Radical Sydney: Places, Portraits and Unruly Episodes

I am excited about reading this book before long: Radical Sydney: Places, Portraits and Unruly Episodes by Terry Irving and Rowan Cahill

This book touches on both things I'm interested in for my thesis and things I did in the long distant past before it .[Before I decided to do my thesis in educational history I was keen on urban history and particularly Sydney - and wrote work on Sydney's AWA tower, on Norman Lindsay's women (bohemian Sydney) and a history of New Year's Eve in Sydney see http://usyd.academia.edu/HannahForsyth/Papers]

Also, the authors Terry Irving and Rowan Cahill both have cameo roles in my thesis due to their involvement in the period of student radicalism (and its impact on university knowledge) which is the subject of a chapter in the middle of it all. For their sake I hope everyone buys a copy!

Soviet and democratic knowledge: Baxter (the last one I think)

The sense that Baxter held that problems of nation, industry and university were a united whole was a part of his allegiance to democracy:

The immense technological progress of the Soviet Union during the last thirty years focuses attention in the United States and Great Britain on the fact that their industrial progress is being limited by the shortage of engineers and technologists.[1]

This was a “rude awakening” he said, from the “comforting belief” that democracy produced better science, or that the west “had a kind of natural aptitude for this sort of work”. Due to a low population and a large landmass, Australia was especially vulnerable, he said, making mechanisation even more important as a way to reduce labour requirements. More, exploitation of nature was needed as a defensive act:

The full development of Australia’s natural resources is essential if we are not to present to other and more powerful nations the tempting sight of rich uncultivated lands and mineral wealth lying idle.[2]

During the Cold War, for those who feared communism, knowledge was as much a race as it had been during the Second World War – the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957 and the ‘space race’ it provoked was a dramatic example. In promoting the need to increase technological graduates and industry-based research in the universities, he drew on fears of invasion. Democratic civilisation depended thus on technological progress. The consequent economic development would not only continue to increase Australian standard of living, but also protect both Australia and democracy from communism.[3]

Ian Clunies Ross, in the 1940s, had joined other Australian and British intellectuals in expressing support for Soviet educational and cultural development in opposition to fascism.[4] At a series of addresses by leading intellectuals (including Miles Franlin and Katherine Susannah Prichard) held in Sydney in 1941, Ian Clunies Ross said:

The cardinal feature of scientific development in the Soviet Union is the recognition of science not as something detached and unco-ordinated, but as an integral part of a planned and ordered society.[5]

This is largely, of course, a difference in speaking from anti-fascism in the early 1940s as Clunies Ross did to anti-communism in the 1950s and 1960s like Baxter. But it also reflects a distinction between the ways they each saw knowledge. Clunies Ross considered knowledge, as shown in the last chapter, to be a unified truth, which supported a civil and humane society. The extension of this civility to Soviet science was, for him, a part of the generosity of the culture that could result from the unifying characteristic of shared knowledge:

It would be appropriate for Australian scientific institutions to issue an invitation to certain outstanding Russian workers to continue their investigations in Australia.

The contrast to Baxter is stark. Baxter did not consider university knowledge to be truth in any universal sense and instead sought to unify industrial practice, government policy and university knowledge for the purposes of economic efficiency. A similar structure – knowledge supports civilisation – is skewed a different way. Knowledge supports technological and thus economic development. This link between knowledge and the economy that was so explicit with the emergence of technological universities is central to changes in widespread perspectives on university knowledge thereafter.

