<name key="name-008371" type="organisation">Victoria University of Wellington</name><date from="1899" to="1999">1899 ~ 1999</date> A History

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VICTORIA UNIVERSITY OF WELLINGTON 1899 ~ 1999 A History

Victoria University of Wellington1899 ~ 1999 A HISTORY Rachel Barrowman VICTORIA UNIVERSITY PRESSVictoria University of Wellington PO Box 600 Wellingtonhttp://www.vup.vuw.ac.nz Copyright © Victoria University of Wellington 1999 ISBN 0 86473 369 0 First published 1999 This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without the permission of the publishers Layout design: Sarah Maxey Printed by South Wind Production (Pte) Ltd, Singapore

Contents

Foreword 7 Introduction 9 Chapter 1: The college is founded 11 The University of New Zealand and Victoria College – the foundation professors – classes begin – the Old Clay Patch – a building at last Chapter 2: War and peace 30 The university reform movement – the von Zedlitz affair – the quest for special schools – the growth of departments – academic reform – silver jubilee Chapter 3: The Hunter years 50 The 1930s – academic freedom – fresh faces – political science – social science – the sciences divide – music – research and publication – the rise of the lecturers Chapter 4: Wayfarers together 76 The students – corporate life – the Students' Society – sport – the arts – hostels – capping – a hotbed of sedition? Chapter 5: The whole ramshackle machine 100 A new principal – independence gained – a royal commission – postwar boom – the Palmerston North branch – the growth of administration – hard times, the 1970s and 1980s – democratisation – academic reform Chapter 6: Cribbed, cabined and confined 128 The site expanded – postwar building boom – the Reynolds–Culliford plan – concrete blocks – the Hunter saga, part one – tower blocks – the precinct project – the Hunter saga, part two – the Polhill plan Chapter 7: Mites and earthquakes 158 Big science – trouble in the faculty – physics – earth sciences – Antarctica – botany and zoology – chemistry – mathematics – computing Chapter 8: Hits and misses 187 Engineering – architecture – a medical school – nursing – Asian studies – Pacific studies – the English Language Institute – criminology – industrial relations – university extension – a survey research centre Chapter 9: Wisdom and gold 211 Economics – accountancy – business administration – commerce and administration – policy studies – the law school Chapter 10: Soft science and hard art 242 Psychology – anthropology – sociology – political science – education – geography – philosophy – religious studies – history Chapter 11: The creative edge 278 English – modern languages – classics – linguistics – drama studies – librarianship – art history – the art collection – music – an arts centre? Chapter 12: Weirdie beardie layabouts 311 A student union building – the conservative years – the decline of sport – welfare services – flats and halls – fashion – politics – the demise of capping – the rise of culture Chapter 13: The truth is out there 352 The Hawke report – restructuring – 1990s – ‘refocussing Victoria’ – gaudeamus igitur Appendices 381 Chancellors, vice chancellors and registrars – Student numbers Notes 383 Bibliography 416 Index 421

Foreword

TO MARK THE centenary of our university with the publication of a history was perhaps predictable. J.C. Beaglehole's masterly ‘Essay towards a history’ published in 1949 on the occasion of our golden jubilee certainly called for a sequel. But this history is more than that, much more. It tells the great story of the full 100 years; the people, staff and students, the challenges faced and surmounted in teaching and learning, in research and scholarship; the difficulties of site and perennial underfunding, and the maintenance of autonomy and academic freedom; from humble beginnings, across an ever expanding spectrum of subjects, to the thriving university we know today. All these themes are addressed in Rachel Barrowman's history which captures the diversity of Victoria and her people, their many successes and their occasional disappointments, their collegiality and their conflicts, and their relationships with the capital city and the wider community.

I am sure that all of those who have passed through the Hunter archway, Te Herenga Waka marae, the student union cafe, or the Rankine Brown courtyard and whose lives have, in one way or another, been changed by Victoria will find this account of the university fascinating and revealing. I trust that Victoria's future generations will also benefit from appreciating what has gone before and that others interested in our university will enjoy discovering what has happened over the years on the hill in Kelburn.

We owe a considerable debt of gratitude to Rachel Barrowman for her research and her scholarly writing. This history is undoubtedly a most significant contribution to the celebration of our centenary and to the record of one of the country's leading educational establishments.

Douglas White QC, Chancellor 6 May 1999

Introduction

THIS IS VICTORIA'S second jubilee history. As if the task of writing the university's 100 years in a little over two was not challenge enough, I follow self-consciously in the footsteps of J.C. Beaglehole, whose elegant, idiosyncratic ‘Essay towards a history’ was published on Victoria's 50th jubilee in 1949. This work is shaped by that one in a number of ways. While it is centennial in scope, my research and writing have concentrated on the second 50 years. The first half century occupies a quarter of these pages, which do not claim to supersede Beaglehole, whose singular achievement is the way in which both his overriding interest in the students and his literary style evoke the spirit of time and place – a curious kind of ‘institutional history’.

This work too was intended to be different, at least within the local field. My brief was to make a contribution to the genre by focusing on academic life and the role of Victoria in the intellectual life of New Zealand, and the world, while not ignoring such important things as buildings and budgets, committees and councillors. (Buildings have certainly not been ignored.) Hence its shape. The first four chapters recount Victoria's foundation and its story until 1949. From there a thematic approach is taken more or less up to the late 1980s. Chapters deal in turn with administration and general themes of growth and change, buildings and site, the academic departments – in no significant order: science, commerce, law, social sciences and the arts, and various bits in between – and the students. It was with relief I learned half way through the project that the Students' Association had commissioned its own centennial history, for, despite intentions (and Beaglehole's example), it seemed the students were in danger of being crowded out by the professors, lecturers and lecture blocks: they have two chapters out of 13, an inevitably impressionistic treatment. The final chapter deals, necessarily hesitantly, with the 1990s.

Beaglehole confidently summed up the ‘spirit’ of the university in a sentence or two (the ‘wise, luminous and compassionate’ utilitarian spirit of John Stuart Mill). This history also hopes to describe what makes Victoria distinctive. Whether it succeeds is for others to say. The potential readership of a university history is as broad as the people who have made that history, and they will each have their own idea about where the centre of the university lies. But it is a simple fact that the university of the 1990s is much bigger and more complex than the university college of 1949. The historian can only aim to be relatively comprehensive within constraints which include time, resources, narrative sense, and her own areas of interest and expertise. Apology is hereby extended to all those who feel that their Victoria has been neglected, misrepresented or maligned.

