A Semi-Education for All

The back page of the Australian’s Higher Education Supplement of August 26 carried a sad little letter from Professor Wilfrid Prest of Adelaide. He laments the disappearance of true learning from our universities, while the marrow is sucked out of their bones by the monstrous managerial bureaucracies which have invaded them. He gives the example of the once-distinguished Melbourne University school of history, “dwindling to the verge of disappearing altogether”.

Fast backwards fifty years to Encounter magazine of July 1960. It contained an article by Kingsley Amis, attacking the incontinent growth of universities just then beginning to spread over Britain. Amis thought it was a mere bogus trend, spawned by the “delusion that there are thousands of young people about who are capable of benefitting from university training”. Then came his warning, not wholly forgotten even today: “more will mean worse”.

An instant and angry blast from the trendy Left denounced his black conservatism, his appalling elitism. But he was right, and Western societies have spent the last five decades flying in the face of his perception. The cry became, “University for everybody—free!” (Remember especially Gough Whitlam.) Now we are beginning to add up the terrible waste of money, and to measure it against the illusory benefits it has yielded to community, to learning and to civility.

In 1962, eighteen months after the Amis article, by the oddest chance, I found myself in a front-row seat, as the curtain rose on the first act of Australia’s very own version of hyper-inflation of tertiary education, and its fast-ensuing burial under bureaucracy. Perhaps, indeed, I was not truly in the audience at all; I had slipped across the footlights, and was playing a bit-part on stage. This is the story:

As Australia in the mid-1940s emerged from the Second World War, its tertiary education system remained in the hands of the six states. Each—some less grudgingly than others—maintained and financed a single university. (In Canberra, the ANU was coming to birth.) These universities were cramped, underfunded, lived from hand to mouth and were sometimes unhealthily influenced by local political, professional or parochial pressures. They were in many respects ramshackle affairs, but generally they held fast to proper standards of scholarly achievement and integrity, and to a serious sense of collegiate responsibility for nurturing young minds.

Sydney University (1850) and Melbourne (1853) laid the foundations of higher learning in Australia, and long maintained the faith of the scholarship that had migrated from the great foundations of England, Scotland and Ireland. Despite antipodean remoteness, and in the face of colonial materialist indifference all around them, many of the newly-created Chairs attracted scholars of high distinction. Within a generation, their brilliant graduates were shining abroad in the forefront of learning.

The names of a few of the teachers and the taught, spanning a century, are jotted down here, off the top of my head; they do not, I think, make up a roll-call of dunces: Samuel Alexander, Charles Badham, W.E. Hearn, the Michell brothers, the father and son Bragg, Enoch Powell, A.R. Chisholm, Howard Florey, John Eccles, Macfarlane Burnet, Keith Hancock. (Entries on some of those will be found in the Australian Dictionary of Biography.)

From 1945, these disparate state universities attained heroic heights of dedication and improvisation, as they coped with the sudden avalanche of enrolments that flowed from Ben Chifley’s wonderful scheme for the rehabilitation of ex-servicemen. The student population almost doubled overnight. Today, I think back with still-lively gratitude to Chifley, to Melbourne University and (especially) to its school of history, where I was lucky enough to be taught. Wilfrid Prest’s lament for its decline is a sad sign of the decay of learning.

The campus on which I enrolled in February 1946 was a mess. A professor’s study then might equate to a broom cupboard today. There was so little desk space in the library that students would certainly do much of their reading sprawled on the floor. The grounds were disfigured by crude temporary buildings. For many years the Architecture school was a set of old army huts nailed together. At one period a whole supplementary campus had to be run up at Mildura.

Lectures were given wherever an empty theatre could be borrowed or poached. Kathleen Fitzpatrick gave her elegant British history lectures in the Zoology theatre; John O’Brien taught us captivatingly about Periclean Athens in the (I think) Geology theatre; Manning Clark revealed his Australian history to us in the English classroom. He had not risen then to fame and grandeur, and was stimulation itself. Not for anything would I have missed the small tutorial classes he held in his own room.

