Confidential report to the Carnegie Corporation James B. Conant on the University situation in Australia in the year 1951

Abstract

I visited the universities of Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide, and the New South Wales University of Technology, and attended a week’s Seminar on Science in Australia at Canberra. At Canberra I had an opportunity to talk informally in the hotel lobby with a number of scientists from different universities as well as to listen to the formal discussions for five days. On that occasion I also had an opportunity to talk briefly with the Vice‐Chancellors of two of the three universities which I did not visit personally, namely, Currie of Western Australia an Hytten of Hobart. About the University of Queensland I am totally uninformed and it may possibly be an exception to all that follows, though if it were a marked exception it would seem that this fact would have been called to my attention in a number of the conversations. In addition to these direct sources of information about the academic world, my talks with some of the industrial leaders at Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne, with some of the political people of both parties, and one or two short comments by reporters and radio interviewers gave me some indication of the feeling of the general public about the universities. Likewise the controversy which has been quite acute in Sydney about the relation of the technical college to the University and the development of the New South Wales University of Technology threw a good deal of light on academic politics.

Citation

Conant, J.B. (2010), "Confidential report to the Carnegie Corporation James B. Conant on the University situation in Australia in the year 1951", History of Education Review, Vol. 39 No. 1, pp. 8-22. https://doi.org/10.1108/08198691201000001