Contemporary

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

‘Harvard by the Yarra’ is actually the University of Melbourne, Australia (the Yarra being the major river hereabouts, though the university is not actually anywhere near it). Some wag coined the phrase to describe (and deride) the aspirations implicit in the Melbourne Model, a radical overhaul of undergraduate teaching announced in 2007. Instead of many specialised undergraduate courses, there are now (or soon will be) only six, which will be more general and will serve as feeders for professional postgraduate courses. So whereas students used to be able to enroll in a law or medicine degree straight out of high school, for example, they now must complete an undergraduate degree first. This is more like the US tertiary education system than the British one, which provided the model for the first Australian universities in the 19th century. Hence ‘Harvard by the Yarra’.

But there’s another similarity to Harvard. Melbourne, like most Australian universities is publicly-funded. However, like Harvard, it is a (relatively, in Australian terms) old and prestigious institution, and so it has also attracted a (again, in Australian terms) large endowment from various benefactors. You might think that this is a good thing to have in a global recession, but apparently not. A slump in the value of the university’s investments combined with several other factors (for example, the loss of fees from local students) has lead to a budgetary crisis, and an announcement by the vice-chancellor of a plan to cut 220 full-time equivalent jobs over the next few years, about 3% of the total workforce, to fall on both academics and administrative staff.

This doesn’t come at a good time for the Faculty of Arts, which has already been struggling to deal with its own deep budget deficits over the last couple of years. This is partly due to curriculum changes imposed by the Melbourne Model, but also to a shift in the way funds are allocated by the university. There has been much publicity about this in recent months, as Arts tried to reduce salary expenditure by encouraging academic staff to take early retirement or go on long-term leave without pay. It’s lost about 65 academics through these measures. The School of Historical Studies, where I completed my PhD studies, has been the focus of much of this attention. What was perhaps the leading history department in Australia is being slowly strangled by the need to do more with less. And with the recent spate of bad news, a recovery in the near future seems unlikely.
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As Chris noted here the other day, David Philips died recently. David was a recently retired associate professor in the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne, where he taught for three decades, and had an international reputation in the study of crime and policing in 19th century Britain and the comparative study of relations between settlers and indigenous people in Britain’s colonies. A South African expatriate, he was long active in the anti-apartheid movement and human rights issues more generally. He was the author, co-author or co-editor of more than a half-dozen books, from Crime and Authority in Victorian England: The Black Country 1835-1860 (1977) to (with Julie Evans, Pat Grimshaw and Shurlee Swain) Equal Subjects, Unequal rights: Indigenous Peoples in British Settler Colonies, 1830-1910 (2003).

Back in 2003-4, I was one of David’s students, so I thought it appropriate to write a little about him. It was only for a semester, at the end of my honours year (technically, postgraduate diploma, but pretty much the same thing). I was already half-way through my honours thesis; my original supervisor had to take a sabbatical in order to write, and as David was the only other British historian around, he was the obvious replacement. I wish I could say that we hit it off immediately and saw eye to eye on how my project was going and where it should be going, but we didn’t quite. I’ve always thought that must have been difficult, to be dropped into the middle of a student’s research without any idea of where they are coming from and having had no opportunity to influence the course it has taken. There’s no choice at that late stage but to run with it.

So I was grateful to David for taking me on. And in the end, although our relationship was not always easy, he did help me produce the best thesis I could write, so I’m grateful for that too. Some of the ideas from that thesis have unexpectedly carried over into my current research, so his influence lives on! We also had fun: although aviation history was not his area, he was a widely-read and intellectually curious person, and as I recall he was quite fascinated by air combat in the Great War, which meant I had to dredge up bits and pieces I’d read about Fokker interrupter gear years before, or the vulnerability of Zeppelins to incendiary bullets. David’s early death, only a year after his retirement, is a loss to the historical community as well as to his family.

A memorial service for David will be held on Monday 8 September at 4:30pm at Melba Hall (map here) on Royal Parade, at the University of Melbourne. All are welcome.