A History of the Modern Australian University

A HISTORY OF THE

MODERN AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITY

HANNAH FORSYTH is a historian of modern Australia and an educator with more than fifteen years’ experience in higher education. She has a PhD and an MA in history, a BA with honours in archaeology and postgraduate qualifications in educational design, all from the University of Sydney. Having completed postdoctoral research in Sydney University’s Social Inclusion Unit, Hannah now teaches history at the Australian Catholic University in Strathfield, in Sydney’s west.

A HISTORY OF THE

MODERN AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITY

Hannah Forsyth

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

© Hannah Forsyth 2014

First published 2014

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Author: Forsyth, Hannah, author.

Title: A History of the Modern Australian University/Hannah Forsyth.

ISBN: 9781742234120 (paperback)

9781742247052 (ePDF)

9781742241838 (ePub/Kindle)

Subjects: Universities and colleges – Australia – History.

Education, Higher – Australia – History.

Australia – History.

Dewey Number: 378.00994

Design Josephine Pajor-Markus

Cover design and illustration Roy Chen, Xou Creative

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

1   A history of Australian universities

2   Universities make a grab for power

3   Universities and national priorities

4   God-professors and student ratbags

5   The end of the golden age (if there was one)

6   A clever country

7   The DVC epidemic

8   Knowledge factories

9   Knowledge in the age of digital reproduction

10   Winners and losers in Australian universities

Afterword: What sort of university do we want?

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In chapter 8 I cite George Eliot’s observation that ‘there was no need to praise anybody for writing a book, since it was always done by somebody else’. While none of the following people or organisations should be blamed for my errors, it is certainly the case that an army of scholars and support schemes supported me in writing it, and I am grateful.

I will start with money. Research towards this book was funded through the Australian Catholic University’s History Research Concentration grant; there were various University of Sydney funding sources, including a postdoctoral fellowship, a Widening Participation Grant and postgraduate student support funding schemes. Additional postdoctoral research was conducted with the support of the Margaret George Award at the National Archives of Australia and by the University of Melbourne as part of a large collaborative project on the history of the Dawkins reforms (which is still ongoing) as well as by a Fellowship at the State Library of New South Wales. The best material here was written away from home at writing retreats supplied on very generous terms in Kiama and at Airlie Beach, though I’d particularly like to acknowledge Cam Mackeller and his yurt at Killcare.

Although my 2012 PhD has a different argument and focus to this book, that research underpins more than half of this volume. This was supervised by Stephen Garton, whose support, advice and guidance was – and remains – wonderful. Geoffrey Sherington, as Associate Supervisor, remains my go-to person for nearly everything. Since the completion of the PhD, two of my thesis examiners, Stuart Macintyre and Deryck Schreuder, have both been more than generous as I pursued the preposterous task of writing this book. At the University of Sydney, Julia Horne, Mike McDonnell and Alan Atkinson all deserve thanks, as does John Hirst for the writing group he hosted. And there has been no better friend to me and my research than Tamson Pietsch – unless it is Peter Hobbins or Sophie Loy-Wilson. Altin Gavranovic entered my life at the end of this book project, but his influence was rapid, inspiring analysis, concepts and phrases throughout.

The new work was largely completed during my postdoctoral fellowship and I would like to acknowledge the generosity, influence and inspiration offered by Annette Cairnduff and her team at Sydney University’s Social Inclusion Unit.

I was assisted in my recent thinking and research by Lin Martin and Richard James on equity; John M O’Brien, Julie Wells and Grahame McCullough on industrial relations; Graeme Davison helped with Ian Clunies Ross; and Frank Bongiorno shared discussions over many aspects of the 1980s. Thanks to Mary-Jane Mahony, Stephen Sheely, Peter Goodyear, Gregor Kennedy, Mary-Helen Ward and Inger Mewburn for sharing ideas about eLearning; and to David Rolph on intellectual property, Simon Ville on economics and Justin Tauber on philosophy. Geoff Sharrock and Gwilym Croucher helped with thinking about university administration – Gwil further contributed to my understanding of the Dawkins reforms and offered me a convivial place to work whenever I was in Melbourne.

