‘God-professor’: recovering the meanings of a contested concept in Australasian university history

ABSTRACT

This article seeks to recover the contested early history of the term and concept ‘god-professor’. Scholars of the histories of Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand universities and their disciplines have often used ‘god-professor’ descriptively, referring to nineteenth and twentieth-century professors said to have held absolute scholarly authority within and beyond the academy. It has been less commonly noticed that when the term ‘god-professor’ emerged in Australian academia in the early 1960s, it was not a historical and descriptive term but one used polemically in contemporary contests over academic authority. The rapid expansion of postwar Australian higher education made tractable the problems then debated. The article examines the emergence of the ‘god-professor’ concept within these debates, not to suggest the primacy of originary meanings but to foreground questions of academic authority and autonomy lost in many later descriptive uses, which are resonant for debates over academic collegiality and managerial governance today.

KEYWORDS:

• God-professors
• universities
• A. P. Rowe
• academic authority
• governance

In his widely-read 1979 study of nineteenth-century Australasian universities, Colonial Cap and Gown, W. J. Gardner dedicated a chapter to a figure he called the ‘encyclopaedic God-professor’. Quoting J. G. A. Pocock, Gardner identified this figure as the ‘professional empire builder’ or ‘professional charismatic’. He – invariably he – would arrive with the founding of a new institution or the establishment of a new department and discipline. Such a ‘new man … with a new subject in which he alone was locally expert’, Gardner claimed, ‘was the stuff of which “god-professors” were made, to adopt A. P. Rowe’s well known label’. The godly status of the ‘new man’ was a product of his rarity as a learned scholar in an otherwise rude colonial society. The ‘encyclopaedic’ dimension was a corollary of this rarity – in settings with little local scholarly competition, the new men marked out broad imperia of liberal learning. According to Gardner, the ‘breadth of their scholarship overawed colonial students, who were all too conscious of the narrowness of their own little world’ (Gardner 1979, 65–66; quoting Pocock 1973, 180).

Gardner’s book, which looked beyond any single institution to draw early Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand universities together into a series of broad comparative arguments, has proven influential among historians of Australasian universities, and among scholars of the colonial histories of disciplines such as literature and history. It has been less commonly noticed that Gardner’s use of the label ‘god-professor’, taken up and extended in much subsequent scholarship, gave it a set of meanings quite different from earlier uses of the term. Gardner signalled borrowing the term from the writings of Rowe, formerly vice-chancellor of the University of Adelaide. He did not, however, ‘adopt A. P. Rowe’s well known label’ so much as adapt it, making it descriptive, historical, and a signifier of social status and meaning. By contrast, for Rowe and for those who responded to him in a significant academic controversy in the early 1960s, ‘god-professor’ (and variants) was a Kampfbegriff, a ‘struggle-concept’, used not descriptively but polemically in contests over academic authority. The term addressed not historical formations but contemporary academic politics, and was defined not in relation to broad social status, expertise or breadth of learning, but in terms of universities’ formal structures of academic and administrative authority. It positioned professors as exercising godly authority relative to both university managers and academic juniors. The thrust of the ‘god-professor’ label was to protest and seek to delegitimise such authority, with critiques coming both from ‘above’ and from ‘below’.

This article examines the emergence of the ‘god-professor’ concept in the controversy over the publication of Rowe’s If the Gown Fits (1960) – the text in which a version of the term was first used – as well as related debates that followed in the years afterwards. Although scholars have sometimes noted antipathy in this period to ‘god-professor’ figures (Dale 2012, 27–28; Horne and Sherington 2012, 131), the controversy in question has not previously been explored in detail. As fuller consideration makes clear, the term was itself a product of such antipathy. In a previous article I considered the controversy over Rowe’s book as a moment in the transformation of Australian university governance driven by the rapid postwar expansion of higher education (Barnes 2020, 155–156). Here I focus on the controversy itself, noting that it was such expansion that made tractable the questions of power then debated. The article begins by tracing in greater detail Gardner’s arguments and their uses by subsequent scholars. It then shifts back to the early 1960s to examine the process by which ‘god-professor’ as a polemical concept emerged in the controversy over Rowe’s intervention, and in subsequent related debates.

