Page 4 - Luce 2024

Fro m The P rincipal

From the Principal

Since mid-2023, the staff, students, and Council of Janet
Clarke Hall have been hard at work on the College’s new
five-year strategic plan. A good strategic plan is the result
of a lengthy and intensive process as you try to articulate
the who, how, what, why, and where of your institutional
identity. Who are you as an institution? How have you
arrived in your current position? What makes you different
from others in your sector? Why do you exist? And where do
you want to be in five years’ time?

Janet Clarke Hall, as the first residential university college
for women in Australia, has a unique story to tell, one that
continues to attract the most promising students who dream Eve Gray (Student Club President 2021-22), Dr Spencer-Regan,
of following in the footsteps of trailblazing alumni like Diane Ayva Jones (Student Club President 2022-23)
Lemaire, Gillian Triggs, Helen Garner, Elizabeth Blackburn,
and Marita Cheng. Our rich history has guided and inspired for new cohorts of students who will face perhaps a very
us as we have sought to answer those questions and look to different world to our own.
the future, asking how best we can continue the College’s
legacy of offering true equity of access in higher education. This sense of responsibility towards future generations – of
being part of a transformative social contract – is something
I hope that you will spend some time reading our new that we are working to instil in our new scholarship
Strategic Plan 2024-2029 which we are proud to share recipients. When they receive the letter informing them of
with you in this issue of Luce. Our Vision – to administer their successful scholarship application, they are asked not
Australia’s first need-blind admissions process and to meet only to write a letter of thanks to their donors – some of
100% of each student’s demonstrated financial need – is whom were students at JCH in the 1940s or 1950s – but also
undoubtedly ambitious and goes far beyond anything to make a commitment to ‘paying it forward’; to becoming
articulated by other residential colleges in Australia. If we a donor themselves at some point in the future in order
are successful, it will mean that by 2035, as in 1886, we to give another young person just like them the same life-
will once again be world leaders in creating transformative changing opportunity. As such, these students become part
opportunities for deserving young people. of the sustaining lifeblood of the College, benefiting from the
generosity of those before them and ensuring that others can
Of course, we will be able to achieve this goal only with benefit in the decades to come.
the help of our alumni community. Many of you already
give so generously to our scholarships program, and we are It has been a particular pleasure to watch alumni from all
deeply grateful for your enduring support and care for the decades get to know one another at our recent gatherings
College. If you are not yet a supporter, then on behalf of our in College; an illustration of that social contract, if you like.
community, I’d like to make just one ask of you today. Please At our Christmas Jazz and Cocktails event, two alumni
take a moment to reflect on your experience at Janet Clarke discovered that they had shared a room overlooking Royal
Hall. If you feel that your time at College enriched your Parade – albeit fifty years apart! Whilst much about student
life and helped you grow, please consider helping another life has changed in the intervening decades, it seems that
young person to access that same opportunity by making a gathering with friends around an open fire, drinking cocoa (or
financial donation, however modest. perhaps something stronger) and putting the world to rights
late into the night is still an intrinsic part of the Janet Clarke
The 18 century Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher, Hall experience.
th
Edmund Burke, wrote that ‘society is a contract between
those who are dead, those who are living, and those who I believe that these opportunities for social bonding are as
are to be born.’ One might think of a residential college important a part of the university experience as attending
community like Janet Clarke Hall in much the same way. lectures and sitting examinations. In 2023, the University
We are shaped by our powerful inheritance from those of Melbourne committed to rebuilding the ‘on-campus’
generations past, we live with and learn from those in our experience for all students after the restrictions and privations
community today, and we keenly hope that the College will of the COVID-19 pandemic. Vice-Chancellor, Professor
continue to thrive long after we have left, serving as a home Duncan Maskell wrote:

4 LUCE Number 22 2023