For archival support, thanks also to staff at the National Archives of Australia, the Australian National Library and Universities Australia. I am grateful to university archivists at the University of Sydney and at UQ, ANU, CSU, RMIT, UNE and UNSW as well as the Universities of Adelaide, Melbourne, Monash, Macquarie and Wollongong. Thanks too, to the NTEU for granting permission to access the FAUSA archives and to Don Aitkin, David Penington and Robert HT Smith for interviews.

Phillipa McGuinness at NewSouth Publishing helped me frame the book I always wanted to write about universities and I would like to thank her, Uthpala Gunethilake and Anne Savage for their warm, supportive and professional work in seeing the book to completion.

I have been wonderfully supported by family and friends, most of all by Cooper Forsyth. This remarkable teenager was my boldest critic, pushing me to improve with the confidence it takes to tell his mother that an idea is ‘so lame’. The book is better because of him.

1

A HISTORY OF AUSTRALIAN UNIVERSITIES

In lodgings and in taverns ideas were born and nursed. They were vague and unpractical ideas that a man of the world would not entertain for a moment: yet thousands of students discovered that the rest of their lives was filled by a growing and maturing of these ideas, and the very subjects taught matured in this atmosphere.

ERIC ASHBY, CHALLENGE TO EDUCATION, 1946.

In 1857, all of the Arts students at the University of Sydney could fit easily in a single photograph.¹ Their only colleagues in the Australian colonies, at the University of Melbourne, would undoubtedly have done so as well. Indeed, Australia then had less than 140 university students all together. Today there are more than one million.

The change this represents is not just a matter of scale. In the 20th century, universities became less elite, but more important. In that time, following the phases of growth that began after the Second World War, six small state universities, educating less than 0.2 per cent of the nation, became 39 institutions enrolling more than one-quarter of high school graduates, a proportion that continues to increase and shows no sign of plateauing. Indeed, most analysts argue that it is essential for our labour market that this participation rate continues to grow. The most conservative estimates suggest that 40 per cent of young people will go to university by 2020; debate rests on whether this rate will in fact be achieved sooner.² In order to facilitate this growth, in 2014 the Abbott Coalition government is discussing deregulation of higher education, controversially asserting that a market will make the tertiary sector simultaneously bigger and better.

These numbers are significant, not just to the lives and hopes of the people who studied and learned, but also because the idea of the university changed. A small elite institution is different to the mass system we see today, and represents a whole other philosophy of higher education. Take the idea of research, for instance. Before the Second World War, university academics focused their energy on scholarship (reading, understanding and maintaining ‘mastery’ of their field) and teaching or examining students. Only rarely – and then only in particular fields – did they conduct research. Later in the 20th century, scholarly leaders began to declare research central to the idea of the university, suggesting it was not a ‘real’ university without research.

In fact, the idea of the university had to change. Despite what it may look like in more traditional corners of some elite institutions, higher education is not the same as it was only bigger. The adjustments, moreover, are not just incidental. Ideas have power. Shifts in ideas about universities in Australia have not been achieved in a disinterested or objective manner: every new idea about tertiary education represents someone’s interests. Because university-based knowledge became so important in the 20th century, whose interests were involved is also important to understand. The story of universities is the story of knowledge in Australia and who controlled it – and for whose benefit.

Consider how wide spreading are the implications. Nearly every occupation now requires more education than before. Many roles that would once have been learned on the job now need a formal university degree – sometimes even a Masters (think of teaching). Even running away to join the circus could now take a university degree: Swinburne University of Technology offers a Bachelor of Circus Arts. This puts universities, often in alliance with professional associations, in a position of considerable influence over the labour market. The relationship between universities and professional associations is often strained, however, for each needs the other (but would perhaps like to need them less) in order to maintain this control. Battle lines are usually drawn over standards, for both education and professional reputation are based, in part, on the regulation of quality. Ensuring that doctors, nurses and pharmacists are educated and able to meet standards of care and ethics has serious implications. The stability of our built environment depends, literally, on the competence of university-trained engineers. Controlling knowledge and credentials is a responsible, as well as powerful, task.

