Advertising the university's academic freedom?

Given my thesis topic it hardly seems likely that I would approve of any university advertising. That is not entirely the case. Nor is it the point of this posting.


It has to be said that much of the time university ads worry me or make me cranky.


But I saw one the other day that made me feel a twinge of hope. Murdoch's: "How do you change the world? Bring freethinkers together to discover."


Let it be a hopeful sign, please please please.

Academic Work in Australian Universities the 1940s and 1950s

I have a new article in History of Education review called Academic Work in Australian Universities the 1940s and 1950s.

It is in a special edition of HER on James Conant. Here is the abstract.

Little though he knew it, in 1951 James Conant visited a university system in the midst of great change. A debate was raging through the system – a debate lasting more than a decade – which sought on one side increased engagement of universities and academic work with industry and the community, as Conant did, but on the other felt that traditional academic values underpinned a humane civil society and should therefore be protected. This long debate, as this paper discusses, culminated in the 1957 Murray report, which irrevocably transformed the Australian system. The lens through which the changing nature of universities and academic work in Australia is discussed in this paper, is the work of Lord Ashby, a British scientist and academic leader who was influential in changes in higher education in Australia and internationally. Eric Ashby’s promotion of particular types of academic work, this paper argues, was designed to attract public funding, but resist public control. Ashby, as we shall see, optimistically promoted change, identifying it as a part of the continuity of the university tradition – so he had less fear of the impact of change than many of his colleagues. The implications and resilience of Ashby’s quite heroic images of traditional academic work in a changing environment relate to principles of academic freedom as universities moved into a new relationship with government and society. The struggle for survival of the figure of the traditional academic in this new environment suggests it to be a moment where the control and ownership of knowledge started to be transferred out of academics’ hands – though Ashby, in his optimism, did not notice it.

Causalities and appropriations

This article by Clive Kessler in The Australian is obviously a contribution to an ongoing discussion about other things, but it connects to an argument my thesis will probably make when I get around to my next chapter on the 1980s.

Professor Kessler says: "The neo-liberal ascendancy had to undermine the structures of intellectual authority that resided within the established disciplines. To prevail it had to disarm the capacity for effective intellectual critique they threatened to offer."

This is true, but in my mind he has his causality backwards.

The delegitimisation he describes as "post-1968" is emerging pre-68 but that is the right time. The authority over knowledge as hoarded by professors was reclaimed by students and this changed the character of knowledge itself, delegitimising university authority. This is the stuff I've been writing about lately.

Of course what happens later is that the language and ideas expounded by student movements of the 1960s and 1970s was appropriated by neo-liberal discourse in the 1980s. The postmodernism that had emerged did not cause this and neither did student-centred learning or student choice (not that Kessler attacks these, not his thing obviously). But they did all weaken the capacity of the university to assert the singular authority over truth that may have prevented some of the market forces arguments. But of course, even rather conservative academics in the 1960s thought professorial authority was too strong. These were good changes. They didn't cause the neo-liberal arguments but they were appropriated by them.

Much as I too sometimes long for an earlier sense of the unity of knowledge and the authority of expertise, trying to revive an obsolete authority by arguing with a 30-40 year-old movement isn't going to fix the problems neo-liberalism have left us with.

The short response to Kessler ought to be "get over it". And not just because being anti-postmodernist is oh-so 1990s and boring. But rather because postmodernism and a whole lot of other things didn't cause our problems, they were appropriated to create different ones. Lets deal with those problems directly, shall we?

Beneath this heroic history lurks a tragic loss

Professors, by their status (that functioned as a signifier of their expertise), had long been positioned to declare which knowledge was considered valid for the university. The supposed unity of knowledge was key to this. Unified knowledge could be understood as truth. This kind of knowledge provided the metanarrative of the university. But it was a self-legitimising system. Professors decided what knowledge was and they then also were required to protect that knowledge as inviolable truth. This was a position of considerable power for, as Lyotard said: “knowledge first finds legitimacy within itself, and it is knowledge that is entitled to say what the State and what Society is”. 

The student movements, in their opposition to examinations exposed the system of power that this type of expertise asserted. Defiance of disciplinary systems demonstrated their anger at the ways that power was institutionalised and deployed against them and against society. Their insistence that students and non-professorial staff be included in university governance – in decisions at all levels – rejected the assumption of the old community of scholars: that only the accepted experts could legitimise knowledge. On the contrary, 1960s and 1970s student movements cast off professorial legitimacy in favour of something new.

