2.7 New knowledge, new authority: the Philosophy Strike

By 1973, some journalists were suggesting that the reversal of authority over knowledge in universities was ludicrous:

How absurd to give such a course, how presumptuous of two women graduates to suggest that they could give it! That’s what you get if you allow professors to have no more than one vote among many.[1]

In 1973 when two postgraduate students, Elizabeth Jacka and Jean Curthoys proposed a course on “Philosophical Aspects of Feminist Thought” some members of the University – we can certainly include David Stove among them – were convinced that feminism was unworthy of serious study.[2] By the 1990s when Professor David Stove wrote a speech for David Armstrong’s retirement, he described feminism as a serious blight on academia:

After the defeat of America by Vietnam, the attack [on the university] was renewed, amplified, and intensified, by feminists. Their attack has proved far more devastating than that of the Marxists…Of the many hundreds of courses offered to Arts undergraduates in this university, what proportion, I wonder, are now not made culturally-destructive, as well as intellectually null, by feminist malignancy and madness? One-third? I would love to believe that the figure is so high.[3]

There were genuine opponents to change and for some its bitterness was lasting.

Consideration of these events on the development of feminist thought has been achieved by a series of articles that came out of a conference organised in November 1996 by Alison Bashford and in Megan Jones’ PhD thesis Remembering Academic Feminism.[4] However, the course proposal and its opposition by professor-level staff dramatically plays out the wider conflict over the ownership of knowledge in the 1970s and highlights some of that conflict’s less visible nuances.

Early in 1973, Jacka and Curthoys prepared a course proposal as an optional unit for senior undergraduates.[5] Ideally, such courses would be proposed a year ahead, but a late proposal intended for the subsequent semester was only frowned upon by those who also frowned upon its subject matter – and there were plenty of them. But while in 1971 Professor Armstrong had been able to stop a course on Marxism-Leninism, he did not hold this power in 1973, as he was not Head of Department. This left Armstrong with a problem. In 1971 when the department and students openly censured Armstrong for his veto of a course that covered Marxism, he had written to the Vice-Chancellor seeking confirmation of that which his position description and his beliefs told him.[6] As professor, and indeed senior professor, he felt himself to be absolutely responsible for the content on every course delivered in his department. But, as it was, the Philosophy Department – including a majority of staff (though not senior staff), as well as students – voted to approve the course and, although he nominally held responsibility for it, he had no power to stop it. The proposal “Philosophical Aspects of Feminist Thought” was sent on 4th April 1973 to the Arts Faculty meeting for approval. Hotly debated at the Faculty meeting, according to a member of the Philosophy staff, one professor gave his reasons for voting against it, roughly along these lines:

I shall vote against this course. I have a feeling about it. It doesn’t smell right.[7]

The Arts Faculty vote was split, with just over 50% of members voting to support delivery of the course. This was the only approval needed for an elective course, so systemically, the story should stop here. The reason it doesn’t is that the course proposers were not staff but PhD students. Seen as a problem by very few of either Jacka and Curthoys’ supporters or opponents, the Head of Department, while supportive of Jacka and Curthoys and their course, did think that accepting proposals for courses from people who were not academic staff members, but for whom academic appointment was an expectation of acceptance of the proposal, set a potentially dangerous precedent.[8]Finding there was no formal problem with this, when the course was approved, Campbell applied to the Deputy Vice Chancellor, Professor O’Neil, for the funds to appoint Jacka and Curthoys to deliver the course.