I was greatly assisted in writing this history by an advisory committee convened by Gary Hawke. Its other members were Charlotte Macdonald, David Hamer, Bill Renwick, Katharine Jermyn and Fergus Barrowman. I am indebted to them for their advice, criticism and encouragement, inside stories and willingness not to interfere. Nor could I have managed the task without my energetic research assistant, Maureen McEnroe, who confronted the dusty boxes of the university archives in the basement of the Cotton building without flinching and with almost unfailing good humour. Many members of the university assisted my research. I would like to thank in particular: John Andrews, Tony Angelo, Ian Axford, Tim Beaglehole, Mary Boyd, Neil Curtis, W.E. Dasent, James Duncan, Robin Ferrier, Peter Franks, Ian Gordon, John Harper, Gary Hawke, Les Holborow, John McGrath, Don McKenzie, Phil Mann, Peter Morris, Christiane Mortellier, Peter Norrish, Jim Robb, John Roberts, Dick Simpson, Don Trow and Douglas White. In addition, the advisory committee convened a series of roundtable discussions, at which staff members, both past and present, discussed, reminisced and argued about the histories of their particular departments. These were fruitful exercises and I thank everyone who came – and everyone else who, in less formal situations, knowingly or not, contributed anecdotes, opinions and ideas. Unless otherwise indicated, photographs are from the university collections, including many by the university photographer, M.D. King. ATL in picture captions refers to the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand.

This history was commissioned by vice-chancellor Les Holborow, and completed with the support of his successor, Michael Irving. Tim Beaglehole, Stuart Johnston, Ian Boyd, Ivor Richardson, George Barton, Frank Holmes, Les Holborow, Douglas White, Peter Gibbons and Jock Phillips read and commented on the draft. Thanks also to: Lou Nichols, custodian of the university archives; Kathleen Coleridge and Blyth Sansum in the J.C. Beaglehole Room in the university library; Paul Cotton, Des Hurley, Peter Castle, Peter Munz and Murray Robb for pictures from their personal collections; Allan Thomas, Vincent O'Sullivan and the assorted residents of the Stout Research Centre where I was happily housed (with a harbour view) for two and a half years; for their various expert services in production matters, Rachel Lawson, Sue Brown, Jane Parkin, Sarah Maxey, Rachel Scott and Simon Cauchi; and first and last Ross Somerville, for putting up with it all for so long.

[one] The college is founded

THIRTY YEARS AFTER the first legislative steps were Staken to provide for university education in New Zealand the newly appointed Council of Victoria, the ‘Cinderella’ of the colony's four university colleges, held its first meeting, in May 1898. The history of the University of New Zealand during those three decades – which its chancellor, James Hector, described when he welcomed Victoria's founding professors to Wellington in 1899 as a ‘thirty years’ war' – has been recounted in splendid detail elsewhere and need only be summarised here.1

Provincialism and parsimony is the short version of the story. In 1868, after some years of discussion, a University Endowment Act was passed, establishing eight scholarships for study in Britain (none of which was ever held) and setting aside a land endowment for a future university in the colony itself. The following year the provincial government of Otago, rich with gold and imbued with a Scottish reverence for education, moved to establish a University of Otago in Dunedin. This prompted the legislators in Wellington to pass, with uncommon speed, a New Zealand University Act in 1870, creating a colonial university. Now Canterbury, not to be outdone by its neighbour, took steps to found its own university college, which was affiliated to the new University of New Zealand – an institution that as yet existed in little more than name – in 1872.

In the period of ‘internecine war’ that continued through the 1870s,2 provincial politics were intertwined with a debate about the nature of a university: an argument about whether (curious as it may sound) a university should teach, or it should not. This was to be a prolonged and hard-fought debate, and one in which, four decades on, Victoria's professors were to take a prominent role. On the one hand, there might be an examining and degree-granting university, with no fixed abode, to which approved teaching institutions would present candidates for degrees. The model was the University of London, and it was promoted by the Canterbury interests. Alternatively, there was the teaching university (such as the University of Otago), which had buildings and professors and conferred its own degrees – and of which, anticipated the premier, William Fox, in 1870, ‘we may have, hereafter, others of the same class established in Auckland, in Canterbury, and even in Wellington – if poor Wellington should ever rise to such a height of prosperity as to entitle it to have a university of its own, or even rise beyond mere elementary teaching’.3 Under a second act passed in 1874, however, the Canterbury view prevailed. The nascent University of New Zealand was re-established as an exclusively examining university, consisting of a Senate and a chancellor, and a Court of Convocation. To it the University of Otago, Canterbury College and several secondary schools affiliated – among the latter the Wellington college and grammar school (which was thereby renamed Wellington College) in order to become eligible for a 63-acre endowment from the provincial government.

In 1878 a royal commission was appointed to review what was by now widely agreed to be an unsatisfactory state of affairs (the affiliation of secondary schools was of particular concern). Its recommendation was for a federal system of four university colleges, two of which should be established in the North Island (one in Auckland and one in Wellington), with the colonial government providing sites, statutory grants and land endowments. Alas, an economic recession intervened. Nevertheless, in 1882 the Auckland University College Act was passed, establishing a college in that city on the cheap, with no permanent site, unpromising land reserves and a meagre annual grant of £4000.

And ‘poor Wellington’? The growth of the population of the North Island and the lifting of the economic depression of the 1880s (although not any new-found generosity on the part of the government) were the key factors in the capital

Chief justice Robert Stout, the ‘founder’ of Victoria College. ATL C2086 belatedly acquiring its college. But not without a struggle. The chief protagonist was Robert Stout, sometime lawyer, chief justice, premier, member of the university Senate and legendary debater, who has thus been accorded the title of ‘founder’ of Victoria College.4 In June 1886, as premier and minister of education, he signalled in Parliament his intention to introduce a bill to provide for university education in Wellington. ‘I do not think it necessary that much expense should be incurred in starting a college in Wellington,’ he reassured the House. ‘All that need be aimed at, at first, would be part of the arts course.’ He went on to elaborate how, in the interests of economy, each college could specialise: Otago in medicine; Canterbury in engineering and agriculture; Auckland, being a maritime city, in astronomy, navigation, mechanical engineering and the like. ‘So far as Wellington is concerned, it is the seat of Parliament and the seat of the Court of Appeal. This city might be prominent for its special attention to jurisprudence, to law, to political science, to history.’ It was a vision that would prove remarkably prescient.

