Paper for ANZHES 2008. Hannah Forsyth, University Sydney
Draft 031208
Professor Baron Eric Ashby was an academic botanist, scholar of higher education and university administrator during a period of massive change in higher education worldwide from the 1940s to the 1970s. Despite remnants of traditionalism in both his career and his written work on the role of academics in society, Ashby had an instrumental role in change. In Australia, Ashby was advisor to the Chifley government on the allocation of intellectual resources during the war and was a sought-after commentator on the role of higher education nationally. He later held Vice-Chancellor positions at Queen’s University and Cambridge.
This paper will explore the work of Eric Ashby, especially his approach and priorities for academic work in Australia. This will be contextualised in developments that led to the 1957 Murray report, which irrevocably transformed the Australian system.
In common with the chair of that review, Keith Murray, Ashby saw academia as a vocation, the university as a sort of secular-ecclesiastical community and positioned the academic in a similar heroic position as that which the literary author enjoyed since the 16th Century. Ashby’s assertion of a particular (and traditional) construction of academic work, this paper will argue, was designed to attract public funding, but resist public control. The implications and resilience of Ashby and Murray’s image of traditional academia in a changing environment will be discussed, especially as they relate to principles of academic freedom as universities moved into a new relationship with government and society.
This paper is a part of a postgraduate work in progress entitled The Ownership of Knowledge in Higher Education in Australia. The struggle for survival of the figure of the traditional academic in the post-Murray period (tentatively, for now) suggests a moment where the ownership of knowledge starts to be transferred out of academics’ hands.
The Second World War, with its significant reliance on academic expertise, should have enhanced the value of knowledge in Australia and thus the value of academic work. And in a certain sense it did. As it became widely accepted that new knowledge could win wars, a changing conception of university-based knowledge was increasingly seen as having broad social and economic value to the nation. Steps made, in this light, at Federal level during and after the war culminated in the 1957 Review of Universities in Australia, chaired by Sir Keith Murray, which resulted in the injection of a large amount of funding into the university system. While funding was certainly a positive outcome according to most academics, many also felt that it changed the character of university-based knowledge, potentially threatening some of the traditional values associated with academic work. As this paper will discuss, Eric Ashby, then Professor of Botany at the University of Sydney, formulated an alternative interpretative framework for academic pursuits that would enable change but protect traditional values. Ashby’s particular characterisation of universities and academic work is important for, through later roles as university administrator, commentator on universities, government consultant and historian of higher education, Ashby was an influential leader in the 1940s to 1960s transformation of the university system in Australia, Africa, the United States and at home (for him) in the United Kingdom. Although only in Australia from 1938 to 1946, one of Ashby’s many obituary writers said, “it would be difficult to name an academic who, with eight years residence in Australia (interrupted by one in Moscow), had greater influence”.[1]
Despite Ashby’s unarguable influence on change in universities, we might well ask how influential his interpretation of it was. Ashby certainly managed his own career and the universities in which he asserted leadership as if his image of these changes as a type of historical continuity (as we will see) were true. But it would be influential indeed to be able to skew public perceptions of the importance of accountability for public funding and the sense of justice associated with getting one’s money’s worth – values that increasingly contributed to utilitarian arguments for university funding. This paper draws on Ashby’s published work, biographical material and a collection of letters to and from Ian Clunies Ross to consider the images of academic work that Ashby promoted in Australia, as well as the Murray review and evidence of the realities of academic work that resulted from it to see just how much resilience Ashby’s traditional academic had in this period of change.
The Sydney press announced Eric Ashby’s arrival in Sydney in 1938 with a photograph of the fresh-faced 34-year-old Professor of Botany stepping off the ship, and marvelled at the novelty that his wife was also university educated.[2] Ashby was a scientist in the emerging civic sense – a scientist with substantial civic responsibility to the nation (and in his case, quite a few nations). The letters between Ashby and Sir Ian Clunies Ross (when Clunies Ross was Chair of the CSIRO) after Ashby returned to the United Kingdom show a strong sense by both of their responsibility to provide leadership as scientists (both to the disciplines in a “pure” sense and to its application nationally and internationally) as intellectuals and as public figures.[3] To both, scientific leadership was a weighty civic role. So, as well as performing his duties as Professor of Botany, during his relatively short stay in Australia, Ashby contributed policy advice and formation to government committees of inquiry, as head of the Australian National Research Council and as advisor to the Curtin government on the enlistment and organization of scientific resources (especially scientists in universities) for the war effort.[4] This government work included a year in Moscow as scientific counsellor. Declining a significant diplomatic post to Russia, he returned to Sydney only to be plagued by “designs on my person” as he put it, “for Vice-Chancellorships”.[5] Longing (in vain, ultimately) for what he described as the relatively peaceful life of botanical research, Ashby accepted a post in Manchester in 1946. In 1949 he wrote to Clunies Ross to say:
The designs have begun again with a vengeance, supported alas! by the Vice-Chancellor’s Committee here; and I have had to ask myself whether I’m not being merely obtuse to remain a botanist when obviously sincere people want me to do the duller, but I suppose more important, job of running a university.[6]
Ashby was to move to the Vice-Chancellorship of Belfast, to Master of Clare College and Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge – notably during the late 1960s early 1970s period of student unrest where, according to Sir Rutherford Robertson, “his wisdom did much to minimise the undesirable excesses of that period of student unrest”.[7]
Despite being an academic botanist, Ashby worked extensively on the history of universities and on observations and recommendations for higher education around the world. Challenge to Education was a book directed at the Australian system, based on pamphlets and radio broadcasts he had made while in Australia in the 1940s.[8] Later books that represent his educational interests include Diversity of Universities in the Commonwealth (1964), Technology and the Academics (1966), Universities: British, Indian, African; a study in the ecology of higher education (1966) Rise of the Student Estate in Britain (1970), Any person, any study: an essay on Higher Education in the United States (1971), and Adapting Universities to a Technological Society (1974).[9]
Ashby’s agenda was multiple of course, but included, while he was in Australia, securing support for increased public funding of the universities. There were many compelling arguments for increasing public funding to universities – though Ashby didn’t use them all for reasons I will discuss. Before exploring Ashby’s particular contributions, we will consider the political and social environment that made this the case.
