Bulletin

Issue: March/April 2007

40th Anniversary

Changing roles for changing times

When La Trobe University started teaching in 1967, there was no particular expectation that our student body would be significantly different in origin or social composition from those of the city’s other institutions, and for the first three years or so that seemed to be the case.

However, from the early 1970s this changed, and it became clear that, without having planned for it, we had come to serve a particular, and important, social purpose: that of providing higher education to first generation Victorians, the children of those waves of post-war European migrants.

By the mid-1970’s, our enrolment statistics clearly reflected this trend. Well over half our students had at least one parent born overseas, and could thus be classified as coming from a migrant background, the highest percentage in the nation, although this has declined since the mid-1980s.

La Trobe opened its doors during a period of considerable social upheaval. It was the ’60s, a time of global generational conflict, of political protest and challenge, and students were in the vanguard.

Young people throughout the world were angered by the seemingly futile and brutal war in Vietnam, or intoxicated by the revolutionary ideology of Mao Tse Dung and his assault on Chinese traditions. Australian universities, like those elsewhere, became sites of protest.

La Trobe was no exception. Our first five years were turbulent ones indeed, and there were many demonstrations on campus. It was not a particularly pleasant time, but it was transient. La Trobe, over the last decades, has been such a quiescent place, relatively speaking, that it takes an effort of will to recall these rather turbulent beginnings.

From the start, La Trobe was an innovative institution, open to new ideas - in governance; in modes of teaching, as we tried to get away from the traditional lecture form in favour of small tutorial groups; and in student selection. I can’t discuss all of these, but I do want to give one example, partly because I was heavily involved in it, and it is the contribution to this place that I remain most proud of.

We became the university of the Second Chance - a place to which folk denied the chance of completing their secondary education could still gain entry. Allan Martin, the Foundation Professor of History and I came up with the notion.

We took it to the then Vice-Chancellor, David Myers, who after much thought and pipe-puffing, agreed that if we could get it through Academic Board and Council, 20 places in the School of Humanities could be reserved for students without the HSC, as the VCE was then known, but who had been selected on the basis of written applications and in-depth panel interviews.

The result was extraordinary. We had hundreds of applicants. Four of the first 20 went on to gain PhDs, some now work in the highest reaches of the public and private sectors, all achieved results far above the University average. And so it continued; the Early Leavers Scheme, as it had become known - or variants of it - was adopted by other schools and faculties at La Trobe, by our sister universities in Victoria, and eventually throughout the nation. Indeed, so successful have they been that just about every Australian institution has subsequently claimed credit for thinking of it first! I chuckle when I hear or read such claims - for I know the truth.

One thing Martin and I did get wrong was our expectation of the gender and social origins of our first applicants, and I think that reflected our own traditional cast of mind. We expected them to be male and working class - ‘hornyhanded sons of toil’ seeking to better themselves. They were not. They were overwhelmingly women, usually middleclass, often married with families, who had been denied the chance of completing their secondary education, let alone going to the university, by the prevailing notion that girls did not need to bother with such things. Unwittingly, we gave them a chance to seize what had been denied them - and seize it they did! We were innovative in all sorts of other ways. For example, we were determined that every part of the campus would be accessible to students with physical disabilities. La Trobe was in the vanguard of much of what are now routine equality of opportunity requirements.

Then came what I term ‘The Period of Repositioning’. This began in the late1980s, and often derived from the higher education reforms of the Minister for Education in the Hawke Labor Government, John Dawkins. Universities and other institutes of higher education were strongly encouraged to merge institutions, faculties and facilities, and this dramatically affected us in two main ways. First, we gained regional campuses.

Second, through our amalgamation with the Lincoln Institute, now the School of Health Sciences, we gained an important vocational component, and this both reflected and encouraged the trend to repositioning within the established schools; the development of vocational courses within all of them, but particularly in Business and Economics; the consequent diminution of the vast Humanities and Social Science faculties, and their eventual merging. Repositioning was inevitably unsettling and painful, but it did result in both an expanded institution and a more balanced one.

The last decade has been that of La Trobe’s internationalisation. We have developed programs in North America, in Europe and in Asia. We are part of a global network of universities facilitating the exchange of staff, students and subjects. We hold graduation ceremonies all over the globe. Above all, we are Australia’s leading provider of tertiary education in China. Certainly, a stroll around the University’s central Agora at Bundoora, or even a look around a lecture hall, provides dramatic testimony to this world-wide engagement.

Emeritus Professor John Salmond is a foundation professor of History at La Trobe and former Acting Vice- Chancellor and Chair of the Academic Board at the University.