THE
WALLACE WURTH INAUGURAL MEMORIAL LECTURE
THE PRIME MINISTER
( The Rt. Hon. Sir Robert Menzies, M. P.)
at
THE SCIENCE THEATRE, UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES, SYDNEY,
on
Friday, 28th August, 1964.
THE UNIVERSITIES SOME QUERIES"
THE UNIVERSITIES SOME QUERIES"
Wallace Wurth was a civil servant. I am occasionally
told that I use this expression wrongly, and that I should refer
to people like him as " public servants", working under what in
Australia are called the Public Service Acts.
However, I believe that there are many people who are
public servants who are not under the Public Service Act at all,
and I therefore have fallen into the habit of calling people civil
servants when I intend to refer to those who are in the direct
administrative service of government.
Because he was a civil servant, Wallace Wurth was a
member of a class of people who constitute a recurrent theme of
criticism, usually by those who are not well-informed.
I have heard civil servants referred to with monotonous
regularity as " bureaucrats", as " clock watchers", as " red tape
merchants", as repetitive and costly " tea drinkers".
My experience shows that such citicisms come most
loudly from those with the least information. When I cast my
eye around the upper brackets of the Commonwealth Civil Service
and realise the devotion and talent and experience and objectivity
which they bring to their work, I could laugh to hear them
dismissed with a sneer. There are, in fact, few people who work
harder and who think more assiduously. They are in a very real
sense among the custodians of continuity and sanity in goVernment.
It is now many years since I first heard a friend of
mine say, with a certain touch of irony, that " the Civil Service
produces a level of efficiency below which no sensible government
can fall". This is, of course, not to say that politicians, and in
particular Ministers, should become the mere spokesmen of their
departmental officers. This would be all wrong. Indeed, it
would be seen to be wrong by their senior officers themselves.
It is the duty of those civil servants who are in the position
of advising Ministers and of administering policies subsequently
created to give the most objective advice and the most intelligent
service that they can. When they have done that, they have
discharged their task.
It is for governments to determine policy. It is
then for the Civil Service to give effect to those policies
whether they assume legislative or administrative form, and to
do so without fear, favour or affection.
For myself, I have never wanted to know the Party
political alignment of any officer of mine. Indeed, I would
resent it if he told me. For the truth is that whatever Party is
in power, it has exactly the same right to expect honest,
disinterested, and competent work from the Civil Service as any
other Party should expect if it came into office,
These general remarks are by no means irrelevant to the
late Wallace Wurth. He was, as his record showed, a man of
most versatile talents, of rich character and personality,
and great achievement, There was, indeed, something elusive
and yet compelling about him.
For ten years, until his death, he attended Loan Councils
amd Premiers' Conferences at Canberra, as Chairman of the New
South Wales Public Service Board. From my place at the top
of the table, my eye would frequently catch the sight of Wallace
Wurth sitting calmly on the front Treasury bench as to the
manner born hearing all, but, so far as I could judge, steeped
in silence, At first I used to wonder vaguely what he was doing
at the conference as a member of the New South Wales team. After
all, I had known a few Chairmen of Commonwealth Public Service
Boards but had seldom found it necessary or appropriate to take
up with them such matters, financial or otherwise, as come to be
argued when the State Premiers march on Canberra-
The Chairman of a Public Service Board has great
responsibilities, but they do not commonly fall into the arena
of the political cut and thrust of a Premiers' Conference.
What then, I used to say to myself subconsciously, was
Wurth doing in this galley? And then the answer dawned on me all
too slowly. Wallace Wurth was not, except in name, Chairman of
the New South Wales Public Service Board in the restricted or
orthodox sense at all. He was the friend, the consultant, the
universal provider, the wise and upright judge of issues. He
was in a sense a muted noise off stage, He was, to vary the
metaphor, armed yet disarming, the eminence grise of the New
South Wales Government. In short, he was present, not as
Chairman of the Public Service Board, but in a wider capacity.
He was, of course, as his whole record shows, a superb
administrator, and I. at no time, doubted that he managed the
New South Wales Public Service very well. But his essential
contribution came through his pervasive influence on general
policy and action, an influence made possible and perhaps
inevitable by his luminous intelligence, his great force of
character and his unbiased integrity.
