The opening wave of universities in Australia ran from foundation of the University of Sydney in 1850 to 1913, when the first students commenced classes in Perth. By then, every state capital city hosted a university, each an expression of the standard Australian metropolitan model. The ideal type was self-replicating: each entity in this collection of institutions was publicly owned, self-governing, focused on professional degrees, meritocratic and non-residential, with a curriculum that aspired to the comprehensive. The first Australian universities would trace a common course, growing from small teaching to large research-based undertakings.
As the model completed its journey across the continent, the first murmurs about greater diversity surfaced. There were calls for further institutions in Sydney and Melbourne, campaigns for regional universities and advocates for a national university based in Canberra. Policy makers grasped that Australia had developed a narrow and exclusively urban model, and sought more choice for students. Their efforts would deliver an expanded number of universities and a more generous geographical spread, but no lively pluralism of institutional types.
Since the nineteenth century, regional voices have sought tertiary education beyond the capital cities. Country centres, too, needed graduates in the professions. Accordingly, some sought to provide opportunities for study far from state capitals. Between the two world wars of the twentieth century, this regional aspiration found embodiment in the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales.
In 1892, Armidale Mayor William Drew boasted that his city had already become a centre for school education. In time, he suggested, Armidale could host a university like Oxford. A teacher’s college arrived in 1929, and on New Year’s Day 1938 Armidale welcomed a ‘northern university’ with the foundation of the New England University College. The college would be affiliated with the University of Sydney, and draw on its parent for curriculum, organisational design and governance. It worked with this arrangement until accredited as an independent university on 1 February 1954. The birth of the new institution, reported lecturer in classics Frank Letters, was heralded when ‘one minute after midnight’ a stream of meteors ‘soared across the sky between the Big Dipper and the Southern Cross’.
This first Australian university outside a capital city established itself as a respected institution within a prosperous rural setting. Importantly, it pioneered distance-education options, an expression of its commitment to make tertiary education more widely available. The success of the University of New England (UNE) argued the case for more tertiary institutions outside capital cities, with residential life on campus and academic specialisations aligned to local industry. Yet the form of the institution owed much to the standard Australian idea of a university, aspiring to comprehensive offerings and research. As UNE developed, reports its jubilee history, the ‘regional location (and obligations) became a less prominent feature of its identity’.1
While the University of Sydney provided the template for New England, from 1951 the New South Wales University of Technology (as UNSW was then titled) supported tertiary campuses with a technical focus. The government of New South Wales was keen to increase the supply of ‘engineers, metallurgists and chemists. An essential element of this plan was the establishment of University Divisions in the steel and mining towns of Wollongong, Newcastle and Broken Hill’.
Once again, demand for trained professionals prompted new universities, though local sentiment argued for broad institutions rather than technical schools. In Wollongong, the manager of the steel works, Gus Parish, urged the addition of arts and commerce to a university college dominated by engineering. In Newcastle, this same message was voiced by Anglican Bishop Francis de Witt Bailey, a graduate of Balliol College, Oxford. The addition of arts, he reasoned, would make Newcastle a ‘proper’ university.2
These new campuses thrived, with Newcastle awarded full university status in 1965 and Wollongong a decade later. Each served its community with distinction, developing over time the familiar array of faculties and degrees offered by an Australian public university. The enterprise at Broken Hill was less successful, whittling down the range of offerings until just mining remained. In 1981, the Council of the University of New South Wales resolved to close the division, with the final students graduating four years later.3
The pattern of satellite campuses graduating into full universities recurred in centres across the nation. In 1959, the Parliament of Queensland debated a new university in the tropics. A key theme was the cost for regional students moving to Brisbane for tertiary study. Minister for Education, Jack Pizzey, talked about giving ‘northern students in science and engineering’ an opportunity to do at least their first year of study in Townsville. From 1960, a new campus of the University of Queensland in Townsville provided the base for James Cook University, which would issue degrees in its own right from 1970.
