Opinion
A Potted History of Australian University Governance.
Self-Rule, Scholarship and the State: Foundations of Australian University Governance
To understand contemporary debates about university governance, it is necessary to return to the period in which universities’ core governing assumptions were formed — when authority, autonomy, and accountability were organised around scholarly self-rule rather than managerial control. Governance was never an administrative afterthought. It was a constitutive feature of the university as an institution.
The university is among the most enduring institutions in world history. Few social forms have survived such profound political, economic, and technological change while retaining a recognisable core identity. Although sophisticated traditions of higher learning existed in China and Persia, the western university traces its lineage to Ancient Greece. In Athens, thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle articulated a vision of education concerned not merely with practical training, but with the cultivation of knowledge, reason, and civic virtue. Many of the questions that animated Athenian intellectual life — the purpose of education, the balance between vocational preparation and liberal learning, and the relationship between knowledge and the public good — remain central to debates about universities today.
While acknowledging earlier developments in the Islamic world, the institutional form we would recognise as the modern western university emerged in medieval Europe, most notably in Bologna and Paris. The first European universities took their name from the Latin universitas — a term referring not to a place of learning, but to a community. At Bologna, that community was organised as a guild of students who exercised remarkable authority over institutional life: they hired and dismissed teachers, set salaries, and imposed sanctions on academics who failed to meet their obligations. At Paris, governance was shared between students and scholars, establishing a mixed model that became dominant across Europe. From the outset, governance was inseparable from the idea of a scholarly community exercising a degree of collective self-rule, often in tension with church and state.
For centuries, universities were overwhelmingly teaching institutions, concerned with the transmission of established knowledge and the preparation of clergy and professionals. This conception was reshaped in the nineteenth century by German universities influenced by the ideas of Wilhelm von Humboldt, who integrated teaching and research in the pursuit of truth. The Humboldtian ideal of the academic as both teacher and researcher would eventually redefine what a university was understood to be, although it was slow to gain traction in the English-speaking world.
Australian universities emerged within this inherited European tradition but adapted it to colonial conditions. Early efforts to provide higher learning, such as John Dunmore Lang’s Australian College, preceded the establishment of formal universities. The first Australian university was founded in Sydney in 1850, not in response to labour-market demand, but from a conviction among colonial elites that a mature society required a university as a marker of cultural and civic progress. Other colonies followed over the course of the nineteenth century.
In the absence of a strong residential college system of the kind found at Oxford and Cambridge, Australian universities borrowed governance patterns from elsewhere. Teaching and academic authority were largely devolved to discipline-based departments, while senior academics exercised collective oversight through professorial boards. Overarching authority resided in bodies known as Senates or Councils. Members of these bodies were often elected by Convocation — a body that historically held the authority to award degrees and which, in the Australian context, comprised graduates. Convocation typically operated through elected standing committees and played a central role in shaping early university governance.
At the University of Melbourne, for example, Convocation elected a Senate, which in turn elected twenty members to the Council. No more than three of those elected could be salaried academics or officers of the University. Once constituted, Councils elected their own Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor. This arrangement embodied a distinctive model of self-government, tempered by limited internal representation and substantial reliance on trust.
From an early point, however, colonial — and later state — governments began to influence university governance. Through acts of parliament, governors were empowered to appoint members to university councils, ensuring that government interests were formally represented. Although universities retained significant autonomy, the state had effectively invited itself into institutional governance by the turn of the twentieth century. At Melbourne, a maladministration scandal in the early years of the century prompted legislative amendment: three additional members were appointed by the Governor of Victoria to the 20 man (expressly no females) council elected by the Senate — a recalibration of autonomy in exchange for increased public funding.
The evolution of university management beyond the departmental level was gradual. Early central administrative roles emerged in the early twentieth century and were often filled by senior academics led by a Pro Vice-Chancellor (quickly the Vice-Chancellor title would be appropriated). These leaders were initially outward-facing, charged primarily with securing resources to sustain teaching. Over time, councils devolved some academic responsibilities to newly created bodies — often confusingly also called Senates or Academic Boards — composed of senior management, elected and appointed academics, and student representatives, acting with delegated authority.
Despite these developments, Australian universities remained small, socially narrow institutions well into the twentieth century. At the turn of the century, they educated only a tiny proportion of the population. In 1895, around 0.16 per cent of Australians were enrolled in universities. This figure rose during the First World War before falling again on the eve of the Second World War. Universities largely served a social elite, even as they reflected aspects of Australia’s self-image as a progressive society. Women were admitted to Australian universities from 1881 and made up around half the student population by 1914, though this equality did not extend to academic staffing. The first female appointed as a lecturer at the University of Sydney was not till the early 1920s and the first women promoted to full professor was not until 1959.
The Second World War marked a turning point. Universities were increasingly seen as instruments of national development, and research assumed new strategic importance, with the Commonwealth increasingly drawn into shaping their future. In 1943, the Curtin Government established the Commonwealth Universities Commission, drawing on British precedents — most notably the University Grants Committee — as a temporary advisory body to assess university capacity and post-war needs.