Continuing the theme of efficiency, Stout suggested that the staff of the Colonial Museum could provide the teaching in geology and natural history. The Wellington University College Bill he introduced in 1887 would effectively annexe the museum to the new college: the director of the museum, James Hector, and his staff of ‘able scientific men’ would devote half their time to teaching, and Hector would become warden of the college. (Hector, who had apparently not been consulted, was unimpressed.) For an endowment there was the acre occupied by the museum next to Parliament, and 14,000 acres of educational reserves (confiscated Maori land) in Taranaki. Stout asked for only £1500 as a statutory grant, less than half of Auckland's.5 Nevertheless, the bill was defeated after a lengthy debate.

Stout lost his seat at the general election a few months later. By the time he re-entered Parliament in 1893 (representing the city of Wellington on the opposition benches), a considerable groundswell of opinion had risen in favour of a university college to serve the area known as the Middle District: the former provinces of Wellington, Nelson, Westland, Taranaki and Hawke's Bay. Its population had grown rapidly and now provided more university entrance candidates each year than any other. Pressure was mounting from the university itself, from the Wellington Board of Education and from Congregationalist minister W.A. Evans' newly launched Forward movement (a philanthropic-cum-adult education crusade). An additional factor in the debate was the future of Wellington's large, brick, Mount Cook gaol, which was empty, and occupied the most imposing site in the city. It was a civic disgrace, ‘the ugliest structure that is to be found between the Bluff and the North Cape’, declared Evans' Citizen.6 The site was ideal, however, for a university college.

In 1894 Stout tried again with a Middle District of New Zealand University College Bill. The debate followed the same pattern as that in 1887. It was extravagant, outrageous, to think of establishing more university colleges before the needs of primary education were properly met; the bill would rob the children of Taranaki of the educational reserves; and how many university colleges did the colony need? ‘We are not in a position to have universities at every corner of the street,’ observed the member for Otago. And even if there was a need for a college in the Middle District, must it be in Wellington? Masterton, Nelson, Picton and Blenheim were put forward as superior sites. ‘I can only say that some of the rankest duffers I have met … are undergraduates,’ contributed the member for Masterton, A.W. Hogg, at the same time suggesting that Masterton was more deserving of a college than Wellington.7 A strong theme of anti-intellectualism underlay the debate. However, being a private member's bill and therefore entailing no financial commitment on the part of the government, the measure was passed. A Middle District of New Zealand University Council, chaired by Stout, met several times during 1895, surveyed the district for available land for endowment, and pressed the government to take action, but in vain.

In the event, Wellington got its university college as the result of something of a whim. In 1897 the Liberal premier, Richard Seddon, who had previously been unsupportive, returned from Queen Victoria's 60th jubilee celebrations in London with an honorary Doctorate of Laws from the University of Cambridge. In a humour of academic romanticism, he decided that the establishment of a university college in Wellington would be a fitting way for the colony to mark the Queen's jubilee year. ‘I do not think there will be any question as to the necessity for the establishment of a University College here in Wellington,’ he remarked when he introduced the second reading of the Victoria College Bill in December 1897, ignoring the three decades of debate and two bills that had preceded it.8 The House was loath to disagree, although this bill too did not pass without some debate. Couldn't the wealthy citizens of Wellington pay for their own university? it was asked. This was a recurrent theme: Wellington was a crass commercial town, once poor and now grown wealthy, with little interest in the higher things of the mind. Perhaps, Jock McKenzie, the minister of lands (and half-brother, as it happened, of one of the new college's founding professors), added facetiously when seconding the bill, ‘those gentlemen who have made fortunes by dealing in Native lands should establish a chair in the University College at Wellington, and call it the “Maori Land Chair”’. (‘I … hope Sir,’ he continued, ‘that for the next twenty years we shall hear no more about universities.’)9 Most of the debate was over the technical details of the somewhat peculiar scholarship scheme with which the college was to be burdened.

Under the act which was duly passed on 22 December 1897, Victoria was established as a ‘poor man's college’, in two senses. It would receive, like Auckland, an annual statutory grant of £4000. Its endowment was 4000 acres in the Nukumaru survey district in Taranaki, ‘of such a nature,’ the Council would remark in 1902, ‘that it cannot be let, even though offered at 6d. an acre’.10 The Council was repeatedly and unsuccessfully to plead for an adequate endowment for its college. The land, which remained vested in the Crown, returned an average income to the college annually of £55: Auckland's 30,000 acres were earning by 1920 some £700, and Otago's and Canterbury's reserves, endowed by their provincial governments, £7000 and £10,000 respectively.11 Out of this modest income the Council was to provide annually six Queen's Scholarships, which were established ‘for the purpose of bringing higher education within the reach of deserving scholars’.12 They were to be awarded competitively to primary school pupils from the Middle District for two years' secondary and three years' university education. Thus, Victoria was founded upon a democratic ideal, as a ‘people's university’. This too had been Stout's vision: ‘You will have men working during the day, clerks in offices perhaps, perhaps mechanics, going to the evening classes, and thereby obtaining a university education,’ he had told the House in 1887.13

The college was to be governed by a Council of 16. Three members would be appointed by the Governor-in-Council; three elected by the members of Parliament and the Legislative Council representing the Middle District; three by the graduates of the University of New Zealand; three by the Education Board; three by the teachers of the district; and one by the college's Professorial Board. The new councillors held their inaugural meeting on 23 May 1898, and elected to the chair John Rutherfurd Blair, an energetic educationalist, chairman of the Education Board and currently mayor. By June they had determined upon four chairs: in English language and literature, classics, mathematics, and chemistry and physics. The chairs were to be advertised in Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand. The appointments would be initially for five years, at a salary of £700.