Minister Pizzey predicted that investing in Far North Queensland would prompt ‘pressure from Central Queensland to establish a centre in Rockhampton’.4 The Queensland Institute of Technology (Capricornia) was founded in 1967. It became the University of Central Queensland in 1992.
As new universities spun out from established players, they transplanted to new communities an existing metropolitan mode of education and organisation. Though vast distances separated these fledging institutions, the campus layout, curriculum and internal governance proved familiar—these were proud colonies rather than bold new departures.
The vision for an Australian capital, articulated at federation, assumed a national university. In 1930, the new capital of Canberra acquired a small institution. The Canberra University College, supported by the University of Melbourne, offered part-time classes after hours at Telopea Park School. With a prominent site for a future university included in the original plans for the national capital, a small after-hours tertiary program would never suffice.
The idea of a national university allowed proponents to recommend a thoroughgoing departure from the standard model. Alternatives proposed included American research institutions such as Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, which focused on high-quality research. The national university should likewise be a research institution with no undergraduate teaching—and hence unlike existing Australian institutions.5
The creation of an Australian national university would be delayed by economic depression, war and wider uncertainty about the future of Canberra. Not until 1944 would a substantive proposal for the university be complete. This called for a disciplinary focus on government and policy studies, history and literature. A concurrent proposal for a national medical research institute was championed by Nobel Laureate Howard Florey, while Sir Mark Oliphant pressed for a strong campus presence for physics.6
In 1946, the Commonwealth legislated to create the Australian National University (ANU). Here was difference—formulated, planned and, for a while, honoured in the implementation. The new institution would pursue a mission to ‘encourage, and provide facilities for, postgraduate research and study, both generally and in relation to subjects of national importance to Australia’.7 Nugget Coombs, a member of the university’s Interim Council, finished a planning meeting by seeking reassurance that everyone understood the departure from standard Australian practice. ‘We are all happy, are we,’ he asked, ‘that it will be a full research university?’8 The founding Act established research schools in medicine, physical sciences, social sciences and Pacific studies.
This first iteration of the ANU lasted less than fifteen years. In 1960, the institution was merged with the undergraduate Canberra University College. The newly expanded ANU acquired the familiar undergraduate arts, science and professional programs found in other Australian universities, though the separation of research schools and faculties persisted for a further quarter century. ‘Although the ANU was unique,’ as the history commissioned for its fiftieth anniversary opined, ‘the broad structure of its government was the same as other Australian universities, which in turn had drawn on British models.’9
Subsequent choices diminished further the special status of the ANU. It surrendered some dedicated funding to compete in national research schemes and became subject to the same federal government rules and regimes that governed other Australian universities. When existing Australian universities embraced postgraduate training in the 1940s, they rendered redundant the unique mission of a national facility in Canberra. With time’s passage, the specialist mission that animated the original ANU design was lost to the more familiar model—a public research university focused on professional degrees, with a teaching curriculum that aspired to the comprehensive. The ANU still enjoys exclusive access to a National Institute Grant, but in other respects it has joined the mainstream of Australian higher education.
The University of New England and ANU were amongst the first to create new institutions with a unique mission. During the long economic boom following World War II, science and technology became policy priorities. Politicians talked of specialist universities to train scientists, technicians and engineers for national prosperity.
The New South Wales University of Technology was the first commitment to a tertiary institution with an explicit science and technology character. Technical education in Australia stretched back to the foundation of the Sydney Mechanics Institute in 1843 and the formation of the Sydney Technical College in 1878. A new university would develop this tradition in the eastern suburbs of Sydney—even if a patronising editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald welcomed a new institution to take on extensive teaching so that the University of Sydney could better focus on original research.
The Technical Education and New South Wales University of Technology Act 1949 established the new institution designed to provide specialist training ‘in the various branches of technology and science’, paying attention to ‘their application to industry and commerce’. Research would have an industrial focus.10 This was a new model for a technical university for Australia, carefully guided by first Vice-Chancellor Sir Philip Baxter.