Universities have also maintained and developed their control of knowledge in areas that have little to do with the labour market, and many people believe that encouraging more ‘liberal’ knowledge is what universities naturally do best. This aspect is explored in more depth later (in chapter 2 especially), but here let us consider what is at stake for society in having institutions that regulate our collective knowledge of art, philosophy, history, literature, pure maths, physics, biology, music and many other fields that are ‘known’ as well as practised. University scholars usually – and rightly – emphasise our good fortune in having institutions where such knowledge is protected and nurtured. Sometimes this knowledge is foundational to things that are of practical value to us, at other times it is valuable just because it adds to the beauty and complexity of the world and our understanding of it. Those are two important issues. A third relates to the social standing of the people who hold this knowledge. Specialists in this kind of knowledge may not always be wealthy, but in general they are influential. They are present in the public sphere, on television and radio, in newspapers and in political decision making. They sometimes do this quite spectacularly: think of the line-up on the ABC’s Q&A program, for example, or of the experts so often cited by journalists and politicians. These are just two of the ways that wielding knowledge – university knowledge – also wields power.

Mentioning knowledge and power in the same sentence will raise a red flag for some people, for this juxtaposition has become associated with French philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault’s assertions about the role of power/knowledge in society were influential, disrupting some of the positions many university scholars valued, whether Marxist or conservative in their outlook. A book about knowledge may lead some readers to assume I am out to prove something about Foucault: indeed some are likely to already be looking askance at the mere mention of this philosophical F-word. He is here, it is true, but Foucault is less central to this study of knowledge than the power/knowledge cliché might suggest. This is because knowledge is not the same as ideas. The kinds of power that Foucault cared about (and here I am skating blithely across decades of Foucauldian scholarship) lay in ideas and how they lead us to regulate our behaviour. It is not my knowledge of how to brush my teeth that leads me to do so every day, it is the idea of dental hygiene, internalised as a kind of teeth-brushing morality.

The reason for writing a book about knowledge, via the history of the university in Australia, is not because knowledge asserts the kind of power that Foucault described (though sometimes it does, and this comes up, especially in chapters 4 and 8), but because knowledge operates a bit like money. Knowledge does not have to work like money; indeed, money does not have to work like money. But just as the flow of money and the institutions that regulate it, the systems that lead people to desire it, the imperatives that compel business owners to pursue it, all structure the conditions in which society functions, so too with knowledge. Who has access to knowledge? Who decides on the value of knowledge, or its price? How do universities (which have grown to such proportions that we might point to their functions as loosely analogous to the tasks banks perform in relation to money) work? What compels them to work in the strange and alien ways that they seem, in recent decades, to have adopted?

For the past 20 years, books about universities worldwide have been rather gloomy affairs, sometimes for good reason. Catalogues of everything that is wrong with universities are reflected in titles like The Fall of the Faculty or Education’s End. American historian Anthony Grafton called these works ‘jeremiads’, collectively pronouncing the end of the scholarly world.³ Australia’s Richard Hil’s evocatively titled Whackademia falls into the same category. I choose, for reasons that I hope become obvious throughout this book, not to follow their path. This is not to ignore higher education’s considerable problems. Indeed, an academic apocalypse can clearly not be averted by blind optimism – if it could, Melbourne Vice-Chancellor Glyn Davis’s otherwise well-researched Boyer lectures in 2010 on The Republic of Learning would have fixed all our problems. Nevertheless, in adopting some of the spirit of both the Jeremiahs and the optimists, A History of the Modern Australian University is a history that has implications for the present. It shows how the things that are wonderful about collecting clever people together to study, research, think and teach and the dreadful, corrupted, ridiculous and wasteful aspects of higher education are both wrought by history.

To the jeremiads we must add the large piles of research publications on university learning and teaching, higher education policy and administration, histories of science, medicine and other disciplines, as well as histories of many Australian tertiary institutions. At one point during my research I had more than 200 of these books on my desk; I wondered what on earth I was doing adding to this literature. What was not in the pile, however, was an overview of the history of universities in Australia, or anything that would tell the story of how we forged the higher education system that we have. Such a book did not exist. The task of telling this story, however, is not just to describe the institutional and policy frameworks that made higher education, for books such as higher education policy expert Simon Marginson’s Education and Public Policy in Australia did that more than 20 years ago. Instead, a larger picture is needed, one that explains not only why universities look the way they do, but also why the knowledge that they protected and promoted became so central to the world and the economy that universities needed to grow and change so significantly.

