Robert Menzies and Australia’s Universities

Presentation to the Robert Menzies Institute, University of Melbourne 7 September 2023  Michael Wesley 

I am privileged to live, work and learn on the ancient, unceded lands of the Wurundjeri and Woi-Wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation.

At this place, Narrm, knowledge has been created, shared and curated for thousands of generations – knowledge that was forgotten, destroyed or purloined but is now crucial to our understanding of how to live sustainably in this place.

I acknowledge and celebrate the elders and ancestors of the traditional owners of this land, and to any indigenous people here.

Thank you to Georgina and the Robert Menzies Institute for the invitation to speak tonight.

I am proud to work for a university that played such a foundational role in the formation of one of this nation’s greatest leaders, and it is fitting that the University remembers Sir Robert Menzies with a dedicated Institute and Prime Ministerial collection.

Tonight I want to speak about the vision Menzies had for Australia’s universities, and about his role in creating the modern Australian university sector.

In fact, I’m going to annoy many Menzies historians and enthusiasts by suggesting that Menzies’ contribution to Australia’s university sector was the greatest of his many achievements as our longest-serving Prime Minister.

I think Menzies was the only Australian leader to articulate a clear and ambitious vision for the role of universities in Australian society – a role I explore in my recent book, Mind of the Nation: Universities in Australian Life.

I want to discuss four aspects of Menzies’ vision for universities and his role in creating the modern Australian university system.

First I want to document the catalytic role Menzies played in taking a marginalised and in many ways moribund university system in Australia and breathing into it a grand vision and ambition, without which we would not have the university system that Australia has today.

Second, I want to discuss Menzies’ strong views on what universities should do – views that were significantly at variance with the prevailing orthodoxy in Australia about what universities were for.

Third, I will address Menzies’ vision of what universities are for – what purpose they serve in society.

Fourth, I’ll touch on the role Menzies saw for the state in higher education, and why that vision translated into two successive step-changes in Australia’s university sector.

My conclusion will argue that each of the last three facets of Menzies’ vision for Australia’s universities has been under sustained attack for the past 30 years.

Surveying the sector today, I believe Menzies would be appalled and alarmed at the state and direction of universities in Australia.

II

On a warm evening in Canberra, 28 November 1957, Prime Minister Robert Menzies rose in Parliament to table a report he had commissioned into the state of Australia’s universities.

The review had been chaired by Sir Keith Murray, the chairman of the UK University Grants Commission, and was the result of sustained lobbying by the Australian Vice Chancellors Committee, including at several well-lubricated dinners at University House on this campus.

Why had a review been called?

Well, we should pause to consider the state of the Australian university sector in November 1957.

Before the Second World War, six universities had been established – one in each state capital. The ANU in Canberra, UNSW in Sydney, and Monash in Melbourne were founded just after the war.

In the words of A W Martin, at that time Australia’s established universities “were small, poor, and for the most part treated with indifference by a society hardly renowned for its concern about things of the mind.”

As a state responsibility, universities existed in a state of perpetual funding crisis, subsisting on a combination of state grants, student fees, and philanthropy.

In 1957, there were 36,815 students at Australia’s universities – a fraction of a percent of the nation’s population of 9.6 million at the time.

They had absorbed 300,000 extra students under the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme in the decade following the end of the war, accommodating them in Nissen Huts and other temporary accommodation, straining their resources to the limits.

In the words of University of Melbourne Vice Chancellor Sir John Medley, the twin challenges facing Australia’s universities at the end of the war were “poverty and isolation.”

By 1952, the strain on resources and their inability to interest governments in the future of universities led the Vice Chancellors to take the unprecedented step of issuing a report titled A Crisis in the Finance and Development of Australian Universities.

The Report observed that “Universities are destined to play an increasingly important role in Australian development. Their future is a matter of grave concern to you and to every other member of the community. Yet there is an alarming degree of public apathy regarding their affairs.”

Whether they knew it or not, they had a friendly ear in the Prime Minister. He agreed to commission a review of the university sector, to be headed by the Chair of the UK’s University Grants Commission, Sir Keith Murray.