In my long experience of public life and affairs,
Wallace Wurth was, in his own right and in his own fashion,
unique. Bearing all these facts in mind, it was a happy stroke
when he was made Chancellor of this new University. For a good
Chancellor, if I may say so, should be a wise and experienced man
with enough knowledge of academic people to understand their
problems, but also to be able on proper occasions to treat them
lightheartedly. He should, in these days when governments have
the major responsibility for universities in Australia, know
something about governments and how they think, something of the
qualities and something of the oddities of politicians, and,
at the same time, enjoy wide respect from people, many of whom
have never been inside a university at all, but who represent
some of the great currents of knowledge and experience which
animate modern social and industrial life
The significance of Wallace Wurth in relation to the
University of New South Wales could perhaps best be expressed if
I say that one of the functions of a university is to produce
individuals who can develop and preserve their individuality while
still playing in the team, This, after all, should be one of the
great purposes of a university; not uniformity but developed
individuals. When I was invited to deliver the Wallace Wurth Memorial
Lecture, I had a vagrant thought, built upon some previous
experiences, that I would be allowed to select any topic and take
the opportunity of saying what I thought about it.
This was not unimportant for me, because I do as a rule
one of these lectures a year, and sometimes, through inadvertence
on my part, two. I like doing them for the very good reason that
in public affairs we can accustom ourselves all too readily to
somewhat general thought and speech and succumb to the endemic
disease of politics, which is a dislike of precision, I have,
therefore, found it a very good thing for me to have to sit down
over a period of many weeks, do some research, analyse some ideas,
and produce them into a degree of clarity of which I would hope
not to be ashamed hereafter.
Full of these ideas, I said to my secretary " Find out
whether I am at large in the choice of a topic". The answer
came back with all the inevitability that one expects from a
great physicist like Professor Baxter, " We would like the Prime
Minister to speak about some topic connected with the universities."
Well, Mr. Chancellor, I have for some reason or another,
or perhaps for no reason, been the recipient of, I think, 18
honorary degrees around the world. That has meant 18 speeches
about universities, I have made quite a number of such speeches
in the Parliament; I have delivered others at the opening
of buildings or schools in various Australian universities. I,
therefore, said to myself, with some feeling of despair, that, as
no doubt some of my political opponents would say, I was an
exhausted volcano. What was there with the faintest degree of
novelty that I could say about the universities? Under these
circumstances I decided on heroic measures. I would put some
queries and perhaps answer them,
I settled on two queries; in each case because I thought
they related to something important about which comparatively
little is said, but about each of which there may be considerable
misconceptions. So, having said something all too little, about the late
Wallace Wurth, I will proceed to deal with my two queries.
The first relates to the new axiom or dogma that
university education ought to be regarded as a right and not as a
privilege; in other words that it should be available to all
persons, male or female, who pass what I will broadly call the
entrance examination. Now in my younger days, this was neither
axiom nor dogmaScholarships were few and had to be battled for
in a highly competitive field. A university education was
not a right, nor indeed was it the perquisit of the sons and
daughters of the rich. In my own time as an under-graduate,
great sacrifices were made by parents, including my own, to
give their children the opportunity for a higher educational
attainment. But times have changed, and, for reasons to which
I will refer a little later, for the better.
Could I start by referring to the celebrated Robbins
Report on higher education in Great Britain? In paragraph 31
of that report the committee said
" Throughout our Report we have assumed as an
axiom that courses of higher education should be
available for all those who are qualified by ability
and attainment to pursue them and who wish to do so.
What type of education they should get and in what
kind of institution are questions we consider later
on; and the criterion by which capacity is to be
judged is clearly a question on which there may be a
variety of opinions, But, on the general principle
as we have stated it, we hope there will be little
dispute." This statement has been referred to with approval by
our own Universities Commission, and by quite a few educational
publications in Australia., Yet, of course, it is not completely
definitive. You will have noted the phrase " Those who are
qualified by ability and attainment to pursue them", and you will
also have noted that " the criterion by which capacity is to be
judged is clearly a question on which there may be a varity of
opinions" Whether this means that the simple test, to apply it
to Australian conditions, is the passing of the Matriculation
Examination, I do not profess to know.. For myself, I would like
to believe that the real point is that finance should not be the
limiting factor where the intellectual capacity and the personal
ambition are adequately high.