Victoria's founding professors were three Scots and a Yorkshireman, who was informed on his arrival by one of the councillors that he had got his vote only because there was no Scotsman on the shortlist. They were relatively young. John Rankine Brown, the classicist, lately a senior lecturer in Latin at the University of Glasgow (having started his academic career at his native St Andrews), was not yet 40; Hugh Mackenzie, who had been tutored by Brown and studied for the

The foundation professors. Back: Hugh Mackenzie, Thomas Easterfield. Front: Richard Maclaurin, John Rankine Brown Presbyterian ministry before himself becoming a private tutor at St Andrews, was the same age. Thomas Easterfield, the chemist from Yorkshire, was 33. The mathematician, Richard Maclaurin, was the youngest, at 28, and arguably the most brilliant of the four. On the advice of New Zealand's agent-general in London, Brown, Mackenzie and Easterfield travelled to Wellington together on the Kaikoura, with their wives and nine young children, to arrive on an ‘exquisitely beautiful afternoon’ on 1 April 1899.14 Maclaurin, a bachelor, elected to come separately via America and Auckland. On the voyage out, Easterfield would later recall, Brown and Mackenzie ‘made it clear that they regarded their subjects as on a far higher plane educationally than mathematics or science’.15 Ironically, it was the mathematician and the scientist who were to distinguish the young college.

The professors were formally welcomed by the Council at the offices of the Education Board on 12 April. A week later they delivered their inaugural lectures. Brown put the case for Latin as the necessary foundation for the study of literature and for accuracy of expression, regretting the prevalent ‘popular attack on the Classics’ in schools and universities, and emphasised the importance of the classics most especially in a colony ‘where one would naturally expect to find the views of the practical man predominant’, and, moreover, in ‘a commercial centre like Wellington’.16 Academically unadventurous, shy and serious with a ‘pawky’ sense of humour (in J.C Beaglehole's portrait), Brown was to be well liked by his students as an excellent and kind teacher; his publications were school editions of Caesar.17 Mackenzie was a livelier personality, ‘a character of Dickensian breadth and geniality’. Jovial, robust, and a lover of gossip and anecdote, it was to his home that everyone went for afternoon tea.18 The theme of his inaugural address (unfortunately, difficult for many to hear beneath his heavy Scottish accent) was the relative claims of art and of science, ‘which is now taking a prominent place in the realm of intellectual activity, would exalt herself and thrust religion and literature into a lower place’. Without wishing to place them in opposition, literature (specifically, English) ‘may save us from ourselves,’ he told his audience; ‘It is the study of life – is, indeed, life.’19 Mackenzie's was a wide-ranging rather than penetrating mind, his teaching conscientious. His aim, as he would later define it, was ‘to make the heavier and more exacting parts of the study of English philology as light as possible for students that could not give their whole time to study, or that began their university course indifferently equipped’.20

Easterfield had a more definite pedagogical purpose. He had gone from Cambridge to Zurich and Würzburg, and with his German research training came to Wellington with the intention of ‘establishing in this city a research school whose fame shall be the pride of our University’. In his lecture on ‘Research as the prime factor in a Scientific Education’ – a topic he had been warned against as likely to be controversial – he argued for early specialisation by students, research and original investigation as a significant component of undergraduate work, and the ‘absolute necessity’ of a ‘really good laboratory’.21 In his 20 years at Victoria, Easterfield undertook research on the chemical properties of native plants (to which he had alluded in his inaugural lecture), published widely (he was the most productive, in this sense, of the colony's four chemistry professors) and succeeded in establishing research as a defining characteristic of the college's science faculty. When he left in 1919 to become the first director of the Cawthron Institute in Nelson, he was made Victoria's first professor emeritus.

It is scarcely surprising that science, more than the arts, should flourish (rhetorically at least) in a university founded at the end of the nineteenth century, in a scientific age. However, a university gains its distinction, and distinctiveness, from the capabilities and the character of its teachers – especially when there are so few of them. ‘These men taught by their personalities,’ it has been said.22 The brightest star of all was Maclaurin. Although born in Scotland, he had grown up in Waikato and Auckland; he excelled in mathematics at Auckland University College and the University of Cambridge, subsequently took up law, and studied philosophy in Strasbourg. He was to publish in both law and mathematics (On the Nature of Evidence of Title to Realty, 1901, and a significant work on The Theory of Light, 1908). He was ‘brilliantly witty and a wonderful raconteur’,23 and his inaugural lecture was the most impressive, exciting even, of the four. Euclid, he said, ‘suddenly takes your breath away’ with his axioms on parallels. Maclaurin considered Euclid's geometrical theorems as ‘possibly only approximations to the truth’, and discussed the development of wireless telegraphy and the application of mathematics to the theory of evolution. Let it not be thought, however, that mathematics was a purely practical science: its ‘interest is mainly philosophic – it touches the great question of the knowable and the unknowable – it may alter our views of the nature of the universe’.24 Maclaurin intended to stay only five years. He stayed for seven before being lured to New York to become professor of mathematical physics at Columbia, and from there, within a year, to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which he virtually created. A later president of MIT would thank Victoria for performing an ‘international service for which we shall ever be grateful’ in ‘yielding him to us in America’.25

In the typically make-do way in which New Zealand's universities were established, each of the professors was required to teach additional subjects. Maclaurin took classes in law; Easterfield taught physics and mechanics in addition to chemistry; Brown, French as well as Latin; Mackenzie, mental science – but he declined to take political economy and history. In May the Council appointed a lecturer in political economy, David Ritchie, a ‘cultured gentleman with a countryman's tastes’ (golf, billiards, fishing and horses) and means, who had come to the colony for his health and with the intention, by and by, of taking up a farm.26 The registrar of the University of New Zealand, J.W. Joynt, who had been a candidate for the classics chair, offered to take classes in German.

