“Murdoch University - the First Ten Years”

“Murdoch University - The First Ten Years” Speech to mark the opening of Murdoch University’s Tenth Anniversary Celebrations His Excellency Mr Gordon Reid, Governor of Western Australia 27 February 1985 Mr. Chancellor Sir Ronald Wilson and Lady Wilson Mr. Pro Chancellor Mr. Kim Beazley and Mrs Beazley Vice-Chancellor Professor Boyce and Mrs Boyce Distinguished Guests Ladies and Gentlemen Mrs. Reid and I are delighted to be with you on this happy occasion. I have always been delighted to come to Murdoch, enthused by its creation and what it has been trying to do, and to be asked to open an occasion such as this is a pleasure. I find that Murdoch's decade is a decade of educational excitement. It is a story of the pursuit of agreed educational ideals in a society which is bewildered by change. I feel certain that if Professor Sir Walter Murdoch were with us today, as I recall his penetrating commentaries on all aspects of Australian society, he would be analysing for the public what has been happening in Australian education over the last 25 years. Murdoch University, many of you will recall, was officially opened on the 17 September 1974 the hundredth anniversary of Walter Murdoch's birth. And that marked the creation of an institution that was built by many people from years of intensive work in planning, designing, landscaping, building, appointing staff and designing the teaching arrangements. The University of Western Australia was created in 1913 after a leisurely two years of planning. Murdoch University, by contrast, was the result of careful intensive planning over almost five years. Its first Planning Board held its first meeting on 9 July 1970. At that meeting a message from the Premier, Sir David Brand, was read and then incorporated in the minutes. I imagine that message will be read repeatedly during the life of Murdoch University because it is a memorial document. Amongst other things it told the Planning Board that it was being asked to lay the foundations of an institution which in years to come would play an important part in the lives of many thousands of students, who in turn would contribute to the development of Western Australia and the welfare of its people. It claimed that the University should be given a name in keeping with the high standards expected of it as a place of scholarship, of learning, and of service to the community. In the Premier's words “I can think of no more appropriate name than Murdoch University and the Government has decided that it shall be so named.” The 1 letter went on to explain that Sir Walter Murdoch was a man who had been prominent in the life and learning of Western Australia for more than half a century and it gave the details of his career which are so well known to so many of us here tonight. At the end of that month, on 30th July, Sir Walter Murdoch died at the wonderful age of 95 years. His family recount that before his death, when he was told that this University had been named after him his response was “Well - it had better be a good one.” Three and a half years after that first Planning Board meeting the University's first students commenced their formal studies. And that was exactly ten years ago. From now. Well, we all know that universities, these days, are large and costly institutions. For a University to be created today a vast amount of public money has to be invested in it. Of necessity, universities are obliged to rely upon governments, first for their base in legislation, and secondly for the provision of the financial resources needed for them. In Australia, we have the peculiar arrangement where the statutory base is the product of one polity - the State Government- and the provision of the necessary financial resources comes from another - the National Government. That is a fascinating arrangement. It has advantages and disadvantages which I cannot pursue here. In making that decision to create Murdoch University both Governments engaged in certain speculations. They made presumptions about the population growth of the State, and of the city of Perth, and about that population's distribution. They made presumptions about the physical development of the City of Perth, about its freeway system, and the mobility of its people. They made presumptions about hospital development seeing medical and allied interests to be important for a developing university. Now, with the wisdom of hindsight, we all know that some of those presumptions were wrong. Some took longer than expected to be realised and Murdoch University, in the midst of such surmises, and with Australia's fluctuating economic climate, had to weather a lot of unpredictable and unexpected vicissitudes. Another important question asked at the very beginning was - what kind of university would Murdoch be? The documents make it clear that there was a firm resolve that Murdoch should not be a carbon copy of the sixty-year-old university on the other side of the River Swan - The University of Western Australia. There was a resolve to make the best of a new start. Hence, in the University's developments from that early stage, ideals of education became prominent. Decisions were made that those ideals should be manifest in the academic shape of the University. The ideals have since been talked about extensively in educational circles, amongst students, and in the community. First there was the notion that there ought to be a flexibility in learning at Murdoch from having interdisciplinary schools rather than the traditional faculty structure. Interdisciplinary opportunities have since been said to be the hallmark of Murdoch's development. Secondly, the planners opted for semesters rather than terms, and also to increase students' choice to show that Murdoch was going to be a different university. Thirdly, a system of continuous student assessment, very radical at the time, was adopted in preference to annual 2 examinations. Fourthly, the notion of a greater degree of student participation in the decision- making of the University was seen to be a desirable ideal. And then, in the academic design of the University the notion of Part I and Part II studies was introduced. Part I allowed students to opt for general studies under a Board of Studies of the University as a whole; and Part II studies brought students to work under a Board of Studies based on their particular school of study. The scheme maximised the flexibility students could enjoy in their choice of subjects and minimised the pre-emption of options that students could take in undertaking their undergraduate courses. The ideal was laudable. If the provision of choice is an aspect of personal liberty, then choice in undertaking one's academic training ought to be maximised within the constraints of academic rigour. In building the academic design of Murdoch University an emphasis was placed on external studies; in this respect the architects saw Australia as their catchment area for students. They also saw the need to develop a close interface between the University and the immediate community, particularly in the expectation of the reciprocal sharing of community resources. There was also a sympathetic disposition towards mature-age students - whether or not the students were external or internal. In many of Murdoch's plans there appeared to be a presumption that university education would continue to be free. That fees would not be introduced. In total, and in retrospect, this constituted a most exciting educational adventure. I envy those who were part of it. The question being asked today - ten years on – is, has it worked? This is an important question. Frankly, I do not know the answer. I have not been a member of Murdoch's staff, nor have I been a student at Murdoch University, nor an active member of any of its committees. For the sake of university education I most sincerely hope that it has worked. It was a noble ideal. It planned to widen student opportunities in choice, it planned to emphasise the generalist rather than a specialised level of approach to undergraduate education, it planned that students through that process would have a greater incentive, a wider invitation, to share in the excitement of learning. Being unable to answer the question "has it worked?" I wondered what I could say in that regard tonight. I am sure that if Professor Murdoch were in this situation he would say that if you are unable to give a definitive answer to a public question - at least provide something to help people towards an answer. My background as a student of government, leads me to consider whether Murdoch's ideals are indeed relevant to the organisational arrangements in the society within which we live. And in talking about organisations in society, I believe no-one should ignore the contribution in this field made by the German sociologist Max Weber in the early part of this century. Weber lived in Munich and wrote extensively about social arrangements in many parts of the world. He lived between 1864 and 1920, and his essay on "bureaucracy" was written about 1910. Max Weber made the generalisation, that organisations in modern western industrial societies all tend towards what he called "bureaucracy". In writing about bureaucracy Weber did not use that term in a pejorative sense; he was not talking about red tape; he saw that the 3 organisations of a modern industrial society had common traits. The traits were such that in any organisation it was difficult to resist their development; they encroached upon an organisation notwithstanding that its ideals and expectations may be different.

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