On this matter I have had my own mind improved by my
perusal, by courtesy of Professor Connell, of a recent study
made by the Department of Education in the University of Sydney,
under the title of " The University and the Community". I am
much indebted to this publication and would like to quote one most
interesting passage from it
" Tertiary education in the past has been thought of
largely as an education of an elite or specially talented segment
of the community, The falsity of this position is now becoming
more apparent every day. The more talented and productive the
elite, the more it becomes necessary to have it built upon a highly
educated community. This is the only way to ensure the continuance
of first rate education for the best brains in the community There
are three good reasons for this. First, the talented perform
best, generally speaking, in a climate of sympathetic understanding
among people who have some reasonable idea of what they are doing,
and take an intelligent interest in their success. Secondly, the
higher education of the talented is an expensive business, and
it will receive-adequate financial support only from public monies.
These will be forthcoming only if there is a sufficient body of
soundly educated people who can see the value of such an education.
And, thirdly, by increasing the number of highly educated men and
women in the community, you not only ensure stimulation and support
for the specially talented, you also increase the pool of individuals
who aspire to further education, and from whom large numbers of
specially talented may be drawn for a higher education. These
arguments suggest that if we are to educate even our gifted
successfully, we must provide opportunity for as wide a segment
of the community as possible to proceed into some form of higher
education, and at the same time raise the general level of
educational achievement throughout the whole community"
Accepting these views, I would like to say that they
not only present a statement of desirable rights, but they
present an enormous challenge. When I attended earlier this year
the University of Birmingham to receive a degree there at the hands
of my old friend, Lord Avon, I said a little about this problem
in my speech of acknowledgment. The Vice-Chancellor of that
university later gave me a copy of his report to his University
for 1963. In this he referred to the implications of the initial
proposition in the Robbins Report,
In the course of this he said " The universities' task of
sustaining quality is more important in the long run than-numbers".
He also went on to say that " Another consequence of the new
philosophy will have to be watched. The attitudes of students
who come to the universities, claiming their places as of right,
will be different from those of students coming to enjoy and use
a hard won privilege." I
He had other things to say which seemed to me to be of
great importance, But, speaking now for myself, and accepting
the new philosophy as an ideal to be aimed at, I do want to point
out a few practical considerations which cannot be ignored in the
enthusiasm of a new vision,
Far too many people in our country, when they urge the
creation of a new university, seem to think of it in terms of
financial provision by governments, and the bricks and mortar of
practical construction-Yet the fact is that the value of a
university depends primarily upon the standard of its research
and its teaching. In short, the greatest problem about the
expansion of universities is of seciirinpa a i fh!'
qualified staff, Any man who has any share of responsibility
for the general national balance and prosperity cannot fail to
be conscious of such problems as the pressure of numbers on
financial resources, the pressure of numbers and demand on
physical resources, because these things form part of the economic
problems of the nation. They have to be considered.. They can
produce some limitation upon the financial provision by governments.
But, in the ultimate, the capacity to establish new
universities or to expand old ones is primarily to be judged by
reference to the maintenance of the quality of research and
teaching and the value of the degrees to be awarded.
Gresham's Law applies to universities and their degrees
just as much as it did and does to money. In short, we have
occurring under our eyes a tremendous explosion in the numbers of
those who seek tertiary education. Our task is to see that they
get it without lowering the standards.
The last thing that I want to do is to encumber you
with statistics, but I would ask you to carry in mind just a few
figures which I derived from the last report of the Australian
Universities Commission.
In 1960, which is, after all, not long ago, the number
of students at Australian universities was ( and I will quote figures
to the nearest thousand) 53.000 By 1963 this had grown to 69,000.
The prediction of the Commission ( and it is not likely to be bVer
the mark) is that by 1966 the figure will be 95,000
These figures represent an enormous increase in what
I will call demand for tertiary education. They must be accompanied
by the observation that graduation rates, either in total or in
minimum time, were, over the period from 1951 to 1956, deplorably
low The figures seem to be improving, but they are still not as
good as they should be. This is, of course, important because
the amount of money spent and the amount of teaching energy put
forward in the training of students is wasted to the extent that
the result is not achieved. Any community like ours, which
accepts large financial burdens for universities, cannot afford
this kind of waste.
