University Unlimited: The Monash Story

Citation

Mark Hutchinson (2015), "University Unlimited: The Monash Story", History of Education Review, Vol. 44 No. 2, pp. 268-269. https://doi.org/10.1108/HER-08-2014-0037

University histories have had their own arc. From a chronicling form acting as a form of institutional summary, to self-congratulatory mirrors of the senior common room, to the coffee table productions of marketing offices, they have given intellectual historians plenty of reason to begin with the index rather than the contents page. The university history, indeed, has been a sort of reflection of the state of Australian intellectual history as described by Paul Bourke in his famous 1967 article: limited, institution-dependent and fundamentally not very “intellectual”. The craft, however, has not been like that for some decades. Suitably, then, the emergence of Davison and Murphy’s University Unlimited demonstrates that the genre of University history, too, has come of age.

This is a fascinating study not just of an important Australian institution, but of a period in Australian history viewed through local historical eyes. It does not emerge in isolation: a wave of “Murray and Martin” universities are turning 50, at the same time as the Dawkins universities are turning 25. In a country with few remaining university presses, the impulse of celebratory occasions has provided welcome resources for important, but “unpopular” after works which have so much to give in terms of the Australian self-understanding. Davison and Murphy make telling choices in this regard, commencing not with a generic statement about Sputnik and the Menzies years, but with the personal relationships between the globalizing intelligentsia which would later converge upon Monash. In a succession of unusually subtle touches, Davison and Murphy note the role of Matheson’s fading northern Quakerism, the old Scots/Pacific colonial roots of Dunlop Rubber, the quest for an “educated democracy”, the influence of C.P. Snow … all contributions to (without becoming full explorations of) the rise of a vision of technophile Monash within the broad late twentieth-century challenges to human knowledge and existence. At the same time, they are aware of the power of contingency – the foundational compromises which eventual success tends to erase from the historical record, such as underfunding, short-sighted space allocation or too rapid an implementation. The story of “the missing page” is typical: “If only the [missing Murray] papers had been fastened more firmly, perhaps Monash’s timetable would have been more generous” (p. 28). Contingency indeed.

This is the work of wise, learned historians: history is full of ironies and misdirections, disappointing to those who look into the future only to see their younger selves reflected there. The (in)famous(?) student troubles are an example: on the one hand, leaders such as Albert Langer saw themselves as sparking the proletarian revolution, as standing at the van of human materialist progress. Davison and Murphy hold this sensitively in tension with the progress of events through the sit-ins, rallies, arrests and violence. All the while, they point to the misogyny, anti-semitism, self-interest and manipulation which informed such juvenilia, the uncontrolled exercise of which came close to wrecking the university and damaging the lives of many of its protagonists. On the other hand, the reader’s sympathy for the subject is not permitted to flag: so many of those who came through Monash during this period (names such as Max Gillies, Geoff Serle, Damien Broderick and Jim Falk, wander easily through the text) went on to make a mark on the confident Australian society which emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. This is a careful balancing act on the part of the authors, to their great credit very largely successful, and repeated throughout a book which demonstrates all of Hancock’s famous virtues of “attachment, justice and span”.

One of the most attractive attributes of the book is the fact that, as with all of Davison’s works, it is eminently readable. The publishers have avoided the “book bomb” and gone for a novel-like format which opens in the reader’s hand with a satisfying quality of “flop”. Its paper quality is substantial yet rough enough to reflect its democratic subject, its cover (though not to my personal taste) loud enough to reflect the brashness and energy of the university itself. All of this is eclipsed, however, after a few chapters, when it occurs to the reader how quickly the text passes under the eye. It is interesting stuff – from revolutionary entrepot, to entrepreneurial “giantism”, to a borderless technical behemoth which finds itself operating on most continents, in alliances for research which are truly global. Such span is a difficult thing to maintain for the institutional historian, who juggles both the human scale “fast stories” and the societal “slow stories” within a steadily progressing chronological framework. It is easy for such things to get “out of synch”, the story of an important individual (e.g.) bulking large and proximate and ultimate explanations off the canvas. This is handled masterfully in University Unlimited, in part because of the flowing, humane writing style which carries the reader so easily forward. The conceptual loops which bind the story back to the earlier chapters are cleverly done, reducing the need for heavy-handed “conclusions” as the authors approach an open present. My favourite is on page 322:

A group occupying the former vice-chancellor’s residence invited the vice-chancellor to meet. Since most university students came from higher socioeconomic homes and were supported by the taxes of people who couldn’t go to university, “it seemed only reasonable that the children of the rich should pay a bit more,” Larkins argued. This impeccable socialist logic made no impression on the angry protestors. Standing in Louis Matheson’s former home, Larkins felt a bond of sympathy with his embattled predecessor.

Place, policy, conceptual inversion and the ghostly presence of the past, all in one brief stylistic capsule. Delightful work, that. So, if you are looking for old style institutional history, you would not find it here. Instead, you will find a category-leading piece of “real history” which puts Australian university history on the same level as the international work of people such as Sheldon Rothblatt. When the parties are over and the candles snuffed out, one hopes that such works will continue to inform serious intellectual history and policy debate for years to come.