When Ashby and Vernon prepared their 1942 submission to the Curtin government they reported:
The Vice-Chancellors of Universities were asked whether they would make available members of their scientific staffs… From the answers we have received it is clear that the Universities are anxious to make as big a contribution as possible to the war.[10]
This paragraph shows Ashby and Vernon’s assumptions that the government had no right to expect universities to contribute to the national war effort – a polite, comparatively timid, request was the most government could do. Participation in the war effort is evidence not that the universities were beholden to the Commonwealth government but that Vice-Chancellors, scientists and other university staff felt duty-bound as citizens to make their individual and chosen contribution to national needs.[11] This statement suggests that there was no sense that the government, the public or the nation “owned” (in the sense of having a right to access) universities or the knowledge within them. Academic work was entirely in the domain of individual academics, unmonitored by the outside world, since State government participants were generally limited to roles in institutional governance and management.
The war created the conditions that could change this. The visibility and value of academic contributions to the war demonstrated that the public and the nation had a stake in academic work. As Geoffrey Blainey described it:
Australia had become the arsenal of the South Pacific, and in the training of urgently-required experts and in the needs of technical research the universities assumed a new importance.[12]
Ashby himself called it a “war of experts” adding that “experts are often (though by no means invariably) academic men”.[13] “Spectacular” and “ingenious” research projects had been the crucial and highly visible contributions by the universities to the war – and when the war was over, new funding for universities was almost inevitable.[14] The need to coordinate knowledge and expertise for the war was most efficiently managed centrally – a structure that had the potential for shifting academic work from individual pursuit to what became commonly known amongst academics as working in a knowledge “service station” for the government and public service.[15]
This centralised control emerged in the form of resource allocation and was greatly concerned with the flow of expertise and qualifications into the right parts of the nation at the right time. Government thus controlled the flow of students through the universities, providing new types of funding (also supporting new types of students) through the Ministry of War Organisation of Industry, led by John Dedman.[16] Dedman established the Universities Commission whose brief was to advise on the allocation of resources during the war – and, importantly, on planning after it.[17] But controlling the flow of expertise by controlling the flow of students did not amount to full control or full funding of university functions. The main change in that particular initiative was in the types of students recruited, which Dedman openly hoped would widen participation and function as a first step towards a reformed Higher Education sector.[18]
This future planning role makes it clear that the establishment of the Universities Commission in 1943, though necessary for organising the war effort, was also seen as an opportunity to centralise at least some coordination of the universities, probably especially funding (which the states were struggling to do at anything resembling an adequate level).[19] There were, of course, constitutional issues that had to be got around before recurrent funding from the Commonwealth could be made available – issues not finally resolved until the Murray report was accepted by the Menzies government in 1957.[20] In the 1940s, the first federal funding, allocated for items of national importance, also brought some of the first inklings of Commonwealth control – administrative control, largely. In the following exchange, for example, universities were required to submit plans for buildings, have them approved by the State that actually held responsibility for the university and then submit the plans to the Universities Commission to be deemed nationally significant. Sir Robert Wallace, Vice Chancellor of the University of Sydney in 1946 was most frank about his dissatisfaction with the need for government approval of specific funds:
Sir Robert Wallace: They [the “Federal people”] don't understand the problem. There should be no difficulty at all. Sydney has put in for nothing it has not absolutely needed....if you can get us some freedom from this long round about way, and expensive and stupid way of doing things, we can get ahead. What has the State to do with it?
Chair [Professor RC Mills, Chair of the Universities Commission]: I don't think the universities have been held up because of any requirements.
Wallace: Could you use your influence with the State government?
Mr Hook [Secretary of the Universities Commission]: Are you in a position to tell us what you want the Premier to agree to?
Wallace: To leave us alone.
RC Mills: The delay at the moment is that you must have some plans and you won't tell us about them...We have to certify for the Prime Minister that it is essential..."
Wallace: What I am asking is that you give us the money and be done with it.
RC Mills: It is a large sum of money and when the Government says "we gave this subsidy, did the universities find it all right?" we must be able to say something more than just "Trust the Universities".
Wallace: I think that is the wrong attitude.[21]
Eric Ashby was, in a way, in a more privileged position than Wallace, since at that time he did not need to deal with the struggles to build and equip a university and pay the salaries of its staff. As a charming character, too, Ashby was also less likely than Wallace to earn the exasperation of his government colleagues. Nor did Ashby (yet) have to attend long and (from reading the minutes) boring conferences with other Vice Chancellors and the Commission. Ashby was free to comment on higher education as he saw fit, to publish pamphlets and to broadcast his views on radio. But it is not just because of his charming demeanour – and perhaps a British revulsion towards grubby discussions of money (one can’t imagine Ashby ever saying, “give us the money and be done with it”, for instance) – that he spoke about university funding very differently.
