That being said, the book does not measure up to its billing as the ‘first comprehensive history of Australia’s university system’. It arose from a commission from Universities Australia (UA), the ‘peak body for the sector’, to mark the centenary of its origins in the Standing Advisory Committee of Australian Universities, established in 1920. The commission both defines, and limits, its scope. UA describes itself as ‘the voice of Australia’s universities’, but the idea that a body composed almost entirely of vice-chancellors truly represents (in both senses) their institutions is one that can no longer be made without challenge. One of the historical narratives that Croucher and Waghorne lay out in their book, but do not seriously question, is how changes to the state and (in the case of the ANU) federal legislation under which universities operate have now concentrated power so narrowly on campus. Vice-chancellors are now in turn commonly answerable to university councils that often do not have a majority of practising academics on them.

Some of the more egregious aspects of the modern Australian university, such as the rise of a precariat of casual academic staff, the prioritisation of property speculation over investment in teaching, and the breathtaking salaries that vice-chancellors are routinely paid, have been linked by critics of the system to these changes in governance. Meanwhile, on UA’s watch, the social and intellectual capital of our universities has diminished. Words like ‘academic’ and ‘intellectual’ are routinely wielded as terms of abuse in Australian political discourse. Politicians, especially though not exclusively from the right, are also now prone to characterising humanities departments as little more than redoubts from which academics can launch politically correct broadsides into the culture wars. I suspect that there may be more than a hint of schadenfreude emanating from the current federal government as our universities are forced to enact drastic cuts to both cash reserves and operational costs.

The University of Melbourne in 1857 from Victoria illustrated (1857), (State Library of Victoria, 30328102131660/34/WikimediaCommons)

This book pays no attention to such a context, however. Nor does it refer to the ever-growing corpus of substantive critiques of the current system, such as Richard Hil’s Whackademia (2012) or the associated genre of academic ‘quit lit’, which would seek to focus our attention instead on how disciplinary values and academic autonomy are now under threat. Indeed, its claim to reveal how Australia’s universities ‘gradually came together to work in common cause’ ignores any analysis or critique of what that cause ultimately was, or what it now should be. Is it the disinterested pursuit of knowledge? Or is it, as some less sympathetic voices might now say, primarily the pursuit of profit?

As a result, this is a history with a managerial and administrative, rather than a philosophical or idealistic, focus. Yet there is still much of interest that can be uncovered. The authors note, for instance, that before 1920, in ‘the most literal sense, universities had no national character at all. Rather they existed simultaneously as local and international organisations.’ That surely speaks to an underlying truth: Australia’s universities, like so many public institutions, such as hospitals, art schools, libraries, museums, and galleries, were founded to be both grounded in their communities and cosmopolitan in nature. They aimed to serve the immediate needs of those who sought and paid for their services; at the same time they expressed an overarching commitment to a set of values (such as ‘truth’, or ‘beauty’, or ‘the public good’) that transcended these particularities of place.

In Australia, our idea of a university was also filtered through a British imperial frame. Our universities thus looked to Oxford and Cambridge (or, more practically and less denominationally, to London and Edinburgh) rather than to Bologna and Berlin for their operational models. It was the global shock of World War I, and a growing awareness of German scientific advances in particular, that helped draw the Australian university system towards a more continental-style model of research-led teaching and learning.

Much of the agenda of the early meetings of Australian university leaders was dominated by more immediate, quotidian, administrative concerns. It was agreed, for instance, that the creation of a common vacation week would help facilitate further cooperation. National standards were also adopted for academic ranks and for some of the contractual terms that came with them. And intimating current concerns about the efficacy of online delivery, university heads discussed how best to accommodate students who could not easily travel to, or live in, metropolitan centres, and thus attend lectures.

