I was pretty thrilled that The Floating University was named one of the books of the year by History Today this week.

I’ve done a bunch of talks lately too, many of which are now up online. So I thought I’d do a bit of a roundup here of the links that I have.

Sincere thanks to everyone who has engaged with the book. As anyone who has written a manuscript will know, it’s completely surreal to have this thing that you have worked on for such a long time out there being read by other humans. I love that voices of Charles Ladd and Holling C. Holling and Lillian McCracken are now in other people’s heads as well as mine!

Of course the greatest recognition of all is that the book has now been pirated. Lib.gen you are too kind.

Recognitions

• Higher Ed Book of the Year (joint), Higher Education Strategy Associates – Dec 2023
• History Today, Books of the year – Dec 2023
• Sydney Morning Herald, Picks of the week – 5 Oct 2023

Talks available online

• American Campus Podcast, 19 Feb 2025
• The World of Higher Education podcast, 23 Nov 2023
• NYU Arts and Social Sciences Book Talk, 10 Nov 2023
• Eastside FM Between or Beyond, on the Floating University’s Jazz group, the Globetrotters – 7 Nov 2023
• New Books Network podcast – 5 Nov 2023
• Stanford & Trinity College, Academic Innovation for the Public Good series – 11 Oct 2023
• Late Night Live with Phillip Adams – 27 Sept 2023
• History of Universities Seminar, Knowing the World in the 1920s  – 5 July 2023

Press

• Psychology professor James Edwin Lough’s ‘floating university’ experiment to link education with experience, ABC RN, 22 Dec 2023.
• Was the 1926 Floating University a Failure? History Today, Dec 2023
• The forgotten ‘floating university’ comes back to life ($) The Australian Newspaper, 20 Sept 2023
• All Aboard The Ship of Self Improvement, The Critic, Aug/Sept 2023
• What is a University? Inside Story, 19 July 2023
• The Students Who Went to Sea, Literary Review, July 2023
• Author’s Corner with Tamson Pietsch, Way of Improvement Blog, June 9, 2023
• An unusual study abroad experience brought 500 students all over the world, Inside Higher Ed, 27 April 2023

Scholarly reviews

• Ian Tyrell. Tamson Pietsch takes us on an educational voyage with the Floating University: The Floating University: Experience, Empire, and the Politics of Knowledge, by Tamson Pietsch, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2023, pp. 323. ISBN 13: 978-0-226-82516-8 (cloth). History Australia, 21(2), 302–304. https://doi.org/10.1080/14490854.2024.2341817
• Qing Liu. Tamson Pietsch. The Floating University: Experience, Empire, and the Politics of Knowledge Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923. 320 pp. History of Education Quarterly. (2024) 64(1):108-110. doi:10.1017/heq.2023.47
• Stephen Tuffnell. The Floating University: Experience, Empire, and the Politics of Knowledge. By Tamson Pietsch. British Journal of Educational Studies (2023), https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00071005.2023.2281147

I’ve been talking about the antics of these interwar Americans for some time now – following them down archival rabbit holes and port city back alleys, and trying to piece together what happened in 1926 on that ship, and why it matters to us today.  It’s been ten years in the making, but my book on the Floating University is finally here!

The book tells the story of the 1926 Floating University: a bold educational experiment in which 500 American college students sailed around the globe in the belief that learning at sea would make them better citizens of the world. As well as a full curriculum, the voyage included visits to foreign dignitaries including Mussolini, Gandhi and the Pope, and stops in 47 ports. But the trip was also beset by trouble: reports of sex, alcohol and jazz made their way back to an American press hungry for scandal and the Floating University became a byword for what could go wrong with educational travel. It explores this largely forgotten voyage and argues that – as well as revealing the tentacles of US empire – it exposes a much larger contest over what kind of knowledge should underpin university authority, one in which direct personal experience came into conflict with academic expertise.

The introduction and table of contents are available here, and (everyone’s favourite) the acknowledgements are attached below. Thank you to everyone who has helped me along the way, and especial thanks to my partner Ruth and my daughter Vita – the cutest book mascot I could ever dream of. I submitted the manuscript the day before she was born and every day since I have thought my heart might explode.

A 40% discount is available from the University of Chicago Press website when you enter the code FLOATING.

