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OPENING OF THE R. G. MEilNZIES SCHOOL OF
HUMANITIES MONASH UNIVERSITY MELBOURNE
ON 24TH AUGUST, 1961
Speech by the Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. Sir Robert Menzies
Mr, Chancellor, Most Potent, Grave and Reverend Seniors
sitting here behind me, and Ladies and Gentlemen
I propose, with your concurrence to institute a
new rule and that is that I don't speak wit; h my hat on,
I can't ( Laughter) I'm very grateful to the Dean of the
Faculty of Arts for having varied the usual form. I always
have to remember when I open anything that apart from uttering
a number of words and if possible saying something I have to
open~ whatever it is and he has given me an alternativo today.
I may either open this School or I may pronounce the benediction
over it. ( Laughter) I now do both,
Mr. Chancellor, your account of how this new movement
in the university world occurred was still interesting to mo
though I had played a part in it. I don't mind telling you
that your broad hints about the future and the slight side
touc~ ios on the same theme by the Dean of the Faculty of Arts
( Laughter) may appear to you to have passed unnoticed by me
because I observed a straight face, but the reason for that
was that looking back in the audience I saw that my colleague,
the Treasurer, was present and so he knows now as much as I do
and if he doesntt know it, I think the Chairman of the
Universities Commission who is also lurking in this audience
will no doubt have made a note of it. And so in due course,
something dreadful will happen, financially, which will be
something very good for the universities of Australia,
You have to do a groat deal of good by stealth.
I offer that piece of gratuitous advice to those who are now
training for some occupation in life. Do it by stealth.
I remember when I had this idea of establish~ ing a committee
with the possibility of getting Keith Murray to come and
preside over it. I didn't care to mention this to the
Treasurer at the time who wasntt Mr. Holt at that timeuntil
it was practically completed. I was in England and I
spoke to Sir Keith Murray and he said, " We lli I would be very
happy. This is the kind of thing that I have had some
experience of, that I would like to do something about, but
I work with the Chancellor of the Exchequer a very happy
arrangement and I will need to have his approval." The
Chancellor of the day was Mr. Harold Macmillan, so I want and
got his approval, Thus the Committee began.
When I had assembled the Committee I then broke the
news to the Treasurer and he said, " Well, ola. man, I know you
are very interested in this kind of thing." I said, I
certainly am", I said, of course, " I warn you, this will c ost
money,"' and he said, " Yes, I had an idea that it would," and I
said, " Any committee of competence that goes into the position
of the universities tremendously pressed as they were at that
time by a vast flood of increase in those requiring university
training well, the cost will be high."
Up to that time, the Commonwealth Government had got
along very quietly with a few special grants of a limited kind-
I think we ran to zabout œ l4in the course of a year but this
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one was bound to be in far greater figures than that. And I
must say for my then colleague that he took this very well and
the Committee then got to work and produced its first report,
its first triennial recommendation and it was very large, as it
seemed at that time and once more I adopted what you might be
pleased to describe as rather devious methods.
I knew that if this report were distributed to the
Ministers too far ahead of a Cabinet Meeting too many of them
might get to know too much about it and so I had to circulate
it one day and deal with it the next, And we came out at the
end of the day in Cabinet completely approving of all the recommendations
that had been made and since then, of course, you know
the story. I know some of it,
I know that for the first triennium under the
auspices of the Universities Commission what had seemed large
figuires in the Murray Report turned out to be quite insignificant
and Sir Leslie Martin has developed nowadays almost a habit of
avoiding my eye because he knows and I know that the next
triennium will be such as to lcavc. the second. one looking a
poor relation. Well, this is all good. It may be difficult
it is difficult, but it is incredibly good and I am happy to think
that what has happened in the universities of Australia has been,
in a sense, revolutionary, never suff. Licient the day will never
come when university authorities will say they are content with
what they have. It ca4n't come, This is not a static community,
it is not a static world that we live in. Problems are increasing
and the demand for people with cultivated intelligence is a
growing demand not only here but all over the world and
consequently, I am not here to say, " Well, gentlemen, call it
a day, will you? It is becoming a little uncomfortable,~ I am
quite prepared to say to you that I will wonder what has htappened
to the universities if they ever reach that comfortable position.
This is eatts and a task which any man claiming any
elements of statesmanship at all ought to be delighted to
participate in,
Of course Sir, it is always worth remembering, and
I am sure that you all remember it, that while there are great
f'inancial problems, great problems of building, great problems
of securing equipment and of keeping abreast of the developing
equipment, particularly in the scientific faculties, although
all those present problems, one of the great problems will be to
maintain in a growing university field the high quality of
university staffs. This is a problem which occasions me
although I am not responsible for dealing with it very much
but this occasions me more thought than all these other physical
problems to which I have referred, because we must maintain'the
high standards. If there is one thing we can't afford in this
country7 it is to lower the standards of university training and
to have first-class people, first-class men, first-class women
in the various faculties is net going to be easy. Nor indeed,
Sir can we contemplate that we are going to secure much help
on Zhat front from outside Australia because all countrie-, s feel
the saime pressure, the same urge, the same urgent demand to
maintain standards and to keep up and expand their first-class
teaching population. This is something that I think must inspire
everybody to greater and greater efforts,
And, Sir particularly here, what a marvellous thing
it is, as I said to the Chancellor after lunch, what a marvellous
thing i t is to have the honour of presiding over and contributing
to the growth of a new university, something straight from the
grass roots, not just inheriting somebody else's work but
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creating something on the spot. This is tremendous. You know,
quite recently in America I delivered the Jefferson Oration, as
they are pleased to call it, at Monticello.