There were a lot of reasons for universities and academics to argue for increased (federal) funding – the new sense of the strategic and economic importance of new (especially scientific and technological) knowledge to the nation, the economic necessity for increased numbers of graduates, and the national service performed by academics. These were some of the arguments presented by Prime Minister Robert Menzies to the Federal Parliament with Murray’s 1957 report.[22] Through Commonwealth implementation of this report and on the basis of these arguments, universities in Australia were understood and funded as a whole (albeit loose) system and that the idea of the university became attached to the idea of the nation. Interestingly, in the 1940s, Eric Ashby used none of these arguments, though they were certainly available to him. Ashby’s quote earlier about the “war of experts” is part of an argument to allow a better pathway from academic study to the public service. His broadcast did ask for more funding but for very different reasons.
In common with Keith Murray, Ashby saw academia as a vocation, the university as a sort of secular-ecclesiastical community and positioned the academic as hero, conferring on him (he does seem to have been consistently male) similar meanings to those enjoyed by the literary author since the 16th Century.[23] For, while Murray used the expected arguments for substantial central funding of universities, he was also keen to promote the image a particular academic ideal. Murray was quite poetic about this ideal academic’s romantic (as in loving) devotion to knowledge:
These men have no immediate practical aim or profit in view: they are simply “knowledge-intoxicated” men who love the life of intellectual effort and inquiry for its own sake, and will devote their lives to it if they possibly can. Though this pure pursuit of truth seems to many to be a rather inhuman, and to some a rather super-human, kind of life, there are fortunately far more of them than most people would have thought possible.[24]
Murray was drawing on an assortment of ideas to convey an essentialised academic; some romantic, some ecclesiastical, some aristocratic. The first important characteristic was that the academic’s work was not for profit, drawing on ideas of the aristocrat who does not do anything so demeaning as work for money.
As McSherry has shown, the idea of producing knowledge for profit – such as patenting invention – was long constructed as the opposite of academic work.[25] The implication was that where there was self-interest and the reward of labour was financial gain, knowledge was not only inherently less “pure”, it was also produced with a view to shorter-term benefits than (so-called) universal truths, or knowledge that has enduring value. We can see the influence of ecclesiastical ideas in which earthly gain may be exchanged for heavenly reward, or as Murray put it:
[We must become] less hypnotized by what is ephemeral and temporary and more sensitive to the fundamental laws which govern human destiny.[26]
Knowledge was the centre of academic and professional pursuits, said Abraham Flexner in 1930, where individuals “free from selfish aims” look to “larger and nobler ends than the satisfaction of personal ambitions” for which “the achievement of these objects incidentally brings in a livelihood”.[27]
Academic work thus gained its authority and credibility from what Ashby called “disinterested curiosity”, drawing on both notions of objectivity (or lack of personal benefit from the inquiry) and the status of aristocratic leisure that enabled this type of curiosity.[28]
Intellectual revolutions are often the product of leisure, even though they cannot be completed without immense industry.[29]
Ashby was not intending to convey status in this quote, but he does draw on its meanings to demonstrate the value of academic work. In Ashby’s writing, the ecclesiastical vocation to poverty combined with the status of aristocratic leisure to give the academic enhanced standing and moral imperative. This was intended to demonstrate value in academic work and gain public sympathy for its support.
The romantic (in this case, the nineteenth century intellectual movement) notion of the sublime, not uncommon in thinking about universities[30], also informed Ashby and Murray’s view of the university, in which education was immersion in an environment – and, in an ecclesiastical sense, for Ashby the “vocation” of the academic and the university was to create this environment, in which the “ideas which have shaped history” could emerge.[31] The vocation of academics and universities, according to Ashby, went beyond “knowledge” and “wisdom” – and also beyond the concern with morality and human values after the Second World War – to encompass the health of society, including intellectually. And since the intellectual health of society is only as good as its universities, universities must be funded:
Today our universities are the trustees of Australian intellectual life; despite their weakness, despite their unworthiness for this high office.[32]
“High office” denotes the sacred duty that both Ashby and Murray intended to convey, also suggested by the frequent use of the word “pure” in association with the pursuit of knowledge or research. “Pure” knowledge was that not only untainted by possible financial benefit but also untainted by “immediate practical aim”, as Murray described it. The equation of “practical aim” and “profit” in Murray’s description is important and represents that which was at the heart of the 1940s and 1950s discussion of “service station” as opposed to “real” universities. Ashby, too, construed “real” academics’ ideas as the opposite of those that have immediate utility:
Plato’s Republic was written for his own satisfaction, not as a Royal Commission report.[33]
Despite Ashby and Murray’s attempts to deflect our attention from grubby ideas about funding, we should not forget that funding is exactly what they were talking about. Murray was describing the role of universities, promoting their traditional functions as valuable, justifying to the Commonwealth why they should outlay a large sum of money for their support. Ashby’s description of the “unworthiness” of Australian universities for the role was his way of calling for increased funding. Despite being generally shy of discussing funding overtly, Ashby did, at one point, tell his audience that “men of the highest quality can not be secured and held cheaply” – reminding us that a reasonable amount of the 1940s and 1950s discussion about the role and value of academia to society is barely-concealed justification for increasing academic salaries.[34]
It was difficult for an academic to say that salaries needed increasing and still claim that their “vocation” was without thought for profit. The idea that academic work was conducted purely from non-financial motivations was important to Ashby, not just because academic legitimacy was borne out of its (curiously named) disinterest, but also to ensure that the funding-state understood its place in the academic scheme of things – for you cannot buy people who don’t care about money.