That approach was reinforced under the post-war Chifley Government with the establishment of the Australian National University as a research institution, signalling that advanced research capacity was a matter of national interest. Research training expanded in the immediate post-war years, with the first Doctor of Philosophy degrees awarded in Australia at the University of Melbourne in 1948. Both the wartime Commission and the Commonwealth’s new university in Canberra proceeded on the assumption that universities, even when mobilised in the national interest, remained self-governing institutions rather than instruments of the state; yet this commitment to autonomy coexisted with the Commission’s authority to intervene in determining the number of students (“quotas”) an institution could enrol in a specific course.
State Governments sought to expand higher education in the post-war period but struggled to meet the scale of demand. In New South Wales, the establishment of a University of Technology in the late 1940s — later the University of New South Wales — foreshadowed further expansion, including university colleges at Wollongong and Newcastle (Sydney had established a College in Armidale in 1938). Increasingly, however, it was clear that the states alone could not sustain the system.
The Commonwealth stepped decisively into higher education under the Coalition Government of Robert Menzies. In the postwar years, the universities had advocated further Commonwealth engagement, including the creation of a new and permanent “University Commission” with expanded responsibilities, but the principle of “University Home-Rule”, as University of Queensland VC JD Storey labelled it, remained sacrosanct.
Sharing the Chifley Government’s view of the strategic importance of universities, Menzies introduced the first Commonwealth operating grants while remaining committed to protecting universities from direct political interference. In the context of the Cold War, the university was conceived as an institution dedicated to the pursuit of truth without fear or favour. This principle was institutionalised through and inquiry led by the UK University Grants Commission chair, Sir Keith Murray. The 1957 Murray Report, recommended the creation of the Australian Universities Commission (AUC) to manage the sector’s expansion and act as a “buffer” body between government and universities. This arrangement allowed for public accountability while preserving institutional autonomy and essentially preserved the internal governance environment for the next three decades.
By 1960, Australia had ten universities. Policy attention increasingly turned to other forms of post-secondary education, culminating in the 1965 report of the Committee on the Future of Higher Education in Australia, chaired by Emeritus Professor Sir Leslie Martin. Amongst other achievements, the Martin Report formalised a binary system of higher education. Universities were designated as research-intensive degree-granting institutions, while Colleges of Advanced Education were primarily teaching-focused.
Although the Martin Report devoted limited space to governance, its observations are revealing. While it did not address the concerns being expressed that the expansion of the sector had come with increasing interference from the Commission, the Commonwealth and the State Governments, it did note the recurring “friction” within universities between councils and academic staff where council authority impinged on academic matters. It suggested that mutual understanding might be fostered through council committees devoted to educational affairs, comprising lay members, academics, and senior administrators. The report emphasised the breadth of council authority, including control of property and funds, responsibility for institutional development, oversight of educational programmes, and the appointment of academic staff.
In its discussion of “Government and Administration in Universities,” the report observed that universities were neither businesses nor government departments, despite sharing some administrative characteristics with both. Universities, it argued, faced distinctive challenges arising from their “diffused and generalised aim” and the absence of clear measures of success. Ultimately, academics were judged by their peers and by acceptance or rejection by their scholarly and institutional communities. Initiatives for change, the report noted, continued to arise largely from disciplinary departments rather than from the upper layers of administration.
Martin also included a table based on 1963 data showing the composition of governing councils across Australia’s ten universities. While arithmetical errors appear in the table, the data is illustrative. The table shows that by the early 1960s the influence of Convocation was in clear decline. Although the University of Adelaide remained an outlier, with 74 per cent of its council elected by Convocation, most universities had significantly reduced this constituency’s role. At Melbourne, Convocation now elected only ten of thirty-five council members (28 per cent), while the number of external government appointments had increased over the century from three to 10.
The newer universities pointed even more clearly toward the future. At the University of New South Wales, only six council members were elected by Convocation, while twenty-four were external appointees. At Monash, just two members were elected by Convocation, compared with twelve appointed externally.
The 1963 data is also revealing with respect to the representation of academics, professional staff, and students (internal members). Melbourne, which in 1904 had no student representation and limited staff membership, by 1963 permitted thirteen internal members, including two students. Adelaide still permitted only two staff members and no students. New universities such as Monash and the Australian National University led in this area, with internal members comprising around 43–45 per cent of council membership, though this pattern was not universal among the newer institutions.
Taken together, these developments suggest that while newer universities often experimented with greater internal representation, governance change was uneven and institution-specific rather than linear or uniform. Changes following the Murray and Martin reports reflected a recurring pattern in Australian higher education: periods of expansion or challenge to universities’ social licence prompted renewed scrutiny of governance arrangements and periodic redefinition of institutional authority.
Understanding these early governance traditions is essential for making sense of later debates about autonomy, accountability, and public purpose. Long before the dramatic reforms of the late twentieth century, Australian universities were already negotiating a complex relationship between scholarly self-rule and government involvement — a relationship that would come under increasing strain as higher education expanded beyond an elite system. It is to the emergence of sector-level coordination and governing at a distance — and to its implications for university governance — that Part 3 will turn.