OPENING OF THE KEITH MURRAY BUILDING, LINCOLN COLLEGE
UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE
ON 1ST SEPTEMBER, 1963
Speech by the Prime Ministerj the Rt. Hon. Sir Robert Menzies
Mr. President, Mr. Premier, Mr. Vice-Chancellor and Ladies and
Gentlemen The Vice-Chancellor is by way of bei. ng a friend of
mine and therefore does me proud, as you might say, but I regret
to tell you that he has omitted some of my academic qualifications
which really entitle me to be here. He has entirely overlooked
the fact that, causa honoris, if for no other reason, I am a
surgeon, a physician, a gynaecologist and obstetrician ( Laughter),
an architect oh, and I forget. And those no doubt give me
spurious qualification for being here, but I don't mind telling
you that my reason for being here, coming over this morning and
going back first thing tomorrow, has a great deal to do not only
with you but with Sir Keith Murray.
This is the Keith Murray Building and I have been
invited I notice with groat interest to name it. Not to open
it or anything of that kind, but to name it, Yesterday afternoon
at the University of Melbourne I found that my task in relation
to the new physiological research building was not to open it but
to dedicate it. Now Sir, this is a task entirely beyond io,
I would have to require it to be performed by others more
ecclesiastically eminent than I am. However, I did it. ( Laughter)
As I told them I remembered that it is only a few years ago that,
speaking at a luncheon of the Presbyterian General Assembly in
Melbourne7 I was introduced by an enthusiastic Moderator-General
as the " Right Reverend R. G. Menzies." ( Laughter) And some of this
aura has no doubt hung about me, so I dedicated a laboratory full
of sheep yesterday and now I am opening a new wing of a college
occupied not by sheep but by..... well, who knows? ( Laughter)
The connection between Sir Keith Murray and yourselves
is a very real one. After all, he was, at the time this College
was established, the head of Lincoln College at Oxford and that
in itself is a very considerable title of honour when you consider
that John Wesley was a Fellow of Lincoln College at Oxford and
remember with pride, as you should, be you Presbyterian like me
or Methodist like Norman Makin that John Wesley was one of the
very great men in the eighteenth century, a century not barren
of great men, not barren of significant people in our history.
Through all its masterly precision, its slight artificiality, its
beautiful craftsmanship, its lovely architecture, there came the
sort of warm pulse of John Wesley, always to be remembered, one
of the immortals of English history. That, I think would be
agreed by everybody. Well here he was, a Fellow of Lincoln.
Keith Murray, the hood of Lincoln.
Back in 1951 1950 or 1951, I've forgotten which
we had I being tremendously keen on university development,
established a sort of ad hoc cormittee to have a look at the
funds and see what needed to be done, and out of this emerged a
grant, a modest enough grant as one sees it now, of about LIM
a year towards the State universities. The very first question
that arose with that co-mittee at quite a late stage in its
deliberations was whether the university colleges, the affiliated
colleges largely church foundations, should in any way at all be
the beneliciaries of any grant that we made, and the cormittee at
that time wasn't very enthusiastic about it. I, myself7 the
most mild-mannered of men, the least qualified to be a dictator,
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spoke to them with a somewhat dictatorial voice and said that
if they believed that a university could reach its full stature
without its affiliated colleges, they were in bitter disagreement
with myself and I would pay little attention to their
report. And in the result there was a small matter I have
forgotten, œ 20,000 or œ 30,000 out of the particular grant
recommended that went, on some basis or other, to the residential
colleges. That was a beginning.
Then, of course, the next stroke was this other
illuminating idea which came to my mind. I have had very few
bright ideas in my life and therefore I can remember them all
without any difficulty. But it occurred to me that what was
needed was not just a sort of catchpenny idea of making a little
grant something to keep the wolf from the door, but what was
needed was a complete and basic examination of the university
problem. This became all the more important because, let
us all remember, that whereas universities before the war might
have, even in the case of the largest of them, 3,000 or 4,000
students, after the war? the demand for tertiary education grew,
not only at an arithmetical progression, but at a geometrical
progression so that instead of having an estimated demand of
20,000 it suddenly appeared to be 30 000 or 35,000. Instead
of 35,600 itsuddenly appeared to be 5,000. And of course,
it was quite manifest that this presented financial problems
utterly beyond the scope of the State Parliaments and Governments,
that the Commonwealth must cone to this party and come to it
in a big way, and if we wore to do that, then we must have some
examination made by a competent body which would not only nap
out the probable future of the universitius, but also ostinate
their future requirements and try to envisage the ways and
means of their development and what would happen to them and
what faculties would expand more than others.
As the first thing you do after you have had a
bright idea is to find a man or men, that's the greatest
problem in life. Somebody suggested to no, " Well, what about
trying to get Sir K-ith Murray. You are going to England this
year. Why not get him? Ho's the Chairman of the Universities
Grants CoLnission and vastly experienced." So I saw him and
he was quite enthusiastic about this. He was to be the Chairnan.