I suppose most of you remember that when Jefferson
drafted his own epitaph for his own memorial stone, he wrote
out " Thomas Jefferson" and his dates, " Draftsman of the
Declaration of Independence, Creator of the Virginia Statute for
Religious Toleration, Founder of the Universitly of Virginia."
Not a word about having been an ambassador, not a word about
having been Secretary of State in George Wvashaington's admninistration,
not a word about having been Vice President, not a word
about having been President, for two terms, of the United States
of America just these three simple things. And when he was
asked by one of his relatives, " Why didn't you include these
great matters?", he said, " Wfell, I wanted to have put on my
memorial what I had don3 for the people, not what the people
had done for me." Now this is superb. It's so simple and yet
it's full of that imaginative quality which is required in the
creation of anything, and here with this new University what
a task, what an opportunity for many among you to be able to
look back and say, " WJell, I was one of the creators in the true
sense of the Monash University."
Now, Sir, I just want to say a word, if I may,
about that very great man after whom this Univ( ersity is named.
lie was never involved in politics and therefore, perhaps, he
escaped the barbed tongaes of undergraduates, I am perfectly
certain that nobody would ever havoe dreamed of referring to a
building with which Sir John Monash was associated as " Jack's
Shack" ( Laughter) but I am told that already the ungodly in this
University are referring to this as " Ming's ' ting" ( Laughter)
But, Sir the naming of this university, this was a positive
inspiration. One of the greatest of Australians of all time
wonderful engineer, a famous and tremendous soldier a scholar
in his own right a great expert in many fields of life and'an
advocate, not only an advocate of good causes, but stopping at
the word " ladvocate" 7one of the greatest advocates I ever
listened to in my life; a man who understood the art of
persuasive spoech, the art of clear speech, who used no jargon
but who went clear to the point persuasively to the point, with
effects thpt I had the opportunity of witnessing in my own
political life more than once. And, Sir, because the University
is named after this great and famous man, I feel that a very
great honour, even indifferently earned, has beon conferred upon
me to have my name associated with one school of study in the
University named aftor him. It will always be a source of
immense pleasure and pride to me and to my family and to my
descendonts. Now Sir, before I conclude, I would like to make
one small contribution on the subject of the humanities. In
this century, and particularly perhaps in the lost twenty years
of it, there has been a very great, inevitable and proper
concentration of mind on what I will call, in the natural sense,
scientific studies, not only for prestige purposes and doing
some violence to the moon or something of that kind. No, but
because this world with its explosion of population, with the
urgent demand that exists all over the world to increase the use
of resources, the discovery of resources, the scientific application
of resources in order to meet a growing population, has
become a task of tremendous urgency and of very great international
significance. And therefore it's right that there should be
this attention, but it is wrong to think ns some people do, that
studies which are not related to practical results of that kind
are idlo and useless, 0
This century hasn't failed either in science
or in technology. It has produced almost the golden age of
science and technology, but in terms of civilisation it has
had failure after failure written up against it and that's
because we have become too fond of the idea that we are clever
people, that we are very, very smart to be able to understand
all the forces of Nature and to harness them, to deal with them,
whereas the truth, of course, is that civilisation I repeat
something that I have said before many times civilisation is
in the heart and mind of people and the task of the humanist the
task of the people who teach and learn in a school of humanities
it not to forget that history for example, is no useless study,
since a man who is ignorant of it will have no sense of proportion,
no benefit of experience in dealing with new problems as they
arise. Languages...... and I throw in with a dying
inflexion a word of classics because a precise understanding
of words and a dislike of jargon will save this world from
many confusions, and as many hostilities have arisen in the
world and in society through misunderstanding as through gross
differences of points of view. Philosophy,... how important
that we should have physics and go beyond it to metaphysics*
that we should understand something about the source and nature
of ideas so that the man who passes through and who is even
lightly touched by these things is forever thereafter a wiser
man, a better-informed man, a better-balanced man. And, of
course, so far as literature is concerned, I don't understand
people who regard the reading of great masters of prose or of
poetry as an irrelevant occupation, exhibiting a slight but
perceptible eccentricity. If I could compel every man sitting
in all the parliaments of Australia to read something of this
kind every night on going back from Parliament House the
standard of debate would rise in the most magnificent fashion.
( Lughter) ( Applause) Sir, I say no more about that. I merely
reiterate that what we want in the world is undoubtedly great
physicists and great chemists and great engineers and what-haveyou
because the world is crying aloud for their work for the
sake of its own problems and its own human beings all over the
world, but it needs even more that wisdom, human understanding,
which produces what I would call an educated tolerance of ideas,
It needs these things far more because wars, disasters of that
kind, bestial repressions here and there the kind of thing we
become accustomed to reading about almost every day in the
newspapers don't arise from mechanical causes they don't arise
because of some jealousy between one scientist and another.
On the contrary, science tends more and more to be international
in its quality, in its thought. These things arise from the
fact that men have inadequately learned to understand men or to
have men understand them, because there is not this quiet,
passionless humanity sufficiently distributed around the world
to make the very thought of some of these events that I have
mentioned impossible. Sir, I repeat, you've done me a very great
honour. I shall remember this occasion but I shall remember even
more the fact that in this new university being pursued as it is
with such vigour, such imagination, having as it most certainly
has, a great future you should have thought fit to associate
my name with a great section of that University; this is, I think,
the greatest honour that any university could pay to any man.
So I give it my blessing and I once more declare it open,