Exploring the earliest usages of the ‘god-professor’ term is not to suggest that originary meanings should necessarily take precedence over genealogically subsequent variations, but is rather to foreground questions of academic authority and autonomy lost in many later adaptations. Aside from the conceptual precision that such an account brings to the relevant history, contemporary debates over academic collegiality and managerial governance are usefully enriched by historical perspectives on their relations. In many respects the moment in which the ‘god-professor’ concept emerged was a prelude to the separation between collegial (or academic) and managerial models of governance. The term marked a phase in which the professoriate had itself effectively become managerial, before the excessive burden of dual management and academic responsibilities in an expanding higher education system led the two to split into separate functions occupied by different personnel. Over time these functions have diverged ever further. If the term ‘god-professor’ is now principally historical, it nonetheless provided a language, in a transitional moment in university governance, through which questions of authority, autonomy, and collegial relations – all issues of power resonant today – could be expressed and debated.

‘God-professor’ as a historical category

William James Gardner was Reader in History at the University of Canterbury, and one of the co-authors of its official history (Gardner, Beardsley, and Carter 1973). There he was also instrumental in the introduction of courses in Australian history. Colonial Cap and Gown extended the reach of Gardner’s university history beyond Canterbury, taking a unified ‘Australasian’ perspective on the mid-Victorian universities of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. The book, which grew out of Gardner’s Macmillan Brown lectures of 1975, was a short series of studies loosely connected by their shared regional vision, focusing on the five Australasian institutions established before 1880 – Sydney, Melbourne, Otago, Canterbury, and Adelaide. His second chapter, ‘The Encyclopaedic God-professor and His Students’, focused on three founding professorial ‘empire builders’: the Reverend John Woolley at Sydney, William Hearn at Melbourne, and the 1975 lectures’ namesake John Macmillan Brown at Canterbury, all of whom held broad composite posts covering disciplines including classics, literature, logic, history, and political economy. From vignettes of these three figures Gardner generalised the notion of the nineteenth-century ‘encyclopaedic god-professor’ whose breadth of learning and force of personality shaped the early years of his institution, for better or for worse (Gardner 1979, 7–8, 43–67).

Gardner’s usage has been followed by other historians of nineteenth-century colonial universities and their disciplines. Some have done so only in passing, or in ways that work within Gardner’s categories (Sherington and Horne 2010, 46; Pietsch 2013, 65, 85; Harvey 2021, 248). Others have offered appraisals or slight interpretive extensions of his analysis. For instance, in a lecture on the export of historical research from Britain, Miles Taylor notes that in nineteenth-century universities of empire, ‘the roles of amateur and gentleman were combined in one person: what has been aptly described as the “encyclopaedic god-professor”’ (Taylor 2014, 278). In a study of Macmillan Brown that takes the ‘encyclopaedic god-professor’ as part of its title, Erica Schouten comments that ‘the negative and paternalistic connotations of Gardner’s phrase can … be said to apply to Macmillan Brown’. She quotes Macmillan Brown’s successor Arnold Wall on his being ‘the prince of know-alls’ who exercised ‘Olympian authority’ over students (Schouten 2005, 122). Registering some dissatisfaction with such usages, Tanya Fitzgerald complains that ‘a frequent stereotypical image in histories of universities was the “God Professor” … whose academic achievements and intellect set him apart from his peers’ (Fitzgerald 2014, 208).

