Julia Horne

Extending the Educational Franchise: The Social Contract of Australia's Public Universities, 1850-1890.

This article introduces the notion of the “educational franchise” of Australia’s public universities established in the mid‐nineteenth century. In his recently published study of the public university and social access in the United States, John Aubrey Douglass suggests that from the mid‐nineteenth century a social contract was formed between American public universities and their social and political constituencies: institutions open to all who could qualify for admission, offering a relevant curriculum and related closely to public schools systems. The idea of the “public university” was not unique to North America. Across the Pacific, the settler societies of Australasia were creating public universities from 1850 – a decade before the Morrill Act which provided the land grants for many public universities in the USA. The Australasian universities also emerged almost simultaneously with the establishment of secondary schools in each of the colonies. This article explores questions of social stratification, meritocracy, social class and gender with a strong focus on the interaction between universities and schools. The social contract in Australia was developed as a form of educational franchise first granted to urban males principally of middle‐class background, but of diverse social and religious origins, and then increasingly extended to those in the emerging public school system, those of rural and regional background, and then to women. The main focus of the article is on the University of Sydney, Australia’s first public university established in 1850. Drawing on an extensive student biographical database we have compiled, the article examines how the “educational franchise” operated in the colony of New South Wales in the period 1850–1890.

Looking from the Inside Out: Rethinking University History.

When Geoffrey Sherington and I set out on our project on the Australian Public University, which culminated in Sydney: The Making of a Public University (2012), we wanted to move away from the emphasis of conventional institutional history on chancellors, vice-chancellors and governing councils in order to explore the university as a social institution. Using the theoretical and methodological approach of social history, we studied how students, academics, researchers, philanthropists along with the universitys governing body were all important characters in the creation and development of Australias first university. This essay explores some of the influences in this approach, especially the relationship between oral history and womens history and the history of administration in the story of educational institutions such as universities, and examines the methodological challenges for historical analysis of bringing together these approaches.

Empire, state and public purpose in the founding of universities and colleges in the Antipodes

From the mid‐nineteenth to the early twentieth century universities and colleges were founded throughout Australia and New Zealand in the context of the expanding British Empire. This article provides an analytical framework to understand the engagement between changing ideas of higher education at the centre of Empire and within the settler societies in the Antipodes. Imperial influences remained significant, but so was locality in association with the role of the emerging state, while the idea of the public purpose of higher education helped to widen social access forming and sustaining the basis of middle class professions.

Universities, expertise and the First World War

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to: introduce the topic of the relationship between universities and the First World War historiographically; put university expertise and knowledge at the centre of studies of the First World War; and explain how an examination of university expertise and war reveals a continuity of intellectual and scientific activity from war to peace. Design/methodology/approach Placing the papers in the special issue of HER on universities and war in the context of a broader historiography of the First World War and its aftermath. Findings The interconnections between university expertise and the First World War is a neglected field, yet its examination enriches the current historiography and prompts us to see the war not simply in terms of guns and battles but also how the battlefield extended university expertise with long-lasting implications into the 1920s and 1930s. Originality/value The paper explores how universities and their expertise – e.g. medical, artistic, philosophical – were mobilised in the First World War and the following peace.

The “knowledge front”, women, war and peace

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to introduce the idea of the “knowledge front” alongside ideas of “home” and “war” front as a way of understanding the expertise of university-educated women in an examination of the First World War and its aftermath. The paper explores the professional lives of two women, the medical researcher, Elsie Dalyell, and the teacher, feminist and unionist, Lucy Woodcock. The paper examines their professional lives and acquisition and use of university expertise both on the war and home fronts, and shows how women’s intellectual and scientific activity established during the war continued long after as a way to repair what many believed to be a society damaged by war. It argues that the idea of “knowledge front” reveals a continuity of intellectual and scientific activity from war to peace, and offers “space” to examine the professional lives of university-educated women in this period. Design/methodology/approach The paper is structured as an analytical narrative interweaving the professional lives of two women, medical researcher Elsie Dalyell and teacher/unionist Lucy Woodcock to illuminate the contributions of university-educated women’s expertise from 1914 to the outbreak of the Second World War. Findings The emergence of university-educated women in the First World War and the interwar years participated in the civic structure of Australian society in innovative and important ways that challenged the “soldier citizen” ethos of this era. The paper offers a way to examine university-educated women’s professional lives as they unfolded during the course of war and peace that focuses on what they did with their expertise. Thus, the “knowledge front” provides more ways to examine these lives than the more narrowly articulated ideas of “home” and “war” front. Research limitations/implications The idea of the “knowledge front” applied to women in this paper also has implications for how to analyse the meaning of the First World War-focused university expertise more generally both during war and peace. Practical implications The usual view of women’s participation in war is as nurses in field hospitals. This paper broadens the notion of war to see war as having many interconnected fronts including the battle front and home front (Beaumont, 2013). By doing so, not only can we see a much larger involvement of women in the war, but we also see the involvement of university-educated women. Social implications The paper shows that while the guns may have ceased on 11 November 1918, women’s lives continued as they grappled with their war experience and aimed to reassert their professional lives in Australian society in the 1920s and 1930s. Originality/value The paper contains original biographical research of the lives of two women. It also conceptualises the idea of “knowledge front” in terms of war/home front to examine how the expertise of university-educated career women contributed to the social fabric of a nation recovering from war.