If you want to know more, there’s an early Q&A with me about the book in Inside Higher Ed or please get in touch with me directly.

I have an article out on the sources of university income in the UK and Australia across the 20th century. To tempt you to read it, I’m going to try my hand at a twitter thread (which I have mostly just cut and pasted here!) @EmeraldGlobal https://doi.org/10.1108/HER-06-2020-0040 (1/13)

[You can read the free-to-access pre-print version of this article here]

Where does funding for universities come from? How has this changed across the 20th century? How do patterns in Australia and the UK compare? These seem pretty important questions right now for lots of reasons @HistEdSocUK @ANZHistEdSoc #auspol (2/13)

.

But answering them is hard because there is no official time series data on university income in Australia that is comparable with Vincent Carpentier’s quite brilliant UK study. @ResearchCGHE (3/13)

Problem is: data + politics. Availability & quality reflects different periods of university governance. As @andrewjnorton says, “different historical data sources do not always match”. The 1970s & 80s in particular are a bit of a mystery (4/13)

But surely it’s possible to do better than this 2014 effort from the @Go8 ??? (5/13)

So I trawled the CTEC reports and Yearbooks and other sources to create (with lots of data caveats) a comparable series for Australia and updated Carpentier’s series as well. What does it show??? (6/13)

Australian universities’ income from all sources since 1922 reveals three distinct periods: mixed 1922-1947; government-led 1952-1987; cost-sharing incl. international students 1992-2017. (7/13)

Similar patterns are evident in the UK, but there domestic student fees have come to make up much greater percentage of income (as it is likely too in Australia post Tehan reforms) (8/13)

Grouping these categories to show universities’ “private” income (ie international student fees & private income such as investments) makes these patterns even clearer for Australia. (9/13)

And the UK shows how domestic student fees have been used as a substitute for govt support. The % revenue universities’ receive from public sources is at its lowest since WW1 (for more graphs see the article!) (10/13)

So what? Do these graphs point to the end of the public as an organising principle of our political, economic & institutional life? (pace @James11Vernon) https://globalhighered.wordpress.com/2010/10/26/the-end-of-the-public-university-in-england (11/13)

Comparison w the UK was crucial to the foundation of @uniaus argue @ejwaghorne & @Gwil_C – Given the challenges of covid + climate, perhaps now the time to make new comparisons about the way #highered has and can be funded? https://doi.org/10.1108/HER-06-2020-0040 (12/13)

For the full article see T. Pietsch, ‘A history of university income in the United Kingdom and Australia, 1922-2017’, History of Education Review (2020) 49:2, 229-248 https://doi.org/10.1108/HER-06-2020-0040. The free-to-access pre-print version is here. (13/13)

What does it mean to do academic history in these times?

In 2018 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change determined that there were twelve years remaining in which the global community could act to reduce carbon emissions by 45% and avert runaway climate collapse. Their report urged “rapid and far-reaching transitions in energy, land, urban and infrastructure … and industrial systems” at a scale and a speed that was “unprecedented”.

The enormity of this challenge is dispiriting. There is no ready-made human community in waiting equipped to forge such change – certainly not one with a democratic mandate. This, as the world is belatedly coming to see, is the tragedy of our inheritance and the challenge of our moment. It is a challenge that spans the immediate and the far distant, the intimate and the general. It is at once metaphysical and mundane, existential and political. It will transform our individual and collective human life and it requires concerted and co-ordinated action. Our existing political communities are stunningly ill-equipped to meet it.

With the summer’s fires encircling our cities, Frances and I sought to think seriously about how the urgency of this challenge might press upon our own home-discipline. We looked not only for the ways it might shape the content of what we teach and research, but also its connection to our epistemic orientation: the ways we face the world and seek to orient subjects towards certain forms of seeing, understanding and acting.

Of course practices of making sense of the past are as old as human time, and have long been undertaken by a host of human actors from a variety of knowledge traditions. But historicity, as it is practised and taught within a range of disciplines at the start of the twenty-first century, carries with it a very particular orientation. It one that is predicated on an impatience with the idea that events or structures are eternal, static or natural. It understands people as subject to forces beyond their control, but also as having power to act on and in the world. Historians today tend to locate their actors in the midst of things: acting as best they can in their context with the tools they have; acting courageously, or secretly or self-interestedly or collectively; pursuing world-making on small and large scales.

