.

Last week, Britain’s General Medical Council issued a lacerating report condemning Wakefield’s unethical failures to disclose his conflicts of interest and his "callous" behaviour to the children in his study, some of whom were subjected to risky and painful medical tests.

The Lancet had published an editorial in 2004 distancing itself from the conclusions reached in the article but not retracting it. Finally, the Lancet had no choice and this week they decided to "fully retract this paper from the public record". Too bad they cannot retract the fear, panic and deaths caused by this article.

We would like to believe that doctors, medical researchers and intellectuals are somehow above this kind of behaviour. Thus, it is shocking to find out that they, and we, are only human.

Hanging on to an idea when it is clear that it is wrong or pernicious is the subject of an article in this week's Times Higher Education (THE), which reports that intellectuals and academics have been accused of "making the world a worse and more dangerous place in the 20th century".

The claim comes from Thomas Sowell, senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, who in a new book Intellectuals and Society says academics cling to their opinions even in the face of evidence to the contrary.

According to THE (I haven’t had chance to read the book yet) Dr Sowell says intellectuals have probably never played a larger role in society, yet unlike other professionals, they are rarely held to account.

The constraints on business leaders, doctors and athletes mean they face "high and often ruinous costs for persisting in ideas that turn out not to work".

"No such inescapable constraints confront people whose end products are ideas and whose ideas face only the validation of like-minded peers."

It is true that over time a minority of academics and intellectuals have occupied the low moral ground. One thinks, for example, of misguided support for eugenics in the 1920s, the doltish worship of Stalinist communism, and latterly the more preposterous posturings of postmodernism.

But academics and intellectuals are not some kind of super-species. They are human beings prone to the same failings as everyone else. And according to Frank Furedi (Where have all the intellectuals gone) most academics are not “culturally equipped” to play the role of public intellectual:

“They belong to their institutions and remain estranged from the world of the public.”

For sure, mistakes have been made, lost causes pursued and ill-advised doctrines adhered to.

That said, I think a check of the moral balance sheet would reveal academics are well in the black. In the quotidian detail of working life they have helped countless young people to achieve worthwhile goals, and pursued research that has had real and numerous benefits for society.

And like everyone else, we have to learn from our mistakes.

- Steven Schwartz

Critics maintained that the data did not tell the whole story, and that aspects of the measurement of performance were “inaccurate and unfair” particularly for schools serving poorer communities. Many were concerned the information would be used to cobble together spurious "league tables" stigmatising schools in disadvantaged areas.

Anyone working in universities - subject as they are to various rankings - would know that there is validity in these criticisms. Every picture may tell a story, but not every story tells the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

But, of course, My School is a work in progress. It will be gradually perfected as new and better data become available. In the meantime, the website does contain valuable information about Australia’s 10,000 schools and, as the Government points out, it is important to compare statistically similar schools to get a fairer idea of which ones are doing well “and which schools need an extra hand”.

It is not all one-way traffic either: Education Minister Julia Gillard - who seems genuinely determined to bring transparency to schools education - has committed to new funding and programs to help struggling schools. More than $2 billion will also go to boosting literacy and numeracy, and to help schools in low socio-economic communities.

The Government will also invest big money "to improve the quality of teaching and school leadership".

This is surely right. I have argued previously that teacher quality is the most important ingredient in student success.

As Miranda Devine puts it in today’s Sydney Morning Herald, "more than anything else in education, it is teachers who make a difference". Research increasingly points to the instinctively obvious:

"Regardless of how many school halls or archery fields, regardless even of a child's socio-economic background, teacher quality is the key to success ...The most valuable information standardised testing can provide is the difference good teaching makes."

Devine refers to “Teach for Australia”, a program first suggested by the Cape York Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson. Teach for Australia, which was nurtured in Macquarie University, is a home-grown version of the British Teach First and US Teach for America programs, which have changed the lives of low-income students and their teachers.

These programs have also transformed school teaching from an unexciting career into an attractive form of public service. In 2008, 25,000 university graduates applied for only 3700 positions in Teach for America. Applications came from the most prestigious universities in the country. In Britain, Teach First attracted applications from five per cent of Oxford's entire graduating class.

