2.6 Professorial authority and the generation gap

Professorial Board minutes can be elusive sources. Written to conceal as much as they reveal, minutes are often evasive on the details one wants and lengthy on those one doesn’t. In 1972, the University of Sydney Professorial Board created guidelines on the role of professors.[1] With growing staff numbers generally the number of Professors in departments had increased, and the expectations of participation by non-professorial staff and students was also on the rise – everyone wanted to be responsible for knowledge and feel that they owned it.[2] It seems probable, then, that the Professorial Board felt that the role of Professor was potentially changing; some certainly perceived it as under threat.

The 1972 Report on the Roles of Professors and Non-Professorial Staff was intended to be read in conjunction with an earlier report on the Administrative Organisation of Multi-Professor Departments, which had laid out guidelines for administration by a department Head in ways that do not “impinge on [another] professor’s traditional privileges”.[3] The Roles of Professors report argued that a Professor was expected to provide academic leadership and supervision, which was impossible if they had “no greater say than anyone else”.[4] This was not to say that lecturers should only do “what they were directed to by a professor” since they had been selected on the basis of a certain level of demonstrated mastery in their field. This meant that professors should consult their permanent academic staff and provide them with “basic information”.[5] However, since the professor “must accept full responsibility” for course proposals to Faculty, they are “not bound by majority opinion” – though some advice can be helpful.[6] Indeed, on the matter of consultation regarding new appointments in a department, the professor was obliged to “make his own judgement and not just report on a majority opinion,” though they may choose to discuss it with their senior staff. Furthermore, although all academic staff should be free to pursue whatever research they like (within funding, infrastructure and ethical limitations) the Professor was to have “the final say in allocation of duties”.[7] The minutes record a question by Professor David Armstrong of the Philosophy department in response to this report – what force would this document have, were the Professorial Board to accept it?[8] Well might he ask, since his Philosophy Department was turning the ownership of knowledge on its head. Sometimes literally.

At the end of 1972 the Philosophy Department agreed to open voting rights in departmental meetings to students – and not just student representatives, or certain students, but all of them. This was the consequence of a long process of incremental democratisation of the department, where rights to vote in departmental decisions had been expanding to include all staff. This had occurred despite – or possibly because of – very deep divisions in the political convictions of its members. David Armstrong and David Stove were both members of James McAuley’s “Peace with Freedom” movement, which sought to fight against what they believed to be a Communist conspiracy to use Australian universities to further their cause.[9] Other members (unsuccessfully) sought introduction of a Marxism-Leninism course and, by the early 1970s the majority of the department (though not the majority of the senior members) self-identified as radical.[10] Early in 1973, when students returned from their Summer vacation period to find themselves able to vote in meetings of the Philosophy department, Armstrong circulated a letter to them explaining why he and three other senior members of the department had voted against this right:

Not all institutions exist solely to serve the interests of their members, in the way that clubs and associations often do. The concern to universities is to maintain, transmit and advance certain bodies of knowledge and speculation of an advanced and difficult character. It is obvious that teachers will have a much better grasp of what is necessary to fulfil these objectives than students will.[11]

Just as Eric Ashby had felt that a university did not exist to meet society’s demands, like an “intellectual department store”, Armstrong felt that the university did not exist to meet student demands. All the evidence shows that Armstrong felt strongly about his responsibility as professor of philosophy – and, although he is only one professor who struggled against student claims to the ownership of knowledge he did so with more difficulty and with far more public interest and exposure than most. For Armstrong the traditional role of professor was the same “high office” that Ashby had assigned to universities in society: to defend, protect and transmit knowledge, and encourage further thought based on mastery of its fundamentals.[12]