There seemed to us to be nothing inherently progressive or conservative in this approach to time. On both the left and right side of politics, it is one that acknowledges animating forces and human striving. It sees the world as sacred and profane, replete with systems of power and possibilities for change and love and hope and tragedy. It is an orientation to power, time and human subjectivity that presents the possibility of a world in which structures can be re-ordered, subjectivities can be re-aligned, and everyone’s actions matter.

It might seem rather obvious to say but, writing under the skies of Australia’s ‘savage summer’, this seemed to us to be an approach to power and human agency that is very different to another orientation that has come to shape how states ‘think’, how politicians and business leaders speak, and the way people from all walks of life understand themselves and their worlds.

This other orientation promotes a vision of the world that is largely antithetical to the possibility of change and human agency. It flattens the differences of place and context and it tends towards fatalism – as evident, say, in its framing of the ‘inevitability’ of artificial intelligence or the ‘naturalness’ of wildfire. It is a technocratic and managerialist orientation that accords a very small class of people decision-making power, while reducing the agency of almost everyone else to the realm of consumption. In the process it seeks to depoliticise issues that urgently need politicising.

For those who feel the urgency of these times, perhaps doing history means seeing themselves as a part of this high-stakes debate about the systems that create and structure the world we all live in?

Our article, published recently as part of a special issue of History Australia, explores what this might mean for the ways historians think about themselves and the ways they write and speak. Thanks to the journal, the piece is available on open access for a limited time, but if you can’t beat the pay wall, the full text is available here for free.

Twelve short years are projected. How will we dwell in that time? Do we still believe it is open? That the ends predicted are inevitable? The communities inviting people to understand themselves as active and their worlds as re-makeable are few and far between.

With the time we have been given, let us speak the thing we know to be true: that in halting, inestimable and surprising ways, societies change, and in acting together, people have a hand in changing them.

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Tamson Pietsch & Frances Flanagan (2020), ‘Here we stand: temporal thinking in urgent times’, History Australia, 17:2, 252-271, DOI: 10.1080/14490854.2020.1758577

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‘I even miss the library’s gigglings, munchings and canoodlings’

Now that they are gone, the value to me of whole tranches of everyday work life have come into view. These include lunch with colleagues in the sunshine on my urban university’s one patch of grass; a commute perfectly calibrated to the length of a half-hour podcast; and that wonderful feeling of the “after work” moment, when I would close my computer and open the door to the possibilities of the evening.

But, most of all, I think I miss the library. I miss the smell of its books, stored for years and brought briefly into the light by my retrieval. I miss the sounds of its muffled diligence and, yes, I even miss its less muted gigglings, munchings and canoodlings.

The library stands as a kind of physical embodiment of the shared enterprise of the university community. It is a community constituted collectively, not only by the students from near and far, the academics trawling the stacks, the countless authors who wrote the books and the librarians who catalogued and digitised them, but also by the security guards at the door, the barista making the coffee, and the porters ferrying books in the stacks. How often, pre-Covid-19, did I think of it this way? And what does my newly acquired sepia filter mask?

Higher education systems in Australia and elsewhere have for some time now relied on rising student debt, precarious work and financial dependence on overseas students and market investments. This is not a system for which to be nostalgic and, when this pandemic is over, I’d love to be able to say goodbye to this system’s reliance on casual contracts and investments in fossil fuels.

Then again, higher education is by no means the only sector whose increasing reliance on such practices has been exposed by the plight of its disenfranchised workers during the pandemic. Indeed, the entire contract between society and the state – between the past, present and the future – will be reshaped by this crisis, and universities will be reshaped with it.

So, as I look back to the things I once took for granted, I am also looking forward and thinking hard about how, in the months and years to come, higher education institutions might also be part of building a more just and sustainable society.

The New Social Contract podcast

Since April, I’ve been working hard to give that hard thinking form. Thanks to the wonderful people from UTS Impact Studios the result is The New Social Contract podcast. Listen online or search for it in any of the podcast platforms.

Ok Covid-19.

It’s a thing.

A big thing.