As with the ANU, the new institution retained many of its founding features but merged quickly into the wider Australian university tradition. The exclusive focus on science and technology lasted only briefly. In 1957, the Murray Report to the Commonwealth proposed that the fledging university ‘be widened to include arts and medical studies and that its name be changed to the University of New South Wales’.11 With these changes, noted Murray, ‘it must be expected that the N.S.W. University of Technology will assume many of the features of a traditional university’.12 So it came to pass. With a new name and expanded faculties, including arts, medicine and law, a distinctive original mission for UNSW was replaced by a familiar comprehensive profile.13
Victoria could call on a strong tradition of technical education, and seemed better placed to create a technical university. Amid reports that the University of Melbourne was ‘bursting at its seams’,14 the state government embraced the idea of a new institution with a proposal to convert the long-established Royal Melbourne Technical College into a university. The idea faced political and bureaucratic opposition. As Member for Albert Park, Keith Sutton, told the Victorian Parliament, ‘I could never quite rid my mind of the disturbing thought that the words “University of Technology” or “Technical University” involved a contradiction in terms’.15 He urged instead the establishment of an institution focused on ‘the pursuit and passing on of wide general knowledge and for research animated by a passion for truth’.
More tellingly, the Victorian government department in charge of technical education had no interest in surrendering its flagship institution. Attention then shifted to the idea of a new university, located on a greenfield site south-east of the city. As in Sydney, the Victorian Government proposed that a second university be organised around science and technology. The Murray Report disagreed, claiming that a wider offering was more desirable because the incorporation of arts, law and psychology ‘would be essential for the intellectual health of the new institution’.16
On 13 March 1961, the first 347 students commenced studies at the Monash University campus in suburban Clayton. The institution grew quickly, adding the professional faculties found in longer-established universities. By 1966, Monash was teaching over 6,000 students across a wide array of disciplines. Though strong in science and engineering, as originally promised, Monash became another comprehensive institution in the Australian mould. As Foundation Professor John Legge declared on the fifteenth anniversary of the institution, ‘having seen itself in 1960 as the first of the new universities’, Monash ‘succeeded, maybe, in establishing itself as the last of the old’.17
The lack of significant differentiation disappointed many who championed a distinctive approach. At a 1965 seminar on the future of higher education, the first vice-chancellor of Monash, JAL Matheson, was reported as saying, ‘I speak … as one who has tried—who indeed came to this country with the avowed intention of trying—to produce a university different in character from the other university in the city in which Monash is located. Instead of this I now find myself vice-chancellor of a University that is disappointingly like the University of Melbourne’.
There are, of course, worse disappointments in life.
At both UNSW and Monash, plans for specialisation in science and technology were overtaken by urgent demand from government and students for the full array of professional faculties found in existing universities. This was achieved with impressive results, but the original aspiration to difference was not sustained. The ANU, UNSW and Monash would, by turns, come to resemble the established archetype of an Australian university, with organisation, courses and academic mission similar to those found at Sydney and Melbourne. Only the architecture remained genuinely different.
The 1960s are remembered as a time of student protest and dissent on campus. The program of Orientation Week talks on the ANU campus for 1969 invited students to consider tanks and freedom in Czechoslovakia, student revolt, a republic for New Guinea and the value of marching. Should the Berlin crisis blow up during the week, noted the program, ‘the 3.00–4.00 pm time slot will be used for an expert talk or debate on this topic’.18
At Monash, ‘the troubles’ lasted from 1967 to 1974. As historians Graeme Davison and Kate Murphy observe, ‘the times were revolutionary’.19 The journal of the National Civic Council, News Weekly, described the university as the ‘Monash Soviet’ with ‘more subversion per square foot than at any other Australian university’.20
The growth of student activism fostered cultural, political and social change. Clive James recalled the intensity of language around new verse, new arguments— ‘I was so excited that my badges rattled. There were sparks coming off my lapel’.21 Change could also provoke divisions. At a seminar at the ANU on ‘The Future of Universities’, an academic asked why these institutions were becoming unpopular with parents, especially when students were the first from their family to study. ‘Because,’ explained Professor Don Anderson, ‘we take their kids away for three or four years, and when we have finished with them they can’t talk to each other.’22
The times inspired a mood for change, including change in institutional design. In Britain, the 1963 Robbins Report recommended the establishment of new universities and encouraged experiment and innovation. Australia likewise experienced similar rapid growth in student numbers, with a sustained burst of new institutions. This began with Macquarie in 1964, and within less than twenty years included La Trobe, Newcastle, Wollongong, Griffith, Deakin and Murdoch. Here, once again, was a chance to break the mould and create something new.
