Sir Bruce Williams

 It is a privilege indeed to share some thoughts and memories of Professor Sir Bruce Williams, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sydney from 1967 to 1981, scholar, gentleman, source of inspiration to many—and loyal friend.

Sir Bruce had the blessing of a childhood in rural Victoria, the third of six children in an energetic family where Christian values and the love of music were influential. His father was a minister of the Methodist Church and both his parents were actively musical.

Despite his inclination towards the life of a farmer, his teachers at Wesley College directed his intellectual attributes towards the University of Melbourne, where in 1939 he graduated with First-Class Honours in Economics and the Wyselaskie Scholarship.

Denied acceptance into the armed forces on medical grounds, he was soon offered, at the age of twenty-one, a lectureship in Economics at the University of Adelaide. Idealistic reflection and his youthful confidence however were convincing him that the flaws of a capitalist system would inevitably lead to negative outcomes in income and employment.

His monograph in 1943, born of these sentiments and titled “The Socialist Order and Freedom”, produced an agitated reaction by some of the members of the University Council. The Vice-Chancellor, Sir William Mitchell, however, in his wisdom, saw no cause for concern. Indeed, around the same period, the young academic was called upon to serve as Acting Head of Economics during the Professor’s secondment as adviser to the wartime Rationing Commissioner.

There was time also for cultural pursuits. Through participation in the Adelaide University Theatre Guild, Sir Bruce met Roma Hotten, his future wife. Together they enjoyed the rich and stimulating literary environment of Adelaide before setting off for international academic appointments.

As Senior Lecturer in Economics at the University of Belfast he was again working with his professor and mentor from Adelaide, Keith Isles, who held the Chair.

Ever idealistic and academically innovative, Bruce Williams (despite well-intentioned advice to the contrary from a former teacher, now at Cambridge), decided to accept the Chair of Economics at the new and experimental Keele University College in the English Midlands. He was then only thirty years old—and a highly productive period resulted in a series of books on science, innovation and academic growth. And over this creative period, the family grew to include five daughters.

A subsequent appointment to a Chair of Economics at the much larger Manchester University enhanced also his involvement with university financial complexities and administration, which added substantially to these strengths in his later appointment at the University of Sydney.

And together with his co-author Charles Carter, he established the Centre for Business Research.

With the impressive range of his involvement in and contribution to new insights stemming from economics and business, he was an outstanding choice as a consultant to the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development, as an adviser to the Wilson government’s new Ministry of Technology, and as a member of the Prices and Incomes Board—perhaps unconsciously pre-determined from echoes of those early years at the University of Adelaide.

Despite a strong attraction now by the challenge of innovative applications in government, he was diverted from this pathway when an invitation to apply for the Vice-Chancellorship at the University of Sydney arrived.

Thus fourteen years from 1967 followed, significant indeed in the life of this University. The early years may be remembered as a period, here and internationally, of student radicalism across campuses, which included a brief and exuberant invasion of his office, which he met with civilised calm.

One former student of this period has recounted to me the understandable distress he and his peers suffered from the heavy concentration of their end-of-year examinations within an exceptionally brief period, and confronted the Vice-Chancellor. To this day, he says, he cannot forget the respect with which they were treated, and the sense of calm and confidence which followed.

In an address early in his tenure, the Vice-Chancellor declared:

To perform its distinctive role, a University must have freedom of enquiry, it must have members with a thirst to know, with a reverence for truth, and a distaste for dishonesty, insincerity, prejudice and shoddy thought.

Because of his unflagging commitment and sheer hard work, the governance and funding of the University benefited significantly—and this approach was extended to other sectors of higher education.

His pride in the University’s continuing success and prestige was deeply encouraging to others, and this pride included the high quality of the cultural life at the University, such as the fine performances of the Graduate Choir with their repertoire of great classical works. However, he was equally proud of the high standards and successes of the University rugby team, the oldest in Australia.

Despite the considerable and ever-increasing demands as Vice-Chancellor, he was called into leadership roles in diverse ways:

• To chair a Committee of Inquiry into Education and Training

• To chair the New South Wales Cancer Council

• To serve for two terms on the Board of the Reserve Bank of Australia

His outstanding contributions to education, to government, and to the wider Australian society were recognised formally in 1980 with the conferring of the award of a Knight Bachelor of the British Empire.

Following his retirement in 1981, and partly influenced by the health of Lady Williams, they returned to Great Britain, where Sir Bruce undertook the directorship of the new Technical Change Centre in London.