In some cases this new pedagogy was explicit. The Free U set out a position paper that detailed a participatory approach that rejected the authority of the teacher-expert.  When George Molnar of the Sydney philosophy department proposed to abolish its core curriculum, he also detailed a collaborative and problem-based approach to learning.  Those opposed to exams and the participants in the philosophy strike held less coherent perspectives, but what they all had in common was the delegitimisation of the god-professor and the instatement of de-centred models of knowledge. Students at Melbourne idealised inclusion and political diversity, rather than support of dominant social and political systems, as an environment in which new knowledge would flourish. This also prompted increased student control over what and how they would learn.   Rather than doctrinal, canonical and certain, knowledge would be seen as individual, socially constituted and political. The approaches to learning advocated by student movements will be familiar to educators of the present. They represent a precursor to current concerns for situated, authentic and student-centred learning – student movements could be described as proto-constructivist. 

Yet, beneath this heroic history lurks a tragic loss. Approximately 25 years after the Philosophy Strike Jean Curthoys said:

This liberal conception of the university no longer has currency…I have no time here to defend this liberal conception and so I shall simply say that my deep regrets about the strike concern the extent to which it opened the floodgates for its rejection.

It is difficult to know exactly what Curthoys meant here about the loss of the liberal university, but the story of the period to me suggests three things. Firstly, by challenging the existing order, students did not add themselves to the professoriate as a new community. Instead, they undermined it. While this may not seem like a great loss, the legitimacy of the university’s claim over truth in civil society rested in that hierarchical order. The second issue is related. By decentralising knowledge construction, a crisis of expertise and legitimacy emerged. If the experts have no legitimate authority over knowledge, “who decides what knowledge is and who knows what needs to be decided?”  And if there is no obvious need for expert knowledge, what is the use of the university at all? The first two issues thus led to a loss of standing, of reputation for the university as an idea. Thirdly, the language student movements used identified a parallel between the ways that money flows in a capitalist system and the ways that knowledge was structured in the university, as two aspects of the same problem. In addition, they described the shift of control from institution to student as requiring student choice: a type of consumer power. The intention of these was certainly not to commodify knowledge or education. But it gave a language that could be appropriated in support of such commodification: a language that already contained powerful moral imperatives.

Truth versus relevance: the ethic of (student) choice

The success of the Philosophy Strike in securing a legitimate place for new knowledge held by non-professors was not the end of the story for the troubled Sydney Philosophy department. On the suggestion of left-wing Sydney Push philosopher George Molnar  and with strong support by students, a move was made to remove a “core” of philosophy courses from the undergraduate curriculum.  Molnar opposed a classic curriculum he believed had been made artificially stable by academics, where knowledge development sought to enrich (rather than supersede) existing knowledge. 

Armstrong put his effort into opposing the idea, believing that core foundational knowledge was the basis of all new philosophical thought – a hierarchical structure to knowledge that was also reflected in his defence of the university’s hierarchy and the traditional role of professors. Armstrong insisted that any student who by-passed the core would “be getting an inferior philosophical education”.  Some members of the philosophy department, after the Knopfelmacher case, the Marxist-Leninist dispute and the philosophy strike, had enough. One responded to the need to vote on the issue with “a pox on George and a double pox on Armstrong!”

Molnar promoted a curriculum based on Althusserian philosophy, claiming that knowledge was produced, uncertain and contextual, and was always ideological.  Rather than learning to emulate academic masters and to parrot their knowledge, under Molnar’s scheme, students would be assessed in groups as they tackled complex topics collaboratively.  Many philosophers on staff supported Molnar’s proposal, agreeing that new knowledge would be best produced by those who can easily depart from tradition, on the basis of individual inquiry and personal discovery. It was in the youth movements of the period that challenges to accepted ideas were being produced and many philosophers wished to encourage the new knowledge that emerged.  Under this scheme, student choice would be the best way to determine the curriculum of each. Philosophy students, in the growing participatory atmosphere, agreed:

The proponents of compulsion commonly rest their case on various value judgements, for example that the compulsory courses are more intellectually valuable than some of the options which a student, given a greater range of choice, might make.

It was the principle of student choice that David Stove derided as a useless basis for curriculum, suggesting, “no doubt many more signatures could be got for a petition for students to determine their own results.”

Student choice was a larger theme of the student movement’s interactions with universities across Australia. Members of student movements felt that students should be able to choose what they studied as a matter of academic freedom. The requirement to study certain things was likened to the military conscription of the Vietnam War:

The university has … [an] obligation to go out and speak as honestly, persuasively and precisely as it can to prospective members, offer an invitation and not rely on educational conscription.

