We choose a path and thereafter it leads us—the ‘deep lane insists on the direction’, as TS Eliot wrote in East Coker. The further we go, the more we commit to this course; other choices fall behind, those paths not taken. Over time, this seems the only road possible. For universities in Australia, the path chosen early still guides the bearing. An Australian idea of a university, developed in colonial society but keenly influenced by British heritage, has shaped all local universities since 1850.1
The pattern set by those original choices produced the metropolitan university, with core characteristics and numerous overtones acquired through a shared history. Over time the institutional model chosen first in Sydney, and shortly after in Melbourne, became the standard Australian university. It served as an ideal type, infinitely transportable, able to be recreated in new settings. The model extended from city to city, modified with experience and expanded as new professions emerged, but essentially developed along the original path. When legislators sought to break the mould and create very different universities, they found the original model hard to resist.
An ideal type can shape public policy until familiarity renders invisible the assumptions that informed the very contours of the type. Once established and shared, a model of what constitutes a public institution will make any alternative seem inadequate—not a ‘real’ university. The ideal type directs choices, encouraging us to create the same institution over and over, despite attempts to innovate. The Australian idea of a university has served the nation well—all the more reason it endures—but delivers a narrow range of institutions, a singular understanding of the university.
This underlying continuity can be disguised by surface changes. Universities are contemporary institutions, apparently much altered over the past century and a half. Once a small community with a single cafeteria where everyone ate and conversed, employing familiar departmental secretaries for the provision of advice, and priding itself as a place of personalities and campus fame, the university has grown to unprecedented scale. During the early colonial period, only a handful of people could access tertiary study. By contrast, in contemporary society nearly 40 per cent of young Australians enrol at a university.
With 50,000 or more students, many universities now offer the amenities of a large town, with standard rules and procedures to deal with complexity. Growth has occurred despite declining public investment in each student. The sector is larger, less personal, more competitive. Scale has encouraged the use of management processes once the preserve of commerce. Universities have ‘taken on more and more functions that require significant administrative capacity’.2 In turn, these developments encourage critiques of the corporate university.3
Still, enduring patterns remain. Form has not overwhelmed function. Behind the new facade an older set of decisions continues to influence higher education. The Australian public university remains city-based; it is a publicly owned but independent, meritocratic and commuter institution; the scope of its interests is comprehensive, with a strong inclination to professional education and a commitment to research. Its mode of instruction, and even the spread of enrolments across its disciplines, suggest considerable continuity. The Australian idea of a university, developed in the 1850s, has evolved—but much abides.
Hence the concern: if Australian public universities are more alike than different, then disruption from Silicon Valley may affect the whole sector, simultaneously. The Australian university system consists almost entirely of those institutions targeted by entrepreneurs for creative destruction, namely, large public institutions offering a standard product. What looks like difference close up loses distinctiveness from a distance. We locals might perceive important variation between the University of Southern Queensland and the University of Western Australia, but seen globally they look alike: both are campus-based, publicly funded institutions pursuing research and offering the same range of degrees, from bachelor to doctoral qualifications in a broadly similar array of fields.
International classifications underscore this uniformity of Australian institutions. For nearly fifty years, the Carnegie Commission has classified every type of higher education institution operating in the United States, a nation that hosts a wide array of institutions. The result is the most rigorous typology available of higher education forms. The Carnegie ‘basic classification’ identifies seven types of higher education, with thirty-two varieties of institution. The schema does not yet include institutions such as Udacity, but makes clear that higher education in the United States encompasses many different organisational forms and an array of missions and scales.4
Transfer the seven basic Carnegie types to Australia, however, and every public university falls within a single category: the doctoral university, marked only by varying degrees of research intensity. So do private universities such as Bond and Notre Dame. There is only a single private liberal arts college in Australia, just one university of specialisation, and a handful of dual-sector institutions, offering both tertiary and vocational courses, a type not recorded by Carnegie.5 Classified by mode of education and highest degree offered, Australian universities are remarkably similar—described by one journalist as ‘unique, in the same way’.6
Why have Australian universities retained so many of their founding characteristics? An answer is suggested by the concept of path dependency, a theory developed in economic and historical analysis and now applied to many aspects of institutional life. The creation of new universities is a rare and expensive act. The first institutions were informed by the needs of the colonies and prevailing thinking about the role of the university. This original model, now well established and perceived as successful, travelled across the nation.
Path dependency explores the lasting influence of founding ideas, the ways in which an initial choice shapes subsequent options.7 Models of path dependency focus on a ‘critical juncture’ that has a lasting power over institutions, reinforcing patterns of behaviour and understanding of purpose.8 Once the key features of an institution are established, the organisation has committed to a particular model. It becomes costly to contemplate major change in direction, and may be challenging conceptually because the original form and mission of the organisation seem comfortable and apparently logical.