Returning to Australia in 1987, he was called upon to chair the Review of the Discipline of Engineering—a review with important implications given the implication of Australia’s expanding resources industry.

The death of Lady Williams, within a few years of their return to Sydney, left a considerable void, but Sir Bruce responded to the University’s call again, this time as a Fellow of Senate, heading its all-important Finance Committee.

His extraordinary commitment, loyalty and intellectual energy would never dim despite the passage of the years and declining health. He continued to contribute in many ways, researching, writing and publishing a valuable overview—“Making and Breaking Universities”—as well as a two-volume collection of memoirs.

It was a joy to his many friends and colleagues, including the former Chancellor, Dame Leonie Kramer, to meet him at University celebrations and functions, and enjoy his witticisms, his pragmatic wisdom and his high intelligence.

During his final illness, with dignity and forbearance he remained at home almost to the end, not so far from the University which he had served so well.

The love and deep respect of his children, his grandchildren and their children was a source of strength and inspiration over his long and productive life. His University of Sydney family shares their keep sense of loss and also of gratitude.

He will never be forgotten.

Her Excellency Professor Marie R. Bashir AC CVO, Governor of New South Wales and Chancellor
of the University of Sydney, delivered this address at the Memorial Service for Professor
Sir Bruce Williams KBE in the Great Hall at the University of Sydney on August 23.

I returned from England to the University of Sydney in 1971 at the instigation of Sir Bruce Williams to set up a new department, unique to this country. Negotiations concerning this transfer had to be carried out via telegram, as Her Majesty’s Mail operators had embarked on a postal strike which lasted many months—the longest in history, in fact. I was impressed by the terseness with which Sir Bruce had managed his side of the expensive electric conversation, and attributed it to a practical application of his subject, Economics.

I later decided that this formality and very deliberate choice of words had to do with his management of the recent (and continuing) student disturbances of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which I had previously experienced in England. Firbank’s Pope remarked, “If you are infallible, as I am, you have to be careful what you say”, and Sir Bruce was similarly careful to stay on track with his message to those for whom bliss was it to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.

He managed this difficult period with forbearance, compassion and dignity, no doubt influenced in part by the memory of his first academic appointment in Adelaide, where publication of his then left-leaning views on economics ruffled establishment feathers, although this did not result in disturbances on the campus. (He was privately advised to read Thomas Hobbes.) Not long after I arrived, he had to deal with a further and more serious onslaught on academic values emanating from within the academic body (Wittgenstein: “There are also slums of the mind”), which he coped with efficiently by quarantining it.

At this time, the academic staff was not yet insulated from the governance of the University by an increasingly impermeable barrier of managers (with their separate fiefdoms) whose responsibilities had somewhat ambiguous connections with traditional basic academic concerns. Sir Bruce managed both overall and detailed governance with a light hand and minimal back-up. He was easily accessible either directly or through his invaluable assistant David Smith, of fond memory. This minimising of bureaucratic loads was very much to the advantage of academic research, which I personally greatly appreciated.

He and I shared a joint background in the University of Manchester (also known as Owen’s College to initiates) and also tangentially in the University College of North Staffordshire (Keele) which had been midwifed by Manchester during my time there. This made for many mutually enlightening exchanges of information about the universally enjoyably scabrous background to much of academic sobriety.

After slightly premature retirement, Sir Bruce returned to England to start up a government-funded Centre for the Study of Technology Transfer. I had occasion to visit the UK regularly, and met with him in London many times during his tenure there. He was very happy to be involved in this exercise, and kept me au fait with the ongoing research through the Centre’s publications. He was at his most contented during this period. He had always wished to be involved in advice to government on economic and specifically technology policy development, and indeed had been very active in this in the days of the Harold Wilson prime ministership. His KBE was presumably awarded partly in recognition of this; he did not attach much general importance to it, although he remarked to me that a Vice-Chancellor without a knighthood was a security risk.

One could always count on Sir Bruce for a sardonic rather than a conventional response. When I mentioned to him in 1972 that the University of Oxford had followed our lead in establishing for the first time a Department of Theoretical Chemistry under the direction of the erstwhile Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics, Charles Coulson, he commented: “Ah yes, Oxford—always the home of lost causes.”

He is greatly missed.

 This is an extract from the memorial address in the Great Hall of the University of Sydney on August 23. Noel Hush FRS is Foundation Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Chemistry and School of Molecular Biosciences at the University of Sydney.