This ethic of choice would mean that universities competed for students, returning power to those who currently considered themselves powerless. It would be the power of a consumer then, which students would be able to assert, ensuring competing universities improve their service and offer courses attractive to students: they “must subsequently perform in accordance with the reasonable expectations [of] students." 

The language of freedom associated with many aspects of the youth movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, even among those who would never have intended it to do so, showed a capacity to slip into the language of the free market. Theodor Adorno had warned about the myth of freedom in the ethic of consumer choice, saying “the customer is not king as the culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object”.  But then student revolutionaries in Paris had rejected and attacked Adorno.

[footnotes removes...available on request]

The emergence of participatory knowledge: The Free U

The Free University near the University of Sydney, known as the Free U, aimed to free knowledge from the university hierarchy that guarded it jealously, and make it the possession of any who wished to inquire. Sydney’s Free U started in 1968 with 150 students and at its peak had approximately 300 participants, of which around 20 were University of Sydney staff.  The Free University movement was international, and Sydney’s participants drew on the previous experience of others in establishing it.  The Free U’s formation was heralded in Honi Soit in 1967 with invitations to students and staff to participate in its planning.  This was a participatory approach – where staff and students were ostensibly equal, where course content was not fixed, course leaders were “convenors”, not lecturers and there was no assessment. It thus sought to challenge professorial authority with alternative pedagogy, expressing some the key knowledge utopias of the 1960s and 1970s.

The Free U was a response to failures by what Terry Irving described as the “mass university”.  The mass university’s hierarchical pedagogies inhibited a “true” community of scholars. The neglect of new academic material that focused on the “real” issues of society or the “real” issues that students faced in their daily lives would emerge, they believed, in a more participatory environment.  The mass university was complicit in the goals of the “establishment”: 

Just as the university serves the nation, so the “good” teacher serves the university by instructing his students efficiently in those skills whose acquisition the nation has already made a condition of his entry to the university. Some departments and some teachers resist this atmosphere; others accept it, or encourage it by continually complicating the lives of staff and students with regulations and forms.

The mass university, Free U founders claimed, contributed to a culture that valued the seniority of the lecturer over the student, positioning the lecturer as the “knower” and the student as “doesn’t know”.  As well as perpetuating the incestuous self-legitimising knowledge of the professoriate, the disadvantage of this pedagogy for teachers, said Free U leader, Bob Connell, was that teachers only ever taught what they already knew, missing a learning opportunity themselves.  Traditional hierarchies and disciplinary boundaries designed to protect existing knowledge, inhibited the production of new knowledge. Admission to a mass university was based on decisions by administrators, not the teachers who, in a Free University, would select students for admission themselves and “teach who they want”.

The Free U was set up in a house in Chippendale, a short walk from the Sydney campus.  It assumed that students were active in the discovery process and that they produced ideas from which their teachers could also learn. Functionally, the Free U positioned learning in an immersive, experiential community that blurred the boundaries between theory and practice, thought and emotion, student and teacher (and teacher and professional practitioner), known and not known:

When you walk in the front door of the Free U, you leave outside the formal distinction between students and teachers … The group studies what the people in it decide they want to study… The way they tackle it is decided by themselves on the spot: not by someone else beforehand. The “course” is what the people in the course group make of themselves.

Founders of the Free U invoked the concept of “community of scholars” to promote a romantic notion of a renewed university, containing as it did a strong desire for authenticity, individuality and spontaneity. The Free U also repositioned the student to the centre of teaching and learning, redistributing knowledge to participants who held “a strong sense that knowledge was for sharing”.  In so doing, the Free U problematised knowledge as foundational and objective, with independent thought only possible after the foundation is acquired through careful discipline and examination. By positioning students and professionals as potential teachers it gave legitimacy to knowledge constructed as reflections on current affairs, social and professional practice. It challenged the idea that such knowledge should be the possession of professors and experts .  The Free University aimed to free knowledge from the disciplines and from the guardianship of its traditional owners. By enacting knowledge utopias, the Free U staked its own claim to the ownership of knowledge, but also showed that it could be produced and possessed by anyone.

The Free U was heavily reliant on its proximity to Sydney University.  It is noteworthy that – unlike the “Learning Exchange” students attempted in Canberra  and the Open University model, which was a topic under discussion throughout higher education  and was successfully launched in the UK in 1969  – admission to the Free U seems to have largely assumed existing university participation, creating a “community” that was really a Sydney University clique.  Its admission policy was also attached to the criterion by which a course could be offered, one of the first instances, perhaps, where student demand explicitly determined academic curriculum:

Anyone can run a course, provided he [sic] can get students

No one thought of this as market demand, rather “reform from below”.  But it nevertheless created a language that could later be appropriated to give moral force to application of market forces to university knowledge.