The reasons for what I have called wastage are, I think,
clear enough. We have not yet reached a completely adequate level
of training in the secondary schools, and, therefore, too many
matriculating students go to university with a considerable risk
of failure, This has deeply impressed me ever since Sir Keith
Murray, now Lord Murray, presented the original report. It
explains why my own Government has initiated schemes for secondary
school scholarships designed to give extra time in secondary
studies, and for science teaching facilities in the secondary
schools so that on the science side students may, if they decide
to go on to the university, go on much better prepared. Again,
most universities have felt inadequately staffed and that the
staff-student ratios were unsatisfactory What I have said
means that I believe that before we become too rhapsodical about
the increase in numbers and the rights of people to have university
training, we should face up to the problem that the greatest task,
and in a sense the most difficult one, is to find the necessary
trained and competent staff.
There was a time when quite a number of professors and
lecturers came from overseas. That time has come to an end.
We must, as never before, generate in our universities our own
future staff.
This is a problem by no means overlooked by our own
Universities Commission, It must not be overlooked by governments.
Unless we can, by one means or another, encourage and
produce an increasing percentage of university students who aim
at higher degrees and research work, then we will do a gross
disservice to university education by concentrating our minds
exclusively on numbers and on money,
I would sum up my own views on this matter by stating the
new rule in my own fashion. I believe that we should aim at a
state of affairs in which all young men and women capable of, and
likely to benefit from, a university education are not denied their
opportunity for want of means. But I believe that this opportunity
will find them pursuing false lights unless they'can go through
a period of training and inspiration which can come to them only
through the work of teachers of the highest order,
My second query relates to " academic freedom".
For various well-known reasons, there has been, during the
last few years in Australia, considerable discussion about the nature
and extent of the academic freedom to be enjoyed by academic
people. I want to say something about the problem tonight, for
two reasons, The first is that I think that I am at liberty to
express an objective view, for, although I have had, fortunately,
much to do with university developments in Australia over the last
decade, I have at all times been careful to maintain my own belief
in the autonomy of universities and in the utter undesirability of
governmental executive directioz. to the universities as to what theyare
to study and teach, It is, I think, well to remember that in
Australia the universities are in a substantial sense government
universities relying to a major extent upon monies provided by
governments. Under these circumstances, it might be feared that
the governments which find the money might wish to call the tune,
and might interfere with those university activities which it is
the function of the university to promote. As I think it will be
agreed that I have at no time sought to interfere with university
autonomy, I may feel justified in offering some views about
academic freedom. My second reason is that I think that a good deal of
what has been said in the press and otherwise about academic
freedom has been over-emotional; it has, I fear, promoted more
heat than light. It is, therefore, I think, a valuable exercise
to pose the question " What is academic freedom?" and to endeavour
to answer it,
The first element in academic freedom is the liberty
of thought. This has never been better defined than by
Charles Morgan in his remarkable book " Liberties of the Mind".
I quote his words
" I mean by it the mind's freedom from any external
pressure designed to drug, intimidate or otherwise reduce its full
exercise of natural capacity"
I would also like to quote with warm approval the words
of the report of the Murray Committee on Australian Universities
" In the middle of the twentieth century universities
are very much in the public eye and in most countries they receive a
good deal of attention, and also very substantial financial support,
from governments In most parts of the free world they are
accorded a high degree of autonomy and self-determination on the
ground that the particular services which they render, both to
their own country and to mankind in general, cannot be rendered
without such freedom. Even in time of war and national danger,
the nations of the West have sought to honour, so far as they
humanly could, the right and duty of the universities to pursue
new knowledge without fear or favour and to educate in a liberal
spirit and with integrity; and even in times of economic depression
they have shown increasing signs of seeking to maintain the life
and work of universities in full vigour".
The integrity of the scholar would be under attack if
he were told what he was to think about and how he was to think
about it. It is of the most vital importance for human progress
in all fields of knowledge that the highest encouragement should
be given to untrammelled research, to the vigorous pursuit of
truth, however unorthodox it may seem. It is for this reason
that in Australia we have established the autonomy of universities,
and have, so far as I know, consistently refrained from intervening
in their work with what I will call political executive directions.
If no limits can sensibly be put to the search for new
truths or the better understanding and expression of old ones,
it follows that the scholar must work in an atmosphere of freedom
and with a free mind. True, in a democracy, Parliament, acting
within its constitutional jurisdiction may, under some circumstances,
pass legislation which limits the rights of expression, Such
circumstances may arise in time of war or other special times
where national security may require, under an appropriate law, some
limitations upon freedom of expression or of individual activity.