Ashby was concerned that provision of the much-needed funds to ensure universities were able to fulfil their “high office” might, in undermining academic freedom, once again prevent universities from performing their role:
In Australia it is extremely important that the tradition of academic freedom should be preserved, and that advantage should be taken of it: for the opportunities for political and sectarian interference in education are greater here than in other British countries.[35]
Indeed, in Geoffrey Blainey’s 1956 history of Melbourne University he suggests that university decisions and statements were regularly made with one eye on its “financial aid of the state” – an attitude by the universities that Jim Cairns, Federal Member for Yarra when the Murray report was presented, described as “pigeon-livered” – but which must have nevertheless been perceived as a genuine financial risk by the universities.[36]
Certainly Ashby would have been aware of the risk. But he was also too masterful an author and too charming a man to simply tell government its place, in the way that Wallace felt he could. Years later in the UK, Ashby would describe relationship of universities to funding governments with his characteristic optimism:
Something like 85 per cent of he cost of running our autonomous universities comes from public funds. Alarmists in the British academic world fear government control and cry: 'Hands off the universities!' I do not share this alarm, for universities have always depended upon patrons to finance them, and over a stretch of seven centuries they have learnt how to dissuade their patrons - princes, bishops, tycoons, alumni - from meddling in their affairs.[37]
In Australia, the way he sought to dissuade the new emerging patron of the universities (the public) from meddling in them was to subtly position academic freedom – space for uncorrupted, disinterested inquiry and fearless speech – as the real reward for academic heroism.[38] This was a very convenient payment, because it enabled academics to do their job, which was apparently all they ever wished for. This “disinterested curiosity”, for Ashby, was the reason academics maintained ownership over knowledge, for they could never be bought.
We would be wrong to conclude, from all this, that Ashby’s traditional image of academia reflected a conservative approach to higher education. In Australia and elsewhere Ashby was intimately involved in the transformation of universities to serve new social needs that integrated scientific and technological development – but he was always careful to do so in a way that would preserve the integrity of academic freedom and thus the “purity” of the academic pursuit.
While Ashby’s discussions of the traditional academic were intended to retain academic freedom while securing funding, Murray most likely discussed it in his report because the topic that was causing a great deal of angst amongst everyone interested in universities at the time of the report, was technological education in universities. Technology in universities was discussed extensively in parliament when the Murray report was presented[39], it was recorded as a concern in the submission to the Committee by every university (except, unsurprisingly, the NSW University of Technology)[40] – and it was the subject of friendly debate in the correspondence between Eric Ashby and Ian Clunies Ross.[41]
The issue of technological education was associated with several intersecting debates taking place amongst academics, policy makers and politicians. These debates regarded the relationship of universities to the society and the economic system in which they were situated, what characterised a “real” university and the nature of the academic vocation. The changes confronting higher education in Australia and globally was a result of the increased intricacy of the relationship between “pure” and “applied” knowledge, “science” and “technology”, professional and vocational education, knowledge for “love” and its economic and financial implications.[42]
For some it was also a class issue – John Anderson (Professor of Philosophy at Sydney University) made an attack in song on the University of New South Wales (NSW University of Technology) describing it as a university that reflected the aspirations of the “proletarian throng”.[43] Menzies betrayed similar sentiments, slightly more subtly, in a speech entitled “The Place of the University in the Modern Community”:
A friend of mine was recently asked for employment by a man claiming to have a degree of M.S. from an American University. On expressing astonishment that a graduate in Science or Surgery should be seeking a minor commercial post, he was staggered to be told that the degree was one of Master of Salesmanship! If I am to choose between this kind of spurious scholarship and the much laughed at pride of the Indian Babu who puts ‘Failed B.A.’ after his name, I shall select the Failed B.A. ’Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.[44]
There is much at work in this paragraph that could distract us: fear of the effect of American values on British ideals; the patronising description of the Indian Babu; the assumption of Science and Surgery as intellectual high culture, over the “minor” character of a commercial position and salesmanship; and finally, love (over instrumental value) of knowledge, making the failed BA the preferred option. The multi-layered message of elitism is unmissable. Labor politicians were not immune to this either – in 1957 the previous government’s Education Minister, Kim (Edward) Beazley declared a University of Technology to be “a complete misnomer” and evidence of a type of Philistinism that may have influenced some of the unethical science conducted in Nazi Germany.[45]
From a somewhat different perspective to Menzies, while in Australia, Ashby was also opposed to including many vocational disciplines into university education:
Academic snobbishness is, of course, not unknown … but the resistance to journalism, salesmanship and such is legitimate”.[46]
He gives a criterion for inclusion of disciplines to the academy, which on the surface sounds highly conservative. Subjects that borrow from an older study (“as journalism does from literature”) do not belong at university for they are vocationalist rather than traditional academic.[47] Moreover while he does draw on meaning derived from a leisured class, his concern was for what he perceived to be the fundamental – and sustaining – value of universities to society:
Universities are concerned first of all with the needs of society, which are not the same as its desires...If universities consented to teach these [journalism, advertising, typewriting and salesmanship] subjects, a real public demand would be satisfied. This, too, no one denies. But satisfying public demands is not the university’s business: it is not a state-subsidized intellectual department store.[48]
Knowledge, according the traditional, Newman-derived perspective on liberal education, is its own end: in this (including Ashby’s) construction, it has no necessary adherence to any belief, politics or purpose other than its own existence and furtherance. And it is this self-referencing purpose that allows it to be truly autonomous, according to the tradition of liberal education. But purveyors of this conception of universities have always struggled to be cautious not to be irresponsibly cloistered from the realities of the world.[49] (flexner p.21-24). One way this was achieved, was to see autonomous universities as an important component of the world beyond it – a component that, if it was to become less autonomous, would fail to fulfil its role to society.