Menzies accepted the proposals of the Murray Report to create an Australian Universities Committee, to oversee the expansion of university access in order to provide the levels of education Australian society would need in the future.

Even more important was Menzies’ acceptance that the Commonwealth should dramatically increase its financing of universities’ operational and infrastructure funding from ￡6 million per year for 1957 to ￡22 million per year for 1958, 1959 and 1960.

These were outlays that dwarfed the contributions of the states, and set the ground for the Commonwealth taking over the funding and regulation of Australia’s universities. It was only with the Commonwealth’s fiscal resources behind them that Australia’s universities were able to proliferate, expand and prosecute more ambitious research agendas.

Later, in 1965, would come another burst of funding – this time to develop and expand a network of technical and vocational, teaching-only Colleges of Advanced Education.

We can trace from that moment in 1957, I believe, the incredible expansion of Australia’s university system, and its increasingly central role in the nation’s life.

Menzies’ intervention in 1957 set the scene for the proliferation of universities and colleges of advanced education in every state and territory over the next two decades and the beginning of an accelerating process of expansion of access to them.

By 2020, there were almost 1.5 million student studying at Australia’s 42 universities, representing about 6 per cent of the population. By that year, 49 per cent of Australians between 25 and 64 had a tertiary qualification. It was 55% of those between 25 to 34, the 9th highest proportion in the OECD.

It was Professor Hugh Stretton, Dean of Arts at the University of Adelaide, who characterised Menzies’ impact on Australia’s universities best:

“… in about 20 years from the onset of the Menzies reforms our universities were transformed, and contributed noticeably to transforming our society. They became respectable members of the international league and substantial contributors to our own economy and culture.  We should not forget who contrived that: a Liberal Prime Minister [who] decided to revolutionise the universities.”

III

Menzies’ vision for transforming Australia’s universities was no thought-bubble. He had a passionate view of what universities should be – a view he returned to repeatedly during his political apprenticeship.

It was also a view that was completely at odds with the orthodoxy that had prevailed in Australia since the founding of its first universities in the 1850s.

In fact, Menzies’ view of universities was founded deeply in his political philosophy, that a liberal society required citizens who had the benefit of a liberal university education.

In the words of Greg Melleuish, there was “a very powerful connection between Menzies’ educational ideals and his lifelong attachment to the Westminster system of government. Liberal education would produce the sorts of people who possessed the capacities to make that system of government work properly.”

Liberalism, democracy and the Westminster parliamentary institutions were for Menzies central to Australia’s cultural inheritance from Britain – and so were its universities.

He believed universities were essential to the balance of a liberal society. Their concern with culture, society and the life of the mind were a counterbalance to the materialism and self-absorption of those engaged in business.

There was a strong element of the Romantic sensibility in Menzies’ championing of the life of the mind as a corrective to what he saw as the soulessness of industrial society.

In a speech he gave in 1937 he observed that economic development had created a “mechanical age” which had enabled advances “in the realm of bodily freedom” but without liberal education it would construct a society of individuals with “liberated bod[ies] but stunted [in] mind and … poor [in] spirit”.

For Menzies, universities were the antidote to the corrupting elements of modern society: the slide from liberty into licence, for the “sober presentation of facts by the press to degenerate into propaganda”, for cinema to “feed people’s imagination with an absurd diet of false sentiment and false values”; thereby creating “a race of people to whom leisure was the chief end of life and the insistence upon a standard of accuracy abhorrent.”

Against the corruptions of modernity and the consumer society must stand the university and its rigorous training of the mind:

Without minds that were informed, toughened by exercise, broadened by inquiry, and fearless in pursuit of the truth, [a people] could never hope to have spirits untrammelled by blinding ignorance or distorting prejudice. Freedom would never be gained without discipline, which was based on an intelligent understanding of the fact that order and unity were essential if the liberty of the individual was to be reconciled with the rights of other individuals.

Menzies had strong views on the rigorous mental training regimen that universities should provide members of a liberal society.

He rejected the view that the work of universities was solely professional training. In tabling the Murray Report in 1957 he said, “The University is not a professional ‘shop’, though in my day we used to identify our own by that mercantile name. As the word implies, the University must not be narrow or unduly specialist in its outlook. It must encourage the free search for the truth.”