O’Neil, smelling (perhaps using similar senses to that anonymous professor in the Arts Faculty meeting) controversy, contacted Armstrong to find out what was going on. He then replied to Keith Campbell’s letter, saying that there were no funds to cover the appointments and set up a meeting with the Philosophy Department professors to discuss it.[9] Hearing this, the full Philosophy Department voted to send a letter to O’Neil, letting him know that consulting with just the Department’s professors would give him a skewed perspective on the issues and urged him to include in the meeting two members of staff who were sympathetic to the proposal. O’Neil replied by saying that those staff could send him a report, but they would not be permitted to be members of what he was now calling a committee -  “I had in mind at that stage an analogue to a professorial board selection committee”, he explained to the professorial board, which was why he rejected non-professorial participation. He sounded utterly bewildered in his report to the Professorial Board that, on 15^th May, a group of staff and postgraduates:

…arrive unannounced … to press me to make a decision and not to rely on a one-sided committee.[10]

O’Neil referred the matter to the Professorial Board apologetically, not normally, he said, bothering them with details about staff appointments. In this case however:

I consider that I could make a fair-minded decision but I doubt that I would be seen to be fair-minded. I have not hidden the fact that I share the view of about half the members of the Faculty present on 4^th April about the value of the proposed optional course.[11]

As well as O’Neil’s report, the 6^th June Professorial Board had before them the course proposal and an open letter from Jacka and Curthoys, who claimed:

By ignoring [the Department’s request to include two supportive staff members] and referring the matter to the Professorial Board, Professor O’Neil has made it clear that be believes the best decisions can only be made by those with the highest rank.[12]

It is uncertain how sympathetically members of the Professorial Board were likely to view this argument, but Jacka and Curthoys informed the Professorial Board that “In our case at least, your high rank in no way qualified you to judge the issue”, since it has “an area which is entirely new”:

It is the nature of the case that we don’t have a long history in the subject. There are no established, recognised authorities to whom we can appeal.[13]

This was entirely new knowledge. Furthermore, unlike other types of university knowledge, the nature of this new knowledge excluded established expert judgement. The Professorial Board was by definition out of touch with this new knowledge and therefore could hold no authority to decide what knowledge is:

The kinds of things that bodies like yours usually consider, don’t apply in this case. This, of course is not to argue that whether or not we are competent is unimportant or undecidable, but rather that you aren’t the proper people to decide it.[14]

Following this none too subtle declaration that professors are no longer the legitimate owners of knowledge, Jacka and Curthoys announced a revolution:

We feel, then, that those who are in a position to judge our competence have already done so. This week we will be asking these people to demand of Professor O’Neil that we are immediately appointed.[15]

It could hardly have been expected that this letter to the Professorial Board, denouncing professorial authority and staking a claim to knowledge owned and approved by students and junior academics in its place, would encourage the Board to a more sympathetic position than those held by O’Neil and Armstrong. Department Head Keith Campbell fought very hard to convince the Board of the competence of Jacka and Curthoys and the value of the course, but was opposed by some very vocal professors. Armstrong pointed out that “a majority of professorial and associate-professorial members of the Department were opposed to or had grave reservations” about the course.[16] The minutes suggest that what really clinched the matter was a reading by Armstrong from an ABC radio interview with Jacka and Curthoys. The transcript of the interview was not quoted in the minutes, but a copy prepared especially for the meeting is in Armstrong’s papers in the National Library. A largely innocuous document, the only item that I could see that might have influenced the Board was that the interviewer asked if the course was “propaganda” and the women confirmed that they were not “unbiased”.[17] Armstrong was to use this interview as evidence at later meetings and would continually refer to it as giving a “different complexion” to the official course proposal throughout the controversy.[18] It obviously resonated with professorial fears, if their own Open Letter had not done that enough as it was. The result was that, although O’Neil’s own committee had recommended appointment of Jacka and Curthoys, the Professorial Board rejected it by 39 votes to 7.[19]

It was this that led to what became known as the Philosophy Strike where staff and students in the Philosophy department stopped teaching, with supporting strikes by other departments as well as the Builders Labourers’ Federation, throughout June and July. Striking students occupied the Philosophy Common Room and students pitched tents on the lawns of the Main Quad, constructing a “Women’s Embassy” (a direct reference to the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra).[20] The strike and its implications for feminism, democracy and student participation in university government and for challenging professorial authority were discussed at length in Strike Bulletins, in typescripts of speeches by staff, in letters to the editor of newspapers, in Honi Soit, and endless quantities of typewritten pamphlets circulated by students both for and against the course.[21]The disruption and publicity was such that the University Senate commissioned an inquiry, chaired by Senate member Justice Robert Marsden Hope.