For Baxter, the distinction between Soviet and democratic knowledge was, firstly, that coordination in a totalitarian state did provide greater efficiencies, making it difficult for democratic nations to compete.[6]  Democratic nations must compete, however, for in Baxter’s view they did not currently have sufficient scientists to be able to govern themselves properly.[7] The second distinction Baxter identified from the Soviet system did not produce efficiencies but made an important qualitative difference to university knowledge in democracies - academic freedom:

In the context of academic freedom the important responsibility of the university is to be a place where all matters and questions can be examined, where research may follow any line of inquiry, where the non-conformist and the heretic may hold and express unorthodox and unpopular views, and be met with argument not suppression. This does not mean that the university normally seethes with heresy and rebellion: on the contrary, but should there be a time when our free society is in danger, if governments of the right or left seek to diminish our liberties, it should be in the universities that voices could and would be loudly raised in protest.[8]

As Vice-Chancellor, he said, he was the university’s spokesman, but he felt he should always try to make clear that this does not make it likely that his views represented those of all of his staff – nor would such unity be desirable. The free speech encouraged within universities as places where thinking must be free would sometimes lead “some sections of the public” to demand action against some individuals. “This the vice-chancellor must firmly resist”:

The vice-chancellor can do much to get the community to realise that universities are places where heresies are tolerated and that it is for the good of the community that this should be so.[9]

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[1] Baxter, "Education for the Nuclear Age." 2

[2] Baxter, "Education for the Nuclear Age," 8.

[3] Baxter, "The Use of Scientific Knowledge by Governments and Industry. Tenth Congress of the Universities of the Commonwealth. Report of Proceedings. Sydney August 17-23, Pp. 259-265," 265.

[4]

[5] Ian Clunies Ross, "Science," in Soviet Culture: A Selection of Talks at the Cultural Conference, November 1941, ed. Ian Clunies Ross (Sydney: NSW Aid Russia Committee, 1941).

[6]

[7] J.P. Baxter, "The Cheap Defence of Nations. The Annie Praed Memorial Oration Delivered 20 May," in Baxter Papers UNSW/CN1053/Box37 (Sydney: UNSW Archives, 1958).

[8] Baxter, "Problems in the Administration of Modern Universities," 115-16.

[9] J.P. Baxter, "The Role of the Vice-Chancellor in the University of New South Wales," Vestes 6 (1968): 11-12.

Universities, industry and atomic energy. Or why Baxter gave us Lucas Heights

Baxter’s preference for integrating the problems of research and industry (and especially in the case of atomic energy, government) is the reason, according to Philip Gissing, for a conflict in 1954 between Baxter and Sydney University’s renowned entrepreneurial Professor of Physics, Harry Messel. Messel was keen to install a small nuclear reactor for research purposes on campus.[1] Baxter was then heavily involved in lobbying for public funding, eventually successfully, for a large nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights in southern Sydney. At an Atomic energy symposium hosted by Baxter at the technology university in 1954, Baxter attacked Messel’s proposals:

I think we should build a reactor very soon but not a low-powered toy reactor for use in the Universities. We want a real reactor from which we can study and learn.[2]

Baxter undoubtedly wanted a comprehensive scheme that involved researchers, industry and government in an authentic setting. In fact, since a hope that there would be fewer constraints on nuclear research and atomic strategy was probably what brought him to Australia, it should not be surprising that Baxter’s desire for nuclear research facilities were as expansive as possible. Sydney University argued that they could not see why there could not be both large and small reactors and that a university-based reactor would give opportunity to train students without them being exposed to national secrets.[3] Baxter simply described the small reactors as a waste of money, a “fetish” amongst the European universities wishing to show off to guests.[4]

The newspaper coverage of Baxter and Messel in 1954 makes their conflict a question of which university would preside over atomic research, Sydney or NSW. Undoubtedly both universities would have preferred the distinction, but other complicated machinations were going on. Delays to the eventual building of the Lucas Heights reactor were a result of the Atomic Energy Commission, chaired by Baxter from 1956 into the 1970s, attempting to keep its options open about using the reactor parts they purchased from overseas for nuclear weapons as well as energy. Conditions attached to purchase of parts determined which types of reactor could be considered if Baxter’s plan for Australia to be self-sufficient in defence and nuclear energy were to be possible.[5]