As you know, we ultimately developed a very strong comi: ittoe
about hin. He said to me, " Well, I would like to do this.
It will take sorao months, of course, and I don't know whether
my Minister would let n'o go." So I said, " Who is your Minister?"
" Well," he said, " the Chancellor of the Exchequer", The
Universities Grants Commission in Australia is rosponsible to
me, but in England the Grants Connmission is responsible to the
Chancellor of the Exchequer which is a very different thing.
So I said at that time " Well of course, that's Harold
Macmillan". " Yes." So I went to Harold Macmillan and with
groat goodwill, he said, " Yes, you may have him." So he came
out, and as you remember, many of you, ho nade, with his
Committee, a long investigation.
He understood perfectly the kind of thing that
I had in my own mind about the affiliated colleges, with the
results that have been spoken of here today. He made an
examination which I believe will remain a classic in the history
of Australian education, so long as Australia exists. It was
a masterly report, and being a mastorly report, it overwhelmed
mo and I, in turn, by giving Cabinet singularly little notice,
overwhelmod the Cabinet. oo** o
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So all the recommendations were adopted and
since then, as you know, with the Universities Commission, the
position has gone from strength to strength, never so strong
as you would desire, never I hope will it be so good as you
would desire because that would be the end of the road if the
universities of Australia said, " Well, we have all we need,
thank you. We have no fresh worlds to conquer." You always
will, but at the same time I say, and you will agree, that
the position of the Australian universities of today has been,
in a very real sense, revolutionised over the last ten years.
As I am here speaking at a college within the
University of Adelaide, I may tell you, though I hope nobody
will allow this to be known across the border, that Koith
Murray after making all his investigations was having a long
talk with me just before he made his report and I said, " Well,
which university in Australia strikes you as coming closest
to your idea of a university," and he said, " Beyond question,
Adelaide." Now I am not just telling you that for fun.
This is what he said to me. He did.' t mean by that, that in
Adelaide you had the best grounds because you don't, or the
greatest supply of buildings because this doesn't follow, or
that the affiliated colleges live in handsome lawns and on
ancient walls and gardens. No, he didntt mean that at all.
What he meant was that there was a spirit here at the University
that appealed to him. There was an understanding of what a
university was for and, above all, that there was a feeling
down North Terrace and through the city among men of affairs
and men of business that they did have some interest in the
University, that they felt for it that they wanted it to
succeed, that they were prepared lo contribute some of their
own time and talent and effort to its work. In other words,
that there was a community aspect surrounding the Adelaide
University which appealed to him enormously.
Now having tediously recited to you some of his
history but I think it is necessary to do that because this,
after all, is to be the Keith Murray Wing and he is a groat
and good man I'd just like to conclude by saying something to
you about the colleges themselves.
I know that our forefathers, grandfathers, whoever
they might be according to our ago, struck a great blow for
what they were prepared to call free, secular and compulsory
education. Secular..... and, of course if you are going
to have compulsory education and I am sure that, by and large
that has been a wondorful thing for Australia; I daresay that
it is very hard to get away from the fact that it will be in its
nature secular because we are a mixed society, but I have never
been able to believe that that is where we ought to stop.
I have never boon able to believe that we ought to regard the
cultivation of the mind as something entirely detached from
the cultivation of the spirit. It is, in my opinion, a disaster
when education in any country comes to be almost rigidly separated
from religious faith or religious teaching or religious background,
because it becomes a one-sided thing.
And, therefore, I have throughout these modern
developments wanted to see as much done as possible for those
affiliated colleges which in particular are colleges affiliated
with the Churches of Australia because I think that here, in
this college, for example, there may meet together and fuse
ultimately the feelings of pure intellectualism and the feelings
of pure religious learning and faith. Those two things, by
fusing, will produce bigger and better people, better citizens,
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more useful people, people who will increase the existing
minority of people who think first of their duties and only
second of their rights.
And therefore, Sir, I am a tremendous supporter
of the residential colleges. I was delighted when only ten
years ago, eleven years this College was established.
Not an easy matter, not a cheap matter, a matter which will
continue to put big burdens on your community and, of course,
increasing burdens upon the Governments Federal and State who
are contributors to those matters, but that it is worthwhile
I have no doubt whatever. When I say all that I hope that
nobody will suppose I am denouncing State education. I am
not. I am its beneficiary. In a country State school and in
a bigger town State school and on State scholarships and
what-have-you, I know something about what the State provides
and I have been its beneficiary, but I have also grown up
more and more to believe in the significance of these places
of residence which have the characteristics to which I have
referred and I know how much you agree with me and how many
people there are here this afternoon who have put their ninds
and hearts into this enterprise.
Therefore, Sir, I have singular pleasure in
doing what I have been instructed on the paper to do I name
this the Keith Murray Building. I can't declare it open
because it bears every sign of having been opened for some
time.