The power of a starting point to shape outcomes is often illustrated by the QWERTY keyboard.9 The QWERTY keyboard was developed in the nineteenth century to overcome jamming in typewriters. The design separated commonly used letters so that the striking of proximate keys in close succession would not cause mechanical failure.10 This requirement is now obsolete, yet QWERTY remains the standard, transposed from keyboards to computers and mobile phones. An early decision in keyboard design to address mechanical failure influences the technological path long after the initial reason fades.
Studies identify similar path dependency in other technologies, the development of institutions, the location of cities, origins of government policies and the formation of law and language. As political science professor Paul Pierson cautioned in a study of the welfare state, once we start down a pathway it becomes ‘hard to reverse’. We adapt to the familiar, making commitments that ‘render the costs of change (even to some potentially more efficient alternative) far higher than the costs of continuity’. Hence, ‘existing commitments lock in policymakers’.11
There are limits to path dependency arguments, which might otherwise say little more than ‘history matters’.12 Not every starting point becomes a set pattern, just as not every current practice is simply the inevitable next step in an original set of decisions. Political scientist Herman Schwartz argues that if small ‘contingent causes at the beginning of a path’ are to encourage continued adherence there must be ‘increasing returns’ to political and social institutions.13 The original reasons for the path must be compelling, and must continue to deliver benefits over time.
Path dependency is a way to think about historical causation, but to persuade as analysis it requires clarity about a starting point and the influences that keep an institution headed in a particular direction. As will become apparent in this essay, a series of original ideas for an Australian university made sense in context, and remain convincing. Choices from 1850 proved intelligent responses to local needs and understanding. As sensible decisions across time, they have endured. In time, those founding ideas have been reinforced by the preferences of Australian students for professional programs, by academic norms about the character of a university and by public policy that imposes homogeneity. Social scientist Scott Page suggests such path dependency is based on ‘increasing returns, self-reinforcement, positive feedbacks, and lock-in’.14 A practical institution is also an ideal, shaping the very definition of what it means to be a university in Australia.
At key moments during the twentieth century, policy makers questioned the value of a narrow model and pressed for more variety. We will explore the challenge of pushing against an established practice. Students and staff alike preferred the status of existing arrangements, and federal ministers found it convenient to impose a uniform regulatory regime for the sector, thus making difference difficult to sustain. Convention overwhelmed invention. New players were drawn back, slowly but firmly, to the existing settings. A single idea of a university has ensured that any new public university resembles those already operating.
Along with parliaments and guns, the English language and rum, the concept of a university was imported with the first European settlers. This inheritance was expressly British in character, part of the nineteenth-century spread of higher education across the British world. As historian and political scientist Tamson Pietsch reminds us in Empire of Scholars, new institutions were set up by ‘self-confident settler elites who saw them as both symbols and disseminators of European civilisation in the colonies’.15 Universities were founded at Madras, Calcutta and Bombay in 1857 and in Otago in 1869. In Canada, the King’s College began in 1827 as an Anglican institution of higher learning. After decades of internal wrangling, the college was renamed in 1850 as the secular University of Toronto.16
This British influence was decisive when Australian colonies came to debate tertiary education. Colonial authorities might have found inspiration in the research universities of Germany or the great private colleges of the United States, but instead focused only on British practice. As with other universities of the empire, any Australian variant would exhibit loyalty to home. Since there was not just one British idea of a university in circulation, however, Australian legislators would devise their own version of British tertiary education, a blend drawn from practice in England, Scotland and Ireland.
Britain in the middle of the nineteenth century was marked by social unrest following rapid industrialisation, the growth of cities, the rise of popular newspapers and agitation for the vote. Riots and recessions made governments sensitive to popular sentiment. This was the moment Charles Dickens published, instalment by instalment, his Bleak House with its vivid depiction of a dysfunctional legal system and grim private schools. Liberals pressed for restrictions on child labour, for better public sanitation, safer factories, free trade, religious tolerance and, sometimes, equality of rights for women.
Scepticism about the established order extended to universities. In England, ancient institutions dominated tertiary education, imposing religious tests for student entry and restricting offerings to a handful of degrees. Reformers sought to open higher study to a broader spectrum of society, and in 1826 established London University under the intellectual influence of reform-minded thinkers Jeremy Bentham and James Mill. London University offered higher education to those excluded from Oxbridge by faith or low income, including non-conformists, Catholics and Jews. The new institution taught in fields other than classics, mathematics and ancient languages, and offered education for the legal and medical professions. Some courses allowed women to enrol, a move that would be resisted for decades at older universities.
London University was firmly based in the city and did not require residence in college. It offered a broad curriculum in ‘modern science, modern languages, the major branches of philosophy, and political economy’.17 In addition, the university taught engineering, mechanics and chemistry. Only one popular branch of higher learning was excluded: there would be no classes in theology.