Little did the professors know as they sailed into Port Nicholson on that April Fool's afternoon that among ‘that agglomeration of derelict tin shanties and pretentious pseudo-Corinthian stucco pilasters’ (as one of their colleagues later described colonial Wellington) there was in fact no university.27 The college they had come to found had an act, a grant, a council and soon even students, but had no physical existence. As the search went on for a site, the Council rented rooms

The Wellington Girls' High School, Thorndon, where classes were held until 1906. ATL F106916 1/2 in the Girls' High School in Pipitea Street for the arts classes, and three upstairs rooms in the Technical School building in Victoria Street for science. Here, despite there being neither water, gas nor drains, Easterfield set up his laboratory. The gift from his Cambridge colleagues of a high-class chemical balance to some extent compensated for the motley collection of instruments that had been ordered on his behalf from England and damaged in transit; happily, the government could be prevailed upon to make a £3000 laboratory grant. But not for another six years would the college have its own home. Meanwhile, the Professorial Board met in a back room in the office of the college registrar, Charles Plummer Powles (an accountant and auditor, and prominent churchman), who was appointed in May.28 There was not, once the essentials had been dealt with, a lot to discuss: ‘one of the chief anxieties of the Chairman of the Board was to rake together sufficient business to keep the Board employed until the time arrived when it could decently adjourn for tea in the “Blue Platter,” a small tea-room at the north end of Lambton Quay’.29

The Professorial Board was empowered – subject to the approval of the Council – to fix the course of study, timetable and attendance regulations, and to manage disciplinary matters, the library and college servants (such as janitors, when they would be needed). They could not, however, decide what they would teach. Course curricula and degree regulations were laid down by the University of New Zealand (to which the college was formally admitted as an affiliated institution on 23 February 1899). At their first meeting the professors defined the academic year to consist of two terms: the first from the beginning of April to the end of June, the second from the third week of July until the last week of October. ‘Terms’ would be kept by attendance at three-quarters of the lectures in at least two subjects, and passing the college examinations in these. The subjects for terms were to be Latin, Greek, English, chemistry, physics, mathematics, applied mathematics, French, mental science, jurisprudence and constitutional history, and general history and political economy (although general history was not in fact taught). Degree examinations were the responsibility of the University of New Zealand, and were set, and marked, in England: the execrable external examinations system against which university reformers would battle for some 40 years. Indeed, it was not necessary to attend lectures at all to sit the exams. Those who did not were ‘exempted’ students, and were mostly teachers living outside the college centres.

Victoria's first students enrolled on 8 April. Regular lectures began on the 18th. Within the first month 49 students enrolled for classes in Latin, 38 in English, 37 in mathematics, 30 in chemistry, 17 in jurisprudence, 15 in mechanics and in French, and 11 in physics. (One hundred and fifteen students in all enrolled the first year, nine of them exempted.) Most lectures were held after 5pm except on Saturdays, so that law clerks and civil servants could attend. This was another bête noire of the university reformers. Of the four colleges, Victoria (followed closely by Auckland) continued to have the highest proportion of part-time students: in 1915, 82.5% of those attending classes were evening students. Thus, in pursuit of the democratic ideal, the college gained ‘that damnosa hereditas of a nightschool atmosphere’.30

The professors also set about defining the college's identity in more obvious ways. A motto, Sapientia magis auro desideranda, was adopted in 1902 after a ‘desperate argument’ over its precise meaning (was wisdom more to be desired than gold, or was lack of wisdom preferable to a lack of gold; or, contributed Easterfield, was wisdom to be desired for the sake of more gold?).31 For the seal, a brief experiment with a crown and laurel wreath was superseded by a lozenge-shaped device ‘with a representation of a figure of the late Queen standing crowned and sceptred’. In 1903 a badge was adopted, depicting the college arms, ‘vert on a fesse engrailed between three crowns or, a canton azure charged with four estoilles argent (in the form of the Southern Cross)’, topped by ‘that lion, or dubious spaniel, “the crest of the Duke of Wellington”’.32 John Rankine Brown penned the college song (in Latin), a classic statement of the colonial condition: ‘We cherish the shrine of Wisdom/ urged by longing/ to know the liberal arts/ in this hemisphere./ We cherish the shrine of the Muses/ under a southern star/ Us from the Muses/ extensive seas cannot separate.’33 It was the students, however, who chose, with some difficulty, the college colours. First there was ‘chocolate and gold’, or ‘brown and mustard-colour’, but this was soon discarded as an unpleasant combination. Maroon and light blue was deemed unflattering to the women. The story goes that it was the visiting French soprano Antonia Delores, a family friend of one of the students, who, gesturing operatically to the dark green and the golden gorse (or was it broom?) of Tinakori Hill, suggested in 1905 that they look no further than nature itself.

The college acquired teachers and subjects as funding allowed. At the beginning of 1900 Maurice Richmond, member of a prominent political, legal and land-owning family, was appointed to teach second- and third-year law. In 1903 the Council accepted his offer to add classes in jurisprudence and constitutional history as an interim measure; it intended to establish a professorship in law, ‘with a view to making the Law School at Wellington the most complete in the Colony’,34 as soon as it could afford to. The college's fifth professor, of modern languages, was appointed in December 1901 after Brown had refused to continue teaching French and the obliging Joynt resigned to free funds for the creation of a new chair. George von Zedlitz, of English and German parentage, was educated at Oxford where he had distinguished himself as a brilliant extempore speaker in Union debates (though had failed to get a first): ‘young, tall, handsome and altogether charming’, the New Zealand Free Lance reported, he brought to the college wit, urbanity and a European sensibility.35

The college arms

However enthusiastic and forward-thinking the professor of chemistry, students could not complete a science degree at Victoria so long as the college did not offer classes in either biology or geology. Stout still had his eye on the government scientific establishment. Hector remained unforthcoming. Indeed, he advised the Council not to undertake the natural sciences at all at present, having such meagre resources; but, if it must, it would do better to choose biology than geology, ‘the surroundings of Wellington offering very little opportunity for its study in the field’.36 In February 1900 C.E. Adams of the Lands and Survey Department (later to be government astronomer) was engaged to give lectures in geology. He subsequently proposed a course in surveying, or a full course in geology, or in civil engineering, but the Council had now determined on a professorship in biology, to be established in 1903.