University knowledge was not always so important, nor indeed was education in general. When Australia was first colonised, education was hardly an institution worth mentioning, neither in Britain nor across its Empire. Indeed, Aboriginal nations and early colonists from China probably had more substantial and institutionalised educational traditions than Britain, at least in the first part of the 19th century. As a result of the weak place of formal education in most colonists’ lives, the path to financial and social standing was not normally via university. Now there is no other path, really, which demonstrates the point: from the early 20th century universities began to take over the control and regulation of knowledge. It was not that knowledge was unimportant in the early days of the colonies. Knowledge, then as now, enabled people to do their work, make decisions, be good parents and be useful citizens. It was just that they did not gain this knowledge at university or even, often, at school.

A quick history of universities before 1939

By 1911, each of the six states had a university. They were all tiny. There were around 3000 university students in Australia in total, with more than two-thirds of them enrolled at the two oldest universities in Melbourne and Sydney. Many people imagine these first universities as little replicas of the medieval British institutions at Oxford and Cambridge. It is an understandable mistake, for the architects of the university buildings and institutional frameworks were trying to create that impression. Sydney University’s old Latin motto adds to it. Translated, it reads ‘though the constellations change, the mind is universal’ – or, in student-speak, ‘new latitude, same attitude’. Linking new institutions to those with far older traditions gave colonial universities legitimacy and authority.

We should not be fooled by the Oxbridge similarities, however. The designers of Australia’s first higher education institutions were very happy to shop around for ideas. Even in a world where very few people went to school at all, they had plenty of ideas to choose from. Within Britain, where they naturally looked first, there were competing ideas of the university between English and Scottish preferences, while Ireland was just beginning something new again. Most Australian universities selected a mix that suited them, adding local innovations that fed back into ideas of the university that spread across the Empire.⁴ Continental Europe had a university tradition extending over seven centuries; in the ‘new world’, America already had 200 years of university experience when Australia’s first institutions were established. These latter models influenced Australian universities more slowly than their British counterparts, but their ideas seeped through eventually.

Not many of Australia’s institutional founders were ‘experts’ in university planning, which probably helped them in their innovation. Most of those instrumental in setting up the University of Queensland, for example, had never set foot in a university, leaving them free to think through what they needed unhampered by nostalgia.⁵ Moreover, innovations in higher education were in the air, worldwide, at the time. In the 1850s, when the universities of Melbourne and Sydney were established, Cardinal John Newman published The Idea of the University. While this selection of lectures promoted new thinking about the university at the time, it was possibly the worst thing Newman could have done for the present system, for the title alone has been enough to make too many of today’s commentators think there is only one proper idea of the university and that it should stand for all time.⁶

Ideas about universities were being developed in a world where education at all levels was changing. By the time the First Fleet set sail for New South Wales, evangelical Christians were becoming convinced that instilling literacy was one way to convert the heathen. Believing Australia harboured quite a few heathens, they encouraged teachers to move to the Antipodes. The teaching in church ‘Sunday Schools’, in keeping with the whole idea of education in the early 19th century, was about morality, not vocational training, a pattern that continued as government-run schooling evolved.⁷

The link between education and morality was also about ‘civilisation’, which colonists (whose worldviews, as historian Alan Atkinson demonstrated in The Europeans in Australia, were shaped by a notion of Christendom) imagined to be connected to being Christian and white. ‘Civilising the savages’ was a moral task, associated with saving souls, so before there was really much in the way of schools for white children, a Native Institution for Aboriginal students was established, with government support, by a missionary in 1815. Missionary work across Aboriginal Australia also established schools – all too often with disastrous humanitarian consequences. Government-supported schooling evolved, aimed at those who, in addition to Indigenous Australians, the authorities believed needed civilisation the most, like the children of convicts. Education, though, was also needed for the elite, who it was believed would eventually lead and govern the burgeoning Colonies. Universities were part of this collection of ideas.⁸

Other kinds of education were growing too. Concern over the morally iniquitous effects of the industrial revolution led well-meaning members of the middle class to promote education for workers in both Britain and the Colonies. The types of institution that sprang from this impulse were many, but most noticeable in Australia were the Mechanics’ Institutes and the Schools of Arts. The first Mechanics’ Institute was established in Hobart in 1827; the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts (which is still running) began in 1833; one was operating in Newcastle in 1835 and another in Melbourne in 1839. Among the subjects promoting morality and wellbeing there were also courses that were directly useful to work, including gold mining. It is no coincidence that in the midst of Victoria’s 1850s gold rush, numerous Mechanics’ Institutes arose; soon they were dotted across the Colonies. Technical education evolved from this system and from the Schools of Mines.