Soon enough London University spawned a competitor, set up by dignitaries such as the Duke of Wellington who opposed the idea of a ‘godless university’. Established in 1829 as an Anglican institution, King’s College London accepted the logic of a more inclusive curriculum and enrolment, but not the exclusion of religion. The rivalry did not last long; in 1836, London and Kings joined as the University of London to offer a wider variety of instruction, with a prominent role for professional education in a largely secular urban setting.
The example of the University of London would influence Australian practice, along with developments in Scotland and Ireland. In Edinburgh and Glasgow, the Scottish Enlightenment fostered a number of universities as non-residential and non-sectarian institutions, with provision of education on merit. Scottish universities differed from some English counterparts by offering large lectures rather than the individual tutorials of the kind provided by colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. This teaching approach would be mirrored in Australia, along with the Scottish innovation of an honours year— first adopted by the University of Adelaide, which introduced the option of a fourth year of study in 1901.18
In Ireland, three new institutions were founded from 1845 as Queen’s College Belfast, Queen’s College Cork and Queen’s College Galway. All were established as secular institutions, to deal with religious divisions in Irish society and encourage a strong focus on the professions. They would be united in 1850 as Queen’s University, one of many institutional experiments with higher education in Ireland.19 Though Catholic and Protestant clerics alike condemned these ‘godless colleges’, the institutions drew enthusiastic young students from across Irish society.
For Irish Catholics, long excluded from Trinity College in Dublin, the new institutions provided opportunity and wider intellectual horizons. Not all Catholic intellectuals, though, welcomed the inclusion of professional programs or focus on employment outcomes. In 1852, John Henry Newman, the rector of the new Catholic University of Ireland, published his voluminous The Idea of a University. Newman rejected professional education and argued instead for knowledge as a worthwhile end in itself. He favoured a liberal education, delivered in an institution that was male, collegiate, literary, residential and focused on teaching.
More than a century later, Newman’s aspiration to inform character through great teaching influenced the 1963 Robbins Report into British higher education:
It is the essence of higher education that it introduces students to a world of intellectual responsibility and intellectual discovery in which they are to play their part … The element of partnership between teacher and taught in a common pursuit of knowledge and understanding, present to some extent in all education, should become the dominant element as the pupil matures and as the intellectual level of work done rises.20
Though the concern for teaching resonated, the organisational form proposed by Newman was hostile to innovation in university education. He spoke against the spirit of his times, rejecting a curriculum informed by metropolitan values or teaching led by research. Instead, Newman offered an idealised Oxford of his youth, distant from the city, a place for quiet reflection. The vision failed in translation. The Catholic University of Ireland struggled to attract sufficient students or supporters and Newman resigned after three years as rector.21
As Australian legislators came to contemplate a local university, they could draw ideas from debate within Britain about how a university could ‘provide a home for attempts to extend and deepen human understating in ways which are, simultaneously, disciplined and illimitable’.22
The spirit of the age questioned received wisdom, including long-established patterns of university education. A Royal Commission in 1850 delivered tough judgements about Oxford and Cambridge and insisted on major reform. Public intellectuals argued for contemporary and relevant universities. Herbert Spencer published Education in 1861, and FW Farrar his Essays on a Liberal Education in 1867, the year John Stuart Mill presented an inaugural address at St Andrew’s University. There, Mill called for a modern education, one that liberated rather than indoctrinated young minds. It was time, he suggested, for ancient universities to stop pursuing ‘the repression of independent thought, and the chaining up of the individual intellect and conscience’.23 Here was reform in full song, a call for relevance and contemporary knowledge at just the moment colonial administrators in New South Wales turned minds to establishing a university.
There was no Australian nation in 1816, and no Australian universities. An aspiring student must sail to Britain, as did William Charles Wentworth, likely the first Australian to receive a university education. Wentworth studied law in London, travelled in Europe and spent time at Cambridge. He returned to Sydney in 1824 to make his reputation as a barrister, publisher and, in time, legislator.
From 1849, Wentworth led the argument in the New South Wales Legislative Council for an Australian university. He joined a circle of Sydney notables who believed the new colony needed trained professionals. A university in Sydney, said Wentworth, would ‘enlighten the mind’, ‘refine the understanding’ and ‘elevate the soul of our fellow men’. It would also train the next generation to fill ‘the high offices of state’.24
Which of the competing British models of a university should New South Wales embrace? The need for a university was not self-evident to many in the colony; Wentworth and his allies had to frame a case that spoke convincingly to local concerns. Their solutions to a number of technical questions shaped not just the proposed University of Sydney, but the many Australian institutions that would follow.
It might be expected Wentworth would look to Cambridge, his alma mater. No doubt his experience there proved influential. Yet the Oxbridge model—‘residential, tutorial, character-forming’25—did not translate well. Cambridge’s association with the established church, its curriculum, residency requirement and physical distance from the capital embodied an approach ill-suited for colonial Sydney. So through 1849 and 1850, Wentworth and associates worked on an alternative model for an Australian university, one based in a city and more in tune with educational reformers keen to teach modern subjects to a wide audience.