Terry Irving’s 1971 chapter in Counterpoints suggests that Free U founders had initially seen the Free University as an instrument of reform. Their vision narrowed after a couple of years. They came to accept themselves as just a “unique academic community”:

The Free University…is not an academy for instruction in doctrinal truth…and it is not the answer to the mass university…we now think of ourselves more as a conscience than a catalyst for the mass university.

The Free U closed in 1972 and its participants saw it as a temporary expression of important ideas rather than the cause of an educational revolution. Despite the brevity of the Free U’s existence, similar pedagogies had more permanent expression through organizations like the Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia (HERDSA), which was established in 1972 and encouraged socially situated, student-centred approaches through professional development for university teachers. 

God-professors: delegitimising academic authority

In 1973, Sydney University PhD students Jean Curthoys and Liz Jacka proposed to teach “Philosophical aspects of Feminist thought”. The proposal was hotly debated in the Sydney Philosophy Department, deeply divided since the mid-1960s (and soon to split officially). Despite some fierce opposition, the Department approved it and it went to the next Arts Faculty meeting, where it was also controversial. One professor gave his reasons for voting against it, roughly along these lines:

I shall vote against this course. I have a feeling about it. It doesn’t smell right. 

The Faculty vote was split, with just over 50% of members voting to support delivery of the course. This was the only approval needed for an elective course, so ordinarily the story should stop here.

Perhaps using similar senses to that anonymous professor in the Arts Faculty meeting Deputy Vice Chancellor O’Neil thought something did not seem right with signing off on the Faculty’s decision. He contacted another professor, David Armstrong. We have already seen the approaches that Armstrong took to try to employ Knopfelmacher in the Sydney philosophy department. A vehement anti-communist, Armstrong was a member of James McAuley’s Peace with Freedom movement and continued in the Congress for Cultural Freedom, becoming heavily involved in conservative thinking in Sydney, including membership of the editorial board of Quadrant (a role he continues at the time of writing, at 84 years old).  Informed during a 1986 oral history interview that one of his many on-campus political “enemies” described him as the most reactionary person they had ever met, Armstrong said, “oh, no, David Stove would win easily”.  Stove was a fellow philosopher, colleague in the Congress for Cultural Freedom and personal friend.

 In 1971 Armstrong had successfully put a stop to staff proposals for a course on Marxism-Leninism – but then, he had been Head of Department. Even then the department had publicly censured him for exercising his veto in relation to the course and he had sought (and received) written reassurance from the Vice-Chancellor that he possessed the right that he had exercised.  As professor, and indeed senior professor, he felt himself to be absolutely responsible for the content on every course delivered in his department. He had taken a strong interest in the recent definitions of the roles of professors, especially in departments where there were more than one, as in Philosophy. The rotation of the Head of Department role to someone else did not make him feel any less responsible for the material taught – nor did it incline him to allow courses with political inclinations he disagreed with. His previous tactics in the department indicated that Armstrong would not hesitate to use his professorial status to stop the course, whichever way he could.

After his phone call with Armstrong, O’Neil declared there to be no funding for the course. Outraged members of the Philosophy department descended on his office in protest, leading the Deputy Vice Chancellor to refer the issue to more professors – the (soon to be defunct) University Professorial Board.  This was exactly the type of behaviour that was making students suspicious of professorial power and hierarchical knowledge. Professors were using whatever power was available to them – in this case funding-power – to control knowledge.

In an open letter, Jacka and Curthoys said:

Professor O’Neil has made it clear that be believes the best decisions can only be made by those with the highest rank.

They informed the Professorial Board that “In our case at least, your high rank in no way qualified you to judge the issue”, since feminist thinking was “an area which is entirely new”:

It is the nature of the case that we don’t have a long history in the subject. There are no established, recognised authorities to whom we can appeal.

This was entirely new knowledge. Furthermore, unlike other types of university knowledge, the nature of this new feminist knowledge excluded established expert judgement. The Professorial Board was by definition out of touch with this new knowledge and therefore could hold no authority to decide what knowledge is:

The kinds of things that bodies like yours usually consider, don’t apply in this case. This, of course is not to argue that whether or not we are competent is unimportant or undecidable, but rather that you aren’t the proper people to decide it.

Following this none too subtle declaration that professors were no longer the legitimate owners of knowledge, Jacka and Curthoys announced a revolution:

We feel, then, that those who are in a position to judge our competence have already done so. This week we will be asking these people to demand of Professor O’Neil that we are immediately appointed.