But I know of no law in a modern civilised country which has made
it an offence to think. There is, of course, in some philosophies
in the world, an attack made upon the mind in order to constrain it
into habits of thought which are agreeable to the rulers.
There are philosophies in the world which aim at reducing the power
and significance of human volition in order to pave the way for
what has been called a mechanistic conception of life; in which
people are to be pawns in the game of economic and material
conflict. But I think we may say that in Australia we have
never accepted these philosophies and that we still retain our
passion for freedom and for the development, not only of the'
individual, but of every faciilty that he may possess for
investigation and discovery.
Now I said just now that some discussion has appeared
to me to be over-emotional, I have, indeed, if I may say so
prudently in this assembly, detected some disposition on the part
of some academics to claim a freedom which puts them outside the
substance and procedures of the ordinary law. Now, quite
frankly, this is a claim that cannot and must not be sustained,
Freedom is one thing. Privilege is another, and cannot be claimed
unless the law recognises it. There are, indeed, some privileges
recognised by the law. For example, the privilege, under some
circumstances, of communications between patient and doctor and
between the priest and a confessing member of his communion.
But these, I repeat, are within the law.
But, putting such matters on one side, freedom is to be
seen as a faculty enjoyed by all citizens, not because they are
academic or because they conduct a newspaper, but because they are
citizens. The freedom of the press, for example, like yours or
mine, is a freedom within the lawo It is subject to all the
legal rules relating to defamation or sedition or violation of the
criminal codes. A rich private citizen achieves no new or special
freedom when he purchases a newspaper and controls its policy and
utterances. Similarly, a barrister practising his profession at
the Bar and enjoying the normal freedom of mankind and the special
legal privilege which attaches to what he says in court, does not
acquire a new body of either freedom or privilege if he becomes a
Professor of Law at a university. It is, I think, well to
remember some of these basic truths,
The whole matter has been somewhat confused for
Australian minds, I venture to think, by the great masses of litigation
and debate which have occurred in the United States, the
reasons for which are, as I will point out later, largely
peculiar to the United States. But before I come to that let me
consider what the position is under our own legal system and that
of England. I will give one example; the famous trial of
Thomas Paine, the author of " The Rights of Man", He was, in the
course of that trial, ( a strange trial for the defendant was not
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present, and a stranger trial because a hand-picked jury had been
in fact bribed to produce a verdict of guilty), defended by Thomas
Erskine. This, I hasten to say, was before Erskine succumbed to
those ambitions which led him to the House of Lords; before
he had entered into that process of deterioration in which he rose
in favour but fell in grace. But his speech in defence of
Thomas Paine remains a classic. He did not attack the law,
for that would have been futile., He did not claim that Paine,
as a thinker and writer, had some special immunity from the law,
On the contrary, he said this:-
" If I were to ask you, Gentlemen of the Jury, what
is the choicest fruit that grows upon the tree of English liberty,
you would answer SECURITY UNDER THE LAW. If I were to ask the
whole people of England the return they look for at the hands of
the Government, for the burdens under which they bend to support
it, I should still be answered SECURITY UNDER THE LAW"..
The whole basis of this famous passage was that Paine's
freedom to write was consistent with, and protected by, the law;
not that it was superior to the law.
I will make one more citation. It is from a play, but
it expresses with great accuracy the spirit of the law, My former
colleague, and our recent Ambassador to the United States, Sir
Howard Beale, has directed my attention to it, The play is
Robert Bolt's play about Sir Thomas More " A Man for All Seasons".
More, as you all remember, was the Lord Chancellor, and,
in those days particularly, the Lord Chancellor was more than the
head of the judiciary, he was a man of immense and, in some
respects, arbitrary power. In the play, his wife Alice is protesting
to him because he will make no move to arrest a man named Rich, who,
although pretending to be a friend, she thinks and believes is
preparing to change sides and become a dangerous enemyz She is
joined in this argument by William Roper and so the dialogue
proceeds
ALICE: While you talk, he's gone'
MORE: And go he should if he was the Devil himself until he
broke the law!
ROPER: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!
MORE: Yes, what would you do? Cut a great road through the
law to get after the Devil?
12.
ROPER: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
MORE: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil
turned round on you where would you hide, Roper, the laws
all being flat? This country's planted thick with
laws from coast to coast man's laws, not God's
and if you cut them down and you're just the man to
do it d'you really think you could stand upright in
the winds that-would blow then?