This appointment was an uneasy one. The new professor, Harry Borrer Kirk, had no academic teaching experience and had been educated wholly in New Zealand.37 The son of a distinguished colonial botanist, he had studied on his own for the University of New Zealand examinations before there was a college in Wellington, and spent 17 years traversing the country as an inspector of native schools, building a working knowledge of his subject. But it was a fortunate choice. Kirk has been described as gentle, courteous, ‘modest to the point of self-effacement’ and a ‘born teacher’.38 He was not so courteous, however, as to agree to take geology as well, once the Council had decided to dispense with the services of the enthusiastic Adams, even though there were few students. The biology department was set up in a room in Miss Baber's kindergarten in Pipitea Street along the road from the Girls' High School. Kirk would work long into the night: his research interests were wide ranging, but his special field was sponges. He was the only university scientist in the colony at this time doing any significant original research in zoology or botany.

The New Zealand Educational Institute would have liked a chair in pedagogy, but the Education Department would not put up the funds. Stout wanted extension or correspondence classes, but the already overburdened professors were unwilling. They did agree in 1901 to a series of public lectures, which opened with Easterfield on ‘The romance of coal tar’ on 29 May, followed by Mackenzie on ‘English literature in relation to the philosophical influences of the century’ – an experiment that was not repeated. (Easterfield had also given a special chemistry class for the city's lawyers, at their request.) However, there was in the Professorial Board's view an ‘absolute need’ for a professor of mental science (in later parlance, philosophy and psychology). By 1903 the classics professor had decided that he no longer wished to teach this subject too. Having decided to terminate Ritchie's part-time lectureship in political economy, the Council advertised at the end of 1903 for a lecturer for both subjects – or possibly one for each. (Indeed, ‘political economy’ could perhaps be taken as the leitmotif of the college's early development.) They appointed Thomas Alexander Hunter, for one year initially. In 1906 his position was confirmed for another five years, and at the end of 1907 he was made a professor, on a reduced salary of £500.

Hunter, it has been said, was for many years ‘the very essence of’ the college (a remark that he, however, would make of von Zedlitz).39 Born in England, he had grown up in Otago and gained first-class honours in mental science from the

The senior football team, 1905 (captain Tommy Hunter, second row, second from right) University of Otago in 1899. Hunter was a man of practical mind and forthright expression, a fervent Rationalist with a guiding belief in the liberalising force of education and the intellect, and a master tactician, ‘adept at breaking or bending rules’.40 A major part of his influence on the college was to be in administration; he would be appointed its first principal in 1938. In his teaching, he strengthened the ‘spirit of research’ that Easterfield had already brought.41 Becoming interested in the new subject of experimental psychology, he visited universities in Europe and the United States in 1906–07. Inspired especially by the work of E.B. Titchener at Cornell, he returned to establish at Victoria the first psychological laboratory in the southern hemisphere. This was, he later recorded, rather too innovative for his colleagues at the other colleges, and experimental psychology was not to be formally recognised by the university Senate until 1916. It was the mid–1920s before it was recognised as a science (that is, as a subject for the BSc).42

An emphasis on research, even if it could be said to be becoming a theme, did not give the college the academic distinction that was desired. It was long to be Victoria's lament that it had no professional, or ‘special’, school. Otago, precociously, had founded its medical school, followed by a school of mines, in the 1870s; Canterbury got engineering in 1890, and control over an agricultural college at Lincoln; Auckland was shortly to establish a mining school. Special schools brought prestige, full-time students and, most importantly, funding. Prolonged territorial battles were waged as the university Senate endeavoured to maintain some rationalisation in the system as a whole – for how many mining, or engineering, or agriculture schools could the colony afford? At the Senate meeting in 1904 Stout, long an advocate of ‘separate but equal’ development of the colleges, put forward a scheme of specialisation in which Victoria ‘could become the Law School … and perhaps pay attention to the allied subject of Political Science’.43 That year Parliament voted an additional ‘specialisation grant’ for each college of £1500, which became available in 1905 (and was increased to £2000 in 1907). Victoria successfully requested an extra £500 so that the college could specialise in both law and science.

The Council began by establishing two chairs of law. Maurice Richmond, the lecturer, was promoted to the junior professorship of English and New Zealand law. For the senior chair Stout recruited J.W. Salmond from the University of Adelaide. Adelaide was piqued.44 Salmond, like Maclaurin, was one of Victoria's shooting stars: a legal theorist of international eminence, and a future New Zealand solicitor-general and Supreme Court judge. His works on Jurisprudence (1902) and The Law of Torts (1907) were international classics. Students appreciated his droll humour and excellent teaching. But he was to stay only a year before being persuaded to the Law Drafting Office. The Council now prevailed upon Maclaurin – whose request for additional remuneration for the law teaching he had been doing they had already declined – to abandon mathematics for law, with the special title of dean of the faculty of law and a special salary of £800. Maclaurin agreed so long as he could have an honorary chair in his chosen field, and so in April 1907 became professor and dean of law and honorary professor of astronomy. Thus law became the college's first faculty, Maclaurin its first dean. Five months later, though, he was headed for New York.

In Salmond and Maclaurin, Victoria had had, briefly, a promise of brilliance in its ‘school of law’, which now entered a long period of thorough but uninspired instruction. This, however, was all that the legal profession and evidently most of the students – who were law clerks for the most part – desired. A degree was not required for the practice of law, and the legal establishment it seems was happy to employ low-paid clerks who could study outside their working hours for their professional examinations and perhaps a degree. To replace Maclaurin the Council appointed James Adamson from Edinburgh, an impressively learned but shy, dour, frustrated Scot. With ‘solid and unimaginative persistence for the next thirty years he drove his men through the requirements of the New Zealand LL.B’ in an accent that remained almost impenetrable to new students (he was known as ‘Scotchy’), and at legendary volume: ‘Lectures, save to the brilliantly resourceful and the highly industrious, were an ordeal.’45 Richmond, by contrast, was a man of pensive, philosophical mind, who found it difficult to bring his lectures to an end. There were complaints; the Council made moves to investigate; and Richmond decided not to seek reappointment at the end of his five-year contract. (He retired to Christchurch ‘as a consultant on knotty points, and to compose a metaphysical work … of some complexity’.)46 In his place in 1911 came James Garrow from Otago, famed for his lecture notes and a pioneering series of published textbooks that were to remain in use for several decades. His teaching was prosaic but efficient.

