150th Anniversary Staff Dinner

Tuesday 29 July 2003
Wilson Hall, University of Melbourne

Professor Alan Gilbert
Vice-Chancellor

Eight-and-a-half years ago, when I was appointed to be the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne to succeed David Penington, it was with considerable trepidation that I contemplated my new responsibilities.

I knew already that Melbourne was the best and most prestigious university in Australia – atop the research pile, awash with wonderfully talented staff and able to attract the best student cohorts of any Australian university. But I feared that it might be a complacent, slightly snobbish scholarly community, proud of its past and a little disdainful of any idea of having to get even better to meet the challenges of the future.

Because I was certain that no Australian university – even Melbourne – was going to remain successful in the long term without prodigious commitment to across-the-board improvement, I feared that I might get a frosty reception. Conservative institutions are very good, in a gentile and deadly kind of way, at challenging newcomers to “fit in or get out”.

But to my great delight, Melbourne was not at all like that. Intellectually, it was better than I had expected – full of impressive intellectuals, some quirky, others simply trenchant, and all wonderfully engaging whenever they sensed a genuine respect for their views. No one in a collegial relationship ever insists that she of he is always right, but they have a right to insist on being included, genuinely, in the processes determining their own destiny and that of their institution.

Melbourne turned out to be that sort of collegial place. You could sense it just walking in to University House; collegiality was obvious when the Heads and Deans met, first (for me) at Geelong and later at Lorne; it came through the serious mutual respect that shaped the way Melbourne committees approached their work; it pervaded the Council, the Academic Board, relations between deans, and meetings with heads of department; it was present in the mutual respect evident between general staff and their academic counterparts .

Among the many thousands of people who have served on the staff of the University, there have been some bad apples. Let me recount just one sobering story. In 1901 an accountant called Frederick Dickson was arrested for embezzling £24,000, a staggering sum at a time when the total Government grant to the University was only £15,000. In case any of our contemporary accountants branch staff want to go for the record on an inflation-adjusted basis, the current embezzlement target would be over $400 million.

In general, however, working for the University of Melbourne is something to be proud of. I am certainly proud to have had an opportunity, as Vice-Chancellor, to be a sort of hybrid – an ex-academic member of the general staff.

I once applied for an academic staff job in the University of Melbourne. It was 1973, and I had just finished my doctorate at Oxford and felt pretty smug, and this was a teaching fellowship in the History Department – the most lowly of academic positions. When I didn’t even get an interview I realized just what a formidable academic staff they must have here. But just imagine what it must be like now to apply for a position at Melbourne straight out of a PhD program, knowing that people like Peter Doherty work here. Virtuosity can be a terrifying thing – until you actually get to know the Peter Doherty’s of the international scientific community, and learn that humility and good humour, not arrogance, are the other faces of virtuosity.

Persistence pays off in the end, and I made it eventually onto the Melbourne staff years. Since then, mindful of my own failure in 1973, I’ve always admired the people who get short-listed for academic jobs, and been in awe of those who actually get job offers. I’ve also learned immense respect for my colleagues on the general staff, who, pound for pound (to use an unfortunate metaphor) are simply outstanding. From the gardeners who have helped me forget what it is to mow a lawn to IT specialists who keep coming up with new gadgets – from wonderfully inventive laboratory technicians to people like Ann Knight, who has led the organization of this function tonight - from the highly competent and good-natured people in the Office of the Vice-Chancellor to the admirable stalwarts in faculty offices who make things happen at the working heart of the University – Melbourne is superbly served by hundreds and hundreds of general staff who make this a wonderful place to be an academic, a scholar, a teacher, a researcher.

Academics and general staff have traditionally worked wonderfully well together at Melbourne. You’ll find in Stuart Macintyre’s history a photograph of Charles Martin, who came to Melbourne via Sydney from King’s College, London. Martin was an inspiring teacher in the Medical Faculty, Macintyre records, and someone who ran a superb lab. “We have lots of chaps always working about the labs and we are very crowded,” he wrote in 1989. The same could be said of so many labs today, except that many of the chaps would be women. But what Martin added in that 1989 account was a comment typical of staff relations throughout so much of this University’s history. In a lab requiring general and academic staff to work cooperatively, Martin wrote, “We are all very happy together.”

Being very happy together had not, sadly, been a feature of the academic experience of University in its early decades, what with the heavy-handed rulings of the University Council in the 1870s, 1880s and 1990s against staff who spoke out on certain public issues, including its insistence that academic staff could speak publicly only with Council’s approval. Happiness was certainly not reflected in the intellectually and morally brutal treatment handed out to the first Professor of Music, George Marshall-Hall, whose career at the University ended over a free speech issue in 1900.

But collegiality and respect for academic freedom have, as we look back now, been highly valued by leaders of this University over many generations, at least since the 1930s. The ferment over the Spanish Civil War may have created openness to dissent. So might the fact that the University was becoming more independent of a Council dominated by astonishingly conservative external leaders. The idea of a full-time, paid Vice-Chancellor was bitterly opposed by many members of Council in the 1920s and early 1930s because of the perceived power that such a person would have. But what the first holder of that office did with his power was salutary. Within a few months of arriving in Melbourne as the first executive full-time Vice-Chancellor, Raymond Priestley said, hopefully, that:

“A University should be a fellowship of students and teachers, living in close and intimate association, with the threefold objective of passing from one generation to another man’s inherited knowledge, extending the boundaries of that knowledge, and learning and teaching how life can be lived in the fullest and best sense.”

Trying to do something about that vision, Priestley became a strong advocate of a University Staff Club, and idea which culminated 18 years later with the establishment of University House. And when he left after only a short period as Vice-Chancellor, he was succeeded by the liberal-minded and deftly understated leadership of John Medley. Medley was never faulted on academic freedom. When confronted on one occasion with the criticism that “the University was a hot-bed of communism”, Medley replied, heroically, I think, “Thank goodness it is a hotbed of something.”

As Vice-Chancellor, I have tried to maintain that same commitment, and I hope that I, too, have not been faulted.

What we can say is this, Melbourne has, over the years, been a true scholarly community, open to change while being true to essential academic values. A university is, in Priestley’s words, a “fellowship”. It was a fellowship of around 4,000 souls, students and teachers, in 1935, when he so described it; yet now, against all odds, Melbourne remains, at more than 10 times that 1935 size, a fellowship still.

We are met tonight as a representative gathering of that fellowship, and it is fitting, on this 150th anniversary, to ask you all, who embody the idea of the University of Melbourne, to join me in drinking a toast on behalf of the University to: “The Staff”.