This small essay has prosaic origins: a curiosity about the uniformity of Australian higher education when confronted with the diversity of American experience. As a post-doctoral fellow in Cambridge, Massachusetts, comparing the technical brilliance of MIT with the intellectual ambitions of Harvard, I wondered why Australia lacked such dramatic contrasts. Scale and wealth mattered, but there seemed more at work.
From this modest inquiry more strands followed: the interplay of history and policy, regulatory choices and budgetary realities, the unexamined cultural norms that encourage Australians towards a single, narrow path for tertiary education.
It is a subject touched in passing in several essays for the Griffith Review and the Australian Book Review before a 2013 exchange with University of Melbourne colleague Professor Rai Gaita. Over lunch, emails and eventually articles in Meanjin, Rai and I talked about the Australian experience of higher education. Though our conclusions spoke to different concerns, the exchange proved stimulating and provocative, a conversation never quite finished but now explored further in this book. I remain grateful to Rai for the invitation to think about the subject.
I learned much also while working with Chief Investigator Stuart Macintyre, and Gwilym Croucher, Julia Horne and Stephen Garton on a 2015 Australian Research Council project examining the history and impact of Minister John Dawkins on higher education. The seminars, lunchtime conversations and publications from the project, and the immense archive of materials collected by the team, deepened significantly a shared understanding of the Dawkins moment.
This essay has a specific and limited focus: the form and mission of public universities. It provides a chance to expand on brief remarks about organisation in The Republic of Learning, my 2010 Boyer Lectures. Much remains to say about private institutions and vocational education, but others are more expert in these topics.
These pages are finished as I close a long and enjoyable tenure as vice-chancellor at the University of Melbourne, but do not (I hope) offer autobiography disguised as policy analysis. I avoid more than passing reference to developments at Melbourne and only one section draws directly on personal experience. This is a discussion in Chapter 4 of changes at Griffith University, my academic home for nearly twenty years.
My thanks to Louise Adler from Melbourne University Publishing for commissioning the volume and to MUP Executive Publisher Sally Heath and her team for steering it through to publication. I am indebted to Julianne Schultz and Peter Rose for the earlier commissions to write on the topic (for how can I know what I think until I try to write it down?).
A number of colleagues have been generous in reading the essay in draft and offering detailed comments. My thanks to Sharon Bell, Mark Considine, Gwilym Croucher, Carolyn Evans, Julia Horne, Gregor Kennedy, Stuart Macintyre, Peter McPhee, Simon Marginson, Ian Marshman, Vin Massaro, Andrew Norton and Carolyn Rasmussen. Each has asked challenging questions, corrected errors and suggested new lines of thought. I am awed by their knowledge of higher education policy.
Above all, I have worked closely on this book with University of Melbourne colleague David Threlfall. His pursuit of additional material, editorial suggestions on drafts, engagement with the mechanics of publication and keen eye for the telling anecdote have made this journey a pleasure. Katia Ariel provided provocative questions and expert editing.
Finally, my thanks to Margaret Gardner for her comments on the manuscript and a conversation about universities through our lives together.
Melbourne
August 2017