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Abstract
This article introduces the notion of the “educational franchise” of Australia’s public universities established in the mid‐nineteenth century. In his recently published study of the public university and social access in the United States, John Aubrey Douglass suggests that from the mid‐nineteenth century a social contract was formed between American public universities and their social and political constituencies: institutions open to all who could qualify for admission, offering a relevant curriculum and related closely to public schools systems. The idea of the “public university” was not unique to North America. Across the Pacific, the settler societies of Australasia were creating public universities from 1850 – a decade before the Morrill Act which provided the land grants for many public universities in the USA. The Australasian universities also emerged almost simultaneously with the establishment of secondary schools in each of the colonies. This article explores questions of social stratification, meritocracy, social class and gender with a strong focus on the interaction between universities and schools. The social contract in Australia was developed as a form of educational franchise first granted to urban males principally of middle‐class background, but of diverse social and religious origins, and then increasingly extended to those in the emerging public school system, those of rural and regional background, and then to women. The main focus of the article is on the University of Sydney, Australia’s first public university established in 1850. Drawing on an extensive student biographical database we have compiled, the article examines how the “educational franchise” operated in the colony of New South Wales in the period 1850–1890.
Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the financial assistance of the Australian Research Council and the research support of Roderic Campbell. They would also like to acknowledge their appreciation and thanks to Alan Atkinson, Roderic Campbell and Stephen Garton, who all read earlier versions of this article and offered invaluable insights.
Notes
1John Aubrey Douglass, The Conditions for Admission: Access, Equity, and the Social Contract of Public Universities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 6, 8–9.
2Jurgen Herbst, “The American People’s College: the Lost Promise of Democracy in Education,” American Journal of Education 100, no. 3 (May 1992): 276, 278–79, 284–85, 287; David F. Labaree, The Making of an American High School: the Credentials Market and the Central High School of Philadelphia 1838–1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 2–7.
3Geoffrey Sherington and Craig Campbell, “Middle Class Formations and the Emergence of National Schooling,” in Transformations in Schooling Historical and Comparative Perspectives, ed. Kim Tolley (New York: Macmillan Palgrave, 2007), 15–40.
4Geoffrey Sherington, R.C. Petersen and Ian Brice, Learning to Lead: A History of Girls’ and Boys’ Corporate Secondary Schools (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987).
5Christopher Mooney, “Securing a Classical Education In and Around Sydney,” History of Education Review 25, no. 1 (1996): 38–53.
6J. Horne, R. Campbell and G. Sherington, “The Idea of the University in the British colonies” (paper presented at the International Conference on The Quest for Excellence: Great Universities and their cities, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai, Mumbai, India, January 17–19, 2007).
7Ibid. See also Clifford Turney, Grammar: A History of Sydney Grammar School (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989).
8See R.J.W. Selleck, The Shop: The University of Melbourne 1850–1939 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003), 27.
9Geoffrey Sherington, Australia’s Immigrants 1788–1978 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1980); James Jupp, ed., The Australian People: an Encyclopaedia of the Nation, its People and their Origins (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
10Brian Fletcher, Australian Anglicanism and Australian History: The Need for Synthesis, Occasional Paper No. 3, 2004, Australian College of Theology (Sydney, 2004).
11W.C. Wentworth in the Sydney Morning Herald, October 5, 1849; W.C. Wentworth in Australia’s First; A History of the University of Sydney, ed. Cliff Turney, Peter Chippendale and Ursula Bygott (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1991), 1: 44.
12Most of the student data used in this article comes from a database of nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century Sydney University students compiled by Roderic Campbell for our Australian Research Council‐funded project, “The Public University in Australasia 1852–1914”. The database largely comprises details of students who won monetary awards (usually as scholarships or bursaries) during their university career. It also includes details of all matriculants for the University’s first decade, 1852–1861. Reference to this database hereafter is “USyd Student Database”. In the first decade, there were 123 matriculants, of whom 39 received scholarships: “USyd Student Database”.
13In this category (i.e. the “educated classes”), the majority of fathers were clergymen, lawyers, and high‐ranking civil officers.
14Douglas Pike, ed., Australian Dictionary of Biography (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1972), 4: 484–85; B. Dyster, Servant and Master: Building and Running the Grand Houses of Sydney 1788–1850 (Kensington: NSW University Press, 1989), 158; J.M. Bennett, ed., A History of the New South Wales Bar (Sydney: Law Book Co., 1969), 83–84, 159.
15For example, the University of Sydney in its foundation years has long been characterised as “The Gentlemen’s University”, a university for the sons of gentlemen: Turney, Bygott and Chippendale, Australia’s First, 1. The same has been assumed for the University of Melbourne in the colony of Victoria: Selleck, The Shop. But in neither case has a detailed study of the social origins of early students – as opposed to university administrators – actually been conducted. While the social origins of early Melbourne University students as determined by their fathers’ occupations is still unknown, our database of nineteenth‐century Sydney University students goes some way to address the issue for the colony of New South Wales.
16For example, occupations included stonemason, undertaker, organ builder, bookbinder, and “settler” (which in the context of the Australian colonies generally indicated a small‐time farmer).
