Histories of Higher Education: Institutional Histories

Despite that overall expression of decline, individual histories of Australian universities tend to be cautiously triumphant. It is primarily through these instituational histories that the chronology of Australian higher education has been expressed, for broad histories have been sparse. Most of those that have been attempted are now hopelessly outdated: J.J. Auchmuty’s article "The Idea of the University in Its Australian Setting" was much-relied upon, but was written in 1953.[1] That date meant it failed to even reach the key turning point for Australian universities, the 1957 Murray review. This, at least was covered in Peter Tannock’s PhD thesis and his subsequent articles, written between 1969 and 1975.[2] While immensely useful despite their age, Tannock’s accounts are not all-inclusive either, focusing on the role of government in education. Stuart Macintyre’s recent book The Poor Relation, gives a more comprehensive overview of higher education, though through the lens of the social sciences, in the period since the Second World War. That study includes details of policy changes that have been only broadly outlined by Simon Marginson’s 1993 book Education and Public Policy in Australia.[3] Nevertheless, the angle of these works require that, to look beyond government policy to the disciplines and decisions of academics and their university leaders, the institutional histories are indispensable.

Histories of the oldest two Australian universities, the Universities of Melbourne and Sydney, established in the 1850s, offer the most comprehensive accounts.[4] Institutional histories are also available for the University of Adelaide, inaugurated in 1876, and Tasmania, established in 1890, and the Universities of Queensland and Western Australia that both opened in 1911.[5]

Histories of the technological colleges that, at the time of the Second World War were not yet, but would one day become universities, are often available.[6] Patrick O’Farrell’s history of the first of these institutions to be created, the New South Wales University of Technology, established in 1949, is important, as it Foster and Verghese’s history of the Australian National University, which began in Canberra in 1946.[7]

The newer universities, established in the 1960s and 1970s, or converted from Colleges of Advanced Education in 1988, are rarely represented in this literature, though a new history of Monash by Graeme Davison is anticipated.[8] Narrower studies of institutions (such as residential Colleges of the older universities, the Sydney Association of University Staff and the Sydney History Department) are complemented by studies of disciplines (such as James Franklin’s history of Philosophy in Australia) and events (like Gavan Butler’s, Evans Jones’ and Frank Stilwell’s account of the struggle to establish Political Economy), but all still tend towards the elite institutions.[9] The elite universities also feature in the very small number of histories that focus on accounts of daily life in the universities. Other than Alan Barcan’s book on the Old Left at Sydney University and Alison Mackinnon’s recent history of women in American and Australian universities in the 1950s and early 1960s, studies of student life in twentieth century universities tend to be concentrated on late 1960s and early 1970s student radicalism.[10] Except for the odd study of a field (such as Academic Development), oral histories tend back towards the great men, focusing on Vice-Chancellors, policy-makers and disciplinary leaders.[11]

The key difficulty with our reliance on institutional histories is that it tends to be mainly the older and wealthier universities who are able to commission them. Vice-Chancellors’ autobiographies do nothing to diminish the dominance of elite institutions in the historiography.[12] Nor do broader accounts of Australian intellectuals.[13] Institutional websites all offer some history. The University of Notre Dame in Australia’s, authored by Peter Tannock is more useful than most.[14] Despite their absence in written history, most Australian universities, at least since the 1970s, were not elite. To assure a more comprehensive understanding of the system, it is therefore necessary to look to the discipline of Education itself.

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[1] J.J. Auchmuty, "The Idea of the University in Its Australian Setting," The Australian University (1953).

[2] P.D. Tannock, "A Study of the Role of the Government of Australia in Education since Federation 1901-1968" (John Hopkins University, 1969). P.D. Tannock and I.K. Birch, "Constitutional Responsibility for Education in Australia: The Federal Government's Latent Power," Australian Journal of Education 16, no. 2 (1972). ———, "Defining the Limites of Commonwealth Education Power: The Drummond Case, the Federal Governmnent and the Universities," Melbourne Studies in Education (1973). P.D. Tannock, The Government of Education in Australia: The Origins of Federal Policy (Nedlands, WA: University of Western Australia Press, 1975).

[3] Macintyre, The Poor Relation: A History of the Social Sciences in Australia. Simon Marginson, Education and Public Policy in Australia (Cambridge University Press, 1993).