Adamson, when he arrived, had devised a plan for a national school of law at Victoria. This, to his chagrin, was not to be. Yet the college had, with its two full-time professorships, the largest law faculty in the university. Otago had abandoned the subject for some years after 1902, and it now continued there with only part-time teaching; Canterbury and Auckland's law faculties were also part time and staffed by practising lawyers. It was the best Victoria would do, for now, for a ‘special school’. But the college also endeavoured to give some effect to its ‘specialisation’ in science. Maclaurin had been replaced in mathematics at the end of 1907 by David Picken, who came from a brilliant academic career at Cambridge and an assistantship at his native Glasgow. Writing some years later, he compared the ‘pristine freshness and loveliness in the corporate personal life of the College’ that had impressed him when he arrived with the glory of the ‘virgin’ South Island bush through which he went hiking with Easterfield – a somewhat romantic view of the character of the young college which was, nevertheless, to endure.47 Picken was less impressed with the number and educational standard of the senior mathematics students, and would be gone, like Maclaurin, in seven years.

At the beginning of 1909 the Council was able to make three new appointments. A deputation had waited on the premier and the minister of education to impress upon them the urgent needs of general teaching at the college, and had been granted £1500. To a new chair in physics, at a cut rate of £600, they appointed an Australian, Thomas Laby, whose pioneering research in radioactivity at the University of Sydney had taken him to the Cavendish laboratory in England, despite his never having matriculated. An indifferent lecturer but a proficient trainer of researchers, he was also to be known as one half of ‘Kaye and Laby’ (Tables of Physical and Chemical Constants, published in 1911). But he too was not to stay long.

The other scientist appointed that year did, and became, if ‘not perhaps one of the [college's] colourful figures’,48 yet one of its, and New Zealand's, illustrious scientists. Charles Cotton, born in Dunedin and a graduate of Otago, was appointed lecturer in geology, ‘and also to give assistance to the Professors of English Language and Literature, Classics, Modern Languages, and Mathematics; besides providing Professor Kirk with an assistant’.49 He went on to become the first professor of geology in 1921, and to prove Hector at least partly wrong by establishing an international reputation in the innovative field of geomorphology, drawing on the work of American physiographers and on the natural landforms and tectonic interest of the Wellington region (whose rocks, it is true, offered little excitement for the geologist). The third new addition this year was F.P. Wilson, tall and dashing, who had been one of the college's founding students in 1899. He was appointed to lecture in economics, history and geography ‘with a view to the Commerce degree’,50 and became a professor (of history) in the same year as Cotton.

After 10 years, the academic establishment numbered 10 professors, three lecturers, and three demonstrators or assistants in the sciences, and the college could report that ‘the provision for teaching is therefore on a satisfactory footing’.51 The financial situation was also looking brighter, comparatively speaking. In

Graduates, 1907 addition to the occasional ad hoc payment or increased grant from the government for teaching purposes, the college had, after persistent pleading, been relieved in 1906 of the burden (some £1100 per annum) of the Queen's Scholarships, and they were abolished finally the following year. Student numbers had quadrupled since the foundation year: there were 466 students, plus 93 exempted students, in 1909 and their fees brought in some £1700 (considerably less than at the other colleges). Initially set at one-and-a-half or 3 guineas per course, depending on the number of classes per week, these were doubled in 1912 and a general college fee of half a guinea introduced. There had been a modest amount of private beneficence. Yet it was hardly a comfortable living. ‘If the College is to continue its present work only, without making any provision whatever for expansion,’ it warned in 1910, ‘it must have a larger revenue. The College deserves well of the Dominion, and ought to be supported. Many of its courses have immediate practical bearing on the political and industrial life of the Dominion.’52

At least the college now had its own home. The newly appointed Council in 1898 had resolved immediately upon the much talked-of Mount Cook site: the gaol and 13 acres. A deputation went to the premier. The government was non-committal but offered as a temporary measure the ministerial residence in Tinakori Road, then in use as a boarding house, which would be available in the middle of 1899. This, Easterfield reported on examination, was quite unsuitable for science laboratories, and was anyway too small. As classes began in borrowed rooms the Council reaffirmed its choice of Mount Cook, and in July petitioned Parliament. The response was a definite refusal from the premier, Seddon, who then accused the Council in the House of having brought out its professors under false pretences and threatened ‘to enquire whether Palmerston North, Nelson or Blenheim, or some other place could be utilized for the purpose’.53 A year later the mayor led a deputation to the college Council to urge it to acquire the Mount Cook site, which the government continued to withhold. A suggestion that Wellington College (now that it was no longer affiliated to the University of New Zealand) should forfeit 10 acres of its reserve land met with little enthusiasm. In the words of the college magazine, ‘Wellington does not abound in sites suitable for University buildings.’54

The deadlock was broken by a suggestion of an unexpected kind. In February 1901 Charles Pharazyn, a wealthy Wairarapa sheep farmer, made the Council an offer it could not refuse: £1000 if it chose to build its college on the Kelburne Park Reserve, a six-acre site comprising the ‘park’ and a precipitous hillside overlooking the city. (Whatever ‘absurd misconstructions of my motives’ may have been circulated, he assured the Council, the offer had nothing to do with his large interest in the recently formed Kelburne Karori Tramway company – whose cable car, opened the following year, was to transport many thousands of students between the university and Lambton Quay; it rather expressed his ‘wish to show … some recognition of my attachment to the City of Wellington’.)55 A Council committee

The handsome pile. Watt collection, ATL 80603 1/2 reported: it was ‘an unused and unsightly piece of land’, but ‘convenient, accessible and suitable and under existing conditions the best available’.56 Negotiations proceeded with the City Council (for the reserve was part of the Town Belt). Meanwhile, the students greeted the visiting Duke and Duchess of York with a banner bearing the cryptic message ‘We have eyes but no site’; and an offer from the Nelson College Board of Governors for six free acres in that city was politely declined. The deal was expedited by the passing of an act of Parliament in November 1901, and the college acquired six and a half acres, ‘a few scraggy pines’ and a view.57