Others have applied the ‘god-professor’ label to universities’ twentieth-century histories, up to roughly the 1960s. Such uses preserve the emphasis on professorial authority and stature but divorce the concept from Gardner’s explanation for it grounded in the intellectual isolation of the early colonial universities. Twentieth-century god-professors remained imperious, but tended not to be encyclopaedic; their authority lay in the specialisation of their expertise rather than in their breadth of liberal learning. There is often in such instances attention to the context of academic relations within the university, which comes closer to Rowe’s usage, but in ways that are descriptive rather than polemical. Susan Magarey describes Manning Clark as such a ‘god-professor’, who oversaw the history department at the Australian National University (ANU) as an ‘autocracy’ (Magarey 2008, 11). Similarly, the New Zealand historian Jock Phillips has written of his father Neville Phillips as the ‘god-professor of history’ at Canterbury in the middle decades of the twentieth century. ‘I say “god-professor”’, Phillips writes, ‘because these were the years when being a professor was not to be a chair among equal academics, but rather to be the unquestioned academic leader; and Neville took on the task as if he was still an officer in the Royal Artillery’ (Phillips 2019, 31).

One of the more suggestive historical uses of ‘god-professor’ concerning twentieth-century settings is in Hannah Forsyth’s A History of the Modern Australian University, in a chapter on ‘God-professors and Student Ratbags’. Forsyth situates the ‘god-professor’ as a figure of controversy, though she focuses on a different controversy – the confrontation between 1960s and 1970s student radicals and traditional structures of academic authority – from that described below. For Forsyth, the critical dimension of god-professorial authority is knowledge. The singular stature of professors within most Australian university departments is in Forsyth’s account a reflection of their responsibilities for the direction of all teaching and research within their departments. In this a professor was the final arbiter of truth. Of the prospect of moves to multiple chairs – some of the reasons for which are discussed below – Forsyth writes that ‘To certain people this was absurd, like having two monotheistic gods. Who was in charge? It tells something of the way they thought about knowledge that they felt someone must be’ (Forsyth 2014a, 80–86). Indeed, as the Melbourne University historian Max Crawford wrote in 1964 in a report circulated to Arts faculties across the country, the move to multiple chairs, though necessary, would come at the price of ‘some loss of direction and perhaps of character’.¹ For Forsyth, the professorial monopoly on knowledge, and its accompanying high degree of esteem, was the basis of universities’ autonomy and resistance to external intervention, a status that would soon come to be challenged from outside universities as well as from within (Forsyth 2014a, 86–87). As will be seen, challenges to such professorial authority came not only from student radicals and outside critics, but also from other sections of academic hierarchies.

‘Professor-god’ as a Kampfbegriff

Albert Percival Rowe was an English physicist who for a decade, from 1948 to 1958, served as the first full-time salaried vice-chancellor of the University of Adelaide. Rowe was not professionally socialised in the norms of mid-century academia, but came to Adelaide from the Telecommunications Research Establishment, Britain’s major research and development organisation for radio and radar. In early 1960, by which time Rowe was back in England, Melbourne University Press published If the Gown Fits, a trenchant if idiosyncratic critique of what he saw as the organisational dysfunctions of Australian – and by extension British provincial – universities, based on his Adelaide experience. In the book Rowe complained of what he termed ‘the professor-god myth’ (Rowe 1960b, 125, 139). Rowe also used the phrase in an article summarising his views in the October 1960 issue of the Congress for Cultural Freedom journal Science and Freedom (Rowe 1960d, 8).

Although Rowe’s book used ‘the professor-god myth’ only a couple of times, more or less in passing and buried deep in the argument, it was frequently highlighted by reviewers, both sympathetic and hostile, as the phrase neatly telegraphed Rowe’s two main complaints about university organisation: ‘departmentalism’ and ‘egalitarianism’ (Cardno 1960, 107; Matthews 1960, 59; Oliphant 1960, 47; Partridge 1960a, 22; 1960c, 54; Spann 1960b, 22; W. G. B. 1962, 187). ‘Departmentalism’ for Rowe referred to the division of the university into ‘a number of isolated units’, ‘little kingdoms’ over which professors held total authority, and which were impervious to outside input. ‘Egalitarianism’ was an egalitarianism at the top, among the professoriate, an assumption ‘that all departments and all professors are equally worthy of support’ and of input into matters of governance (Rowe 1960b, 28, 34). These factors together stymied much of what Rowe hoped to achieve as vice-chancellor at Adelaide. As one reviewer put it, the ‘whole pantheon’ of professor-gods ‘seems to have been the rock on which all Rowe’s enthusiasm was shattered’ (F. H. J. 1960, 5).