In their study of dominion legacies, Sydney-based historians Julia Horne and Geoffrey Sherington suggest that Australia’s first universities embodied three fundamental values about the nature of public institutions: they should not be beholden to religious beliefs; access should be decided by merit alone, tested through public examination; and financial support should come not just from government but from public-spirited citizens.26 Merit would temper privilege.
Such values seem unremarkable today, but the University of Sydney was among the first established in the British world along such lines; it would take another half century before ‘these beliefs had become the norm for most universities in the British Empire’.27
To understand the ideas underpinning the first university in Australia, it is helpful to trace how policy makers shaped the University of Sydney, for taken in aggregate the choices they embraced sum to the Australian idea of a university.
A public institution
Who should own and operate an Australian university? There seems little evidence the matter was much debated. Harvard and Yale provided familiar examples of private colleges in the United States, but Wentworth and his contemporaries looked only to British practice: the new university would be a public institution, established by government and funded with public money. It would levy fees on students but offer scholarships for deserving candidates who could not afford a place on campus.
Thus, a motion moved by Wentworth in the New South Wales Legislative Council on 28 June 1850 proposed a ‘University for the promotion of Literature and Science’, established with £5,000 per annum, provided at public expense.28
This public status meant the university would sit within the state, legally under the supervision—however nominal—of a minister and the oversight—however sporadic—of the parliament. It would be public in a legal sense, but public also as an institution of the society that called it into being, ‘constituted and shaped by political projects and the broader settlements that underpin them’.29 Public ownership remains the norm; to this day, 97 per cent of degrees awarded in Australia are provided by universities established by legislation and owned by a state, territory or federal government.30
A self-governing institution
Britain could call on a ready-made instrument for constituting a public university. The Royal Charter provided a template for internal governance and a legal guarantee of independence for universities. Although the Royal Charter was not available for Australian colonies, they could pass legislation to achieve the same end, creating the new University of Sydney as a statutory entity with its own governing council, supported financially but not controlled by government.
Legislation establishing the University of Sydney passed in 1850, and the new institution was proclaimed in the New South Wales Government Gazette. A senate, initially comprising sixteen appointed fellows, would govern the institution. Only men were appointed, with educational backgrounds richly suggestive of the mix of influences underpinning the first Australian university— five foundation fellows had no university education, five were Cambridge graduates and one had graduated from Oxford. Three had attended Trinity College Dublin and two had attended Edinburgh.31
The Act established the University of Sydney as a ‘body politic and corporate’ with perpetual succession, able to make its own statutes within the broader Act of Parliament.32 This made the university self-governing, though in a different sense from Oxbridge. The new institution would be overseen not by a collegium of academics answerable only to themselves, but by a board of supervisors appointed by legislators. Over time, this arrangement would produce lively tensions between governance and professorial expectations of independence. After serving as an externally appointed part-time vice-chancellor at the University of Melbourne, an exasperated Sir John Monash declared he found it easier to organise an army on the Western Front than to run a university.33
Still, such arguments occurred within the institution; Australian universities, from the first, operated with an expectation of significant autonomy from government, despite their reliance on public funding. Again, this model has endured, with nineteenth-century governance arrangements still largely intact.
A university of professional courses
Universities inspire lofty rhetoric. Proponents suggested the new University of Sydney would produce ‘a long line of illustrious names—of statesmen—of patriots— of philanthropists—of philosophers—of poets—and of heroes—who would shed a deathless halo, not only on their country, but upon that University which called them into being’.34
The deathless halo of fame notwithstanding, there were practical considerations to resolve. A degree of public funding implied useful returns to the colony, such as addressing the shortage of skilled professionals. This created an immediate tension with the Oxbridge model of education. With a focus on the literary, philosophical and mathematical ‘greats’ of the western canon, the curriculum of Oxford and Cambridge did not speak to the practical needs of colonial Sydney.
Hence, the founding statute of the University of Sydney looked forward to professional education, with specific mentions of law, medicine, pharmacy, surgery and midwifery.35 As historian Richard Selleck observes, the colonies would need ‘mining and construction engineers, surveyors, botanists, chemists, agriculturists, astronomers, legislators, geologists, physicians, surgeons, teachers, journalists, lawyers, judges’.36 The new institution was expected to educate the professional classes of Sydney.
The preference for professional degrees was somewhat tempered by broader aspirations. The first principal at Sydney, John Woolley, was a classicist, keen to see students benefit from a liberal arts education.37 Professional disciplines such as law and medicine were recognised by the university from its foundation, but did not become teaching faculties for some decades. The first undergraduates at Sydney were required to study in an arts degree for a year or more before passing on to professional qualifications. Exam papers from 1880, still available in the University of Sydney calendar archives, offer copious prose and verse to be translated into Latin and Greek.