And its consequences for universities are going to be enormous.

Like really.

That’s why now is the time to start a conversation about how the relationship between universities, society and the state might be remade.

Because, let’s face it, the virus has pulled on the threads of the already worn fabric of higher education policy.

What comes next is a question the sector has been asking for some time. Now it’s a question that has a great deal of urgency.

What kind of universities does our society need?

As someone who has long been interested in universities and their relationship to society, I figured I’d better have a go at talking about these questions.

So with UTS Impact Studios, I’ve been making a podcast — recording from under a ladder with a duvet on top of it, in my spare room.

The trailer is out now and the first episode will release 4 May so SUBSCRIBE on all the usual podcast platforms (just search for “The New Social Contract”). Here are a few handy links:

Apple Podcasts  //  Spotify  //  Stitcher // Whooshkaa

Part 1: Focuses on the value and purpose of the university, and the form it has taken in Australia. How have universities changed in the twentieth century, and what might they become, under the pressure of this present moment? >> Listen now

Part 2: Takes up the question of the university in the post-COVID19 world, focusing on possible reforms as well as wider questions of climate, technology and what we want and need from our universities? >> Listen now

Speakers:

• Professor Brian Schmidt – Vice Chancellor, ANU; 2011 Nobel laureate for Physics
• George Megalogenis – author and journalist
• Associate Professor Tamson Pietsch – Director, Australian Centre for Public History, UTS.
• Dr Rebecca Huntley – social researcher
• Professor Des Manderson, interdisciplinary scholar, law and the humanities, ANU.
• (moderator) Dr Natasha Cica – founding director, Kapacity.org; author; honorary professor, ANU College of Law.

The question of how COVID-19 is reconfiguring the relationship between universities and their societies is one I’ve been thinking about *a lot* in the wake of this discussion. It’s something I’ll be coming back to in the next few weeks, but for now here’s my definition of a university from Part 1 of the above discussion, and why I think it matters so much, both in our current moment and more broadly:

The university has changed a lot over the course of the last one thousand years and it will continue to do so if it will survive. But … a university remains an orienting institution. It is one of the great institutions for how we make sense of the world as humans and also how we have ruled the world, so it’s connected to power. But if we think of it as an orienting institution, the university sits between the past and the future, between the dead and the living and the yet to be born, between the here and the elsewhere, and also between the known and the unknown, and research sits in that space. As a consequence, it is an incredibly important institution to hold us through uncertainty and in times of certainty. And that’s a useful definition to hang on to in this moment.

]]> https://capandgown.wordpress.com/2020/04/13/the-purpose-and-future-of-the-university/feed/ 0 tamsonpietsch Purpose and Future of the University recording at NLA, March 2020 https://capandgown.wordpress.com/2019/07/17/where-i-stand-rewriting-the-academic-bio/ https://capandgown.wordpress.com/2019/07/17/where-i-stand-rewriting-the-academic-bio/#respond Wed, 17 Jul 2019 08:02:28 +0000 http://capandgown.wordpress.com/?p=4913

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about expertise and its history and the ways that academics like me deploy it to underpin our knowledge and authority claims.

This is my current bio, taken from my UTS website.

I send versions of this bio to conferences and academic journals and reproduce it in thousands of conversations. It follows a pretty defined formula, beginning with my name (often also given with pre-noms), my position in a hierarchy and my employing institution. It then proceeds to mobilise my publications in order to establish my authority and field of expertise, complete with the sanction of academic publishers and grant-making bodies. At the end come more references to credentialising institutions that stand as further markers of status and serve as evidence of my international formation and legibility.

It is a bio that is geared towards establishing my standing as a professional and as an expert, who is fluent in a language of specialised knowledge that is portable, authoritative and objective.

And this language does work. Since the early part of the twentieth century university credentialed expertise has extended its reach into more and more knowledge domains,  underpinning the technocratic forms of rule-making that have shaped our societies, political systems and economies. Today it continues to be my passport to speak in academic and professional contexts across the world.

The problem is, I’m just not sure that apparently objective and disembodied expertise is what our world needs any more (if it ever did), and not least because there is no such thing as objective and disembodied knowledge free from social and economic relations in the first place.