Baxter was never able to successfully sell his scheme of integrating research, energy and defence strategies in nuclear power. Not satisfied, as Messel and Mark Oliphant[6] were, for the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor to enable Australian science to contribute knowledge to the world, Baxter had wanted to connect scientific knowledge with the problems of application for energy and national defence policy.[7] However, technical political opposition to nuclear weapons meant that, by the mid-1960s Baxter could no longer “get his way with skilful organisation of meetings, and backroom machinations.”[8] Pushed, Baxter joined the anti-communist organisation, the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom. He escalated, without success, his argument for Australian self-sufficiency, claiming that nuclear energy and weapons gave Australia the potential to be self-reliant and defend itself from Asian attack.[9]

Atomic energy is hardly a mainstream business in Australia and Baxter’s University of New South Wales certainly also forged links with many other industries. Within the first quarter of its existence, Unisearch was showing receipts from Taubman’s paints, Ampol Petroleum and Besser Vibrapac Masonry.[10] Nuclear science was Baxter’s own field, but his belief in the collaboration of industry, government and universities in the production of knowledge shaped the character of the whole of the University of New South Wales. He clearly considered his particular approach to efficient and useful knowledge to be the right way forward for the whole sector:

The success of the world’s big science-based industries, the chemical and petroleum industries, electronics, aviation, pharmaceuticals, communications and automobiles, shows that these industries have mastered the task of using science in a profitable way and…they provide pointers to how science policy might be applied to government, if governments had the courage.

This belief was about the way Baxter thought scientific problems were best addressed, but it was also political. Baxter was concerned – and he was not alone – that communism did this better. Not only about one-upmanship, Baxter said:

Technological and industrial progress is today the way to world supremacy.[1]

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[1] Baxter, "Education for the Nuclear Age," 2.

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[1] Gissing, "Sir Philip Baxter, Engineer: The Fabric of a Conservative Style of Thought", 124.

[2] Anonymous, "Atom Men Explode on Small Reactors," Sydney Morning Herald, 1 September 1954.

[3] Anonymous, "Atom Research Plant 'One of the Most Modern in the World'," Sydney Morning Herald, 12 October 1954.

[4] Anonymous, "Atom Men Explode on Small Reactors." Anonymous, "Professors Differ on Atomic Plant," Sydney Morning Herald, 2 September 1954.

[5] Gissing, "Sir Philip Baxter, Engineer: The Fabric of a Conservative Style of Thought", 125.

[6] Oliphant was head of physics at the Australian National University and was the only other scientist in Australia to have worked on the first atomic bomb in the USA

[7]

[8] Gissing, "Sir Philip Baxter, Engineer: The Fabric of a Conservative Style of Thought", 126.

[9] Gissing, "Sir Philip Baxter, Engineer: The Fabric of a Conservative Style of Thought".

[10] Unisearch, "Statement of Receipts and Balances 1st April to 30th June 1959," 125-26.

University and industrial knowledge: Baxter continued continued

Note that these Baxter posts are VERY rough drafts (...excuses excuses)...

The outstanding characteristic of the civilisation of the twentieth century is that it is that it is derived from and is almost wholly dependent upon the application of scientific knowledge to the affairs of man [sic].[1]

Baxter was convinced that the growth of higher education was central to national planning (an idea he admitted his father’s generation would have thought “odd and my grandfather’s extraordinary”) because:

Our complex, technologically oriented civilisation demands ever increasing numbers of people who can operate within it at various levels of understanding and without whom it cannot continue, let alone expand.[2]

Material progress had long been connected to civilisation as a type of evolution where progress in material culture was assumed as parallel to theories of social evolution.[3] For Baxter, this meant that twentieth century complexity and technological innovation suggested a rapidly evolving civilisation. Civilisation, in this sense, required a conquest of nature:

Man [sic] is involved in a struggle against nature itself. Scientific progress leading to the conquest of disease, vastly greater food production…[4]

Australia’s small population and large land mass made this especially difficult, Baxter said, for sufficient resources to be devoted to support the technological development needed to ensure continuing increase in the nation’s standard of living.[5] This standard of living was underpinned, not by knowledge in a civilising sense of Clunies Ross’ unified truth, but rather in knowledge applied to the problems of industry. Baxter was of the opinion that the division between pure and applied research was overstated:

Discovery and application are not really two separate processes. There are, of course, cases of people who, simply searching for knowledge for its own sake, have made discoveries of great importance but not without any thought or instruction in possible application .. But a vast amount of scientific knowledge comes from situations where the two processes are completely mixed together as a single operation.[6]

It is clear from this statement that to Baxter “important” knowledge was that which had significant application. His description of the interaction between discovery and application was certainly derived from his experience in industry where practical problems and scientific knowledge had interacted seamlessly. So to Baxter, for his university to advance knowledge, connection to industry was essential. This had been the case for the University of New South Wales from its beginnings, since the Council contained members of industry – BHP, for instance – but Baxter was keen for the interaction with industry to occur at the level of research, not just governance.

In 1956, before the university had changed its name or seen any cash from the Murray review, the NSW Premier suggested that the NSW University of Technology should look beyond the state for funding and “actively seek industrial work”.[7] Baxter was only too happy to consider this and chaired an ad hoc committee to consider how the university might provide assistance to industry. This committee suggested that there was a need in Australia for an organisation that would provide research services for industry with fees paid to the university. They recommended the university set up a limited liability company to facilitate this service.[8] Unisearch was established in 1959 and produced revenue from industry-funded research projects, educational testing, academic consulting and leasing laboratory equipment.[9] The potential for innovations to lead to commercialisable research was immediately recognised. This had new implications for the ownership of knowledge.

The question of patents has probably placed more barriers in the way of co-operative research projects between industry and universities overseas than any other single issue. [10]

University and industry collaboration highlights the division between knowledge for its own sake and knowledge for profit:

Some universities have held to the position that a public institution cannot assist in creating a private monopoly and have discouraged any projects whose sponsors desired patent protection.[11]

Unisearch was there to facilitate the interaction between organizations whose focus was profit and the university, whose focus was knowledge. Some sort of compromise, the executive were told, could be made, as long as they had a “realistic attitude”. Indeed, the document the meeting of Directors reviewed suggested that patenting might even be the university’s responsibility:

It is becoming increasingly recognised in the higher technological institutions that it is their duty to assist in accelerating the translation of scientific and technical knowledge into new processes, products and techniques.[12]

Unisearch was more interested in a modest income stream for the university than long-term ownership of patents, however. Unisearch policy thus sought to enable sponsors of research to own either a large share or the patents wholly, or have exclusive rights to any patents that arose from research. The university adopted policies regarding patenting invention in 1963 to enable Unisearch policies to be implemented. This also included a policy regarding ownership of patents by staff. Overseas examples had suggested it is not a good idea for staff to outright own all patents resulting from the work, as this can lead staff to only wish to work on potentially patentable research, skewing the university’s research effort.[13] This policy was based on a simple proposition that staff may not apply for a patent alone and that the university would not apply for a patent for any invention until an agreement had been reached. Thus, reasoned Baxter, both sides had incentive to reach agreement:

The University obviously has little to gain by being mercenary and the inventor has much to gain by working with the university.[14]

Although the Premier had hoped that actively seeking industrial work would relieve some of the State’s responsibility by providing the New South Wales University of Technology, Baxter’s priorities were around establishing structures that would facilitate the highest degrees of cooperation possible. The relationship he saw between industrial problems and science, based on his prior experience with ICI, meant that collaboration was his priority. So, while Baxter established the earliest research commercialisation organisation in Australian – almost 30 years before the majority of commercialisation initiatives in higher education  - he did so to pursue knowledge the way he thought it should be structured.

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[1] J.P. Baxter, "The Use of Scientific Knowledge by Governments and Industry. Tenth Congress of the Universities of the Commonwealth. Report of Proceedings. Sydney August 17-23, Pp. 259-265," in Baxter Papers (Sydney: UNSW Archives, 1968), 259.

[2] J.P. Baxter, National Planning and Inter-Governmental Relations Education (Australia: Self-Published. Held in National Library of Australia, 1968), 1-2.

[3] 

[4] J.P. Baxter, "Education for the Nuclear Age," in Baxter Papers UNSW/CN1053/Box16 (Sydney: UNSW Archives, 1957).

