Abstracts Education

The Dual Purpose University: The Humanities, Technology, and the Reshaping of the Idea of the University, 1935-1960

by Michael Goodman

In the mid-twentieth century, a new idea of the university arose that aimed to resolve the conflict between the liberal and instrumental aims of higher education. Using methodologies from institutional and intellectual history, this thesis examines moments in the emergence and development of a new idea of the university, a “dual purpose” university which served national economic interests while retaining its function as a source for liberal research and the social good. In tracing this evolving institutional idea, the thesis offers close examination of the three significant government reports on universities and higher education – the Percy Report (1944) in the United Kingdom, the Truman Report (1947) in the United States, and the Murray Report (1957) in Australia. Published in the midst of key historical confluences, these reports contributed to an unfolding debate on the role for universities for their times. New economic conditions provoked new understandings of the function that knowledge and technology would play in the development of national and global economies. New political realities inspired awareness of the importance of an informed citizenry. Increased student enrolments, coming from a far wider range of social and economic backgrounds, entered universities in the post-war period, contesting traditional methods in which they selected for a somewhat narrow range of intellectual aptitudes. These societal shifts challenged universities’ ability to adjust, and unsettled notions of their responsibilities to their nations. A case study of the creation of the New South Wales University of Technology (later the University of New South Wales) explores why the teaching of humanities became regarded as a vital component of the idea of the university in this period. This thesis aims to understand how this contingent moment of national recognition of and heightened expectations for universities eventually came to reshape the idea of the university in this period.