When you look at it, my academic bio says very little about me. Although it obliquely speaks to some episodes in my life that were hugely important to me (my time at Oxford for example), it says little about where I come from and the forces and belongings that fashioned me. It does not reveal my values, my obligations or my commitments, and it speaks in only the most minimal terms about where I live, why I do what I do, and how that is connected to the community in which I make my home. The only thing to which it holds me accountable is the world of trans-local expertise and the institutions that retail in it.

Reading Bruno Latour’s recent book Down to Earth: Politics in the new Climate Regime* has mobilised me to try something quite different and unfamiliar. He ends his book by introducing himself and describing “where he would like to land”. In the process he turns on its head the usual formula for performing academic credentials to re-situate himself in a place and a set of values, hopes and solidarities.

So, following Latour, I’ve attempted to write a different kind of academic biography, one that locates me as a part of an historical process of formation (familial, settler colonial, religious), points to the ground I call home, foregrounds my commitments and my values, and understands my institutional location as the outcome of these commitments.

In short, it makes me political. But it also makes me a person who is much more than a brain on a stick.

It was, I confess, deeply uncomfortable to write, and probably it’s still a work in progress. Stripping away the apparatus of status built up over nearly twenty years (eek) of life in universities, made me feel vulnerable and exposed.

But I think that, really, is the point. In speaking about where I stand, I make myself available. And from there grows the possibility of relationships with both others and with places, and of common action. And goodness knows, that is what the world is going to need a lot more of as we find a way to live together in our common home.

Tamson Pietsch was born and grew up in Adelaide on the lands of the Kaurna people, as part of Australia’s German Lutheran community, and now makes her home in Sydney. She believes that the ways we make sense of who we are and how we got here helps to shape the societies we are striving to build. Tamson is committed to the roles that universities and other cultural institutions play as homes of this meaning-making. This commitment has been shaped by experiences and relationships made in academic and civic institutions in Adelaide, Melbourne, Oxford and London. It is a commitment that underpins Tamson’s work as an historian of higher education and ideas, and as Director of the Australian Centre for Public History at the University of Technology Sydney. 

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* Go read this book! Not only has it helped me make sense of the entangled politics of ecological destruction, inequality, deregulation and globalisation, but it also points to an alternative. We need to learn new ways to inhabit the earth in order to live together in our common home.

I recently wrote a review (with the longest title ever) on a series of books about the Dawkins’ reforms of the early 1990s. Now I know that higher ed reform is hardly everyone’s special subject, but I think the review (and maybe even the books) might be of interest to those attempting to understand the present state of Australian higher education. They certainly serve as a reminder that change – even system-wide change – is always possible.

Tamson Pietsch, “Life After Dawkins: The University of Melbourne in the Unified National System of Higher Education / Coming of Age: Griffith University in the Unified National System / A New Kid on the Block: The University of South Australia in the Unified National System / Preserving the Past: The University of Sydney and the Unified National System of Higher Education, 1987–96”,Australian Historical Studies (2019) 50:1, 146-149, https://doi.org/10.1080/1031461X.2019.1559450

These four little blue books are a must read for anyone interested in understanding the contours of contemporary higher education in Australia. They offer deep dives into the ways the reforms introduced at the end of the 1980s by John Dawkins, the Commonwealth Minister for Employment, Education and Training, took shape in four very different state and institutional contexts – the Universities of Sydney (details here) and Melbourne (details here), Griffith University (details here) and the University of South Australia (details here). Produced as part of ARC Discovery Project, these four volumes constitute studies in the determinative political roles played alike by institutions, individuals, states, and communities in shaping processes of change. “The universities were not passive instruments of government policy”, states their common introduction, “they resisted some components of the Unified National System and grasped others”; and – it may equally be said – they resisted or grasped these components according to their own (often internally inconsistent) ends and desires.