I was transported by it all; the shape of the world and of the culture I came from had gained meaning and coherence. Enormously enriched (though with but a sadly undistinguished degree) I slipped out of university to spend a decade or so among the tinsel and the cakes and ale of advertising, public relations and journalism.

Beyond question, all of Australia’s six teaching universities sorely needed reform, and resources on a scale most unlikely to be provided by any state government. The entire tertiary sector required a good re-think; in 1957 British educationist Sir Keith Murray was appointed by the Commonwealth to survey it. His report was accepted more or less in toto by the Menzies government, which in 1959 created its own Universities Commission under physicist Sir Leslie Martin. A thorough spring-cleaning of Australia’s universities was on the way.

I returned to university life in 1962; by the most astonishing stroke of good fortune I had been appointed Director of Melbourne University Press. But wait! There was a catch! Like Jacob labouring for Abraham to win a bride, I was required first to serve the Vice-Chancellor, Sir George Paton, for six months as his personal assistant. My job? To prepare a draft of Melbourne University’s first application for Common-wealth funding—to cover three years—under the new Murray–Martin–Menzies dispensation. A cash-strapped university had caught a glimpse of buckets and buckets of Canberra gold. Sleeves up!

Sir George installed me in a commodious Gothic room adjoining his own, and approved my engaging a secretary-assistant from an agency, Pat Cowl; a sterling colleague she proved.

The main initial demand of the Martin Commission was the completion of the most stupendously detailed questionnaire I have ever seen, with several thousand questions, many of them of a most footling kind. (I don’t recall that it actually asked what brands of tea and coffee were served in the cafeteria, but you wouldn’t have been surprised if it had.) Faintly sinister hints of an inhuman abstraction appeared. Some statistics had to be expressed, not in numbers of persons, but as “Equivalent Full-time Student Units”, or “EFTSUs”.

Endless rounds of visits had to be made to every dean and every department head, often with several follow-ups. Pat and I worked extremely hard—regularly ten to twelve hours a day, and sometimes into the weekends. (I was told that Melbourne was the only university to meet the Martin Commission’s deadline. I did not say that our promptitude sprang less from a desire to satisfy a bureaucracy than from a passion to begin my true lifework at MUP.)

Melbourne University had been economically administered—probably too economically. While I worked for Sir George, I often took my morning or afternoon cup of tea in the amiable company of the other administrative officers; we all fitted comfortably into one decent-sized room. Today, multi-storeyed modern buildings barely suffice to accommodate the pullulating hordes of their successors. Pat and I saw clearly enough what would follow our labours. At our humble level we had helped create yet another Canberra traffic hazard, where the cart always precedes the horse; we had assisted in forging an iron fetter which would chain learning under the tyranny of bureaucrats.

Back to Kingsley Amis. My twenty-six years at MUP, on the edge of Melbourne’s campus, gave a good view of the student body. I pay tribute to its better side—to the majority who would become valuable citizens. But my guess was that perhaps a quarter of them were lost souls, loafers, larcenists, plagiarists or racketeers battening on their fellows. True, being “students” kept them off the streets, but a university should not be used as a Borstal. If our tertiary institutions are serious about seeking economy and rationalisation, they will re-read Kingsley Amis and, after a ruthless campus cull of no-hopers, downsize enrolments.

Most of us would like to ensure the survival of the orange-bellied parrot—engaging little creature that it is. What about some similar environmental tenderness for another threatened rare bird—the Melbourne school of history? The signs are auspicious. Kevin Rudd’s speech late in August was in effect his very own Treaty of Westphalia, by which the long-running “history wars” are now over. This (may we take it?) is the comeuppance of General Stuart Macintyre, self-proclaimed aggressor in those boring and unproductive hostilities. To restore the school to the standing it enjoyed in the times—for example—of Max Crawford, John La Nauze and Geoffrey Blainey would be a noble achievement for a university now re-dedicating itself to scholarship instead of bureaucratic form-filling and paper-shuffling.