[5] Baxter, "The Use of Scientific Knowledge by Governments and Industry. Tenth Congress of the Universities of the Commonwealth. Report of Proceedings. Sydney August 17-23, Pp. 259-265."

[6] Baxter, "The Use of Scientific Knowledge by Governments and Industry. Tenth Congress of the Universities of the Commonwealth. Report of Proceedings. Sydney August 17-23, Pp. 259-265."

[7] Referred to in NSW University of Technology, "Minutes of the Council Meeting 11 March 1957," in Unisearch UNSW/CM366 (Sydney: UNSW Archives, 1957).

[8] NSW University of Technology, "Minutes of the Ad Hoc Committee of Council Chaired by Sir Philip Baxter " in Unisearch UNSW/CM366 (Sydney: UNSW Archives, 1957).

[9] Unisearch, "Report to General Meetings Revenue Graph," in Unisearch UNSW/CM366 (Sydney: UNSW Archives, 1963).

[10] Unisearch, "Attachment 10 of Minutes of Meeting of Board of Directors 7 July 1959 General Patents Policy of Company," in Unisearch UNSW/CM366 (Sydney: UNSW Archives, 1959).

[11] Unisearch, "Attachment 10 of Minutes of Meeting of Board of Directors 7 July 1959 General Patents Policy of Company."

[12] Unisearch, "Attachment 10 of Minutes of Meeting of Board of Directors 7 July 1959 General Patents Policy of Company."

[13] Unisearch, "Attachment 10 of Minutes of Meeting of Board of Directors 7 July 1959 General Patents Policy of Company."

[14] Unisearch, "Proposed University by-Law Relating to Inventions," in Unisearch UNSW/CM366 (Sydney: UNSW Archives, 1963).

Ascent to power: Baxter continued

While still on the ship that would bring him to Sydney, Philip Baxter later claimed, during a pause in he journey at Adelaide he received a telegraph:

‘I am setting up a committee to study the Australian requirements of nuclear energy, would like you to be a member of it,’ signed Menzies, who I had never heard of.[1]

Once Baxter figured out who Menzies was, this must have seemed a promising start to his migration.[2] Baxter brought industrial and managerial experience to the professorship of Chemical Engineering, a history of working with government on focused projects of national significance and political experience (he had been very active in local politics prior to his move, leading the local conservative party). He hoped that Australia would provide the room he needed to unite these experiences and promote his ideas about industry and defence, which he saw as the “same problem”.[3]  The Australian press made a fuss when Baxter arrived, too, which must have fuelled his sense of potential influence.[4] What Baxter did not have, which most of his university colleagues did, was academic experience (excluding his youthful PhD of course). Convinced as he of the value of his industrial experience, Baxter did not mind that the NSW University of Technology did not adhere to a lot of university traditions. Many of his colleagues did, however.

The NSW University of Technology’s humble beginnings were as barely an offshoot of the Sydney Technical College in Ultimo, then an industrial area full of factories and warehouses. The administration of the university had initially been merely an extension of the college’s administration, which placed academic staff within the NSW public service.  This meant that academic staff were subject to the same working conditions as members of the public service. Most controversially, this included clocking on and off, rather than the autonomy traditionally granted in the tradition of creative intellectualism. Changing the working conditions was more difficult than it might at first appear, since the public service had a standard award system and the same teachers often taught towards both university degrees and college diplomas in the technical college system, which had long been under the public service. At first, teachers in the new university were whoever was available from the College, including a number who had to learn what they were teaching as they went, so the conditions were not a problem to them. But as the university expanded and started to move to its own campus in Kensington, the new academic staff who were recruited expected to be treated with the same privileges as their colleagues at other universities. Objections sent to the University Director Arthur Denning and the industry and public service dominated Council were initially ignored as mere irritants – and were not supported by Baxter, whose self-esteem held no requirement for signifiers of status. However, while Denning was on study leave a coup was arranged. Baxter had been acting Director while Denning was away and, when he returned Council held a crisis meeting in which they voted Denning out and Baxter in. By 1955 his title changed from Director to Vice-Chancellor, a role he held until he resigned in 1969 to take a full-time role as chair of the Australian Atomic Energy Commission – a position he had for some time occupied on a part-time basis.