Rowe’s proposed solution was the establishment of authority above the professorial level, greater professorial accountability and rewards for merit, and less departmental isolation. Regarding senior authority, the position of vice-chancellor as then constituted hardly sufficed. Australian universities had by mid-century mostly moved away from older practices of a vice-chancellor being merely a member of the governing council or senate who was elected as its leader. Adelaide in fact lagged behind Sydney, Melbourne and Queensland in this regard, all of which had made the vice-chancellorship a separate salaried position in the 1920s or 1930s. But an ethos of the vice-chancellor not as an executive manager but as primus inter pares (first among equals) prevailed into mid-century. In 1957, the federal government’s Committee on Australian Universities, known as the Murray Committee after its chairman Keith Murray, expressed concern at the executive weakness of Australian vice-chancellors, and proposed strengthening the role to become ‘the academic and executive head of the whole institution’ (Murray 1957, 93–96). Rowe likewise sought to break established patterns, arguing for investing ‘authority in a small committee consisting of the vice-chancellor as chairman and a small number of deans chosen for their wisdom and experience in university administration’ (Rowe 1960b, 30). In response to criticism that doing so meant disrupting cherished traditions of academic self-government, Rowe claimed that he wished to see self-government retained but organised on less ‘egalitarian’ bases, with management responsibilities vested in a select committee of those professors most skilled in administration (Rowe 1960a, 30–31).

Rowe’s intervention prompted widespread controversy in Australian academic circles over the quality and organisation of the country’s universities. Simultaneously, Rowe was prosecuting a campaign in Britain for reform of the organisation of civic universities there, for which he spoke on BBC radio and on university campuses, and wrote short versions of his argument for a number of journals and magazines, all drawing on his Adelaide experience.² In Australia, one of the principal sites of debate was Vestes, the journal of the Federal Council of University Staff Associations of Australia. The journal published a series of reviews of Rowe’s book (Matthews 1960; Oliphant 1960; Partridge 1960c; Spann 1960a), gave Rowe space to reply (Rowe 1960c), and reported on discussions of the book in Adelaide and Melbourne, and on Rowe’s campaign in Britain (‘Our Adelaide Correspondent’ 1960; Paton 1960a; M. P. S. 1961). Rowe’s attack on professorial godliness from ‘above’ also dovetailed with a series of critiques of the organisation of authority and responsibility within departments, mostly from ‘below’ – that is, by junior academic staff – but also by several professors themselves. Appearing in Vestes over the first half of the 1960s, these critiques either cited Rowe or referred to variants of his ‘professor-god’ concept (Hartwell 1961; O’Neil 1961; Truman 1963; Serle 1963; Parker 1965; see also Binns 1962, 49–50). Critics targeted departments’ internal hierarchies and the ‘authoritarianism’ of professors towards their junior staff. Such arrangements, it was claimed, not only limited the autonomy of sub-professorial staff, but left them underutilised while professors were overburdened by departmental and institutional administration (on the latter point see also Partridge 1960b, 90–93). Even professors whose style was consultative found that universities’ constitutional structures restricted their scope for delegation. Departments thus suffered the excessive influence of personality, their fates depending too much on the capacities and shortcomings – and sometimes the health – of single individuals. What was required, critics charged, was a more ‘democratic’ distribution of authority and responsibility from the professorial level down.

