Universities are often defined by their place as much as their purpose. Equally significant are the historical contexts of their foundation. The University of Sydney, Australia's first, was opened in the former buildings of the former Sydney College, only to move within a decade to the acreage of Grose Farm within sight of the city. Founded in the new era of constitutional democracy, the University initially focussed on a “liberal education” as a way of extending an educational franchise for a meritocracy. Almost a century later, the University of New South Wales was created in the wake of the Second World War, beginning as a technological university with the distinct purpose of contributing to economic growth. The University soon took over Kensington Racecourse as a site prime for development.
In this large format and well illustrated book, Mark Hutchinson examines many issues related to themes of place, purpose and contexts. As a former co-author of a history of Macquarie University he is well aware of the politics of higher education which gave rise to new universities in Australia from the 1950s to 1990s. It could be suggested that the establishment of Macquarie University at Ryde in the 1960s may have influenced and even distorted future discussion of the future expansion of higher education in Sydney. But the author is more concerned here to show how the quest for a University of Western Sydney had a long history particularly through the ambitions of certain politicians and others. In their view it was not so much that Macquarie had been placed in the wrong place but rather there was a view that the older University of Sydney was thwarting the people of Western Sydney who wanted their own university in their region rather than having to commute into Sydney.
It is not always clear as to whether the author fully identifies with such views or is merely seeking to analyse in the manner of a political and social historian. Certainly he has tried to identify “Western Sydney” clearly as a region of the expanding city of Sydney after the Second World War. There is thus a useful history of settlement in the west of Sydney, beginning with the early years of colonisation and continuing up until 1970. This is really an account of a rural region close to Sydney. Hawkesbury Agricultural College was formed in 1891 to provide training for future farmers. Until the late 1940s Parramatta High School was regarded as a country high school. It was post-war migration that helped to transform western Sydney into a gathering of suburbs with different ethnic contexts. And then the election of Gough Whitlam in 1972 and the idea of better cities helped to provide the cause for a university for the region.
This campaign took shape from the 1970s. With the new Wran Labor Government in power the Department of Education began also to press the case with an indirect criticism of how the University of Sydney was failing the expanding western suburbs of Sydney. But it was also a campaign which emerged in the period of increasing Commonwealth reductions in the higher education budget and resistance to establishing new universities. And perhaps this was more significant than any perceived views about the University of Sydney.
And here I must profess my own contexts in this account. I was at Wollongong from 1978 to 1981. This was a University that came into being in 1976 by rejecting its former status as a college of the University of New South Wales. It is I suspect a common way for new institutions to achieve or attempt to achieve a certain status. Equally, when I returned to Sydney in 1981 I found no firm views opposing a University of Western Sydney except that there was a strong call for the University to widen its social profile by taking in more students from the “west”. Almost at the same time there was pressure to upgrade the Colleges of Advanced Education in western Sydney into a university, much in the form of what occurred at Wollongong.
In the end the University of Sydney became involved in the movement to establish a university in western Sydney. Chiefly University College was founded in 1988 with specific provision for a close relationship between the older University of Sydney and the newer institution for western Sydney. Within a year it was dead, killed by the Dawkins reforms for a “Unified National System”. In effect the new University was certainly not unified. Rather it was a rushed federation between Hawkesbury Agricultural College and Nepean and Macarthur Colleges. There were also community divisions between the various regions around Parramatta, Bankstown and Campbelltown, each of which sought primacy and resources for their own constituencies.
Divisions on the future of the University re-surfaced with the appointment of Professor Deryck Schreuder as the second vice chancellor. Rhodes, scholar, Oxford graduate, Professor of History at Sydney and then deputy vice chancellor at Macquarie, he “brought the world to Werrington” (p. 130) as the formal administrative centre of the university. But many did not want the “shared co-operation” that Schreuder promised. The idea of a unified university soon gave way to the claims of specific regions. By the mid-1990s there was even suggestions coming from local politicians of having three universities in the west. This all placed the new vice chancellor in a difficult situation particularly when the Nepean College under Professor Jill Maling sought a future as an “independent university”, essentially attempting to secede from the federation. Eventually the Board of Governors at the University achieved the resignation of Maling despite protests on the Nepean campus.
Almost a decade after it came into being the new university now had to find ways to justify its status as a federated if not unitary institution. According to Mark Hutchinson the re-building and healing came with not only a new head at Nepean, Professor Chris Duke with experience in adult education in London, but through other senior academics who were not attached to the local allegiances of the past and whose contribution came more in the area of new forms of research. When Deryck Schreuder left in 1997 to become Vice Chancellor of the University of Western Australia much of the necessary re-structure of the new University had taken place. The university had begun to emerge with its own shape and without fears of dissolution.
The appointment of Professor Jan Reid in 1998 led to increasing stability in administration. With a background in health education in Western Sydney, and administrative experience of a technological university in QUT, Reid was only the third woman to become a vice chancellor in Australia. Mark Hutchinson also suggests that she was adept at engaging local communities. But over the past decade and a half, Western Sydney has in some ways shared some of the current dilemmas of current higher education in Australia. Thoughts of a federated university gave way to the realities of life under the Howard Government which reduced Commonwealth financial commitments. The University resisted a push to introduce fee paying students but in other ways was drawn into the new environment of funding. And by 2000, the New South Wales Government was imposing on all public universities in the state new processes of management and accountability through governing bodies.
By the turn of the twentieth century the new university had even begun to re-invent itself from servicing the local area, towards a mission to “Greater Western Sydney”. Even then a university created to meet the expectations and needs of the people of Western Sydney had to increasingly engage in seeking students and contacts from throughout Australia and across the globe just in order to survive, while seeking to meet global standards in the emerging international tables of measured research performance as well as surveys of teaching effectiveness. The final paragraphs of this history thus conclude with a homage to “One of Australia's Great Universities” admitting its failures but celebrating success within locality, nation and “transnational space”. You do not have to endorse all of this evaluation but certainly this study is a significant and substantial story of not just western Sydney but the nature of higher education in Australia over the past quarter of a century. The many photographs will attract attention but so should the analysis.