For many new institutions, the great organising principle would be interdisciplinarity—bringing down the walls between academic fields, thereby enabling students to range across the full spectrum of human knowledge. Interdisciplinarity encouraged curricular innovation and new ways to organise academic life. Interdisciplinarity would open a new way ahead, and so end the dominance of a single idea of the Australian university. The emerging universities could embrace fields not supported in older universities, and make their name with original contributions to the study of Asia, the environment, the humanities and culture. Vice-Chancellor David Derham at Melbourne might explain that his institution avoided student radicalism because it did not teach sociology,23 but elsewhere academics and students were keen to embrace the restlessness of the times.
A shortage of places on campus encouraged the first in a new wave of institutions: Macquarie University. Established as the third university in a city, it could be designed in conscious contrast to Sydney and UNSW. At a time of rising nationalism, the new university would be the first in the state named after a prominent Australian, with the New South Wales Cabinet debating whether to honour the architect of higher education William Wentworth, influential premier Sir Henry Parkes or early governor Lachlan Macquarie. As Bruce Mansfield and Mark Hutchinson aver in their history of the institution, there is irony in a place once described as ‘Australia’s most radical and unconventional university’ carrying the name of a ‘staunch Scots Tory and High Anglican soldier who had governed New South Wales at the height of the convict era’.24
For a motto, the founders turned to Chaucer rather than Latin, though ‘And gladly teche’ recalled an earlier era of higher education, since research was always part of the Macquarie mission. Still, founding Vice-Chancellor AG Mitchell was determined that Macquarie would be different. Instead of the usual choice of programs, Macquarie offered a single undergraduate degree to encourage breadth of study. It would stress access and participation, and seek links across academic disciplines. Unlike its city competitors, Macquarie would not be comprehensive but instead would develop distinctive areas of academic strength.
The new university chose an innovative structure to encourage academic cross-fertilisation. Rather than mobilising traditional disciplinary departments, Macquarie would organise itself as a single college, along the lines of American universities, encompassing the arts and sciences. The institution looked also to recent British innovations, such as the integrated first-year course proposed for Sussex University in Brighton. This inspired Fred Chong, Foundation Chair in Mathematics, to describe subject choice at Macquarie as ‘an academic cafeteria’. A student might select a variety of titbits or ‘a veritable feast on a few favoured dishes’.25
Even as they designed a distinctive approach, Macquarie pioneers acknowledged a risk that the institution would in time abandon difference and trek the familiar Australian path. Chancellor Percy Partridge voiced this concern during planning for the new university. Would Macquarie, he asked, ‘be subject to the iron law of reversion to type?’26 This concern has run through Macquarie’s history, a worry that under pressure the institution would not hold its ground and defend a ‘broad educational mission as tenaciously as it should’.27
Macquarie remains a flourishing institution with innovative programs, but it is no longer the outlier. Messages to potential undergraduate students stress breadth of offerings and freedom to explore, but in place of a single degree the Macquarie course guide offers dozens of degrees, from a Bachelor of Actuarial Studies to a Bachelor of Teaching (Early Childhood Education). The academic structure has migrated to the standard Australian organisation, with disciplinary departments grouped in faculties. Over its half a century of academic and community contribution, Macquarie has moved into the mainstream.
Flinders University in South Australia also provides an example of a university founded on aspirations to lower disciplinary walls.28 The original plans called for a second campus for the University of Adelaide at Bedford Park. Academic appointments had already begun when a new state government embraced a more sweeping approach, a second university for the capital city.