Both Rowe’s top-down critique of overall university organisation and the bottom-up forays against ‘departmentalism’, which adapted Rowe’s categories to their own purposes, were resonant in the early 1960s because they occurred in the context of a major expansion of Australian higher education. The 1957 report of the Murray Committee was a response to a system-wide financial crisis, and implementing its recommendations brought the federal government into the funding of Australian universities on a more systemic basis than previously. This funding underwrote growth in the sector from the late 1950s, with student numbers tripling from 30,000 to more than 90,000 in the decade from 1956 to 1966. Expansion widened the gaps between professors and those on the middle academic tiers (readers, associate professors, senior lecturers, and lecturers). Between 1939 and 1963, Australian professors increased by a factor of three, from 128 nationally to 404. Over the same period those on the middle tiers multiplied ten-fold, from 320 to 3249. Including also tutors and demonstrators, whose numbers increased four-fold, professors as a proportion of all academic staff dropped from around 21 percent in 1939 to less than 10 percent in 1963 (Barnes 2020, 155; Martin 1964, 1:89–90). The professoriate may have been expanding with the growth of higher education, but the professorial oligarchy that controlled universities was becoming proportionately ever smaller. By the time Rowe wrote, the issue had reached a crisis point.

From ‘professor-god’ to ‘god-professor’

The early reviews of and responses to Rowe’s book mainly followed Rowe in referring to ‘professor-gods’ or ‘the professor-god myth’, and this usage was continued in a 1961 critique of departmentalism in Vestes by the historian Max Hartwell. According to Hartwell, formerly of the New South Wales University of Technology but by then in Oxford, where he could afford to be impolitic, ‘The only good idea that Rowe had was the need to destroy “the professor-God myth”. Until the absurd power of the professors is drastically reduced, morale in most university departments will remain bad’ (Hartwell 1961, 36; for context, see Forsyth 2014b). In the same issue of Vestes, William O’Neil, professor of psychology at Sydney, wrote more temperately on ‘The Unsatisfactory Role of the Non-professorial Staff’, referring in one place to ‘what I have come to call the god-king conception of the professor’ (O’Neil 1961, 41). Both of these passages were quoted in a further 1963 article by T. C. Truman, senior lecturer in political science at Queensland, who tried out his own variant, the ‘professor-king’ (Truman 1963, 4–5).

The earliest instance I have found of ‘god-professor’, in that sequence, is in a letter to graduates by the Melbourne vice-chancellor George Paton in the May 1960 University of Melbourne Gazette (Paton 1960b). According to Paton:

One of the underlying themes of [Rowe’s] book is the attack on the “myth of the god-professor”. I feel that there is equal danger in the myth of the god-vice-chancellor. Delusions of grandeur in one professor may be laughed at by fifty others – in a vice-chancellor the assumption of god-like qualities is harder to manage without creating acute controversy.

Though a vice-chancellor himself, Paton operated within the ethos of primus inter pares, repudiating any interest in claiming for himself a strengthened authority. The age when university managers organised themselves as an emergent class with shared political interests, as they would in the 1980s and 1990s (Marginson and Considine 2000), was still a long way off. Paton’s misquotation of Rowe may have been accidental, or it may have been calculated to parallel ‘god-vice-chancellor’, given that ‘vice-chancellor-god’ is hardly as felicitous. In any case, Paton’s letter gained a wider audience when it was excerpted in Vestes under the title ‘The Myth of the God-vice-chancellor’ (Paton 1960a).

Paton’s adaptation of Rowe’s phrase was not immediately taken up by others. Subsequent Vestes articles by Hartwell, O’Neil and Truman, as noted above, employed other variations on the theme. The consolidation of ‘god-professor’ as the standard term, perhaps picking up on Paton’s misquotation, came with a 1963 article by the Monash historian Geoffrey Serle, which appeared in the same issue of Vestes as Truman’s piece (Serle 1963). This article had a notable backstory, as Graeme Davison and Kate Murphy (2012, 59–63) have documented in their history of Monash University.