Having interviewed Jacka and Curthoys, all the Philosophy department professors and others, and collected dozens of submissions, Justice Hope’s committee concluded that the course should proceed.[22] Several people, in response to O’Neil’s initial assertion that there were no funds to pay Jacka and Curthoys to teach it, had offered to donate the required amount. The Senate Committee felt that funds should not be accepted as a general rule by donors who specified who should teach.[23] The Senate directed the University to pay their salaries, which, as students had regularly pointed out in Honi Soit and elsewhere, the university really could manage to do, not only due to its comparative wealth at that time, but also within the existing departmental budget allocation.[24]

A surprising amount of Justice Hope’s report to Senate focused on Armstrong’s position description, a discussion that confirms that professorial responsibility, was a complicating factor. That is, consideration of new knowledge – feminism – and who it was held by required a rethink of professorial authority, as described in the terms of appointment of some senior staff. The Senate report shows that Armstrong was in the superior professorial position in the department.[25] Keith Campbell, though Head of Department, was acting in the inferior position in Nerlich’s place. Importantly, this justified O’Neil’s decision to listen to Armstrong over Campbell in the first place – an act that led to the strike, though the Senate Committee pointed to the culture of mistrust and obstructivism in the Department as another cause of the strike.

Leonie Kramer, then Professor of Australian Literature, was horrified that the Senate Committee’s report did not give more support to Armstrong’s position, adequately acknowledge that the department’s professors had been opposed to the course and that students had been able to vote. Kramer insisted in both the Senate minutes and the publication of the report in the University of Sydney News, on adding the support to Armstrong and condemnation of the academic integrity of the course herself.[26]This act earned Professor Kramer the title, amongst activists, as “an honorary man”, a name that, more than 20 years later, Jean Curthoys apologetically described as “a piece of abuse … I would have preferred to leave repressed”.[27] Rather than necessarily reflecting her supposed masculinity, it certainly reflects her belief that the professors were the most capable of evaluating the course and that the public would identify the student vote with an invalid decision.

The Philosophy Strike not only enabled the development of new knowledge that would contribute to the establishment of feminism as a valid intellectual pursuit, but also heralded an increased significance of democratic principles in education, especially increased student participation in governance. Since, for many, increased participation is what the Philosophy Strike was “all about” Keith Campbell felt compelled to write to the Senate discussing the issues emerging from the Philosophy Department’s experiment with democracy.[28] He did so confidentially, asking the Senate Committee to understand the delicacy with which such a department needed to be managed. Campbell said:

The idea of moving away from the traditional departmental structure, in which the Head and/or professors took decisions, which were then handed down to lesser mortals, has my whole-hearted support. … Yet I cannot say that I think it has worked entirely successfully.[29]

Campbell discussed the particularities of the Philosophy Department, including the personalities and politics, the extent to which each side considered the other perspective to be illegitimate and the tendency to take issues beyond the department, such as to the Professorial Board or to a strike. There was also a problem with the student vote, according to Campbell, since there is an “in-built majority for change” the student vote made it difficult for the Department to “settle down” and staff were reluctant to exert a veto against it. There was a mismatch, too, he thought between the democratisation of the Philosophy Department and the University. The University beyond the department, said Campbell, still maintained a central, God-like role for the professor that led to conflicts between decisions by democratic consent and the opinions of a professor like Armstrong. Despite these beliefs, Campbell suggested that, although he was supportive of democratisation of the university, “limitations should be placed on the extent of the student voice in any primary vote” – suggesting that academic independence and standards could not rest entirely on democracy.[30]