As the federal government rethinks higher education in Australia through its Universities Accord, it should bear in mind Robert Menzies’ vision of the place of universities in society.

No figure bears more responsibility for Australia’s university sector than Menzies. His two interventions into higher education, in 1957 and 1965, established the basis for the system we benefit from today. His response to the Murray report in 1957 saw the federal government almost quadruple its funding for higher education, ultimately assuming responsibility for the sector from the states, enabling Australia’s universities to proliferate, expand and prosecute more ambitious research agendas.

In 1965, he accepted the Martin report’s suggestion that the country should develop and expand a network of technical and vocational teaching-only colleges of advanced education.

These two moves enabled ever greater numbers of Australians to access higher education, to a point where today just under half of all Australians have a higher degree.

Menzies was inspired by a personal vision about the role of universities in society that was founded deeply in his political philosophy – that a liberal society required citizens who had the benefit of a liberal university education.

University education, thought Menzies, was necessary to develop the public spiritedness, breadth of vision, attention to societal rather than personal interests, and leadership capabilities necessary for a truly liberal, democratic society. These were ideas he formulated and expressed as a student at the University of Melbourne, and during his political apprenticeship in the 1920s and ’30s.

It was his reading of the political classics, twinned with his acute observation of what was happening in the world, that shaped Menzies’ views. The war, the Depression and the march of communism and totalitarianism demonstrated to Menzies how liberal, democratic societies could succumb to internal and external assaults. He believed strong universities and the rigorous mental training they provided were the best defence against the corruptions that beset such societies.

In his speech tabling the Murray report he said: “Civilisation in the true sense requires a close and growing attention, not only to science in all its branches, but also to those studies of the mind and spirit of man, of history and literature and language and mental and moral philosophy, of human relations in society and industry, of international understanding, the relative neglect of which has left a gruesome mark on this century.” Menzies worried about the effects of industrialisation and mass culture on society. In a speech in 1937 he observed that economic development had created a “mechanical age” that had enabled advances “in the realm of bodily freedom”, but without liberal education it would construct a society of individuals with “liberated bod(ies) but stunted (in) mind and poor (in) spirit”. Universities could counter the corrupting elements of modern society: the slide from liberty into licence, for the “sober presentation of facts by the press to degenerate into propaganda”, for cinema to “feed people’s imagination with an absurd diet of false sentiment and false values”, thereby creating “a race of people to whom leisure was the chief end of life and the insistence upon a standard of accuracy abhorrent”. Against the corruptions of modernity and the consumer society must stand the university and its rigorous training of the mind: “Without minds that were informed, toughened by exercise, broadened by inquiry, and fearless in pursuit of the truth, (a people) could never hope to have spirits untrammelled by blinding ignorance or distorting prejudice. “Freedom would never be gained without discipline, which was based on an intelligent understanding of the fact that order and unity were essential if the liberty of the individual was to be reconciled with the rights of other individuals.”

Menzies rejected the orthodoxy that university education was only about vocational training. In a speech to parliament in 1945, he said: “The greatest failure in the world in my lifetime has not been the failure in technical capacity or manual capacity half as much as it has been the failure of the human spirit.” He blamed this failure on “the increasingly pagan and materialistic quality of our education”. Education was about broadening the mind: “Let us have more scientists, and more humanists. Let the scientists be touched and informed by the humanities. Let the humanists be touched and informed by science. That proposition underlies the whole university idea. It warrants and requires a great variety of faculties and a constant intermingling of those who engage in their disciplines.”

For Menzies, universities were a public good. In increasing funding in 1957, he said: “Universities are to be regarded not as a home of privilege for a few but as something essential to the lives of millions of people who may never enter their doors.” He justified almost quadrupling the government’s funding of universities by placing them squarely at the centre of national wellbeing. Funding universities was entirely legitimate as a nation-building project. “We must,” he urged, “become a more and more educated democracy if we are to raise our spiritual, intellectual and material living standards.” Menzies’ passionate views on universities are a necessary tonic to a national discussion that increasingly sees them in narrowly vocational, instrumental terms, as needing to produce “job-ready graduates”.

As we move through our current Universities Accord process, we must recall Menzies’ vision of universities as delivering broadening education, and as necessary to the political, social and economic health of Australia.

Written by Michael Wesley. Originally published in The Australian 16 September 2023.