If those supporting Baxter’s rise to leadership thought that this would lead to a more traditional university environment, they must have been disappointed. In writing about the University of New South Wales for Vestes in 1960 (shortly after its name change) Baxter said:

The lot of those who choose to work in a new university is not a comfortable one. We cannot be like the professor described in Mr Rowe’s If the Gown Fits, who wanted, not an efficient university, but a more comfortable one. We have, we believe, achieved an efficient university.[5]

Baxter was here deliberately contrasting himself and his university to the more stately and aristocratic images of Adelaide University presented by the then recent autobiographical account of its Vice-Chancellor AP Rowe, who retired two years earlier.[6] Baxter did not want the University of New South Wales to be like other universities and he certainly did not shape its early years on the basis of academic tradition. Reflecting on his tenure as Vice Chancellor in the 1980s, Baxter proudly spoke of the influence of the “procedures of industry” on his leadership style, claiming he understood “but does not identify” with academic work practices, which he seemed to find inefficient.[7] He had little faith in academics’ administrative and financial skills and appointed Deans on the basis of administrative skills over academic seniority.[8] Baxter’s personal preferences for efficiency, financial prudence, links to industry and support of government policy shaped the physical and cultural environment of the university.[9] Baxter sneered at universities that did otherwise, considering them to be undermining the trust of the public on whose funding they relied:

This is a large business by any standard and since the money is public money a great responsibility will rest on the governing council to see that the money is spent wisely, efficiently and economically.... It must at the same time be a large scale employer, spending big sums of public money in ways which will satisfy Auditors-General and Ministers for Education the taxpayer is getting value for his dollar and that nothing wasteful or extravagant is being done (1966b, p.114) [10]

Baxter was explicit about what universities had to give away in exchange for public funding – their autonomy, or at least some of it. Other university leaders – Eric Ashby, Clunies Ross even Keith Murray himself – had tried to find a way to secure both Commonwealth funding and preserve of academic freedom, which included institutional autonomy. Baxter was different. Having described, in a 1966 article, the increased size and complexity of modern universities, needed to serve economic and technological needs, Baxter acknowledged that public funding was the only way societies would be able to get the universities they needed. He went on to say:

This dependence on public funds means that to a substantial extent the activities of universities are accountable for their use of the public funds. While academics are aware of the need for this accounting, some may feel that there is, at times, a divergence between the course necessary to meet the immediate requirements of national development and that which should be followed in the long term interests of scholarship and research (1966, p96)

Baxter saw that the increase in public funding to the universities since the Murray report had also resulted in an increase of government involvement in their management:

The degree of interference in internal affairs of the universities by conditions attached to financial supply is already very considerable, and it increases in every Act and every triennium (1966b, p.111)

Unlike Sir Robert Wallace in the previous chapter, Baxter considered the days of "give us the money and be done with it" to be over and that painstaking accountability was now required. With his characteristic focus on efficiency, Baxter said:

The price of academic freedom for the universities will be an impeccable level of efficiency, performance and service to the community, and an administration which can demonstrate that this is so to the point where it is fully trusted by that community and by the governments it elects (1966b, 113-114)

Baxter certainly believed in academic freedom (which we will see more a little later), but he also considered public funding to come with a hefty responsibility for explicit social accountability. In this sense Baxter separated university autonomy from academic freedom – considering some sacrifice of autonomy to be fair exchange for the intellectual freedom of the academics within the institution. In fact, Baxter even considered university autonomy to be a problem – for this autonomy meant most universities failed to provide appropriate service to the community by neglecting technological research and education, which he thought was what the universities were being funded to do. Not possessing the same fears for university autonomy, Baxter forged the links with government and industry that would direct knowledge and graduates that he thought would advance technological progress.