[4] Both universities have long histories written in the 1990s in two volumes. At Melbourne, Richard Selleck’s The Shop covers the period up to the Second World War while John Poynter’s and Carolyn Rasmussen’s 1996 book A Place Apart begins with the war. Sydney’s too is aplit at the Second World War, though the two volumes are more self-consciously paired. R Selleck, The Shop (Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 2003). John Poynter and Carolyn Rasmussen, A Place Apart: The University of Melbourne: Decades of Challenge (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1996). C Turney, U Bygott, and P Chippendale, Australia's First: A History of the University of Sydney Volume 1 1850-1939, vol. 1 (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1991). WF Connell et al., Australia's First: A History of the University of Sydney Volume 2 1940-1990 (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1995). Both universities have also more recently prepared shorter histories, see Stuart Macintyre and R.J.W. Selleck, A Short History of the University of Melbourne (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003). Julia Horne and Geoffrey Sherington, Sydney: The Making of a Public University (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2011).

[5] WGK Duncan and Roger Ashley Leonard, The University of Adelaide 1874-1974 (Adelaide: Rigby, 1973). Richard Davis, Open to Talent: The Centenary History of the University of Tasmania (Sandy Bay: University of Tasmania, 1990). Malcolm I Thomis, A Place of Light and Learning (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1985). Fred Alexander, Campus at Crawley: A Narrative and Critical Appreciation of the Frist Fifty Years of the University of Western Australia (Melbourne: FW Cheshire, 1963).

[6] Michael White, Wait to Curtin: A History of the Western Australian Institute of Technology (Bentley WA: Paradigm Books Curtin University, 1996). Noeline Kyle, Catherine Manathunga, and Joanne Scott, A Class of Its Own: A History of the Queensland University of Technology (Alexandria NSW: Hale & Iremonger, 1999). Stephen Murray-Smith and Anthony John Dare, The Tech: A Centenary History of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (Melbourne: Hyland House, 1987).

[7] SG Foster and Margaret M Varghese, The Making of the Australian National University (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1996).

[8] An existing history of Monash by Simon Marginson only gives an account of the changes to the university under Mal Logan in the late 1980s. Simon Marginson, Monash: Remaking the University, Allen & Unwin (St Leonards NSW2000).

[9] James Franklin, Corrupting the Youth: A History of Philosophy in Australia (Sydney: Macleay Press, 2003). Gavan Butler, Evan Jones, and Frank Stilwell., Political Economy Now! : The Struggle for Alternative Economics at the University of Sydney (Sydney: University of Sydney Press, 2009). Sybil M Jack, History of the Sydney Association of University Teachers 1943-1993 (Sydney: University of Sydney Printing Service, 1994). Barbara Caine, "The Department in the 1970s," in History at Sydney, 1891- 1991: Centenary Reflections, ed. Barbara Caine, et al. (Sydney: Sydney Studies in History, 1992).

[10] Alan Barcan, Radical Students: The Old Left at Sydney University (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002). Alison Mackinnon, Women, Love and Learning: The Double Bind (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010).

[11] For example, Julia Horne, Not an Ivory Tower: The Making of an Australian Vice-Chancellor. Based on Interviews with Michael and Kenny Birt (Sydney: University of New South Wales Archives, 1997). Alison Lee, Catherine Manathunga, and Peter Kandbinder, Making a Place: An Oral History of Academic Development in Australia (Milperra: HERDSA, 2008).

[12] See for example David Penington, Making Waves: Medicine, Public Health, Universities and Beyond (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2010). Bruce Williams, Making and Breaking Universities: Memoirs of Academic Life in Australia and Britain 1936-2004 (Sydney: Macleay Press, 2005).

[13] Geoffrey Serle, From Deserts the Prophets Come: The Creative Spirit in Australia 1788 - 1972 (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1973). Terry Irving, "Intellectuals and Class in Australia in the 1960s and 1970s: A Working Paper and Bibliography," in Seminar Papers Nationalism and Class in Australia, ed. University of Queensland Australian Studies Centre (Brisbane: Australian Studies Centre, University of Queensland, 1981). White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688-1980. Brian Head and James Walter, eds., Intellectual Movements and Australian Society (Melbourne: Oxford University Press,1988).

[14] Peter Tannock, "History of Notre Dame University Website,"  http://www.nd.edu.au/university/history.shtml. (Retrieved 24 June 2011)

Histories of Higher Education

Progress, despite its link to university research and education, is not normally the dominant narrative of twentieth century university history. Considering the growth of higher education in size and importance across the Western world, this might seem surprising. Crises in the universities, however, have been declared with regularity throughout the twentieth century. Contemporary titles internationally demonstrate the loss that scholars of the university express: The Last Professors, The Fall of the Faculty, The University in Ruins.[1] In Australia, titles have included On the Brink, and Why our Universities are Failing.[2] The Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee published a booklet about the crisis in the universities in 1952.[3] On the surface, there is no evidence yet that, in the approximately sixty years since, academics have ever collectively declared the crisis over.