An article in this month’s The Atlantic Online describes the positive attributes that these young people bring to school education in America.

Teach for Australia has now recruited its first cohort, all of whom are teaching in economically disadvantaged Victorian schools.

If My School results in more tangible support and encouragement for current and potential high quality teachers everywhere, students, parents and the entire community will benefit.

- Steven Schwartz

A recent report by The Hanover Research Council attributes the failure to plan to "higher education's fundamental differences from the corporate world where succession planning first appeared". In other words, as the American academic Henry Rosovsky has noted, the problem is cultural.

In business, candidates do not publicly proclaim their unwillingness to take on a management position while at the same time secretly lobbying for the job. As Rosovsky notes, in universities this happens all the time.

The contrast between public statements and private ambitions reflects the academic culture, in which it is considered unbecoming for an academic to be interested in management.

Moving from an academic role to a management position - abandoning research and teaching - is viewed as a form of betrayal or, at best, an admission of failure. Either way, academics who accept management jobs are immediately transformed from "one of us" to "one of them".

Perhaps this is why colleagues offer condolences rather than congratulations to those who assume the job of department head. It is also why heads are careful to bemoan their lack of time for scholarly work. In a university, respect is reserved for scholarship not management.

The result is that universities rarely have a pool of carefully nurtured academic managers waiting for the next career opportunity to arise. Instead, universities choose managers using an open application process that usually includes external candidates.

Indeed, external hiring is often preferred and justified as a good way of bringing new ideas and people to the institution. Still, even if most managers are hired externally, it is worth having a robust internal succession planning process because, as The Hanover Research Council quotes an expert, it "forces an institution to take stock of its administrative personnel and to devote attention and resources to the career development of its staff".

If done well, succession programs can improve the skills of current staff, encourage their loyalty and provide a benchmark against which external candidates may be judged.

- Steven Schwartz

This line, spoken by Holden Caulfield, opens the novel The Catcher in the Rye, whose author, JD Salinger died last week.

The Catcher in the Rye was not the first novel I ever read, but it was certainly one of the first. Back before it became required reading in many American schools (and banned in others), The Catcher in the Rye was already giving alienated adolescents a rationale for their disaffection.

Holden was an alluring misfit. He runs away from school, smokes, drinks, solicits a prostitute and swears. Needless to say, this was guaranteed to make Holden appealing to me and most other teenagers although we would never had have got up the nerve to behave similarly. Holden hated the world's "phonies" and "morons" and so did we. He was perceptive and sensitive and funny and that's how we wanted to be. Eventually Holden crashed to earth, and we knew we would too.

Rejected by several publishers, The Catcher in the Rye has now sold 60 million copies. It has inspired many other books, most famously, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. Rather than bask in his fame, the author became a recluse surfacing rarely and publishing nothing for decades.

Salinger's short stories, which are almost as famous as The Catcher in Rye, display his ability to reveal character using very few words. For example, in a story called Franny, Lane Coutell is waiting on the platform as the train carrying his girlfriend pulled into the station:

Then, like so many people, who, perhaps, ought to be issued only a very probational pass to meet trains, he tried to empty his face of all expression that might quite simply, perhaps even beautifully, reveal how he felt about the arriving person.

In his unforgettable story, For Esmé with Love and Squalor, Salinger has the narrator describe his wife as "a breathtakingly levelheaded girl" which tells us exactly how she will respond to any spontaneous suggestion.

Salinger wrote the way people really speak. When I was young and still in my acting phase (a story for another place), I appeared in a production of Just Before the War With the Eskimos, a play based on Salinger's story of the same name. Every word spoken in the play came directly from the story; nothing needed to be added.

It's been a long time since I thought about Salinger. But now that I have, I find myself missing him, his writings and the past more generally. Perhaps Holden Caulfield's last words are an apposite way to end:

About all I know is, I sort of miss everybody I told about. … It’s funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

- Steven Schwartz

Meanwhile, my congratulations go to all those who received awards in the Australia Day 2010 Honours List including the Macquarie University-educated The Wiggles, who received the Order of Australia for services to children’s entertainment and the arts.