The ’shop’ Menzies referred to was of course the University of Melbourne. Of course it had a formative influence on Menzies the student, but there is an additional way in which this University helped shaped his views on universities.

In 1933, when Attorney-General of Victoria, Menzies shepherded through the Legislative Assembly, funding for the University of Melbourne to appoint its first full time Vice Chancellor.

That person was Raymond Priestly, a scientist from Cambridge University. He proved to be an energetic reformer and public intellectual who was shocked at the impoverished and marginalised state of the University.

Priestly became a powerful voice for reform and the recognition of the importance of universities in society.

In a 1937 speech he proclaimed:

“Our job – the job of a university – is not to fill its students’ minds with facts. We need to teach them to think and give them time to think and read; to encourage them to criticise and use their brains; to show them how to weigh evidence … how to handle men and situations as well as things.”

Menzies and Priestley became friends, talking and corresponding regularly. They admired each other and clearly shared a view of what universities should do.

In 1957, Menzies told Parliament,

“Let us have more scientists, and more humanists. Let the scientists be touched and informed by the humanities. Let the humanists be touched and informed by science, so they may not be lost in abstractions derived from outdated knowledge or circumstances. That proposition underlies the whole university idea. It warrants and requires a great variety of faculties and a constant intermingling of those who engage in their disciplines.”

Such was his passion for a liberal education that when in 1965 his government established the Colleges of Advanced Education imparting technical and professional skills, Menzies argued they should also offer students “appropriate courses in the liberal arts”.

IV

In championing a liberal education that enriched individual and society intellectually and culturally, Menzies was swimming against the tide.

Australian views on higher education had been thoroughly instrumentalist since the founding of the Universities of Sydney and Melbourne in the 1850s.

Colonial governments founded universities as a state-building project: to provide training for the class of professionals needed by a growing society: doctors, lawyers, clergymen and so on.

In the 1850s in Europe, two distinct approaches to higher education sat side by side. One, exemplified by Oxford and Cambridge, emphasised a liberal, educative approach, training students to think and lead through deep exposure to the classics and Socratic learning.

The other, exemplified by Germany’s technical colleges, focused on training students with the skills needed by an industrialising economy.

It was the Scottish and the Dutch universities that brought these together, seeking to combine a broad liberal education with preparation for the professions.

When this model reached Australia, the demands of colonial society tended to value and emphasise professional training over contemplation and education.

Menzies, however, pushed back hard against such utilitarian understandings of universities’ purpose. In a speech to Parliament in 1945 he said, “The greatest failure in the world in my lifetime … has not been the failure in technical capacity or manual capacity half as much as it has been the failure of the human spirit.”

He went on to pin a large part of the responsibility for this failure on what he termed “the increasingly pagan and materialistic quality of our education.”

Universities for Menzies had to be places for broad liberal education and spiritual enrichment of the sort necessary to maintain a society that is cohesive, democratic and robust against the corruptions of industrial development.

V

Menzies was firmly of the belief that universities were predominantly institutions for the public good. In a statement typical of his vision for universities, he said in 1957,

“civilization in the true sense requires a close and growing attention, not only to science in all its branches, but also to those studies of the mind and spirit of man, of history and literature and language and mental and moral philosophy, of human relations in society and industry, of international understanding, the relative neglect of which has left a gruesome mark on this century.”

He categorically rejected claims that higher education was a private good, saying later in the same speech, “It is not yet adequately understood that a university education is not the prerequisite of a privileged few. It is not to be thought of merely in terms of the individual student.”

He argued that “universities are to be regarded not as a home of privilege for a few but as something essential to the lives of millions of people who may never enter their doors.”

Menzies was convinced that a university-educated society was necessary for a healthy, liberal, social order; and that, while only a small proportion of society would go to university, the roles they would play as citizens and leaders would be for the benefit of all.

As Greg Melleuish observes,

Menzies was the crucial figure who moved universities to the centre stage of Australian life and gave them a prominence they had not previously enjoyed. One could argue it was Menzies who moved universities from the periphery of Australian life, as institutions alien to the interests and concerns of the majority of Australians and cemented their place in the wider ‘constitution’ of the country.