Ashby’s declaration of faith in liberal education contains with it an implicit understanding of knowledge as the foundation of a civilised society.[50] Ian Clunies Ross put the issue most clearly in a letter to Ashby:
My fear is that as science and technology draw from an increasingly large proportion of those best endowed intellectually, we will have fewer and fewer men [sic] capable of contemplating in any adequate way the problems of national or international society.[51]
This is a conversation between two scientists, who were not alone in analysing a fear that with a lower proportion of people educated in the humanities (despite the fact that the total would probably be higher), the humanity of society might also lessen. The war had left a significant uncertainty about the moral underpinnings of a civilised society[52]. The fact that Beazley (Senior) had compared technological universities to the science conducted in Nazi Germany is evidence of the uncertainty present – especially regarding the control of knowledge – and the perceived role of universities in the guardianship of society through the protection and pursuit of knowledge as a civilising commodity.[53]
Ashby, like many others, had come to realise that an increase in technological education in universities was not only an expectation of the government, on whose purse the universities increasingly relied, but a necessity for the common good. He wrote two books on this subject and in his correspondence with Ian Clunies Ross, Ashby discussed “technological humanism” – technological education with no loss of humanity.[54] He was shortly to publish Technology and the Academics, which considered technology as a part of the long heritage of universities rather than as new and threatening.[55] Clunies Ross was not convinced, but it shows Ashby’s willingness to pursue change, while also maintaining a deep commitment to the ideals of liberal academia.
The approaches to intellectual leadership that both Clunies Ross and Eric Ashby took demonstrate a sense of responsibility to the protection and furtherance of knowledge, always with a view to its role underpinning humane civilisation. Later – during the period of student unrest in the 1960s and 1970s – we are able to see that this vision of academic work as leadership to society was informed by a hierarchical epistemology. This hierarchy of knowledge was also what meant the university must be hierarchical – and both were unacceptable to the new student movement that tended to see knowledge in such a form, and the exercise of its authority, as power and violence.[56] Ashby’s personal schema, in which knowledge and its exercise were civil responsibilities, understood hierarchically only to ensure the most able were positioned to take their responsibility appropriately, ensured that Ashby was unable to fully understand the student position.
Though he did his best. Both The Rise of the Student Estate and Masters and Scholars, both published in 1970 are sympathetic pieces of work that indicate a strong sense of inclusion of students in all aspects of the university community.[57] But Ashby saw this as continuous from earlier student participation and protest and was unable to see that the reason these particular students were causing so much trouble is that they were, broadly, concerned to change the very structure of knowledge itself – and thus the structure of the university and the role of professors like Ashby.
When Clunies Ross wrote to Ashby in 1956 to congratulate him on his knighthood he said:
I cannot pretend I was surprised in any way since it was as inevitable as the night follows the day.[58]
Ashby’s reply – and the whole of collection of letters, actually – suggests that both Ashby and Clunies Ross saw knowledge as underpinning society – a sort of foundation on which leaders might build advanced applications or construct new ideas. As leaders in knowledge fields, they held particular responsibility to society. It is this public duty more than any inherent qualities, hints Ashby, that biases them towards honours:
Yes, your honour, like mine, is an occupational risk of our professions. But poor administrators need a crumb of comfort occasionally. When I recollect the leisured life of a professor of Botany…[59]
Despite Ashby’s claims to leisured research and his belief in its importance to the university form, this statement is the only evidence of leisure in Ashby’s work and career. His drive to strategic as well as academic development was always substantial.[60]
Wallace’s reaction to accountability for public funding was encapsulated in his outburst of “I think that is the wrong attitude”, when, in 1946, RC Mills said that he could not tell the government to “trust the Universities”.[61] However, after the Murray report, trust was to be the foundation of the relationship between universities and the Commonwealth, but it was universities that would need to exercise trust of the committee Murray recommended the government put in place:
The universities…will have to give the Committee a full measure of trust if, in the end, they are to gain for themselves the facilities which they feel that they need and to play the part which the country expects of them.[62]
This paragraph – especially the “if” – suggests that trust by the universities of the government committee is not only a functional good, but that funding is contingent on a slight surrender of some of the universities’ managerial autonomy. It suggests a subtle repositioning of universities as a public utility, providing service in exchange for public funds. This is clearly quite different to the circumstances in which Ashby wrote to the universities in the early 1940s to politely inquire as to their willingness to contribute to the national need.