The first Flinders students arrived in 1966. They were typical of their time. Men outnumbered women two to one. Most lived at home with their parents, their background overwhelmingly middle class. A survey in the first years of the new institution confirmed Flinders students were not politically radical. A slim majority indicated support for the government of Harold Holt. Only a handful opposed American and Australian involvement in Vietnam. If conservative about political change, the Flinders students did not forgo Commencement Day pranks, with a mock Russian submarine pushed into the university lake. Most students studying at Flinders were destined for teaching or the public service.
Though Flinders students were much like Australian tertiary students elsewhere, their new university was anything but typical. As founding Vice-Chancellor Peter Karmel told a meeting at the Adelaide Town Hall, ‘we want to experiment and experiment bravely’.29 Instead of traditional faculties and departments, there would be schools of Social Sciences, Biological Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Language and Literature. Students, it was hoped, would explore the spaces between disciplines, in a university committed to a coherent intellectual and social experience. Even when the university began to teach medicine in 1975, the course was designed so students would take majors in other faculties. Many chose the humanities and social sciences.
Innovation at Flinders extended from subject matter to teaching method. The School of Language and Literature introduced the novel practice of continuous assessment, with teaching delivered through now-unimaginable tutorials of just three or four students. Flinders students could take Australia’s first undergraduate course in Spanish, along with other subjects not offered at the University of Adelaide.
With no God professors reigning over departments, Flinders staff were expected to contribute to leadership. A participatory system of government would prevail, in which decisions were taken, as David Hilliard’s book on Flinders recounts, ‘often at wearisome length’.30 However exhausting, the approach created a sense of community among staff. Numbers were sufficiently small that everyone could know the vice-chancellor. Flinders recruited widely, with many young academics establishing families in a new city, and forming close bonds with each other and their new university.
Yet, as years passed, familiar patterns returned. What originated as radical departure began to take on the degree structures, teaching practice and governance fabric of Australian orthodoxy. Engineering began at Flinders in 1990, with law approved the same year. A review of administrative structures recommended the introduction of faculties, a semantic change acknowledging the pressure of rapid growth in enrolments and the need for better signalling of course offerings.31
Located away from the city centre, in what Premier Don Dunstan unkindly described as a ‘suburban paddock’, Flinders has retained many traces of its distinctive ethos, notably a character defined by difference from the University of Adelaide. However, in time Flinders responded to student preferences and to competition from the new University of South Australia by offering more professional qualifications. Interdisciplinarity became an aspiration rather than a thoroughgoing point of difference. What began as a brave experiment is now an institution firmly embedded within the Australian norm.
The story of La Trobe, which began operations in 1967 in the northern Melbourne suburb of Bundoora, traces a similar transformation over decades. Robert Manne joined a university ‘without a vocational faculty’ but watched the centre of gravity at La Trobe move slowly towards professional degrees. ‘The moment I recognised something fundamental was shifting was when Alpine Tourism appeared in a corridor of the Social Sciences building where I worked.’32
La Trobe graduate historian Don Watson makes clear his disappointment at this end to idealism:
Two decades after La Trobe opened to students, much of the founders’ philosophy had been forgotten. The college system had been scrapped; the school had been broken into departments; power had passed from the professors to administrators; governments were deciding the shape and function of the University and pushing it away from the original broad education model and towards greater specialisation and concentration; basic (scientific) research was being abandoned in favour of short-term, ‘goal orientated’ research, much of it determined by ‘Procrustean politicians’ perceptions of what is good for the country’.33
Yet the sense of creating something new was never lost entirely. La Trobe placed great emphasis on its humanities expertise, and has maintained this tradition. Perhaps more than other third-wave institutions, the transition to standard Australian curriculum and governance at La Trobe posed challenges to governance and management.
