Nearly there....

My silence in recent months is noteworthy. I have been refining, revising, checking and adding facts. Understandably, I have not re-posted every minor re-draft of each chapter. But it has certainly kept me busy, thus the silence.

The good news: nearly there. Some very generous colleagues are proof-reading for me. I intend to submit on 21st February, 2012.

Draft abstract

This thesis traces transformations in the history of higher education in twentieth century Australia from the perspective of the ownership and regulation of knowledge. Using primarily archival and oral sources from universities and governments, I argue that after the Second World War, the university’s place in society and the economy was radically altered because of challenges to its authority over knowledge.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the Australian government increased its interest in research. Among political and tertiary leaders, this led to questions about the role of research and higher education for society, resulting in uncertainties about the ongoing independence – and thus reliability – of university knowledge. A growing reliance on higher education to support government aims linked the growth of universities in Australia to nation-building and the government’s economic strategies. But in the 1960s and 1970s, a small but influential group of university staff and students resisted the connection of higher education in Australia to established goals and values, exposing the university’s vested interests in society and its role in legitimising and perpetuating social and economic injustices. As a result of these questions about its integrity, in the 1980s, the university’s authority waned. This opened the door to increased control by government, who confronted changing economic priorities. Under new pressures, university leaders sought to regain their standing in society by reconfiguring their task in commercial terms. By the 1990s, the question about the role and autonomy of higher education had developed into a significant contest over the ownership and control of knowledge as a form of intellectual property. Unlike the public institutions they had been in the 1940s and 1950s, universities were treated as an industry, competing with others for government support and commercial revenue. 

New Year's Eve

Years ago I wrote a MA thesis on New Year's Eve in Sydney. The thesis ended up as an article in the journal Continuum and another in History Australia. I also did the entry for the Dictionary of Sydney and today, an article in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Eminence

We no longer question the category of eminence, for all our attention is now directed at how best to define it - and who benefits when we do.

Final Draft

For the past couple of months I have been preparing this final draft of my thesis, which is now being reviewed with a view to planning final revisions.

The ownership of knowledge in Higher Education in Australia, 1939-1996

New introductory paragraphs

Despite the urgent need for scientific research when the Second World War began, it did not immediately occur to the Australian government to turn to the universities for help. Universities and their scholars occupied a place in the nation’s high culture that seemed to preclude them from the pragmatic problems of wartime science. Professors seemed above such considerations, figures of public importance whose arrival, normally from Great Britain, was announced in the newspapers, as was their attendance at official functions, where their wives’ outfits were documented as items of public interest.  Their standing enabled academic staff to promote the university and their disciplines in the public sphere. Within the institution, they protected truth by reading, teaching and by setting examinations that would test and assure the accuracy of their students’ learning.  What they did not do, typically, was research.

Even in the 1940s, that was beginning to change as some academics, in the tradition of disinterested scholarship, pursued research with a determined independence from commercial interests. As the decades passed, research became more prominent, so that by the 1990s, it infused university life.  Research seemed, by then, to define the very idea of the university, leading to a state where efficiency in the creation of new knowledge that was useful to others (even if only other scholars) was now the key source of academic distinction. Professors were not lauded as they had been, but many still had substantial standing in an industry to which their research contributed. Academics continued to promote their discipline, but their purpose, often, in doing so was to attract new research funding. New income was always needed to enable them (and, most probably, a whole team of collaborators) to keep developing new ideas and discovering new applications. The value of research would now often be described by the amount of funding it brought into the university, changing that institution’s sense of purpose. No longer a monument to the guardianship of truth, higher education was increasingly identified – particularly by government – as an industry, trading in the intellectual property that was the product of their work.

This transformation raises some important questions about the connections between university knowledge and the development of the nation’s identity and economy. The shift towards a substantial national investment in research assists in revealing the changing relationship between the government, public expectations, and Australia’s public universities. But what if academic staff and students did not wish to endorse government goals – what were the implications for academic freedom and institutional autonomy? Perhaps more to the point, as universities continued to change, what if they did seek to conform, assenting to a government imperative that they operate in an increasingly commercial manner? The commercialisation of higher education is a familiar story, but there are aspects that remain elusive. For while the character of the university as an institution and its importance to society and the economy have been frequently articulated, the ways the different parties characterised and sought to control university knowledge through research funding, teaching, examination and a trade in intellectual property is not as readily explained.

It is an important set of relationships, however, for in the twentieth century society grew to rely on university knowledge to a considerable degree. To be deemed the possessor of knowledge granted individuals access to professions and social standing: examining and legitimising knowledge conferred, then, considerable authority to the university over labour supply and social capital. Research fuelled economic growth, which in the second half of the twentieth century was underpinned by technological development, so that the control of research priorities became central to national economic management. Even parliamentary decision making was increasingly legitimised by expert opinion, making academic advice a key tool of modern democracy. Given this importance, was it really plausible in a capitalist democracy like Australia that research, education and the legitimation of expertise be left to the vagaries of an unelected, socially elite group of scholars?

Taking a longer view of widening participation: toward a history of social inclusion in higher education in Sydney, c.1945-1975

Another new project, coming soon! Funded through the University of Sydney with MUCH gratitude.

Since the 1940s, the Federal government has regularly sought to widen participation in higher education. Each time new people have been brought into the university, so have new kinds of knowledge, re-shaping the university. This historical study will consider the ways that two universities navigated and debated the issues attached to widening participation in two key decades. It will enable us to contextualise and evaluate strategies for widening participation in the last seventy years and consider which approaches have led to a more socially inclusive university and professional environment for disadvantaged sections of the population.

Full project description here