Monash University was established in 1958, commenced teaching in 1961, and grew rapidly, its student body doubling in size every two to three years through the 1960s. Serle, a senior lecturer, joined the new university from Melbourne, where he had previously been part of Crawford’s history department. In 1962 he turned forty, and he seems to have been conspicuously conscious of being ‘junior’ but by no means young. In August of that year Serle sent Monash’s vice-chancellor Louis Matheson a paper on ‘The Sad Case of the God-professor’, targeting reforms in Monash’s organisational structures before it grew too large and became too firmly established to change course.³ In departing from Melbourne, Serle wrote in a follow-up letter to Matheson, he was leaving behind ‘the general stagnation there, the dead-hand control of senior members as a whole, and the appalling frustration felt by those on the middle levels’.⁴ Monash’s very infancy seemed to offer other possibilities.

Serle’s paper made many of the same criticisms as the other Vestes writers: that professors were overworked, having too many different responsibilities; that other academic staff were underutilised and lacked input into decision-making; and that combining consultation with ‘authoritarian’ structures was at best a fraught and sometimes an impossible exercise. Serle tied his argument to the rapid expansion of higher education at the time, both nationally and at Monash in particular, noting that the crisis was ‘very largely a product of scale’. Government by professorial oligarchy, he wrote, had ‘worked moderately well in a university of under 5,000 students [but] is hopeless in a university of over 10,000 students’ (for similar comments elsewhere, see Hartwell 1961, 36–37; Salmond 1989, 65).⁵ Serle’s proposal was for multiple chairs, the establishment of full-time deans, the appointment of administrative officers within departments, and greater representation of sub-professorial staff on various institutional committees and boards. He also argued that the professorial board, the formal convocation of the professoriate, should be transformed into something like Rowe’s proposed selective executive committee, but with a quarter of its membership drawn from the sub-professorial staff: ‘aim at getting the best talent for the purpose together in a working body, keep off the inevitable minority of professors who are not interested in or are not much good at high policy, [and] allow the others to take turns and hence release them for other things’.⁶

Serle’s arguments were received by Matheson with mild sympathy, but firmly rebuffed by assistant registrar Jim Butchart, who held that the ‘days of the Anglo-Saxon Moot’ were over. The solution to the problem of the excessive concentration of power in the professoriate, Butchart argued, was not democratisation nor a widening of the ruling oligarchy, but rather administration by a ‘more formal autocracy’ (Davison and Murphy 2012, 60–62). Serle’s paper appeared in Vestes in March 1963, reframed to focus less on Monash in particular, and with what Matheson called its ‘tendentious’ title replaced by the milder ‘God-professors and Their Juniors’ (Serle 1963).⁷ According to Davison and Murphy (2012, 62), the paper ‘spurred vigorous debate but little change at Monash’.

In neither of its versions did Serle’s paper cite Rowe. Nor did it define ‘god-professor’. But both versions used the term in their titles, as well as in the first subheading (Serle 1963, 12). In short, by 1962–1963, the concept was familiar enough to Australian academic readerships that its meaning could be taken as read, even though the terminology had fluctuated over the previous few years. Serle also noted that the trouble with undivided authority was that ‘professors are not gods; they are human’. In the published version he toyed with the theological metaphor, writing of the proposal for multiple chairs that ‘Polytheism may not be much better than monotheism (especially if the gods war among themselves), unless there are so many that they lose their godlike status’ (Serle 1963, 12, 16). Although Rowe had developed the concept, it was Serle’s version of the terminology (perhaps with some input from Paton) that stuck. Two years later, when ANU professor of political science R. S. Parker revisited the issues in Vestes under the title ‘Departments and God-professors’, he, like Serle, treated the meaning of ‘god-professor’ as self-evident, without defining it or citing Rowe (Parker 1965).