This is important in considering academic work, for it determined where the academic was positioned in relation to constructions of knowledge, authority and its ownership. Public funding probably necessarily makes the relationship between universities and government tense – and possibly more so than for other types of “patron” as Ashby described them. Public funds, as Conrad Russell put it, are granted by democratic consent and consent is difficult to grant unless details of expenditure are known – thus creating a requirement for accountability. However, according to Russell, academic freedom and the assumption that research investigates that which is not yet known and which may or may not have useful or significant outcomes, are contrary to the principles of accountability for funding.[63] This is why Ashby positioned the academic in such heroic terms, attempting to reduce academic purchasability. However, government was not positioning itself as the universities’ patron (though, possibly Menzies was, personally).[64] Rather, government agreed to fund universities because society needed them – a distinct exchange scenario. Some saw this as a need for more accountability than was being proposed by University-types at the time, including the Prime Minister. For example, Liberal Member for Warringah, Francis Bland, when the Murray report was submitted, suggested government take more control:
We need an investigation…with a view to seeing whether these additional moneys that are being provided by the Commonwealth will be used to the best advantage.[65]
The universities, according to most commentators, were increasingly acquiring a “Service Station” mode of being, which was normally construed as the opposite to the “Ivory Tower” model (so neither were particularly favourable).[66] While the “service station” is a poor image of the “high office” to which Ashby said Australian universities were called, it had tangible value that was justifiably fundable from the public treasury. PH Partridge, Professor of Social Philosophy at the Australian National University said, less than eight years after the Murray report was presented to parliament:
As time goes on, all universities, in all countries, will become increasingly influenced by the pressures of vocational or professional training. I cannot see how this can be avoided, because of the way in which universities are being more and more integrated into the economy, into modern social structures generally; because of the manner in which they are becoming part of the mechanism of modern society.[67]
Some of this is a part of the debate between the value of “pure” and “applied” knowledge, which is not entirely divorced from the separation of knowledge for profit and knowledge for enduring reward. But it is also a question of lowering the barriers between the knowers, or those who held “mastery” over knowledge, and the rest of the world, allowing a greater integration of university-based knowledge with all other kinds. This changed the position of both university and academic in relation to the society and the governments that funded it:
It is no longer a wry jest: universities are now, in considerable part, public utilities or instrumentalities. They are being increasingly supported by governments from public funds because they carry out public functions, as hospitals and public transport systems do.[68]
The value of universities had increased during the second world war so that everyone wanted a piece of it – it was now too valuable to be left solely in the hands of academics. Sol Encel, political scientist at the Australian National University (later Professor of Sociology at the University of NSW) said that a consequence of expansion in higher education was that “education itself has become the property of economists, sociologists, planners and politicians”.[69]
Such change could not be effected without also changing the character of academic work, though it was with some shock that the Association of University Staff discovered that “the relationship of the University to a professor is that of master to servant”.[70] This discovery was made in the Orr case, which was a cause célèbre in the 1950s, in which Sydney Sparkes Orr was dismissed for misconduct from the University of Tasmania – an example, potentially, for government and the public, of the possibility for abuses of the power attached to academic authority. Interest in the case in academic circles often surrounded a potential breach of the principles of academic freedom in his dismissal.[71] But for the Association of University Staff, the disturbing reality was that academics were no longer autonomous masters of knowledge but employees of the University, paid to provide an academic service.[72] Since the state had contributed to the perception that knowledge was purchasable and positioned the universities as contractors, the authority of the academic started to be undermined.
This might sound quite melodramatic, but if we recall the socially formulated basis for academic authority, it is not so surprising. Academic authority, as Eric Ashby highlighted, was based on its separation from financial gain, utilitarian application and other worldly cares. Academic work, in loosening its cloistered character and breaking down its separation from other forms of knowledge, also undermined the source of its own authority. The perception that knowledge was purchasable – that funding from the state could purchase knowledge for society – may also have contributed to a loss of authority. It must certainly have contributed to the sense that knowledge could no longer be owned solely by the academics, even those who produced it, since society was paying to purchase it.
As a historian of education, as well as botanist, educational administrator and intellectual leader, Eric Ashby drew on images of academic work that would support the university system he wanted to see in place. This system was progressive and was being systematically transformed to enhance its relevance to society, which increasingly including instrumental and technological education. However, the system he hoped for was also genuinely autonomous and acted as a guardian of existing knowledge and promoted living, growing pure thought, regardless of its apparent relevance. For, while Ashby identified the increasing importance of new knowledge to society he also said that they were not “intellectual shopping centres” where consumers could expect to purchase any knowledge that they wished for.[73] Both his criteria for inclusion as university knowledge and his conception of the role of academics and academic leaders were quite traditional. It is clear from Ashby’s work – both written and enacted – that these traditional images were necessary to sustain, in his mind, the academic freedom of individuals and institutions and the humane knowledge that underpinned a civilised society.
However, despite Ashby’s efforts, the system that supported the traditional academic would be begin to be undermined within the period of Ashby’s university career by three related forces. Firstly, although academics who do not care about money can not be purchased, public funding always requires public consent – and public consent requires knowledge. As a result, the barriers that formerly divided the academy from the society in which it was situated were weakened and the distinction between university-based knowledge and all other kinds became decreasingly clear. Ashby’s optimism about universities’ capacity to manage their patrons and his determination to see universities’ problems as a continuation of their long heritage meant that he operated as though his own cosmology was true. As a result, in the end, he failed to really address the consequences of change.
The process of investigating and convincing government and the public that universities should be publicly funded was based on the usefulness of universities and university-based knowledge to the economy and to the emerging issues of post-war society. In this way, knowledge was positioned as purchasable commencing a process of commodification. Furthermore, academic labour was perceived and valued no longer as the leisured, pure inquiry of academic Masters, but as employed labour in service to each university – which was in turn now in service to its society. Ashby may have wished to retain the traditional academic’s independent and disinterested inquiry – but in the new economic and political environment and with public funding, they were necessarily performing intellectual labour in exchange for financial gain. Academic authority – based on its difference to the meaner, more worldly financial gain associated with other forms of knowledge – began to be undermined.[1] Sir Rutherford Robertson, "Eric Ashby: Letter for University of Sydney Gazette," in Eric Ashby (Biographical) (Sydney: University of Sydney Archives, 1993), 73-77.