It is probably fair to say that Armstrong’s personality and politics do much to complicate examination of the issue of professorial authority. By 1972 he was completely paranoid about plots – possibly communist ones, some of which could have come straight from North Vietnam[13] – in his department, intended, he thought, to undermine his authority.[14] And there probably were plots against him, to some degree, for he appears to have been extremely difficult to work with – not least because he took professional disagreements personally and tended to blow them out of proportion. For example, after a senior colleague voted differently to Armstrong in relation to a course proposal, Armstrong not only refused to support this colleague’s application to a chair but also threatened to resign were he appointed.[15] A tendency to consider differences of opinion to reflect personal and political enmity seems to have been picked up by Armstrong’s students as well. Armstrong’s very well organised papers in the National Library contain dozens of letters from students. Some of these letters painstakingly explain a student’s political differences to Armstrong, expressing the hope that he will understand; others have sent him copies of letters to editors of various newspapers as demonstration of their support for his cause; and some sent him reports on student meetings that Armstrong would not have been able to attend, acting almost like personal spies. Almost all of the letters from students seem to be tinged with fear that Armstrong might take it into his head that they are opposed to him in some way, and many seem desperate for his approval.[16]

This tendency to paranoia and belief in personal-political enmity manifest itself, on occasion, in Armstrong’s decision making during the 1970s, which were sometimes based on attempts to frustrate the goals of those who he considered to be his enemies in the department – even goals that he would otherwise support.[17] This meant that he often appeared to be even more authoritarian than he probably intended, even though he clearly believed that professorial authority had an important place in a university. The exaggeration, as a result of this paranoia, of an authoritative approach to his professorial role probably led to an increased desire by some of Armstrong’s junior colleagues to challenge it. Such challenges would in turn have justified and fed Armstrong’s paranoia, continually escalating conflict in the department. Although unique in the 1970s, the Sydney Philosophy Department captured the imagination and the public’s interest because it presented an exaggerated picture of the conflicts present on every campus – conflicts which were about to get a whole lot more dramatic than allowing students to vote.

Professors like Armstrong had been used to having control over their departments and complete authority on courses – or, in other words, they had the authority to determine what knowledge is and who may teach or learn it (or own) it. Many departments had only one professor, making this control absolute. But increasing student numbers and funding had resulting in similarly increased staff numbers.[18] This had led to a tendency for more professors to be appointed to a single department, which is why the Professorial Board felt the need to produce guidelines for managing departments where there was more than one. In the case of philosophy this was especially difficult, for (despite Armstrong’s many statements about not politicising philosophy[19]) Armstrong was determined that any other professors should be of the same political persuasion as him. He had worked very hard to gain support of notorious anti-communist Knopfelmacher, to no avail.[20] He then knowingly supported (what he acknowledged to be) another second-rate philosopher, hoping, if not for a good philosopher, at least for a political ally.[21] When Graham Nerlich was eventually appointed to a chair (despite Armstrong’s earlier threats to resign if he was) it was on the explicit understanding that, although he was to have professorial authority, it was definitely not going to be as much professorial authority as Armstrong held.[22]

The difficulties of competing professors paled against the growing challenge to professorial authority asserted by junior staff. The large influx of staff during the sudden period of growth afforded by the Murray report created a significant age gap between longstanding senior staff and a large new generation of junior staff, many of whom had quite recently been students themselves.[23] Many junior academics were influenced by emerging ideas about student-focused pedagogies and 1960s criticisms of university hierarchy, outdated courses and an “overall conformity of the university to dominant political and social values” – and they wanted to offer their own contributions to knowledge.[24] While there was a lot to stand in the way of junior staff assuming some of the authority professors had held as a matter of tradition, change was also enabled by this generation gap. Simplistically, the generation against whom protest was directed were on their way out, and a very large number of new generation academics were on their way in with few in between to temper revolutionary change. But while professors were now being construed as feudal-type masters, hoarding the wealth of knowledge for their own pleasure, this is not the tradition they felt themselves. The role of professor, traditionally, was not one of ownership at all, but rather a role of protecting knowledge and knowledge standards. It was the language of democracy that introduced the notion that knowledge was the possession of the professors and that it ought to be shared more equally amongst the remainder of the community of scholars, sub-professorial staff and students. The existence of knowledge as an entity somewhat separate to any institution or individual dissolved into a type of power to be constructed, wielded and distributed. Armstrong expressed it almost as a loss of faith in knowledge:

They seem to want to substitute the God-Department for the out-worn God-Professor. I am against there being any Gods in a university.[25]