Yet student preference for professional qualifications over generalist degrees arose early and proved insistent. Direct enrolment in professional courses became the established pattern at Sydney by the 1880s, and soon accounted for around 70 per cent of students. This number would move little over the next hundred years.38
A meritocratic institution
Speaking to his proposal for a University of Sydney, William Wentworth declared the institution would allow ‘the child of every class, to become great and useful in the destinies of this country’.39 Here was merit understood in two senses—economic, so that class should not be a barrier to participation, and social, relating to distinction of religion. Wentworth did not consider merit in a third sense, that of equality of opportunity for women.
In their influential study on the original educational franchise in Australia, Horne and Sherington document the success of opening tertiary education to a wide constituency. They stress the importance of a scholarship scheme as ‘central to the meritocratic aims’ of the institution. Paid by government, an annual scholarship of £50 supported around a third of students.40 There was no means test, just an examination, with a majority of scholarships won by students from outside the traditional educated classes of the clergy, law and professions.
A meritocratic institution mirrored broader colonial sentiment—that of a place aspiring to avoid the class distinctions of British society. It would be a society where the son of a convict could become a distinguished legislator, and the hard-working find themselves studying at university.
Entry to university on merit also spoke to a second issue, the role of religion. The Oxbridge approach to higher education presented Australian legislators with an insuperable political problem—close links between the ancient universities and the established Anglican church. 41 This made the model unacceptable in a colonial society riven by sectarian tensions. For Wentworth, an Australian university must be ‘open to all, though influenced by none’.42
The idea of a university on the basis of academic distinction alone, without reference to religious conviction, may seem self-evident, but it was a contested concept in the Sydney of 1850. The precedent had been set by London University and the Scottish institutions, but religious leaders in New South Wales objected vigorously to the secular constitution for the new university proposed by Wentworth. Legislative Council debate focused on the ‘historical basis of religion at the centre of a university’.43 Though the university was to ‘teach secular knowledge’, suggests historian Alan Atkinson, ‘it did not follow that it was to be a secular institution’.44 Legislators assumed a Christian character for the colony, and Wentworth talked of the new university ‘proving the divinity of the great Christian code’ and training minds that ‘trusted and relied’ upon that code.45
The religious imagination ran deep. The Great Hall at the University included carvings of angels and scrolls with Christian messages. A visitor felt that he ‘gained in health and spirit, gazing at the beauty of its walls’.46 Yet in practice, sectarian divisions and the absence of an established church in the Australian colonies made any specific spiritual affiliation unworkable. Whatever their underlying assumptions about pervasive Christian values, legislators established a secular institution in name and operation; the founding statute required that ‘no religious test shall be administered’ to any student or staff member at the University of Sydney.47
The legislative provision for an open educational franchise required students be selected by public examination, with a bursary system for those unable to afford the fees. An early success of the university was to admit Catholics and non-conformists in numbers that reflected their portion of the population.48
In time, the absence of religion shaped acceptable language about the purpose of the new institution. This would be a utilitarian institution befitting a pragmatic society. It was devoid of a chapel; its workaday discourse was not mantled in appeals to God; there was no evocation of campus life as resonant with moral purpose. Likewise missing were American campus tropes about university forming moral character and instilling the virtues necessary for democracy. In its origin, the Australian university was determinedly prosaic.
A commuter institution
As legislators pondered expectations of religious involvement in tertiary education, they hit upon a compromise: the university would be secular but welcome affiliated colleges with a religious character. Land was set aside for colleges to provide ‘residence, religious teaching and tutorial assistance’.49 In 1861, only two students at the University of Sydney lived on campus, though by 1900 this figure grew to around 15 per cent of the student body. Some colleges began with plentiful resources, but for others ‘money was scarce, building slow, students few’.50 Staff could be unreliable—the first permanent warden of St Paul’s College was dismissed in 1861 ‘after he had been seen in an inebriated state on a Manly ferry’.51
By contracting religious instruction to residential colleges, legislators defined the meritocratic character of the first and subsequent public universities. This decision bore unforeseen consequences. Colleges were not the financial responsibility of the university, and ambitious early plans stalled for want of finance. Churches had more pressing priorities, and it was years before the first colleges opened. This was particularly acute for women. Though women were admitted to all degrees at the University of Adelaide from 1880, the first Australian institution to do so, there was only temporary accommodation in a cottage for female students from 1916.52 Not until 1947 did the University open St Ann’s College for women.
With modest opportunities to reside on campus, students made other arrangements. They lived at home or in lodgings, making Australian universities commuter institutions, places for local students to study during the day. Universities remain so. Though some institutions now host significant numbers in colleges and halls of residence, only around 5 per cent of Australian university students reside on campus during their degree program.53 A commuter campus has implications for student life, with students disappearing into the surrounding city at the end of classes. Early observers noted the lack of social and political life; outside teaching times, campus could be a lonely and desolate place. More recently, the necessity of part-time work for many students undercuts campus life even during semester.