17Bede Nairn, ed., Australian Dictionary of Biography (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1976), 6: 20; Douglas Pike, ed., Australian Dictionary of Biography (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1967), 2: 269.
18Bede Nairn and Geoffrey Serle, eds, Australian Dictionary of Biography (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1983), 9: 519.
19R. Campbell, comp., “USyd Student Database”.
20Turney, Chippendale and Bygott, Australia’s First, 1: 68–71.
21Ibid., 71.
22 Sydney Morning Herald, February 28, 1856 cited in G.L. Simpson, “Reverend Dr John Woolley and Higher Education,” in Pioneers of Australian Education, ed. C. Turney (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1969), 1: 84.
23Pike, ed., Australian Dictionary of Biography, 2: 283–85.
24Nicholson quoted in Turney, Chippendale and Bygott, Australia’s First, 1: 4.
25Examiners’ Report 1854 in Simpson, “Reverend Dr John Woolley,” 99. Our colleague Roderic Campbell is currently examining the relations between Woolley and the first cohort of University of Sydney matriculants in the 1850s. In the examiners’ report Woolley spoke more highly of the few matriculants educated in English Public Schools but even they often faced his wrath over matters of standards and attendance at lectures. Roderic Campbell, “Identifying the Golden Natures; glimpses of student and staff relations at Sydney University in the 1850s” (working paper, Department of History, University of Sydney, 2008).
26Turney, Grammar, 31–32.
27Ibid., 28–65.
28Geoffrey Sherington, Bob Petersen and Ian Brice, Learning to Lead. Turney, Grammar.
29Nicholson quoted in Rupert Goodman, Secondary Education in Queensland (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1960), 28.
30Ibid., 34–46. See also Martin Sullivan, “Fifty Years of Opposition to Queensland Grammar Schools,” in Melbourne Studies in Education, ed. S. Murray‐Smith (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1974), 181–221.
31Marjorie Theobald, Knowing Women: Origins of Women’s Education in Nineteenth Century Australia (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 91–113.
32Goodman, Secondary Education in Queensland, 73–75.
33Ibid., 76.
34Ibid., 93.
35Ibid., 97.
36Ibid., 78–107.
37Alan Barcan, Two Centuries of Education in New South Wales (Kensington: University of New South Wales, 1988), 130.
38D. Pike, ed., Australian Dictionary of Biography (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1969), 3: 68–71. See also Turney, Chippendale and Bygott, Australia’s First, 144–45.
39Roderic Campbell, “‘The modest hospitality of a scholar’: Badham and the first bursaries,” Record (Sydney: University of Sydney, 2005): 13–22.
40Turney, Chippendale and Bygott, Australia’s First, 1: 188–93.
41P.W. Musgrave, From Humanity to Utility Melbourne University and Public Examinations 1856–1964 (Melbourne: ACER, 1992).
42John Roach, Public Examinations in England 1850–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 1–102.
43Turney, Chippendale and Bygott, Australia’s First, 1: 149.
44Turney, Grammar, 85.
45Turney, Chippendale and Bygott, Australia’s First, 1: 150.
46E.W. Dunlop, “The Public High Schools of New South Wales 1883–1912,” Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 51, Pt. 1 (1965), 62–63.
47Geoffrey Sherington and Craig Campbell, “Middle Class Formations and the Emergence of National Schooling,” in Transformations in Schooling Historical and Comparative Perspectives, ed. Kim Tolley (New York: Macmillan Palgrave, 2007), 29.
48Barcan, Two Centuries of Education, 119.
49Ronald S. Horan, Fort Street (Sydney: Honeysett Publications, 1989), 55–84.
50Winifred Mitchell and Geoffrey Sherington, “Families and Children in Nineteenth Century Illawarra,” in Families in Colonial Australia, ed. P. Grimshaw, C. McConville and E. McEwen (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), 109.
51In the historiography, the NSW Premier, Henry Parkes, is usually portrayed as the major force in developing the public education system, with no reference to the effort of Badham and other university men: Barcan, Two Centuries of Education.
52Dunlop, “The Public High Schools of New South Wales 1883–1912,” 60.
53Ibid.
54Ibid., 64.
55Ibid., 64–74; Barcan, Two Centuries of Education, 142.
56Ibid.
57Douglass, Conditions of Admission, 28–29; Turney, Chippendale and Bygott, Australia’s First, 642.
58R. Campbell, comp., “USyd Student Database”.
59Theobald, Knowing Women, 60–61.
60Noeline Kyle, Her Natural Destiny; The Education of Women in New South Wales (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1986), 101.
61Ibid., 160.
62Barcan, Two Centuries of Education in New South Wales, 134.
63Theobald, Knowing Women, 122.
64Helen Proctor, “Gender and merit: A history of coeducation and gender at an academically selective public secondary school, Parramatta High, New South Wales, 1913–1958” (Ph.D. diss., University of Sydney, 2004).
65Douglass, Conditions for Admission, 21–22.
66Theobald, Knowing Women, 55–56.
67W.J. Gardner, Colonial Cap and Gown (Christchurch: University of Canterbury, 1979).
68Theobald, Knowing Women, 55–64.
69Turney, Chippendale and Bygott, Australia’s First, 183–88.
70Ibid., 186. See also Theobald, Knowing Women, 55.