At this stage, this will lead into a section on Institutional Histories, Higher Education Studies and Academic Markets (last one needs a new subtitle...any suggestions?)

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[1] Frank Donoghue, The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the Administrative University and Why It Matters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

[2] P Coaldrake, and, Steadman, L, On the Brink: Australia's Universities Confronting Their Future (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1998). Geoffrey Maslen and Luke Slattery, Why Our Universities Are Failing: Crisis in the Clever Country (Melbourne: Wlkinson Books, 1994).

[3] Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee, A Crisis in the Finances and Development of the Australian Universities (Canberra: Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee, 1952).

Technology and the University

[another segment of my draft Intro]

Technological progress, based on scientific discovery, was the marker of modernity as economies and cultures sought mechanisation, automation, speed and constant change. While this occurred in Australia as it did across the Western world, its global emergence is a narrative in which Australia rarely features. As a result, historians have not closely considered the significance of Australian technological development, particularly in its relationship to the universities. North American historiography displays the reverse tendency. The importance of the growth of twentieth century higher education, in a substantial body of North American scholarship, was that it underpinned technological innovation and produced a skilled workforce that assured the United States’ economic dominance. In Australia, Irving & Connell and other historians have pointed to the skilled workforce, led by ‘technocrats’, that transformed Australia’s post-war manufacturing capacities.  And yet, despite this evidence that technological development and technological education were central to Australian post-war modernisation, the structures that enabled their skilling have been largely ignored.

An exception to that broad neglect, in Governing Prosperity historian Nicholas Brown documents the post-war rise of the universities among the key social changes of the 1950s in Australia. He positions the technological turn in the universities within the larger, longer debate between liberal and vocational education – a debate that, as Andrew Spaull’s history of education during the war suggests, signalled a decline in university autonomy in relation to government.  Brown’s observations of the debate between general and specific tertiary education, however, could just as easily apply to other professions (architecture, medicine) as to the growth of technological disciplines.

There may be a strategic reason for this neglect. Australian scientists regularly invoke a narrative that would be disrupted were they to also make historical connections between technological development and economic growth. In popular press and pleas for sympathetic government policies, Australian scientists often articulate one of two historical arguments: firstly, that Australia has fostered innovation but not development and secondly, that industrial development in Australia occurred despite, not because of, its universities.  These are both narratives of achievement in the face of adversity: a scientific redux, perhaps, of the valiant colonial bushman. They point to Australia’s proud record of technological invention. But those technologies – and often their inventors too – almost all move overseas in this narrative, costing Australia by compelling industries to buy back the nation’s own innovations and inviting governments to reverse the policy failure by investing further in science and to implement financial incentives to ‘reverse the brain drain’. 

This image of disconnect between Australian innovation and university education and research helped to nourish a particular vision of Australian universities, one that was inserted into popular consciousness by criticisms directed against higher education from the 1930s to the 1980s. Australian universities, the public imagined, more closely resembled late-medieval British colleges than American bastions of innovation. The scholarly community, envisaged as gown-wearing, port-sipping elites, was only slowly supplemented by images of academic scientists developing progressive technologies in clean, modern laboratories.  The celebration of institutional technological achievement in Australia was thus largely confined to histories of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR, which became the CSIRO).  While the task of that government body was to support industrial development in ways that universities found more problematic, the divisions between the types of institution have been too starkly imagined. That is not to suggest the division was not real. Indeed, for reasons this thesis will explore, in the view of many academics and politicians, for some decades technology did not seem to belong in the universities. It does, however, belong in their history.

The shift towards technological knowledge in the universities was not only contentious because of a division between utilitarian and liberal aims in higher education, though Brown was right to point to this as one of its elements. In the late 1970s, philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard suggested that the transfer of university attention from scientific observation to technological development constituted a shift that challenged the legitimacy of the university’s authority over knowledge.  If Lyotard was right, defending the university from a shift towards technology was not just a defence of liberal knowledge over vocational training. It protected a past epistemology that defined the university’s traditional role in society.

According to Lyotard, the modern university (since the German Enlightenment and the French Revolution) were founded on two modes of legitimacy, or authority over knowledge, both based on scientific research norms. One form, derived from German idealism, stated that scientific knowledge legitimised itself – that is, the value of knowledge was knowledge itself (just as Newman argued for ‘knowledge for its own sake’ in The Idea of the University).  That suggested that knowledge was elemental – it was life, or spirit. The state had no authority over this knowledge – indeed, only knowledge could “say what the state and what society are”. 

