Education

The idea that academia is a meritocracy in which intelligence and hard work will inevitably result in a long and storied career sounds these days like the foundation myth of a dead religion. Inger Mewburn’s How to Be an Academic is a salve for people such as myself who were silly enough to pursue a research career anyway ...

Ever since Henry VIII plundered the monasteries, relations between those in seats of power and learning have tended to be fraught, since political administrators do not take kindly to scholars thinking they know best how to run their own affairs, and vice versa ...

At the heart of Required Reading is a database called ALIAS (Analysis of Literature in Australian Schools). It includes all the reading material prescribed for senior secondary English and Literature courses in most of the states from 1945 to 2005. Like all electronic databases, ALIAS comprises a structured collection of items ...

Hannah Forsyth, a lecturer in history at the Australian Catholic University in Sydney, begins her first chapter with the words: ‘In 1857 all of the Arts students at the University of Sydney could fit into a single photograph.’ Some neo-liberal critics of universities would argue that it has been downhill ever since. By World War II, Forsyth estimates that there were still only about 10,000 university students in Australia. Forsyth succinctly highlights the historical changes from a small élite higher education system, dominated by white male ‘god’ professors, to the current complex system, where more than one million students face major changes in higher education funding and settings.

Helen Small, Professor of English at Pembroke College, Oxford, adopts a pragmatic and non-polemical approach in addressing The Value of the Humanities. This topic has been much debated recently as political and economic pressures on universities and funding agencies have led to an alleged devaluation of the humanities.

Notwithstanding occasional media focus on misbehaving students or senior members, the residential colleges and halls dotted around or about most Australian university campuses keep a low profile. Their influence has undoubtedly declined since the early twentieth century, when as many as one quarter of Melbourne’s enrolled undergraduate population, and a much higher proportion of full-time students, were attached to Trinity and Janet Clarke Hall, Ormond or Queen’s. But the collegiate ideal to which all these institutions aspire, more or less, still provides a vital alternative to the regrettably prevailing view of higher education as mere vocational training – especially now, when the future viability of universities themselves is called increasingly into question.

Christopher Hilliard’s meticulously researched and richly detailed English as a Vocation: The Scrutiny Movement opens with a historical anecdote regarding an after-hours, postwar negotiation ‘between literary analysis and popular culture’ undertaken in that most evocative of English holiday destinations: Scarborough. In these opening lines, Hilliard describes how the founder and director of Birmingham University’s renowned Centre of Cultural Studies, Richard Hoggart, working in an earlier capacity as an adult education tutor in North Yorkshire, spent his evenings in the late 1940s combining classes on Shakespeare with sessions scrutinising advertising rhetoric and the language of newspaper articles.

This is a highly intelligent collection of essays by some of the nation’s finest minds about the ebb and flow of intellectual endeavour in the humanities since the institution of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1969. In the thirty-one essays – built around keynotes, panels, and responses – there are too many gems among them for me to be willing to pick out individual contributions for particular attention. If you care for the life of the mind and for our culture, download the e-book and peruse it, according to your interests. These are mainly stories of success, in transforming disciplines and the like. Less flatteringly, they are also a reminder that the humanities were more central in Australian universities back in 1969 than now.