In the west, Murdoch too wrestled with tension between its original vision and pressures to conform, a trajectory that social scientist Toby Miller describes as ‘from periphery to core’ (and sometimes back to the periphery).34 Murdoch began with innovative offerings such as a foundation veterinary science program, and added professional offerings along the way, including a law program from 1993. Named after the Foundation Professor of English and later Chancellor of the University of Western Australia, Sir Walter Murdoch,35 Perth’s second university aimed to address knowledge with ‘humane and vital intelligence’.36
The new university established itself as a place of both new ideas and practical cooperation. It put early students to work in a very practical sense, creating a new setting for tertiary education in Western Australia:
During the early months of 1977 a large party of students and staff devoted themselves to digging out an amphitheatre on the western side of the campus which could be used for open-air performances. At the end of November it was used for the first time for a staging of Toad of Toad Hall.37
All institutions are unique, and yet alike: more than fifty years earlier, staff and students at the University of Western Australia likewise banded together to dig a reflection pond in front of Winthrop Hall.38 The pond was finished just hours before the opening ceremony for the new building, and filled with water lilies that the university website concedes, tactfully, ‘may or may not have been “borrowed” from Queens Gardens’.39 Murdoch University pushed further, intellectually and organisationally. It proved inventive in other ways—an Orgone box was constructed in the common room of the School of Social Inquiry, and the staff choir at graduation ceremonies mustered uncommon virtuosity in singing a cantata based on the university’s parking regulations.40
Murdoch worried about drifting too far from conventional practice. To secure students the university needed popular courses and recognisable degree titles. It negotiates still the tensions between founding mission and contemporary expectations. Like other universities, Murdoch is a community both distinct and working within familiar structures and patterns. Institutions may nurture their own characters and aspirations, even as they converge organisationally.
As this last third-wave institution has moved towards the mainstream, the experience at Murdoch has underscored the episodic nature of innovation. Important social movements, notably feminism, made lasting changes on campus, but the brief flurry of interest in new organisational forms did not endure. Keen advocates of consultation councils and university assemblies graduated or moved to other interests. Energy around institutional difference evaporated as inherited forms quietly resumed their influence.
Path dependency is not just a grand historical narrative but the cumulative choices of individuals. To endure over generations, universities must employ academics and professional staff with a commitment to their mission— people who honour a shared sense of what matters. They become the bearers of their institution’s tradition, the colleagues who steer its destiny. When one road is preferred to the others that are available, this is not an assertion of some inevitable force. Human initiative is at work.
In particular, academic norms tally closely with institutional practice. Academic judgement is the basis of curriculum quality control, of access and appointment, of promotion and reward. Professors promote their own disciplines as suitable subjects for teaching, and resist encroachment from fields they consider unsuitable for a university. They share with peers in other places a sense of what is appropriate for a university, an understanding drawn from institutional practice elsewhere, and personal experience. Professional staff support and create structures to make the organisation work effectively. The university is not separate from its staff; it reflects the interaction of organisational form with the values and priorities of those who work within the gates.
Staff profiles have changed as the university mission has shifted. Through the twentieth century, and on to the present day, research has become ever more central to the university mission. This means teaching-focused staff have lost out to academics who combine teaching with research. A 1965 survey found 21 per cent of academic staff in Australia with teaching-only duties. By the 1990s, this number had declined to just 3.5 per cent.41 As universities were standardised by national policy and prevailing academic culture, so the university workforce lost diversity of experience.
A brief personal account may illustrate how academics, as bearers of a tradition, reinforce a dominant model.
My first academic position was teaching public policy in the School of Social and Industrial Administration at Griffith University, then a small, single-campus institution in a forest south of Brisbane. The second university in the city, Griffith began teaching in 1975. Like other third-wave universities, Griffith embraced a fierce commitment to interdisciplinary education and a reputation for radical epistemology. When I applied for a lectureship a decade after the first student intake, prospective academic staff were required to write a short essay outlining their personal commitment to an interdisciplinary pedagogy. Induction sessions for the successful applicants stressed this fundamental organising principle for the new institution.