In particular I’d like to single out my distinguished colleague Macquarie University’s Professor Max Coltheart who was awarded an AM for service to cognitive psychology as a researcher and academic, and to people with learning difficulties. This is truly a much deserved honour. You can watch and listen to Max talking about his work here.

- Steven Schwartz

It's a different story in the United States, however - the apparent liberal (that is, on the left of politics) orientation of academics has been the subject of much debate.

Research suggests that in the US professors tend to be liberal while farmers, police officers, and members of the military are typically conservative. Now UBC sociologist Neil Gross and Harvard doctoral candidate Ethan Fosse think they may have found out why American academics lean to the Left.

In a new working paper entitled Why are professors Liberal? they argue that through the 20th century the American academic profession acquired a strong reputation for liberalism and secularism so that

over the last thirty five years few politically- or religiously-conservative students, but many liberal and secular ones, have formed the aspiration to become professors.

Before the 20th century the primary mission of American colleges and universities, they say, was to inculcate civic and moral virtues and transmit classical culture. Professors were often clergymen expected to teach accepted verities and live uncontroversial lives, but

With the birth of the American research university in the second half of the nineteenth century, the capacity to produce new knowledge came gradually to be valued above political or religious conformism.

The professoriate has thus become “politically typed” as appropriate for and welcoming of people with broadly liberal political sensibilities, and as inappropriate for conservatives.

This reputation leads many more liberal than conservative students to aspire for the advanced educational credentials that make entry into knowledge work fields possible, and to put in the work necessary to translate those aspirations into reality.

You can read the paper in full here.

Writing on his new website, Gates says David's Big History topic "is so broad that it synthesizes the history of everything including the sciences into one framework". David Christian began teaching ‘Big History’ – which examines the past "on the largest possible scales, including those of biology and astronomy" - at Macquarie in 1989. Among his many scholarly works his book Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History attracted a lot of international attention.

Gates accessed David’s course through an organisation called The Teaching Company under the title Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity. The course is presented over 48 lectures each 30 minutes long.

Needless to say, it's great that such a leading figure as Bill Gates should give this endorsement for David Christian and the University.

Beyond that, Gates makes some interesting points which give us pause to think about the future of higher education.

Technology, he says, now enables "almost anyone to learn from the world’s greatest minds". One of his passions, he says, is to consider how "students who otherwise wouldn't have access can experience these great courses and learn from these great teachers".

A recent report from the UK-based Demos think tank called The Edgeless University says that universities "are now just one source among many for ideas, knowledge and innovation". Author Peter Bradwell contends that the function universities perform "is no longer contained within the campus, nor within the physically defined space of a particular institution, nor, sometimes, even in higher education institutions at all".

"This is driven by people finding new ways to access and use ideas and knowledge, by new networks of learning and innovation, and by collaborative research networks that span institutions and businesses."

Creative education expert Sir Ken Robinson says that digital technology is contributing to the "biggest generation gap since rock and roll" and we will need to change the way we think about education.

As with textbooks, the subject of an earlier blog, universities will have to consider what easy digital access means for the way we educate our students and that perhaps, one day, we may even have to build an entirely new and different model.

- Steven Schwartz

This is an exciting time for Macquarie because this year we are introducing our new undergraduate curriculum. It is of course equally exciting for our new students who bring with them their hopes and dreams and limitless possibilities.

Australia’s universities will undergo some big changes in the next few years, not least of which is that from 2012 places will be uncapped, meaning that if universities accept appropriately qualified students for recognised courses, the Australian Government will fund that place. Education Minister Julia Gillard expects this change to create an additional 80,000 student places between now and 2013, allowing around 50,000 more students access to higher education.

The Government also plans to spend around $437 million over four years to reward universities that enrol more students from non traditional backgrounds.

Universities will face many challenges in adapting to this new model and I plan to discuss some of these here as the year progresses.

For now, though, I want to wish all our new and continuing students the very best for the year ahead and to assure them that we at Macquarie will be doing our utmost to help them achieve their ambitions.

- Steven Schwartz