The non-residential nature of Australian universities has also influenced internal governance. In the ancient universities of the United Kingdom, colleges often predated the university, and remained an essential part of its teaching and governance. In Australia, the universities were founded afresh as unitary institutions, single entities that could host colleges but not be beholden to them.
A comprehensive institution
The University of Sydney was assumed to be comprehensive, in the sense of covering the widest possible array of academic disciplines. Securing disciplinary coverage proved a project of many decades, but helped define the Australian university. A comprehensive institution made sense in a continent with only a few cities, far apart, and only one university in each city.
Like the QWERTY keyboard, the comprehensive character of Australian tertiary institutions remains entrenched even after the original logic has vanished. There are now Australian cities with five or six public universities, yet still only modest specialisation among institutions. Medical schools remain strictly rationed by government, but otherwise curriculum offerings are remarkably uniform. Most Australian public universities offer courses in science and arts, engineering and business. Many provide nursing (only the ANU, Macquarie and UNSW abstain). Just one public university, Federation, does not offer a law degree, though it provides law subjects as part of a business degree.
The assumption that public tertiary institutions should be comprehensive, even in crowded markets, has been part of the Australian idea of a university for as long as universities could choose their own profile. In this, Australian practice has anticipated international developments, with the comprehensive university now dominant in many education systems.54
Teaching and research
A standard model does not imply a static, stable world. On the contrary, universities can be places of lively argument about the curriculum, and about student and staff behaviour. Heated debates on governing boards find their way into the metropolitan media. New areas of study prove controversial, with long arguments about whether dentistry or nursing, media studies or creative writing deserve a place on campus.
The first Australian university defined its mission around teaching. By-laws at the University of Sydney required daily lectures during term, each of one hour, by the professors of classics, mathematics and experimental physics. These were scheduled between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m., Monday to Saturday. Some subjects were popular with students, others languished. Early classes in jurisprudence attracted large crowds at Sydney, earning the lecturer backhanded encouragement from the senate. He should make his classes ‘as popular as lectures on jurisprudence were likely to be, without making them unworthy of the University’.55 By contrast, the original course in German at the University of Sydney was abandoned when the single enrolled student quit the class.
Though the university saw itself as embodying new thinking about higher education, for some it could never be contemporary enough. A letter to the Sydney Morning Herald in November 1857—just a few years after the first classes on campus—complained of a curriculum that was ‘at the very best ten years behind the age in which we are living’. It was time, suggested the writer, for more contemporary subjects in the humanities, medicine and physical sciences.56
An exclusive focus on teaching as the sole mission of the university altered only slowly. Any inclusion of research in the university mission was resisted strongly at first. The original Australian universities reflected conventional British wisdom that teaching is the principal occupation for a scholar. In 1755, Dr Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary defined a university as ‘a school where all the arts and faculties are taught’. A century later, John Henry Newman strongly opposed any place for research in a true university. For him, a university was a ‘place of teaching university knowledge’, where ‘rashness is rendered innocuous, and error exposed, by the collision of mind with mind, and knowledge with knowledge’. In such a setting, teachers are too busy to do research, and researchers too preoccupied to teach. Indeed, said Newman, ‘If its object were scientific and philosophical discovery, I do not see why a University should have students’.57
This emphasis on teaching appealed strongly to colonial governments, keen to secure graduates for the professions. Professor John Woolley, an Oxford graduate, used his inaugural address at the University of Sydney to define a university as a school for liberal and general knowledge and a collection of special colleges, devoted to the learned professions. He did not mention research. In 1878, Charles Pearson, a member of the Council of the University of Melbourne, asserted that the main function of a university professor was to ‘impart, not invent’.
A determined defence of teaching allowed local educators and legislators to resist the growing influence of non-British perspectives on the mission of a university. In 1809, Prussian scholar and administrator Wilhelm von Humboldt proposed a new university in Berlin that combined education and research, making fundamental inquiry the work of a university professor. Humboldt talked of an intellectual institution to cultivate ‘science and scholarship in the deepest and broadest sense’.58 The campus would unite teaching and research as a single undertaking, with teachers who could share their discoveries with students, and demonstrate first-hand how new knowledge emerges.
Though absent at the founding of Australian tertiary education, the idea that research deserved a place alongside teaching eventually found adherents. Research laboratories began to appear on the Australian campus from the 1870s, though the idea of a research qualification as essential for an academic career remained controversial. A program of doctoral education was not offered in Australia until 1946. Some continued to argue for the ‘mastery’ of a discipline in the British research masters tradition as ‘the longer, harder and more important route to expertise than the “horribly American” PhD, which privileged mere discovery of something new’.59
Given this opposition, it took decades to graft a research mission onto the original Australian idea of a university. Yet, eventually, this showed itself to be a significant development on campus and beyond. Universities would provide not just graduates, but some of the technical and medical breakthroughs necessary for contemporary life. Historian Geoffrey Blainey suggests that the introduction of research contributed to social acceptance, the ‘growing idea that a university is perhaps not an extravagance’.60
Australia may have begun with teaching institutions, but in time the important technological innovations of German and American institutions, and a rising international interest in scientific research, became decisive. Research would become a universal attribute of Australian higher education, adopted by every institution and eventually required by law in the very definition of a university. It would prompt criticism of universities also, claims that academics are too preoccupied with research to value their students. The Humboldtian ideal of research influencing the classroom was challenged by growing division between the two activities, and by the emergence of specialist research-only posts. Achieving balance between research and teaching remains controversial on campus—even as both pursuits remain firmly within the accepted idea of a university.