Few of the thousands who rushed to the gold fields in the 1850s had much knowledge of mining techniques. Some had experience: there were diggers that had learned their trade in California, for example. But many more did not even know how to identify gold, let alone find it, purify it and make money from the process. At the Sydney Museum of Practical Geology, people attended lectures on these basic topics before heading west to Lambing Flat and Hill End.⁹ But more substantial knowledge was needed for gold mining to become as profitable for the colonies as it could be. In Victoria, the Ballarat School of Mines established a connection between mining and education that later influenced university growth.

When the University of Melbourne was created, mining and mineralogy were the trendy topics of the time, putting practical knowledge on the agenda from the beginning.¹⁰ Not so in Sydney, where the tradition of liberal education had a firmer footing, with the purpose of the university, as articulated by its parliamentary champion, William Charles Wentworth, focused on producing the elite who would be needed to govern the Colony. Wentworth explicitly linked the idea of the university to self-government, which he said ‘would be a useless boon’ without the university, for ‘the native youth of the country could not now obtain the education which would fit them for high offices in the state’. Wentworth pointed to a future colony that would be ‘enlightened and refined’, a state only achievable, he argued, through the education provided by a university.¹¹

Educational historians are divided on just how elitist Australian universities were at their inception. On the one side, Julia Horne and Geoffrey Sherington completed a study of the first 123 students at the University of Sydney, which revealed that 48 (39 per cent) had fathers who worked in either lower middle-class jobs or traditional working-class trades.¹² They maintain that merit, over birth, defined university enrolment. Professors were concerned to protect and teach what they considered to be a ‘commonwealth of knowledge’, believing knowledge to be the property of all. Moreover, from 1881 Australian universities admitted women, among the first in the world to do so. Women quickly made up around 50 per cent of some disciplines, even before the First World War. Compared to the very elitist institutions in Britain where students needed not only to be male and wealthy but also Anglican, Australia’s universities were remarkably inclusive.¹³

On the other side, in their histories of the University of Melbourne, Stuart Macintyre and Richard Selleck point to the ways that the university was designed to serve the purposes of the establishment. Enrolment of the daughters of Melbourne’s aristocracy, they maintain, was a convenience for those no longer able to support them financially as the wealth of the gold era waned.¹⁴ It is not that Sydney was inclusive while Melbourne was not (though that was partly the case); it is a matter of historical emphasis and interpretation. While Sydney and Melbourne were certainly more inclusive than Oxford and Cambridge, the numbers they enrolled were hardly sufficient to either bolster an elite or facilitate much in the way of systematic social mobility. They maintained a symbolic place, however, in Australian high culture. From the opening of the country’s first university with a recital in Sydney’s Great Hall, the two universities were looked upon as the educational birthright of Sydney and Melbourne’s best breeched and well connected. They still are. Merit was important, and while this extended the educational franchise a little further, merit itself was nevertheless fashioned to benefit the elite – as chapter 10 will detail.

The founders of the first Australian universities would have been astounded should anyone have suggested that they consult their fellow colonists from China on the nature of their long and esteemed scholarly traditions. Nor is there evidence to suggest that the Chinese colonists in their turn, even those of wealth and rank, sought to have any input. Other non-British colonists – Americans, Germans and others – who arrived in small numbers in the 1850s similarly seem to have had little input or perhaps interest in the idea of the university in Australia. How different our universities might look if they had.

By contrast, hidden beneath the rhetoric about long histories grounded in ‘western’ knowledge, there is emerging evidence that Australian universities were also founded on Aboriginal knowledge and labour. Our research in this area is just beginning, but it is evident that natural scientists, astronomers and anatomists relied on Aboriginal knowledge as trackers, guides and labourers, as well as Indigenous knowledge of medicine, plant properties and healing, that anthropologists drew meaning from Aboriginal stories, culture and even body parts, and that classical scholars traded Aboriginal artefacts for Greek and Roman objects, so that even the Classics in Australia owe something to the nation’s Aboriginal heritage.¹⁵

Around 20 years after the first two universities were founded, a group of nonconformist clerics decided to form