In the years since the publication of his Green Paper in 1987, the name of Dawkins has become shorthand for the introduction of marketised mechanisms of governance into Australian higher education. The list of the major changes he introduced sounds a familiar note: the abolition of the binary system that distinguished between universities and other advanced education providers; the amalgamation of institutions to meet various size thresholds; the increase of student numbers; a more competitive and selective approach to increased research funding focused on newly defined areas of “national priority”; the centralisation of governance and greater power for Vice-Chancellors; greater institutional autonomy within funding agreements; and the transfer of the financial burden for higher education to students and users. Together these initiatives constituted a shift to what the authors of the University of Melbourne volume describe as “indirect control that embedded the government’s objectives in the practices of universities themselves” (M 36). Critics of this shift often look back to a pre-Dawkins era in which tuition was free, universities were given block grants and governance was democratic and participatory.

Brett, Croucher and Macintyre begin their volume on the University of Melbourne by reminding readers what life was like in universities in the 1980s. After the expansions of the 1970s, Commonwealth spending had all but frozen. Course offerings and student numbers were static, infrastructure spending had stopped and cost cutting measures were required (S 15). Dubbed the “steady state”, for academics this meant declining salary levels, poor teaching facilities and restricted recruitment and career opportunities (M 7). There were also real questions of equity: female participation among students and staff was low, as was indigenous participation, and McKinnon’s volume on the University of South Australia contains a salutatory reminder of the privileged political relationship enjoyed by the older, established universities. In 1990, she notes, there was only one tertiary-educated member of the South Australian cabinet who did not have a degree from the University of Adelaide (UniSA 61).

One of the things these books show is that by the mid 1980s the need for change was already driving reform. Professional central administration and hierarchical management had appeared at Melbourne in the 1970s (M 6), many Colleges of Advanced Education (CAEs) had been forced to merge in the early 1980s (UniSA 17), and the binary divide between the universities and colleges was already breaking down (S 15; M 30). Initially restricted to undergraduate teaching focused on vocational training, drawing some of their staff from the cohorts of PhD students unable to find positions in the universities, many colleges had begun to offer courses in a wide variety of fields including at Bachelor and Masters level. In some research was substantially developed. Recognising this, state governments had begun to legislate for the conversion of some colleges into universities, enabling them to qualify for higher Commonwealth funding. In 1985 the WA Institute of Technology became Curtin University and in 1987 the NSW Institute of Technology because the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). By 1987, the combination of these already-in-train changes, together with the crisis in university funding and the evident need for Australia to adjust to a de-industrialising economy made higher educational reform a necessity.

What is notable about reading these four volumes together, is just how complex and comprehensive were the changes Dawkins introduced and how quickly they were implemented. At times I longed for a timeline that would help me keep track of the green papers and white papers and policy initiatives and the various committees and consultative processes and protests and negotiations – national and state – that emerged in response to them. This is not always helped by the institutionally specific focus of these volumes. Brett, Croucher and Macintyre are best at setting the University of Melbourne story in the wider national context and for this reason their volume should be read first, though for a full account, their more synoptic companion volume, No End of a Lesson (MUP, 2017) is the place to go. Alison McKinnon outlines the way staff living through these changes frequently felt “adrift and distrustful, and experienced identity crises as they came to terms with new structures” (UniSA 92). What did lives lived in service of one institution mean in the wake of its closure or merger? Even David Penington wept when he retired (M 119). The effect of the closure of CAEs on regional and suburban communities is only briefly gestured at. (UniSA 109)

The stories told in each volume are necessarily specific. The internal culture of each institution, its peculiar state political context, as well as its relationship to other local universities significantly shaped how it was able to respond to Dawkins’ reforms. The University of Sydney had a had very politically active staff and a particularly dire institutional financial context (S 7); South Australia was characterised by four relatively evenly matched institutions in terms of student numbers (UniSA, 57), whereas in Victoria the established position of the University of Melbourne gave it considerable negotiating power. The Universities of Melbourne and Sydney were both conscious of the rising challenge of Monash and UNSW, whereas in Queensland it was Griffith that presented that challenge. But institutions are made up of people, and in these accounts the influence of individuals on events is also apparent. At times in can seem that the main characters in the story are the Vice-Chancellors: Sydney’s John Ward, master of internal politics (S, 34); Melbourne’s David Penington; Griffith’s Roy Webb and, for better or worse, the Director of the South Australian Institute of Technology (SAIT), Alan Mead. And of course there is John Dawkins himself – a man who was not scared of conflict. Horne and Garton give good attention to Ward’s formation at Sydney in the 1930s and 40s (S 22) and other leading figures also need to be placed in the contexts that shaped them. But the Vice-Chancellors were not the only ones influencing events: the Principals of the CAEs, State Ministers of Education, Chancellors together with the – in these books – largely unnamed members of Dawkins’ trusted “Purple Circle” of advisors were also crucial. So too were the staff associations and unions, student groups, professors, Deans and members of governing bodies who directly and indirectly created the context for negotiation as well as accommodation. People make institutions make people make institutions.