From inception, the University of Sydney borrowed curriculum and ethos from British practice. As in London, the university offered entry without religious qualification to those who passed an examination.61 Classes were organised around the ‘lecture and tutorial’ model familiar in Scotland and Ireland, and the university employed professors, not tutors, as principal teachers. The university opened to those who could meet admissions standards, and supported through scholarships students who might struggle financially. Again, as at the University of London, students typically lived at home and travelled to campus for classes. Australia followed recently founded British and Irish universities in developing strong professional programs in medicine, law and engineering.
Yet, as Horne and Sherington have argued, the new institution also departed from British practice. The emphasis on merit for entry ‘was an idea first successfully implemented in Australia and a hallmark of Australian universities from their foundation, part of the social contract between colonists and the government’.62 Though the new institution featured architectural hints of the ancient universities in its design, and adopted a motto—sidere mens eadem mutato—to stress continuity with British origins,63 it relied also on local invention in a colony many months’ sailing from the mother country. A coat of arms featuring a familiar book under the Southern Cross neatly positioned the fledgling university.
This amalgam of British inheritance and Australian innovation was not a replica of any one British institution, but a response to the needs of urban Sydney and the aspirations of a local elite. The path invented for the nation’s first metropolitan institution would shape Australian higher education. It proved an enduring act of public policy—‘Sydney became the model for all Australian universities’.64
In 1853, the University of Melbourne followed Sydney. The idea for a second university on the Australian continent grew in part from inter-colonial rivalry. Victoria had just separated from New South Wales, as Melbourne boomed following the discovery of gold.65 Championed by Redmond Barry, a judge of the Supreme Court of Victoria and leading member of fledgling Melbourne society, the new university would add to the esteem and civility of a suddenly wealthy colony.
This new university was established swiftly. A Bill was considered by the Legislative Council in January 1853, and received royal assent within weeks. The foundation Council for the University, announced by Lieutenant-Governor Charles La Trobe in April 1853, was populated once more with graduates from Oxford, Cambridge, Trinity and Edinburgh. As in Sydney, the founders selected a coat of arms invoking European wisdom under new skies. To teach the handful of men who would begin classes in April 1855, the new institution recruited four professors to cover mathematics, classics, natural sciences and modern history.
In Melbourne, those appointed to govern were drawn from the professions. Clerics were few, though the Council adopted an ecumenical approach by inviting the Anglican and Catholic bishops of Melbourne to join the governing body. Even so, Melbourne followed London University in excluding religious instruction from the curriculum.
The Act to establish the University of Melbourne required that the institution be ‘open to all classes and denominations of Her Majesty’s subjects’. As in Sydney, the new university would be a state-initiated entity, publicly owned and required to report to parliament each year.66 In time, the new university would become known to its students as ‘the shop’—an affectionate if matter-of-fact-description of an institution where students commuted to campus each day and studied for future careers.
There were subtle but significant differences between the newly established entities. Lectures were not compulsory at Melbourne; though most students were drawn from the ‘urban middle classes’, the University sought also to welcome students who had to work for a living and could study only in the evening.67 Government was less generous with initial funding than in New South Wales, making the new university more dependent on philanthropy, and perhaps more eager to offer professional courses that attracted enrolments.68 Those founding the University of Melbourne would choose more austere architecture—sombre Scottish ecclesiastical stonework as against the exuberant gothic revival of Sydney’s main quadrangle. Legislation differed in detail, and Melbourne moved with greater speed to create vocational faculties, with law (1857), engineering (1861) and medicine (1862) all operating within a decade of Charles La Trobe’s laying a (now lost) brass plaque to begin the university.
As in Sydney, the educational franchise stressed merit selection. Horne and Sherington observe:
The social contract in Australia was thus developed as a form of educational franchise first granted to urban males principally of middle-class background, but of diverse social and religious origins, and then increasingly extended to those in the emerging public school system, those of rural and regional background, and ultimately women. Much of this change had occurred by the 1880s.69
Those who found a place at the new university seemed determined to enjoy the experience. Students at Melbourne embraced the quaint rituals of university life, throwing each other into the lake or braving the £2 fine for plucking a camellia on campus.70 University lecturers could incline to the eccentric. The first professor of mathematics at Melbourne, William Wilson, would sit in the lecture room ‘watch in hand, calling the roll punctually whether or not the students had arrived’. He would then deliver his lecture to an empty room, ‘marking it down as a source of examination questions’.71
Women appeared in classrooms at the University of Melbourne within two decades of foundation, though initially excluded from medical study. From 1887 all degrees at Melbourne, including medicine, were open to female students, though recruitment of women as academics proved fraught. The barriers to female careers on campus ‘remained severe. In 1932, the percentage of professors who were women in Australian universities was zero’.72 By this time, women accounted for more than a quarter of students on campus.