As at Macquarie and Flinders, Griffith embraced schools not faculties, concentration areas rather than disciplinary departments, and degree structures that emphasised knowledge across domains. There were no professional degrees, and strict limits were placed on subjects offered by each academic concentration with the School of Social and Industrial Administration. This required students to range across numerous fields to complete a degree. Academic decisions were made in consultative committees by a young and enthusiastic staff keen to innovate. In his history of Griffith’s early years, Noel Quirke observed that ‘Australian Environmental Studies was so near the academic cutting edge in the early seventies that the primary challenge for its first Chairman, Professor Calvin Rose, was to determine what actually constituted the field of environmental studies’.42
This lively and argumentative culture attracted an early satirical novel. Pushed From the Wings, by Griffith academic Ross Fitzgerald, lampooned philosophers falling asleep amid heat and humidity while reading The Death of Socrates, students conspicuously carrying Trotsky’s The Permanent Revolution, anarchist teaching fellows with private incomes, and a self-imposed tyranny of the collective.43 We could guess the identity of familiar colleagues working in the humanities.
Griffith was a determined effort to break with existing practice. But where to hire for such an enterprise? The university recruited some superb international academics, a sprinkling of new doctoral graduates such as myself, and many local academics from existing institutions. For some recruits Griffith was a chance to experiment, but for others it proved a disappointing shadow of the ‘real university’ just across the river. At the nearby University of Queensland, one could find comforting tradition in sandstone buildings housing professional faculties and disciplinary departments, recognisable degrees and a decision-making process easier to navigate than the sometimes baffling democratic processes of the Nathan campus.
As a young academic, I joined a university constantly torn between those committed to Griffith’s founding mission, and those anxious (even if unconsciously) to recreate the University of Queensland in a new setting. The touch points were the radical edges of the institution, those very features designed to emphasise difference. Staff wanted more conventional names for the academic units—so Social and Industrial Administration became Commerce and Administration. In time, ‘schools’ became ‘faculties’. The interdisciplinary design of degrees was pegged back, as disciplines such as accounting and economics demanded compulsory subjects so their programs could achieve professional accreditation. Programs in law and engineering found their way to campus. With amalgamations, Griffith acquired a number of additional campuses. This required consistency of treatment and parity of esteem for newly acquired colleagues and disciplines from nearby colleges of advanced education. Accreditation requirements diminished opportunities for idiosyncratic course offerings. A more conventional management style emerged to handle increased scale and complexity.
By its twenty-fifth anniversary, Griffith was firmly in the mainstream of Australian universities, with a mission that honoured its origins but reflected contemporary aspirations. As the university’s third vice-chancellor, I was fortunate to lead an institution with strong professional schools and impressive research. I contributed to standardisation by launching degrees in medicine and dentistry. Professional programs enabled Griffith to build a viable local student base across the corridor from Brisbane to the Gold Coast, and attract large international cohorts. Pioneering original degrees in Asian Studies and Environmental Science survived, but most students looked to professional qualifications when enrolling.
Such changes were perhaps inevitable. A university is a community, so the choices of students and staff should influence institutional choices. Still, it is hard not to recall the frustration of the original Griffith visionaries as they watched their innovations in pedagogy and governance quietly replaced by more orthodox practices. These pioneers experienced something familiar from other third-wave universities: the hold of the Australian idea of a university over the academic imagination. Griffith rightly celebrates a distinctive history. Yet differences with its nearby competitors have diminished over time, as Griffith has become one institution among many similar players in a national tertiary system.
The second and third waves of universities in Australia followed a similar cycle—a desire by policy makers to increase structural and pedagogical diversity, brave opening gambits, then a slow but steady move over decades to a more conventional configuration. While educational innovators sought to shake the tradition, the drift from the periphery to the centre mirrored the aspirations of staff, the financial reality of attracting students, the practical benefit of a tried and tested curriculum and a navigable (because familiar) organisational structure.
In John Dawkins, the Minister for Education from 1987 to 1991, Australia would find a politician who would not only embrace the standard model, but write it into law.