The second mode of legitimacy did not sit easily with the first, according to Lyotard, and it eventually overtook it. In this, knowledge was part of a larger narrative of human liberty. Knowledge was legitimised, not by mastery, but by consensus. Knowledge was thus found to be ‘truth’ or ‘untruth’ by the people, in this heroic myth, as a part of their struggle for freedom – a mode of legitimacy that had expression in democracies. National universities, as democracy emerged, were thus established in the name of freedom, argued Lyotard, as the struggle (by researchers) to win control of knowledge was considered a necessary component of the struggle of democratic people to rule themselves.  This second mode of legitimacy meant that university knowledge to become about action rather than truth.  It was through observable benefits that the value of science would be evaluated and so science became what the people required it to be – technological.  Its value was not initself: it realised when it worked. Given that authority was now located in the people, not in mastery, the university was not necessarily more able to offer technological solutions than anyone else.  Knowledge was not ‘life’ or ‘spirit’, it was merely another tool to effect progress.

Lyotard’s interpretation of the logic of legitimacy and the changes rendered by technological change seem a long way from the task of nation-building that preoccupied Australian political and civic leaders in the post-war period up until the economic reforms of the 1980s. But concerns in the universities that appear to mirror Lyotard’s analysis did emerge with each change. No voice was sufficiently influential, however, to prevent a shift towards an emphasis on knowledge that would support the progress the nation sought.

Histories of Science

[From a section of my draft Introduction]

It was scientific knowledge, in particular, that they sought – but this preoccupation was still quite new. In 1952, at the Centenary of the University of Sydney, leading Australian scientist Ian Clunies Ross recalled the words of William Charles Wentworth when the Bill for that university was introduced in parliament. Wentworth had listed the great thinkers he imagined would emerge from Australia’s first university. Not one of them was a scientist. The great change of that first century of scholarship in Australia, argued Clunies Ross, was the ascendancy of science.  As the twentieth century progressed, all other disciplines were made subservient to science: the social sciences building themselves into a kind of “poor relation”, as Stuart Macintyre described them.

Science ascended gradually. The slow progression from imperial exploration to national science in the nineteenth and early twentieth century has commonly been seen as evidence of Australia’s growth and maturity – though as both Peter Hobbins and Tamson Pietsch demonstrate, scientific connections with Britain and the Empire were maintained long after scientific ‘independence’ was achieved.  The rise of institutions such as the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and the development of disciplines, academies, societies and universities are depicted – for example in collections such as as those edited by R.W. Home and Roy Macleod – as providing the intellectual infrastructure for the nation.

While scientific knowledge thus shifted from an exploration of Australia to research for Australia, it was nevertheless not ‘owned’ by the nation. Biographies – Ian Clunies Ross among them – and popular histories emphasise the scholarly discoveries and leadership achievements of scientific heroes like Howard Florey and Marcus Oliphant.  Attribution of discovery, as historian of science Mario Biagioli, points out, is a marker of the ownership of knowledge. That is because scientific discovery mimics literary authorshop, he suggests. But Biagioli contends that all is not as it seems. By focusing on observations of a world that exists beyond the author, science challenged authorship’s ability to ‘own’ knowledge. Science, he argues, posited ideas and realities that could not be easily owned at all, contesting traditions of authorship and copyright.  And yet, in Australia, histories of science, making regular gestures to British imperialism, emphasise the power of science in owning and controlling the world. Histories of science highlight the colonial power asserted by science in Australia and the racial and imperial assumptions informing its applications, particularly population health management.  These, historians of science contest, in line with Foucault, can constitute ownership claims by humans over nature, a kind of imperialism of the knower over that which they know. 

The history of science repeatedly demonstrates that human power over nature was enabled by science’s claims to methods that objectively described reality.  This gave science an authority unavailable to other types of kowledge. The university, in appropriating science as the proper function of the university, also appropriated its authority. Other disciplines and activities – history, economics, sociology, even cooking (‘domestic science’) sought, particularly in the ‘social sciences’, some of the legitimacy scientific knowledge had acquired.  Scientific authority certainly augmented the university’s entitlement to the guardianship of knowledge – to possess truth and its purity, or ‘universal’ knowledge, as Foucault described it.  As the twentieth century unfolded, however, science became useful, rather than merely true. The methods of research and discovery led not just to new knowledge but also to new technologies, inventions, medical advances and industrial processes. With so many benefiting personally and financially from its technologies, who would own knowledge now?