To continue, I would venture to say that a professor or
lecturer at a university is an employee of the university acting
through its governing body, and that, as an employee he is subject
to the normal rules relating to master and servant, to dismissal
without notice if his employer can prove good cause, and to all
the risks of not being re-appointed if his original appointment has
been for a specific term. To deny this proposition would be to
say that he is taken out of the usual Common Law relating to
master and servant and put into a category which is above the
law or which is subject to no law. This is not a tenable
proposition. I hasten to add that any university, which treated a
professor or lecturer as if he was just a man hired to study as
directed and to teach in accordance with rules laid down by
other people, would be an extremely strange university;
it would have failed to understand the immense importance of true
academic freedom. There is, of course, great scope for discussion of the
rules of practice that may properly be applied in a university;
rules of practice which may warrant consultation and exchange of
views on the facts between the lecturer and the governing body
before some action affecting the lecturer is taken.
These are matters which fall within the principles of
natural justice, which are not inconsistent with the law, and may
freely tend to the improving of academic morale. But it still
remains true that academic freedom is within the law, subject to
the law, and that if recourse is made to the law, the ordinary
rules of law will apply. For all these reasons I am convinced
that it is a disservice to academic freedom, a freedom to which
I attach the most tremendous importance, to seek to promote it
into a doctrine of privilege outside the law; a privilege which
sets the academic free from obedience to the ordinary legal rules
which govern the lives of all the rest of us.
It is perhaps because these things are pretty well
understood in countries familiar with the rule of law and not so
familiar with special constitutional provisions, such as those which
appear in two of the amendments to the American Constitution,
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that, so far as I can discover, there have been no notable
instances in the United Kingdom of interference with academic
freedom. I recently read an article by Lord Chorley in a
compendium on academic freedom, published by the School of Law
at Duke University. He says that academic freedom is taken for
granted in the United Kingdom. He, of course, concedes that
there have been other pressures or dangers of pressures, religious
or political, in the course of history. But, on balance, he thinks
it is safe to say that academic freedom is enjoyed as fully in
English universities as anywhere else in the world, He points
out, as indeed I endeavoured to point out a little earlier in
other words, that " in the modern age there can be no doubt that
the main enemy to academic freedom has been the powerful State".
I turn now to the United States of America where academic
freedom has been, in contra-distinction to the state of affairs in
Great Britain and Australia, much discussed in the courts and
particularly in the Supreme Court the highest tribunal,
To understand how such a matter can fall for judicial
decision, it is necessary to look at two provisions of the
American Constitution, It will be recalled that the Constitution
of the United States was amended very early in the piece. The
first Congress, when it met in 1789, submitted to the States ten
amendments to clarify certain individual and State rights not
named in the Constitution. These amendments were ratified.
The ten original amendments are always referred to in the United
States as " The Bill of Rights". I will just quote two of the
Articles Article 1 provided that " Congress shall make no law
abridgifg freedom of speech or of the press
Article 5 made a general provision, that is, not one
directed at Congress only, but of wider application, which was
that " no person shall....., be deprived of life, liberty or
property without due process of law".
Many years later, in 1868, the 14th amendment came into
operation. It was stated in more comprehensive terms and
affected both the Congress and the legislatures of the States.
It said: " All persons born or naturalized in the United States,
and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the
United States and of the State wherein they reside, No State
shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or
immunities of citizens of the United States, nor shall any State
14,
deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due
process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the
equal protection of the laws".
It will be seen that these celebrated Constitutional
provisions, commonly referred to as " the due process" provisions,
have brought into the arena of judicial determination matters which
in another Constitutional structure would not reach a Court at all.
I do not propose to engage in a close examination of the
decisions of the American Courts, but I think there are a few things
which can be said with advantage,
In a fairly recent case, Mr. Justice Harlan, whose
name is greatly respected among Australian as well as American
lawyers, summed the matter up and explained the reason for judicial
proceedings in a single paragraph. He said: " When academic
teaching-freedom and its corollary, learning-freedom, so essential
to the well-being of the nation, are claimed, this Court will always
be on the alert against intrusion by Congress into this constitutionally
protected domain".
After a considerable review of the decisions of the
American courts, I have come to the conclusion that they have
been astute to protect the universities against any violation of the
freedoms guaranteed by the American Constitution. The protection
has not been given to a privilege claimed outside the law, It
has been given to a freedom guaranteed by the constitutional or
basic law of the nation. As one American writer has said
" In the United States freedom is not an academic privilege; it is
a right constitutionally guaranteed to all residents,"
In 1952, that very great judicial lawyer, Mr. Justice
Frankfurter, put the whole problem in a single paragraph.