[2] Anonymous, "Botany's Service to Commerce " Sydney Morning Herald 25 February 1938. Anonymous, "Eric Ashby," Daily Telegraph 22 February 1938. Unknown, "Unlabelled Press Clipping of Eric Ashby's Arrival in Sydney," in Eric Ashby Biographical File 961 (Sydney: University of Sydney Archives, 1938).
[3] Ian Clunies Ross, "Eric Ashby (Personal Correspondence)," in Ian Clunies Ross (Canberra: National Archives of Australia, 1949-1959). NAA/ICR20/5
[4] Eric Ashby and J. Vernon, "The Enlistment of Scientific Resources in the War Effort. Report to the Rt Hon. The Prime Minister April 21st 1942," (Fisher Rare Books: 1942). Alan Burges and Richard J Eden, "Ashby, Eric, Baron Ashby (1904–1992)," in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
[5] Eric Ashby, "Letter to Ian Clunies Ross, 23 September 1949," in Ian Clunies Ross Collection: Eric Ashby (Personal Correspondence) (Canberra: National Archives of Australia, 1949). NAA/ICR20/5
[6] Ashby, "Letter to Ian Clunies Ross, 23 September 1949."
[7] Robertson, "Eric Ashby: Letter for University of Sydney Gazette."
[8] Eric Ashby, Challenge to Education (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1946).
[9] Eric Ashby, "The Diversity of Universities in the Commonwealth," The Australian University 2, no. 1 (1964). Eric Ashby, Technology and the Academics: An Essay on Universities and the Scientific Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1958). Eric Ashby, Any Person, Any Study: An Essay on Higher Education in the United States (New York: McGraw Hill, 1971). Eric Ashby and Mary Anderson, Universities: British, Indian, African; a Study in the Ecology of Higher Education (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966). Eric Ashby, Adapting Universities to a Technological Society (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1974). Eric Ashby and Mary Anderson, The Rise of the Student Estate in Britain (London: Macmillan, 1970).
[10] Ashby and Vernon, "The Enlistment of Scientific Resources in the War Effort. Report to the Rt Hon. The Prime Minister April 21st 1942," 125.
[11] cf Andrew Spaull, Australian Education in the Second World War (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1982), 225.
[12] Geoffrey Blainey, The University of Melbourne: A Centenary Portrait (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1956), 30.
[13] Eric Ashby, "The Tenpenny Universities: Originally Broadcast in 1942," in The Challenge to Education, ed. Eric Ashby (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1946).
[14] Spaull, Australian Education in the Second World War, 220-22.
[15] Australian-Vice-Chancellor's'-Committee, "Submission by the Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee to the Committee on Australian Universities 4th July 1957 Naa/Cau/Alluniv/8," in Committee on Australian Universities (Canberra: National Archives of Australia, 1957).
[16] John J. Dedman, "Universities Commission. What It Is and What It Does.," ed. Department of War Organisation of Industry (Sydney: 1944).
[17] Andrew Spaull, John Dedman: A Most Unexpected Labor Man (Melbourne: Hyland House, 1998), 64-65.
[18] Dedman, "Universities Commission. What It Is and What It Does.."
[19] Universities-Commission, "Minutes of the Conference of the Universities Commission with Vice-Chancellors of Australia Held at 119 Phillip Street Sydney 4-6 September 1946," (National Archives of Australia 1946).
[20] P.D. Tannock, The Government of Education in Australia: The Origins of Federal Policy (Nedlands, WA: University of Western Australia Press, 1975), P.D. Tannock and I.K. Birch, "Constitutional Responsibility for Education in Australia: The Federal Government's Latent Power," Australian Journal of Education 16, no. 2 (1972).
[21] Universities-Commission, "Minutes of the Conference of the Universities Commission with Vice-Chancellors of Australia Held at 119 Phillip Street Sydney 4-6 September 1946." NAA/SP36/21
[22] House of Representatives Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, "Universities Committee Report 28 November 1957," (1957).
[23] Pamela O. Long, "Invention, Authorship, "Intellectual Property," And the Origin of Patents: Notes toward a Conceptual History," Technology and Culture 32, no. 4 Special Issue: Patents and Invention (1991): 847. On the role of the author-function for textual legitimacy see Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice : Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977). See also Corynne McSherry, Who Owns Academic Work? Battling for Control of Intellectual Property (Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001), 39-40.
[24] Keith A.H. Murray et al., "Report of the Committee on Australian Universities," (1957).
[25] McSherry, Who Owns Academic Work? Battling for Control of Intellectual Property, 37.
[26] Murray et al., "Report of the Committee on Australian Universities," 11.
[27] Abraham Flexner, Universities: American English German (London: Oxford University Press, 1930), 29-30.
[28] McSherry, Who Owns Academic Work? Battling for Control of Intellectual Property, 37. Eric Ashby, "Universities in Australia, Originally ACER Pamphlet, 1944," in Challenge to Education, ed. Eric Ashby (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1946), 77.
[29] Ashby, "Universities in Australia, Originally ACER Pamphlet, 1944," 77.