Conclusion

The term ‘god-professor’ emerged in the early 1960s not because of a need for a historical or a contemporary descriptor, but as part of a contest over the academic authority of those it came to signify. It is not incidental that the term emerged in the last years of the reign of the ‘god-professors’. The rapid growth of postwar higher education – which enabled expansions of academic staff at the same time as it necessitated more extensive administration – brought god-professorial governance to an acute crisis. It was only then that the figure became visible as such. Over subsequent years, as enrolments continued to expand and departments grew accordingly, the older and larger universities did indeed shift to systems of multiple chairs. The next generation of new universities after Monash – in Australia Flinders, Macquarie, Griffith, Murdoch, La Trobe, and Deakin, and in New Zealand Waikato – sought to evade the organisational problems that beset the older universities by developing alternative governance structures grounded in large interdisciplinary schools rather than in disciplinary departments (Alcorn 2014; Forsyth 2020). In doing so they drew not on the model of ‘the Anglo-Saxon Moot’, but on New Left theories of participatory democracy and on the examples of new British universities such as the University of Sussex. By the second half of the 1970s, when Gardner delivered the Macmillan Brown lectures and revised them for publication, the ‘god-professor’ – as an extant figure whose power was subject to live critique – had receded sufficiently for Gardner to take the term and considerably transform it into one that was historical and descriptive. In time Gardner’s descriptive version came to be applied also to twentieth-century histories chronologically closer to the controversy that had enabled the emergence of the original concept, though now with that controversy itself often forgotten.

The disagreement between Serle and Butchart at Monash dramatised two potential alternatives to the increasing dysfunction of god-professorial governance – on the one hand collective, aspirationally ‘democratic’ decision-making, and on the other centralised top-down managerial authority. Over the quarter-century following the ‘god-professor’ controversy, these two models of collegial and managerial governance competed and intersected in variable ways as enrolments rose, as the new universities opened and themselves grew, and as older institutions developed more expansive administrations as well as a range of innovative organisational experiments that reflected shifting ideas about participation and authority (Barnes 2020, 157–159). In Australia, the Dawkins reforms of the late 1980s then tilted the balance drastically in favour of managerial over collegial governance (Macintyre, Brett, and Croucher 2017). The ‘god-professor’ term and concept was forged by the convergence of Rowe’s critique of professorial power from ‘above’ and Serle’s from ‘below’. In the long run both appear historically distant, but for different reasons. The long-term victory of the critique from above has ensured the obsolescence of that from below. Today, questions of collegial academic relations and of academic authority are expressed through different languages befitting the context of the governance structures of the twenty-first century university. Yet the core issue of power remains. Universities have decisively changed their faiths, but have certainly not dispensed with deities.

Acknowledgements

This article draws on research conducted for the Institutions of the Humanities Discovery project funded by the Australian Research Council (ID: DP170103252). Thank you to Lesley Johnson for comments on the draft manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [Grant Number DP170103252].

Notes on contributors

Joel Barnes

Joel Barnes is a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He was previously a research associate at the Australian Centre for Public History at the University of Technology Sydney.

Notes

1 R. M. Crawford, ‘The Future Development of the Humanities and the Social Sciences in the Australian Universities’, February 1964, 32, in R. M. Crawford papers, 1991.0113, 8/174, University of Melbourne Archives.

2 Various publications, clipping and correspondence from this campaign are collected in A. P. Rowe papers, Documents.22754a, B.50–B.55 and C.1, Imperial War Museum, London.

3 Geoffrey Serle to Louis Matheson, 31 August 1962, with enclosure ‘The Sad Case of the God-professor’, in A/1/0 Pt 1, Monash University Archives (MUA), Melbourne.

4 Serle to Matheson, 13 September 1962, in ibid.

5 Serle, ‘Sad Case of the God-professor’, 2.

6 Serle, ‘Sad Case of the God-professor’, 5. Emphasis in original.

7 Matheson to Serle, 3 September 1962, in A/1/0 Pt 1, MUA.