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[1] Baxter, cited in Gissing, "Sir Philip Baxter, Engineer: The Fabric of a Conservative Style of Thought", 104.

[2] Although, given that Baxter had been involved in Conservative party politics at home, was moving to Australia partly for political reasons and Menzies had recently conducted a tour of the UK in which Baxter may well even have seen him, it is highly unlikely he’d not heard of him. Gissing puts this statement down to Baxter’s dry wit, rather than the arrogance it suggests on the surface.

[3] Baxter, "Oral History Interview with Jp Baxter Conducted by Laurie Dillon, Edited by Linda Bowman. Transcript," 9.

[4] Gissing, "Sir Philip Baxter, Engineer: The Fabric of a Conservative Style of Thought", 103-04.

[5] J.P. Baxter, "The University of New South Wales," Vestes 3, no. 4 (1960): 18.

[6] Rowe, If the Gown Fits (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1960).

[7] Baxter, "Oral History Interview with Jp Baxter Conducted by Laurie Dillon, Edited by Linda Bowman. Transcript."

[8] Baxter, "The University of New South Wales."

[9] J.P. Baxter and Rupert Myers, "Administration in a Post-War University," The Australian University 4 (1966).

[10] J.P. Baxter, "Problems in the Administration of Modern Universities," Vestes 6 (1968).

Knowledge and intelligence

Fingers crossed, this is the final version of Knowledge and Intelligence. Showing that this paper is about knowledge and that spies and protesters are mere actors has been a writing feat I am still not sure I'm capable of. We shall see...

Baxter

At 23 years old, John Philip Baxter (known as Philip) graduated from the University of Birmingham with a PhD in chemical engineering – a field so new in 1928 that no university yet offered a course in it. On the recommendation of his supervisor, Baxter took up a position at Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) where, by 1935 when he was thirty he was research manager for the chemicals division, consisting of twelve thousand people. After patenting several chemical-based inventions (such as the neurotoxin Lindane, used as an insecticide) Baxter’s attention, when the possibility of a super-bomb had been presented to him, shifted to uranium. As well as participating in British government research on a possible atomic bomb, a short secondment to Oak Ridge Tennessee in 1944 to advise on the extraction of enriched uranium resulted in his employment in the United States for the remainder of the war.[1] Philip Gissing, whose Science and Technology Studies PhD was a biography of Baxter, says that Baxter was thereafter deeply dissatisfied with work in the UK: unhappy with the impediments to further post-war nuclear research due, perhaps, to his lack of political clout. Gissing suggests that Baxter longed for a ‘dominion’, a kind of deserted island where he could implement his ideas for an integrated industrial and defence strategy that centred on atomic energy.[2]  He chose Australia.

While Baxter was assisting to develop the bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Australians were starting to think that they needed more universities. In particular, the demands of the Second World War on technological education, as already seen in chapter one, highlighted both a lack of capacity and a lack of experience in teaching the types of knowledge the changing world required. The Australian National University, as we have seen, was designed to fulfil this purpose. Patrick O’Farrell has shown that the NSW government, like leaders in Canberra, were keen to expand Sydney’s Technical College to focus on education to fulfil local industrial needs. In order to attract suitably qualified staff and, in the belief that Australians did not understand any other terminology, the institution they developed was called a university: The NSW University of Technology, which after the Murray review would be re-named the University of NSW.[3] The controversies surrounding this new university were a concentration of the issues faced by the whole system. The distinctive approach to scholarship, teaching and research that that university took, particularly under Baxter’s leadership from 1952, pre-empted the relationship between university-based knowledge and the economy that would shape the higher education sector for decades.

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[1] Philip Gissing, "Baxter, Sir John Philip (1905 - 1989)," in Australian Dictionary of Biography (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, c.2000).

[2] Philip Gissing, "Sir Philip Baxter, Engineer: The Fabric of a Conservative Style of Thought" (University of NSW, 1999), 82, 92, 94.

[3] Patrick O'Farrell, UNSW: A Portrait. The University of New South Wales 1949-1999 (Sydney: UNSW Press, 1999).