by Robert Manne
Perhaps most importantly of all, as a consequence of all this, despite much not insincere lip service, the teaching of undergraduates – the bread and butter of the university, even the principal reason for the sector’s massive expansion – tended gradually to be valued less and less, according to objective standards like promotion. In certain areas of the university, where the training of technical personnel rather than the offer of a liberal education became the purpose, it was now discovered that online means of delivering the necessary information to the students was both less costly and more efficient.
In what I have just said, I hope not to be misunderstood. Once it was decided to transform the universities into mass institutions where the teaching of the traditional disciplines and old professions were joined by courses designed for the purpose of training the workforce; and once it was decided to obliterate the distinction between universities and colleges of purely vocational training; and once it was decided that up to 40% of the population ought to go to institutions of higher education frequently called universities – very many of the changes to the idea of the university that I have witnessed over the past forty years were not only inevitable but also sensible.
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I am retiring at the end of 2012 from the humanities and social sciences faculty at La Trobe University, one of the “new” universities. I am also retiring at a time when several attractive aspects of the older conception of the university I encountered as an undergraduate in the 1960s no longer, often for sound reasons, cut much ice. One may regret the passing of the traditional university, as I do in very many ways, but minimal realism forces one to accept that it cannot be revived.
There is one old idea, however, that is not yet dead. This is the one that suggests that within the university a home for the old community of scholars and students, whose purpose is the pursuit of truth and the education of a self-chosen segment of students in the core academic disciplines of the West, can still be found. No one ought seriously to think that such tasks are all that the university will do. No one who researches and teaches in these core disciplines ought any longer to think they are at the centre of the university and the schools of professional or technical training are only on the periphery. Yet equally, no one should deny that one of the fundamental purposes of the contemporary university is to introduce one part of each new generation of students to the core disciplines of the Western tradition. Once, that initiation was decided on the basis of class and gender. Thank God, that era has passed. Now it is to a great extent, and certainly ought to be, decided on the basis of disposition and talent, of inborn or awakened intellectual curiosity and hunger.
Teaching at a university for almost forty years has convinced me that there exists a minority in each new cohort of students who are drawn instinctively to the most traditional purposes of the university; whose interest in one or another of the proven disciplines can be awakened by teaching that opens eyes to the beauty and the power of philosophy or physics or mathematics or history or literature; and who will soon discover, often to their surprise, that they have come to university not only or even primarily to earn a professional qualification to equip them for the workforce but to take part in the search for knowledge and understanding and to experience the life of the mind.
Revised from The Conversation, 18 October 2012
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
On Borrowed Time is the third volume of my collected essays. It follows Left, Right, Left: Political Essays 1977–2005 (2005) and Making Trouble: Essays Against the New Australian Complacency (2011). Once again I am indebted to two treasured friends: Morry Schwartz, the most creative publisher in recent Australian history, and Chris Feik, a truly incomparable editor and the captain of the team at Black Inc. Working with Morry and Chris over almost two decades has been one of the most pleasurable and fruitful experiences of my life. Somehow, Black Inc. has managed to employ reliably outstanding editors, designers and publicists. On this occasion I am grateful to Rebecca Bauert and Dion Kagan for their painstaking and sensitive editorial work, to Tristan Main for the elegant cover and typesetting, and to the wonderful Anna Lensky, who has risen to the challenge of publicising the book of an author whose voice has been reduced to a whisper.