It could hardly have been expected that this letter to the Professorial Board, denouncing professorial authority and staking a claim to knowledge owned and approved by students and junior academics in its place, would encourage the Board to a more sympathetic position than those held by O’Neil and Armstrong, who were already suspicious of feminism and defensive of their academic authority. Department Head Keith Campbell fought very hard to convince the Board of the competence of Jacka and Curthoys and the value of the course, but was opposed by some very vocal professors. Armstrong pointed out that “a majority of professorial and associate-professorial members of the Department were opposed to or had grave reservations” about the course.  The minutes suggest that what really clinched the matter was a reading by Armstrong from an ABC radio interview with Jacka and Curthoys. The transcript of the interview was not quoted in the minutes, but a copy prepared especially for the meeting is in Armstrong’s papers in the National Library. A largely innocuous document, the only item that I could see that might have influenced the Board was that the interviewer asked if the course was “propaganda” and the women confirmed that they were not “unbiased”.  Armstrong was to use this interview as evidence at later meetings and would continually refer to it as giving a “different complexion” to the official course proposal throughout the controversy.  It obviously resonated with professorial fears. The professorial board represented the university’s system of knowledge: those deemed to be academic “masters” could decide what university knowledge was – a legitimising arrangement. That these experts were also the creators of knowledge who then validated it was a problem students and junior staff were starting to associate with the broader problems the movement had with capitalism. Just as the structure of economics promoted concentration of wealth for a few, so did the structure of the university hoard knowledge as a type of wealth amongst the professors.  That knowledge might flow like money – even when that conception is put to the purpose of reorganising it as shared wealth – forged a new conceptual connection that will become important in later chapters. But in 1973 this revolution was just starting and was fuelled as much by the generation gap as the structure of legitimacy.

The large influx of staff during the sudden period of growth afforded by the Murray report created a significant age gap between longstanding senior staff. Universities recruited a large new generation of junior staff, many of whom had quite recently been students themselves. Many junior academics were influenced by emerging ideas about student-focused pedagogies and 1960s criticisms of university hierarchy, outdated courses and an “overall conformity of the university to dominant political and social values” – and they wanted to offer their own contributions to knowledge.  While there was a lot to stand in the way of junior staff assuming some of the authority Professors had held as a matter of tradition, change was enabled by this generation gap. The generation against whom protest was directed were on their way out and a very large number of new generation academics were on their way in – with few in between to temper revolutionary change. The professoriate had reason to fear the consequences of this change and they started examining the “meaning” of being a professor and its structural and authoritative implications.

These fears were compounded by anti-feminist sentiments that some professors held passionately. Professor David Stove, even nearly twenty years later was still outraged by the inclusion of feminism in valid intellectual inquiry:

After the defeat of America by Vietnam, the attack [on the university] was renewed, amplified, and intensified, by feminists. Their attack has proved far more devastating than that of the Marxists…Of the many hundreds of courses offered to Arts undergraduates in this university, what proportion, I wonder, are now not made culturally-destructive, as well as intellectually null, by feminist malignancy and madness? One-third? I would love to believe that the figure is so high.

The result of the combination of suspicion of feminism with fears for the status of professorial authority was that, although O’Neil’s own committee had recommended appointment of Jacka and Curthoys, the Professorial Board rejected it by thirty-nine votes to seven. 

Thus commenced the highly publicised Philosophy Strike. In this, many staff and students from several departments went on strike. The Builders Labourers Federation weighed in with their support and media contacts and a Women’s Tent Embassy was constructed in the Main Quad.  A University Senate Inquiry resulted in approval for the course.  Leonie Kramer, then Professor of Australian Literature, felt the published Inquiry report failed to give an adequate picture of the Philosophy Strike and insisted that her own analysis be published alongside it. She was concerned to publicise the fact that, while a majority in the philosophy department had supported the feminist course, the majority of professors did not. Kramer thought that this would persuade the public about the intellectual invalidity of the subject. She believed the public would respect the opinions of professors over even a large number of others.  There is some evidence that she was right. One newspaper said:

How absurd to give such a course, how presumptuous of two women graduates to suggest that they could give it! That’s what you get if you allow professors to have no more than one vote among many.

But the fact that there was sustained opposition to feminism and non-professorial knowledge does not remove the importance of the change this event exemplifies: the delegitimation of professorial authority over knowledge. The strike announced that knowledge was possessed by hundreds of individual knowers – individuals who would no longer accept the authority of a group of self-proclaimed experts. They were, as Lyotard put it, “sounding the knell of the age of the Professor”.