Text Transcript of Peace Initiative Video
Professor Rae Frances, Dean, Faculty of Arts:
Monash University has a really strong vision that it wants to produce graduates who not only have really good technical skills but also have a very strong commitment to social justice and peace.
And to that end we have a number of initiatives across the university. In the Arts Faculty we have a very well developed program around interfaith dialogue. And that has a number of components. We have 3 major centres. One which focuses on religion and theology, which has historically focused on Christianity but not exclusively. We have another centre that focuses on Jewish Studies, and that’s not just Israel but Judaism in the Diaspora including Australia. And we also have more recently a Centre for Islam and the Modern World.
The object of having all these different centres with different perspective is not so that they pursue their own narrow areas of research in isolation but they actually work together to produce greater understanding from a position of knowledge. This is an enterprise where graduates will work together. Undergraduates will learn in a collaborative environment where they are in the same classroom with people from different backgrounds and that encourages mutual respect, shared understanding.
One of the things that Monash has a particularly proud tradition of has been involved in organising the Abraham Conferences. And these are conferences when people, academics and partitioners from all of these religions get together in a mutually respectful environment to try and find common ground.
We find that the passion that so many of our graduates bring to issues of social justice and human welfare is evidenced not just from our Australian graduates but also from graduates from our campus overseas and from our students who are still studying. And most recently at the Monash South African campus students there have become active in connecting with some of the groups of children in the immediate vicinity of the campus in Johannesburg.
Grant Gilbart, Community Outreach Officer, Monash University South Africa Student Association:
We do a lot of fund raising and with the funds that we raise, we raise it for the ‘Reach Out and Support a Child Foundation’ or our project that’s what we call it and that money goes to the kids.
Professor Rae Frances:
I think it’s certainly true to say that Monash is one of Australia’s leading universities at the moment in the area of social cohesion and we have a number of our researchers who spend a great deal of their time and energy communicating what I believe is a very humane message of understanding and mutual respect to a wide audience.
Associate Professor Mark Baker, Director, Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation:
I think it’s very important that scholars use the media in order to contribute their opinions. The media all too often provide very shallow stereotypes of different cultures and those stereotypes can literally trigger off major conflicts in the world. And universities provide complexity and shades to situations and cultures.
Waleed Aly, Lecturer, School of Political and Social Inquiry:
For someone who is engaged in media and engaged in public debate, and so on, you’re never really quite sure exactly what the effect of your work is going to be and sometimes you’re not sure whether or not you should have said anything at all but I think that over a long period of time what I hope is that it makes some kind of positive difference, so that people get to know something that they wouldn’t have known.
Professor Edwin Cornish, Deputy Vice Chancellor & Vice President Research:
We’ve always been a university that sought to not just be an ivory tower. While we want to be excellent in our research and education we want to reach out to the world and make a difference.
Professor Rae Frances:
At Monash we’re interested in, not just academic research, but also strategies and developing practical examples of the way in which we can apply the theoretical insights that we gain through our research to real life situations and one of the examples I can think of is through the use of sport. Most recently we’ve seen the Australian Football League being active in South /Africa, again using sport to improve relationships between people of very different cultural, ethnic, economic backgrounds. Personally I can’t imagine a more important area for the community to support than the area of peace and conflict studies. So in terms of contribution to the ongoing viability of the human race this is really the key area that we need to know more about, that we need to support research in.