The Australian Idea of a University

Glyn Davis, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne, is an influential and frequent participant in Australian public debate – such as it is – about higher education. The Australian Idea of a University (“Idea”) is his second book-length contribution on the topic, following the 2010 series of radio lectures published as The Republic of Learning. In a prologue and five short chapters, Idea offers a potted history of Australian universities from the foundation of the University of Sydney in 1850 to the present day, in order to explore how “shared origins, student expectations, academic culture and federal regulation contribute to a single idea of an Australian university” (2). This history is not a mere chronicle: it comes with a warning and some recommendations for policy change. The warning is about the vulnerability of Australian higher education to threats from e-learning “providers”: “if Australian public universities are more alike than different, then disruption from Silicon Valley may affect the whole sector, simultaneously” (30). The suggestions, elaborated and justified in the book’s last chapter, concern the desirability of “a single policy perspective over the post-school sector, funding for teaching and research that reflects actual costs” – as the surrounding discussion makes clear, Davis is actually urging higher student fees – and “the creation of new universities to accommodate growth” (121).

Davis’ opening chapter places the advent of online learning in the context of earlier economic cycles of “creative destruction”. The second chapter discusses the establishment of Australia’s first universities in Sydney and Melbourne, which Davis sees as initiating the path dependency that has shaped the subsequent history of the country’s...