Looking from the inside out: rethinking university history

Abstract

When Geoffrey Sherington and I set out on our project on the Australian Public University, which culminated in Sydney: The Making of a Public University (2012), we wanted to move away from the emphasis of conventional institutional history on chancellors, vice-chancellors and governing councils in order to explore the university as a social institution. Using the theoretical and methodological approach of social history, we studied how students, academics, researchers, philanthropists along with the university's governing body were all important characters in the creation and development of Australia's first university. This essay explores some of the influences in this approach, especially the relationship between oral history and women's history and the history of administration in the story of educational institutions such as universities, and examines the methodological challenges for historical analysis of bringing together these approaches.

Keywords:

• history of higher education
• universities
• women
• oral history
• vice-chancellors

Notes on contributor

Julia Horne is associate professor in History at the University of Sydney and writes on the history of universities and the history of colonial travel and exploration. With Geoffrey Sherington, she is co-author of Sydney: The Making of a Public University (Miegunyah, 2012).

Notes

1. Wentworth. Sydney Morning Herald, September 21, 1849.

2. (Early President) quoted in Friedland, The University of Toronto. Levi, Comings and Goings.

3. Horne and Sherington, “Extending the Educational Franchise.”

4. Selleck, The Shop, 27.

5. Edward Gibbon Wakefield was involved in various immigration schemes to promote British colonisation to South Australia and New Zealand through a workable combination of labourers, artisans and capital.

6. Gardner, Colonial Cap and Gown, 9–42.

7. Selleck, The Shop, 320–330.

8. For example, Nadel, Australia's Colonial Culture; Roe, Nine Australian Progressives and Macintyre, A Colonial Liberalism.

9. The project has so far produced a book, six published articles and chapters, a biographical database of nineteenth-century scholarship holders and a number of briefer items published in non-academic outlets.

10. Dillon, “Up Close and Personal,” 3.

11. Each hour of interview equates to about 5000–6000 spoken words.

12. For a social historical justification of oral history, see Thompson, The Voice of the Past. Oral history was also championed in the 1970s and 1980s by historians in History Workshop Journal.

13. O'Farrell, “Oral History.”

14. Ibid., 7.

15. O'Farrell, “The Great Oral History Debate Revisited.”

16. O'Farrell, UNSW: A Portrait. The questionnaires and responses included two substantial surveys of student experience in the 1950s and 1960s conducted in 1996 and 1997, respectively, by the Oral History Program in the UNSW Archives (as it had become known during my custodianship). Students in the 1950s: A Survey of Student Experience at UNSW, Conducted by J. Horne, UNSW Archives; Students in the 1960s: A Survey of Student Experience at UNSW, Conducted by J. Horne, UNSW Archives.

17. Horne, “Capturing the Personal.”

18. “Editorial,” iii.

19. Frisch, A Shared Authority. See also, Portelli, “The Peculiarities of Oral History”; Schrager, “What is Social in Oral History” and Grele, Envelopes of Sound. On popular memory, see Thomson, Anzac Memories, 7–11, 225–239. For a discussion of the idea of ‘popular memory’ and ‘dominant memory’, see Popular Memory Group, “Popular Memory.” A landmark Australian text on memory and history, which includes a number of articles on such themes as public memory, private memory, contested memories, and oral history and memory is: Darian-Smith and Hamilton, Memory & History in Twentieth-Century Australia.

20. Passerini, “Work Ideology and Consensus.”

21. On the question of subjectivity in oral history interviews, see: Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts and Schrager, “What is Social in Oral History?”

22. Barker, Phyllis Margaret Rountree, i.

23. Barker, Phyllis Margaret Rountree, 14–28.

24. Barker, Phyllis Margaret Rountree, 23.

25. Mackinnon, The New Women; Mackinnon, Love and Freedom.

26. Horne and Sherington, Sydney: The Making of a Public University, 70.

27. Barker, Phyllis Margaret Rountree, 4.

28. Pietsch, Empire of Scholars.

29. Barker, Phyllis Margaret Rountree, 4.

30. Barker, Phyllis Margaret Rountree, 3.

31. Theobald, Knowing Women and Kyle, Her Natural Destiny.

32. On the British situation, see Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex?

33. “Unis Accused of Lip-service over Women,” Sydney Morning Herald, October 24, 1995, 5.

34. “UNSW Reforms Recruitment to Rectify Gender Imbalance,” The Australian, Higher Education Supplement, 6 September, 1995.

35. Beverley Kingston was a member of the working party of the UNSW VCAC constituted as a consequence of Canberra criticism to examine the position of women in UNSW. A recommendation was made to profile the careers of successful women academics.

36. Horne, “Women's History in the UNSW Archives.” Women in the Archives: A Survey of Women's Experience to assist in writing the recent history of women at UNSW for its 50th anniversary, Conducted by J. Horne. And survey responses, UNSW Archives.

37. Bowman, John Philip Baxter.

38. Gissing, “Baxter, Sir John Philip (1905–1989).”

39. O'Farrell, UNSW: A Portrait, 53–55.

40. Campbell, “Cold War, the Universities and Public Education,” 31.

41. Bowman, John Philip Baxter, 3–4.

42. Forsyth, “Negotiating the Benefits.”

43. Bowman, John Philip Baxter, 11–12.

44. Bowman, John Philip Baxter, 19.

45. Horne, “Oral History as Modern,” 28–30.

46. The interviews were brought together as the basis of a publication: Horne, Not an Ivory Tower.