" It is the special task of teachers to foster those
habits of open-mindedness and critical inquiry which alone make
for responsible citizens, who, in turn, make possible an enlightened
and effective public opinion. Teachers must fulfill their
function by precept and practice, by the very atmosphere which they
generate; they must be exemplars of open-mindedness and free
inquiry. They cannot carry out their noble task if the
conditions for the practice of a responsible and citical mind are
denied to them, They must have the freedom of responsibility
inquiry, by thought and action, into the meaning of social and
economic ideas, into the checkered history of social and economic
dogma. They must be free to sift evanescent doctrine, qualified
by time and circumstances, from that restless, enduring process of
extending the bounds of understanding and wisdom, to assure which
the freedoms of thought, of speech, of inquiry, of worship are
guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States against infraction
by national or state government.
The functions of educational institutions in our
national life, and the conditions under which alone they can
adequately perform them, are at the basis of these limitations
upon State and national power".
Here we have stated with clarity the whole reason for
academic freedom and the reason why, in the case of the United
States, special constitutional provisions were established to
protect it. But the point that I want to emphasise, though it
ought to be trite enough, is that in America itself, with these
special constitutional provisions, the guaranteed freedoms belong to
the community as a whole, and are not in some particular or exclusive
way sectional privileges outside the law. It is one of the
glories of a civilised democracy that we enjoy out freedoms in
common; that we are born with those freedoms, and that they can
be limited or taken away only by the principles of the common law
or by constitutionally competent statutory provisions made by
Parliament. In the absence of specific legal provisions, no
man way claim a greater freedom than another. Yet, and I come
back to it, the freedom of the enquiring mind in a university is
of vital importance, not only for contemporary society, but for
a developing future. For this reason it is important that academic
people should not set their claims too high, so that they appear
to be claiming privileges unrecognised by the law. But they
certainly should, in their university community life, insist,
within the law, upon the maintenance of the freedom of their minds;
and should at all times resist unauthorised political interference
with their work, or & dministrative procedures within the
university itself which could frustrate them in the kind of work
they are in a university to do.
Interestingly enough, there has been a good deal of debate
in the United States about the position of a practising Communist in
a university. Some responsible and liberal-minded people have
queried the employment of practising Communists in a university,
for the intelligible reason that the whole philosophy of Communism
and the whole discipline of the Party are opposed to that complete
freedom of thought and objectivity of mind which it is one of the
functions of a university to maintain. I will not try to pursue
that argument to its conclusion, because the boundary line is
very hard to define.
16.
One other matter that has engaged a good deal of
attention in the United States is the problem of the tenure of
members of university staffs. There can be no doubt that professors
or lecturers appointed at will could be much more liable to
executive interference or pressure than those who are appointed
for a substantial term. Even those appointed for a term of years
may find themselves complaining that a failure to renew their
appointment at the end of their term has been due to some
objection to their exercise of their academic freedom. These
are, of course, very important matters. I, for one, would offer
my own view that an academic appointed after due consideration
should not feel himself to be at the risk of arbitary treatment if
his enquiries lead him to conclusions which are, in some quarters,
unpopular. But it still remains true that, whether the staff member
has a fixed short or long term or no term at all, the rules which
control the right of the university to dismiss him are the same as
the rules that apply in any contract of employment, and that,
if he is dismissed without notice, the onus will, as in any other
case, be on his employer, the university, to justify in law the
action that has been taken.
To sum up, you will see from what I have said that when
we speak of academic freedom, we are not speaking of a privilege
given to academic people and denied to ordinary men and women.
It merely happens that, as universities are increasingly in what
I might call the limelight of current history, there will at all
times be two temptations. One will be a temptation on the part
of partisans, including partisans outside the university, to seek to
control the universities in what they think and what they say,
irrespective of the law. The other will be a temptation,
occasionally encouraged in circumstances of emotion or heat, for
university people to claim that those rules which apply to
ordinary men and women in the eye of the law, do not apply to them.
I would prefer to think of academic freedom as a precious and
shining example of that kind of freedom which all thinking men and
women in our community want for themselves, and will not abandon
without a struggle.