First Australians were also notably absent. The first recorded graduation of an Indigenous student in Australia was not until 1959, when Margaret Williams-Weir of the Malera and Bandjalang people of northern New South Wales completed her Diploma in Physical Education at the University of Melbourne. She would continue studying and teaching through a long and distinguished life, eventually earning a doctorate at the University of New England.73
Taken overall, the governance, funding and social impact of Australia’s first two universities were strikingly similar. The new universities reflected analogous influences and adopted a similar organisational form and mission. In turn, they would inspire the next generation of institutions. The Province of South Australia established the University of Adelaide in 1874, using the same model. The Act of incorporation for the University of Adelaide mimicked key tenets from legislation in Sydney and Melbourne, creating a non-sectarian institution governed by an independent council empowered to award degrees. It embraced lofty language. The University of Adelaide, its first chancellor promised in 1877, would form the ‘character of the governing classes’ and ‘help elevate the middle class to higher civilisation’.74 The curriculum choices on offer, though, were similar to those operating in Sydney and Melbourne.
Hobart gained a university in 1890. The founders praised the ‘no frills’ Scottish model of university education, with instruction in the classroom rather than in Oxbridge-style colleges.75 Brisbane followed in 1909, when the Queensland Government agreed to spend £10,000 a year for seven years to hire four professors and ten lecturers who would start a new university. Founding legislation drew once again on experience at the University of Sydney, even naming the governing body a ‘senate’, as in Sydney.76 Two years later Perth welcomed the new University of Western Australia, with a strong commitment to practical and accessible courses. It would prove a place equally of serious scholarship and lively pranks—engineering students once drove a flock of sheep into Winthrop Hall to protest against the ‘automated ritual of graduation ceremonies’.77
Each university was established by an Act of Parliament based on the now-dominant Australian model. In each case, land and funding supplied by the state would support a non-sectarian and self-governing institution. Though residential colleges would be established in due course, most students would commute to campus, complete a single undergraduate degree and leave for a life in the professions. The facts are unremarkable, yet each decision helped define a model that endures. Time present and time past point to time future. A familiar pattern began early and has continued through generations.
The Australian idea of the university arose in an urban setting and remains metropolitan in character—a campus in the city, focused on educating local students into the professions, tied to the life of the surrounding town. Australia would go on to develop universities in regional centres, though these would resemble their city cousins in outlook, curriculum and organisation. The path, once trod, continued to speak to Australian values, and to provide a comfortable logic. The prevailing model can seem natural; we forget this is just one of many possible tracks into the future.
That journey began with the University of Sydney and led quickly to similar undertakings in each colonial capital city. As a history of the University of Adelaide notes, Australians drew lessons from British models but tailored local institutions to the ‘environmental and social characteristics’ of new settlements. ‘Thus developed a distinctly Australian tertiary system, with an eye for the Old Country.’78
The form was fixed early; by the 1860s, the senate at the University of Sydney, under the guiding hand of Principal Woolley, had ‘set the pattern which later advocates of change would find difficult to overturn’.79 Here was an enduring adaptation of British antecedents to local conditions, a series of choices that sum to an Australian approach. Historian Richard Selleck described the unique complexion of the new institutions:
A state university, urban, secular, professorial, nonresidential and noncollegiate, centralised in government, controlled by a laity, and possessing power to teach and examine. Other universities had some of these characteristics, but none had this particular combination.80
This has been a journey, though not to a destination—for the model continues to evolve. A time would come when institutions, having looked beyond British models, found much to like in German research, European community engagement, American philanthropy. A set of secondary characteristics, though not mentioned at foundation, would eventually cluster around campus—expectations of academic freedom, a space for political activism, student newspapers to challenge censorship and the administration.81 As historian Sheldon Rothblatt argues in a study of British universities, the idea of higher education is not fixed or coherent but arises by ‘joining principles and values that at bottom have different historical origins and acutely different cultural meanings and purposes’.82 The Australian experience embodies this accretion of ideas and aspirations, held together by a shared belief in education and research.
This rich array of ambitions is found in the mission statements of Australian universities. There are elements of Newman’s insistence on teaching and intellectual formation, Humboldt’s focus on advancing knowledge, the elite technical training of the French grandes écoles, mingled with more recent language about industry partnerships. Despite this accumulation of ideas, though, the typical Australian university is fundamentally similar to its neighbours, an expression of a shared national idea. A single path, beginning with a decision by the New South Wales legislature in 1850, has delivered a model of the university across a continent.