He was prepared to defend the inner workings of universities that seemed arcane to most Australians, as activities that “the world needs as never before.” For Menzies, what others dismissed as “useless scholarship” represented “sanity in an insane world; that it stands for due proportion in life and living; that it develops the humane and imperishable elements of man; that it points to the moral that the mere mechanics of life can never be the sole vocation of the human spirit.”

VI

It followed that as a public good, universities should rightly be publicly funded. Menzies was adamant, in tabling the Murray report, that “the community is accepting heavy burdens in order that, through the training of university graduates, the community may be served.”

For Menzies, funding universities was entirely legitimate as a nation-building project. “We must,” he urged, “become a more and more educated democracy if we are to raise our spiritual, intellectual and material living standards.”

And of course in tabling the Murray Report, Menzies announced an almost quadrupling of federal government funding to Australia’s universities, a trajectory that continued to rise for the next two decades.

Menzies insisted that public funding should be provided via block grants, leaving it up to them to decide how to apportion the resourcing of their activities, according to the judgement of their own academic communities.

As A. W. Martin observes, “Here were the words of a man, it seemed, who really knew his university world – how universities worked, what they traditionally did, and how precious their autonomy” was.

VII

In farewelling Sir Keith Murray, Menzies said “I have been almost thirty years in Australian politics; I have not found them very rewarding, but if I leave the Australian universities in a healthy state it will all have been worthwhile.”

Undoubtedly Menzies shifted the trajectory of Australian universities. The resources and patronage he delivered were to ensure not only the growth in the number of universities and access to tertiary education of growing numbers of Australians, but it also enabled the research takeoff of the Australian university sector.

Without Menzies, it is hard to believe that Australia’s world class university sector would be as it is today.

But perhaps the more searching question is whether Menzies’ vision for universities as places providing rigorous, liberal education for spiritual and intellectual enrichment, survives.

There would never again be a national leader with Menzies’ instinctual understanding of universities and liberal vision of their role in society. Perhaps the closest may have been the short-lived Prime Ministership of Gough Whitlam.

Without such leadership, it was natural that the dominant instrumentalist view of universities in Australia would powerfully reassert itself.

But Australia’s pre-existing instrumentalism was assisted by two further developments.

The first was the project of using universities as platforms for social and political transformation of society; what Melleuish calls the “oppositional university” associated most strongly in this country with University of Sydney philosopher John Anderson, who “considered the role of universities, and in particular the humanities, to be critical in nature, subject only to their own norms and values, and devoted to stripping away the illusions that govern our life, including the idea of the ‘common good’.”

This tendency in some of the most vocal and visible parts of our universities has alienated significant sections of society, including many whom Menzies would have seen as universities’ natural constituency.

This in turn has fed public scepticism about universities’ role and commitment to the public good.

The other development was the rise of neoliberal economics as an imperial method of understanding society and how and when government should act.

With its epicentre at the University of Chicago, the neoliberal project redefined higher education in narrowly economic, individualist, terms. In the words of Gary Becker, university education could be characterised as an investment in “human capital”, “in the sense that [it will] improve health, raise earnings or add to a person’s appreciation of literature over much of his or her lifetime.”

Becker’s University of Chicago colleague Milton Friedman agreed, arguing that higher education “is a form of investment in human capital precisely analogous to investment in machinery, buildings or other forms of non-human capital. Its function is to raise the economic productivity of the human being. If it does so, the individual is rewarded in a free enterprise society by receiving a higher return for his services.”

Consequently for Friedman, “Individuals should bear the costs of investment in themselves and receive the rewards.”

It was such thinking, which soon established an ascendancy in government in Australia, that entrenched a vocationalist, instrumentalist cast to university education in Australia. It also imposed strict limits on how much governments or taxpayers were prepared to fund universities, while leading to a bipartisan conviction that the role of universities is to produce “job-ready graduates”.

These would be developments that would have horrified Menzies. Yes, he did transform the university sector in material terms, but his vision for what universities should do, and the role they play in society, were to remain stillborn.