One of the most fascinating elements of these books is the alternative possibilities for Australian higher education, to which they point. As Horne and Garton point out, the historians Bruce Mansfield and Mark Hutchinson described the amalgamation negotiations of 1988 and 1989 as “a frenzied dance” with “partners clasping and disengaging and clasping elsewhere, lest they be left neglected or pass into oblivion” (in S 63). But reading these volumes sometimes seemed like following the plot of an Iris Murdoch novel in which a small number of characters experiment repeatedly with coupling in various overlapping combinations. The marriages that were contemplated but never eventuated are worth pausing over because they point to alternate futures as well as possible pasts: a large South Australian university made from the merger of all the state’s institutions (UniSA5; 7;28; 54); a federated state-wide Queensland University (S65); and my personal favourite, a NSW creative arts institution consisting of the various colleges of visual art and design, the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and other cultural institutions located at the Rozelle Mental Hospital (S68; 72). And there are other policy initiatives that-might-have-been as well: the state-wide staff and student mobility scheme proposed by the University of Adelaide (UniSA 28) and the possible combined opposition of the universities of Sydney and Melbourne (S 34) standing out. This latter possibility is given more discussion in the Sydney than the Melbourne volume, perhaps indication of a different kind of dance that continues to be played by Australia’s two oldest universities today. The story does serve to highlight, however, just how little universities banded together to resist Dawkins’ reforms and just how little opposition came from the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee, something Terry Hogan points out (G 56).

There is, however, a tension in these books between the sense that Dawkins’ reforms pushed higher education institutions towards uniformity and the notion that they brought about a new form of hierarchy among them. Prior to Dawkins there had been some experimentation in course design, social mission and governance structure evident in the newer “gum-nut” universities such as Flinders and Griffith and also in some of the CAEs such as SACAE. But as the Griffith volume shows, the monetary incentives Dawkins offered encouraged all institutions to develop similar characteristics – a spread of courses, postgraduate training and research (G73; G78; G86) – and assessed them according to uniform standards. Glyn Davis, the outgoing Vice-Chancellor of the University Melbourne, has lamented this at length in his 2018 volume The Australian Idea of a University (MUP). Yet the common introduction to these four books makes it clear that, “despite its homogenous characteristics … the Unified National System [was] [n]ever likely to result in a uniform national system” and by 1993, Griffith’s Roy Webb, believed that “a new binary system was evolving as a divide between the wealthy older universities, on one side … and the rest of the sector on the other side” (G 135; 137; 144). Historic funding for research enabled established universities to attract almost all of the competitive research funds. This in turn determined the allocation of the Research Quantum, the Infrastructure Block Grant, small ARC grants and eventually the allocation of postgraduate scholarships (M 106). CAEs with smaller research active staff, many of whom did not have PhDs, struggled to compete. As Brett, Croucher and Macintyre point out, it was an uneven competition. To whom much had been given, much, much more was given.

The questions raised by Dawkins’ reforms, raised in these books, and as yet unanswered in Australia are these: what is a university and who should hold it to account? The older universities viewed the proliferation of newer institutions as a threat. Not only was there a great deal of snobbishness and fear of dilution of standards and resources (eg. G62-63) but there was also the threat of competition and the concern that in a mass system research could not be maintained. The AVCC responded to these concerns by seeking to define what a university was: it must have a significant load of students in at least three broad fields of study; a minimum of 3 per cent postgraduate research students; meet certain thresholds of competitive grants and refereed publications per staff member; and have at least 25% of staff with PhDs (60-80% in “well-established” institutions)(G 69; M 143). But like all attempts at definitional stabilisation, their effort proved futile and in 1993 the “Great Eight” came together to make the same case via different means (M 145). If a university is a knowledge institution that, through its teaching and research, exists to orient individuals and communities not just to the needs of the present, but to the conditions of future life and past life; if it is an institution that needs to be remade in every age, to accommodate changing political and economic, social and intellectual currents and to maintain its relevance to the communities that support it, then Dawkins’ reforms were an important if imperfect part of the long story of the renewal of the university. But since the early 1990s a host of new pressures, including policy stasis, massive funding cuts, dramatic technological change, the marketization of the society and economy, housing stress, global competition and the attendant recruitment of large numbers of international students, have pressed down on Australia’s higher education system in ways that make the reforms of the 1980s no longer fit for purpose. These four books compel readers to ask anew what a university is and what it might be. Above all they show that change is always possible.