[30] see Jacques Derrida, Catherine Porter, and Edward P. Morris, "The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of Its Pupils " Diacritics 13, no. 3 (1983).
[31] Ashby, "Universities in Australia, Originally ACER Pamphlet, 1944," 77.
[32] Ashby, "Universities in Australia, Originally ACER Pamphlet, 1944," 74.
[33] Ashby, "Universities in Australia, Originally ACER Pamphlet, 1944," 77-78.
[34] K. Buckley and E.L. Wheelwright, "Commentary on the Murray Report," Vestes 1, no. 1 (1958).
[35] Ashby, Challenge to Education, vi.
[36] Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, "Universities Committee Report 28 November 1957," 2711.
[37] Eric Ashby, Masters and Scholars: Reflections of the Rights and Responsibilities of Students, The Whidden Lectures for 1970 (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 10.
[38] Ashby, "The Tenpenny Universities: Originally Broadcast in 1942," 70. Ashby, "Universities in Australia, Originally ACER Pamphlet, 1944," 77-79. Ashby, Challenge to Education.
[39] Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, "Universities Committee Report 28 November 1957."
[40] Various, "Submissions to the Committee on Australian Universities," (Canberra: National Archives of Australia A7691, 1957).
[41] Clunies Ross, "Eric Ashby (Personal Correspondence)."
[42] Flexner, Universities: American English German, 18-19.
[43] John Anderson, 1961 song "Philosophical Blues", quoted in Patrick O'Farrell, UNSW: A Portrait. The University of New South Wales 1949-1999 (Sydney: UNSW Press, 1999).
[44] Robert Gordon Menzies, "The Place of a University in the Modern Community," in An Address Delivered at the Annual Commencement of the Canberra University College (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1939), 10-11.
[45] Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, "Universities Committee Report 28 November 1957," 2717.
[46] Ashby, "Universities in Australia, Originally ACER Pamphlet, 1944," 80.
[47] Ashby, "Universities in Australia, Originally ACER Pamphlet, 1944," 81. For definitions of the distinction in types of university knowledge, see Peter Goodyear, "Technology and the Articulation of Vocational and Academic Interests: Reflecting on Time, Space and E-Learning," Studies in Continuing Education 28, no. 2 (2006).
[48] Ashby, "Universities in Australia, Originally ACER Pamphlet, 1944," 80-82.
[49] Flexner, Universities: American English German, 21-24.
[50] See Jaroslav Pelikan, The Idea of the University: A Reexamination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
[51] I Clunies Ross, "Letter to Eric Ashby (4 May 1956)," in Ian Clunies Ross Collection: Eric Ashby (Personal Correspondence) (Canberra: National Archives of Australia, 1956).
[52] SG Foster and Margaret M Varghese, The Making of the Australian National University (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1996), 19.
[53] Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, "Universities Committee Report 28 November 1957," 2717.
[54] Clunies Ross, "Letter to Eric Ashby (4 May 1956)."
[55] Ashby, Technology and the Academics: An Essay on Universities and the Scientific Revolution.
[56] Michel Foucault, "Truth and Power," in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972).
[57] Ashby and Anderson, The Rise of the Student Estate in Britain. Ashby, Masters and Scholars: Reflections of the Rights and Responsibilities of Students.
[58] I Clunies Ross, "Letter to Eric Ashby (23 March1956)," in Ian Clunies Ross Collection: Eric Ashby (Personal Correspondence) (Canberra: National Archives of Australia, 1956).
[59] Eric Ashby, "Letter to Ian Clunies Ross, 28 March 1956," in Ian Clunies Ross Collection: Eric Ashby (Personal Correspondence) (Canberra: National Archives of Australia, 1956).
[60] Peter Froggart, "Eric Ashby," in Queen's Thinkers: Essays on the Intellectual Heritage of a University, ed. Alvin Jackson (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2008), 117.
[61] Universities-Commission, "Minutes of the Conference of the Universities Commission with Vice-Chancellors of Australia Held at 119 Phillip Street Sydney 4-6 September 1946."
[62] Murray et al., "Report of the Committee on Australian Universities," 107.
[63] Conrad Russell, Academic Freedom (London: Routledge, 1993), 10.
[64] Bob Bessant, "Robert Gordon Menzies and Education in Australia," Melbourne Studies in Education 1977, no. Edited by Stephen Murray-Smith (1977).
[65] Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, "Universities Committee Report 28 November 1957," 2714-17.
[66] For example, see Australian-Vice-Chancellor's'-Committee, "Submission by the Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee to the Committee on Australian Universities 4th July 1957 Naa/Cau/Alluniv/8," 7.
[67] P.H. Partridge, "Comment on the Social Role of Higher Education by S Encel," in Higher Education in Australia, ed. E.L. Wheelwright (Melbourne: F.W Cheshire, 1965), 34.
[68] Partridge, "Comment on the Social Role of Higher Education by S Encel," 34.
[69] S. Encel, "The Social Role of Higher Education," in Higher Education in Australia, ed. E.L. Wheelwright (Melbourne: F.W Cheshire, 1965).
[70] R.H. Thorp and K. Buckley, "Report on a Visit to the Tasmanian Association," Vestes 1, no. 5 (1958).
[71] Cassandra Pybus, Gross Moral Turpitude: The Orr Case Reconsidered (Melbourne: William Heinemann Australia, 1993), 73-77.
[72] Thorp and Buckley, "Report on a Visit to the Tasmanian Association."
[73] Ashby, "Universities in Australia, Originally ACER Pamphlet, 1944."