One of the more radical proposals put forward was one from the vice-chancellor of the University of Western Australia in 1923 to introduce a common first-year curriculum for all students. Had he been successful, much more recent efforts to introduce a US college-style education at the undergraduate level (such as can be found in the so-called ‘Melbourne Model’) would have been redundant. Large-scale cross-institutional curriculum initiatives, however, faced early and strong resistance from those who were opposed to what they feared would become an over-centralised system. They found support for their concerns in the Australian constitution itself, which implicitly made educational policy a state, not Commonwealth, responsibility.

As Australia’s population grew and its economy became more dependent on technological and service-centred industries, so did demand for university places. When the vice-chancellors first met in 1920, there were around 8,000 enrolled students. Today, the figure is around 1.4 million. Meeting this demand required massive capital investment, and that inevitably led to growing Commonwealth control, formalised first in the establishment of the Australian Universities Commission in 1956. As constitutional scholar and later vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University Greg Craven has observed, this was the ‘unintended consequence of the failure of the financial settlement under the Constitution, which left the Commonwealth flush with funds, and the states with insufficient revenue to meet their policy obligations, including those posed by universities’.

The decision of the then New South Wales University of Technology not to confirm the appointment of historian and former Communist Party member Russel Ward to a lectureship in 1956 became an early example of the perceived downside of this increased central government interest in universities. Presaging more recent criticism, the outgoing dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Max Hartwell, declared it to be an ‘unpleasant example of what can happen in a university where power is concentrated, where policies are bad, and where professors are timid’.

Croucher and Waghorne nevertheless show how increased cooperation between universities, governments at all levels, and the emergent academic staff unions helped deliver the significant growth in university places that Australia now required. They document the positive impact of reviews into the sector led by Keith Murray (1957) and Leslie Martin (1961), in particular, which helped set the stage for the Whitlam government to make education free for all students from 1974, a policy that would remain in place for the next fourteen years. We also read how the foundation of the newer, outer metropolitan, campuses of La Trobe, Griffith, Flinders, and Murdoch were to be ‘based in general studies emphasising breath of learning and collegiality’. John Willett, inaugural vice-chancellor of Griffith, argued that university education should avoid becoming a ‘slavish hand-maid of the status quo, a factory fitting out men and women to serve the community within present values and organisations’.

The history of the decades that follow emerges less positively. While the incorporation of colleges of advanced education into the university system, and the introduction of the HECS, later HELP, student loan scheme certainly enabled a further significant expansion in university enrolments, not least from women and minorities, it also allowed successive federal governments to increase their regulatory control while reducing per capita funding overall. That in turn encouraged universities to massively expand their exposure to the international student market. Croucher and Waghorne would wish to characterise this growth in international student numbers as a positive reflection of the aims of the Bradley Report of 2008, which sought to increase access to university from all sectors of society. They describe it as part of an institutional ‘desire to embrace a wider range of students with different points of view and from all walks of life’. From our current difficult circumstances, however, that seems overly sanguine, if not Pollyanna-ish. There is arguably now a significant conflict of interest built into the Australian university system between universities as tax-free entities providing tertiary education for Australian students and universities as commercial businesses selling full-fee services to foreign students, complete with huge investments in property and accommodation infrastructure, typically exempt even from paying local council rates. So much of day-to-day academic life has also now come under federal government control through overarching regulatory bodies such as the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA), which in no small part were established to deliver quality assurance for that international education market.

Croucher and Waghorne argue that Australian universities nevertheless remain ‘self-governing’ institutions, which have ‘embraced their diversity and intersecting histories’. It would have been reasonable to expect the authors to have interrogated just what is this institutional ‘self’ today. If, as some might suggest, the supply and quality of education in Australia has now become subordinate to the commercial chase, this issue of institutional identity is no mere ‘academic’ one. But a full examination of it would require a much more critical and sceptical view of university decision-making processes than has been undertaken here. All the same, the history we do get is at least thoroughly scoped, researched, and referenced. It may not provide us with clear answers to the many questions that now beset the sector, but it at least provides us with much new material to help inform the debate.