STCA letterhead, 318.03 Passage, 477 Students’ Triges (1925), HAL Archives

I came across the records of the Student Third Class Association (STCA) in the Holland America Line archives in Rotterdam while I was on the endless chase to track-down records on the Floating University, which also sailed on a Holland America Line ship. At first I could not believe what I was reading. Was it really possible that a major transatlantic shipping company ran a student organisation as a front for their commercial rebranding? The answer, it seemed, was yes.

My article on the STCA, which was founded in the early 1920s by a student of Yale University called James Stanton Robbins and sponsored by the Holland America Line throughout the interwar period, has just been published in Diplomatic History, and it sheds light on much bigger questions in the history of U.S. foreign relations in this period.

Working for the Holland America Line in the 1920s, J.S. Robbins presented the Student Third Class Association as a student organization and the voyage across the Atlantic as an extension of college life. Deftly exploiting cultures of trust embedded in elite East Coast college life, Robbins recruited students to sell third class travel to each other, and in the process played a major role in laundering the reputation of steerage travel by commodifying university prestige. The indignities of Ellis Island, the notorious conditions in steerage, and the prevalence of white, middle-class fears of racial and class-based contamination are well established in the history of 1920s United States, as is the generally white and elite nature of East Coast colleges and universities. This article shows that in the mid-1920s, the STCA used U.S. students to foster the idea that long distance travel was affordable, accessible, and acceptable to the U.S. middle-class.

Yet Robbins and his fellow student travel organizers have disappeared almost entirely from the history of Americans abroad in the early 1920s. The rapid growth of student third class travel across the Atlantic in this period is usually portrayed either as part of the history of U.S. tourism (a 1925 innovation of the shipping companies in response to the dramatic reduction of steerage traffic from Europe to the United States after the introduction of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Restriction Act) or as a footnote in the history of international education (which tends to cast the shipping companies as merely a means to get to Europe for the summer). This article provides a new account of the cultural and economic politics of travel in the interwar period, showing how the ground of post-1945 mass overseas tourism was laid in the 1920s by U.S. college students who, both as travelers and retailers, remade the hierarchy of steamship travel and the politics of class formation.

I think the history of the STCA is important to the history of U.S. foreign relations because it collapses boundaries between consumer and producer, campuses and commerce, and the United States and the world in the 1920s. In doing so it helps de-naturalize this series of binaries that remain stubbornly entrenched in our histories. The STCA highlights how central universities and colleges were to the United States’ commodifying empire, not just as engines of expertise and ways of knowing, but also as sites that fashioned what Paul Kramer has recently called “bourgeois internationalism’s structuring habitus”—the college ties, elite mobility, and geopolitical imaginary that functioned as a key component of U.S. internationalism and cultural and dollar diplomacy before and after the Second World War.

In uncovering the intimate relationship between the expansion into Europe of the networks of this commercial empire and the thick cultures of sociability cultivated in elite white East Coast college campuses in the period after the First World War, this article responds to Kramer’s call for “bridge-building projects that join local, subnational, and national histories of U.S. capitalism to transnational histories of the capitalist world economy.” Highlighting the centrality of college students as commercial as well as cultural intermediaries, both domestically and abroad, it shows how post-1945 U.S. foreign relations drew upon the commercial and cultural entanglements of the interwar period.

You can read the full text of the article here.

Tamson Pietsch, “Commercial Travel and College Culture: The 1920s Transatlantic Student Market and the Foundations of Mass Tourism” Diplomatic History, Volume 43, Issue 1, pp 83-106 https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dhy059