Work began forthwith on levelling one and a half acres of the near-vertical site, and in July 1902 the Council asked the government for £40,000 for a building. The government offered first £25,000, then £15,000 over three years. Bravely the Council called for competitive designs for a £30,000 building, and in June 1903 announced the winning design by local architects F. Penty and E.M. Blake: ‘a handsome building, strongly reminiscent of Parliament Buildings and the Canterbury College buildings, yet with an imposing appearance of its own’.58 It became more imposing when the government architect added a third storey to the design at the insistence of Seddon – in the interests of efficiency rather than aesthetics. Economy was the rule of the day. Tenders were called for only the science block and middle portion of the arts block (the brick to be of the deepest red locally available, the roof of Welsh slate, and the external facings and carvings of Oamaru stone), and the governor, Lord Plunket, laid the foundation stone on 27 August 1904.59 When the building was officially opened on 30 March 1906 flags and greenery obscured the unfinished third storey. Still, the Evening Post was moved to describe it as ‘a handsome pile’.60 The style was late nineteenth-century revival Gothic, or ‘collegiate Gothic’ (but inside changed to ‘a sort of bastard Early English, breaking down in the science building, as the architects gave up the unequal struggle, into plain utility,’ observed the college's jubilee historian, who held definite views on its architecture).61 At the opening ceremony Easterfield was upbraided by a choleric Council member for the extravagant size of the science block, for which he had provided specifications, and refrained from mentioning plans for an additional science wing to be built within a few years.

The building was never completed to the original design. It was progressively added to in much the same manner as the college's academic establishment, as pressures grew and money was found. Within a year or two, ‘through the liberality of the Government’ (to whom another delegation had gone), a room could be fitted up to hold large classes.62 In March 1910 a new wing at the rear of the arts block was opened, providing two large classrooms, a common room, a tearoom and a robing room. The £3000 cost was met by public subscription and a £2-for-£1 government subsidy. In addition, the top storey of the original block was now lined, and one room prepared as a geology laboratory and lecture room. This was made possible by a grant from the Unemployed Relief Committee, topped up again by government subsidy. Equipping the geology laboratory, the physics laboratory (which opened with a public demonstration in October 1910) and a metallurgy room had now exhausted the original £3000 laboratory grant. Another £860 was spent on improvements to the grounds: they ‘are now nearly in permanent shape,’ observed the annual report, ‘but much turfing, grassing, and tree-planting is still necessary to make them sightly … The grounds of a University College ought to be attractive, but ours as yet are far from that.’63 In the meantime the students

Assembled professors, councillors and clergymen on the steps of the new building, opening day, 30 March 1906 had dug out tennis courts, a two-year project, Seddon turning the first sod on 9 September 1905; and on 30 July 1909 a two-storey wooden gymnasium and social hall was opened. This ‘useful addition to the College’ was also owed ‘to the energy and good college spirit of the students’, who called for subscriptions, made donations and held a gigantic bazaar.64

North and south wings were added to the central arts block with the provision of two government grants (of £20,000 each) after the First World War. The north wing, built to a new design by the same firm of architects (assisted by a Scottish Gothic specialist), was completed in 1922, and provided class and staff rooms, a women's common room, a new tearoom, and a library, the building's architectural pièce de résistance. The college library had had its beginnings in the Girls' High School cupboards, a few donations and some modest purchases, the remains of the Provincial Council library, and in 1901 a grant of £100 from the college Council. In 1906 it was installed in the oriel-windowed first-floor room above the main entrance of the new building. A student, H.D. Skinner (who was to become a distinguished anthropologist), was appointed assistant custodian, and an annual Council grant of £200 was instituted, soon augmented by a £300 bequest.65 In July 1910, now with 7000 volumes, the Council appointed the college's first librarian: the formidable Reverend Horace Ward who, dressed in skull cap and clerical black, ruled over his domain from a raised desk in the centre of the reading room.

The south wing, to house physics and geology, was completed in 1923. The building, the annual report recorded with satisfaction, ‘now presents a strikingly handsome appearance’.66 This was the last addition to the college site for 15 years, save for some beautification of the grounds. In the late 1920s, in a deal with the City Council, which wanted to widen the road at the Salamanca Road/Kelburn

Prime Minister Richard Seddon turns the first sod of the tennis courts on 9 September 1905

College, courts and cable car in the 1930s. ATL F59972 1/2 Parade intersection, the unsightly clay bank at this corner was replaced by ‘a fine sloping lawn and shrubberies’.67 Still, it was hardly the sylvan glades and avenues of an Oxford or Edinburgh. The steep, undeveloped, at times perilous approach to the college from Mount Street, used by the students who made the daily (or nightly) ascent from town, was slowly improved, largely by their own labour. When it was surfaced with bitumen in 1931 the Students' Association expressed its gratitude to the Council.

The professor of physics drew to the attention of the Council the following year ‘the amount of dirt which comes through the windows of the Physics Department, even when the windows are closed’, causing damage to his equipment: ‘We have certainly endured this nuisance for some years, but since it is local dirt, I think the nuisance could probably be overcome by tar-sealing the path around the physics end of the building,’ he suggested.68 The college had hardly begun to outgrow that quickly bestowed and well-earned epithet, ‘the Old Clay Patch’. Protracted negotiations were begun in the mid–1930s with the City Council and the Catholic Cemetery Trustees, custodians of the cemetery on the college's eastern boundary, to allow access to a new science building: a two-storey biology building at the south end of the site. This, and a small administration block, also in brick, erected between 1937 and 1939, completed the college's occupation of its original six and a half acres.

[two] War and peace

WAR MARKED THE century's, and the college's, second decade. In the years before and during the First World War the college was embroiled in two political struggles. Both were fought over ‘University Ideals’ – the title that Picken, a leading combatant in one case, took for his presidential address to the college Debating Society in 1908. The first was the struggle against ‘the system’: the examining university. It was not Victoria's struggle alone. Nor was it new. Much of the critique advanced by the University Reform Association, which was formed by the Victoria professors in 1910, had been aired before: by the royal commission in 1879, for example, and by the professor of English at Canterbury College, Arnold Wall, who had been campaigning for some years, and with small success, for reform of the structure of the arts degree. The student pursuing a bachelor of arts degree in the University of New Zealand – and most did – took six one-year courses from a total of 17 recognised subjects (although not all were taught at every college); Latin and mathematics were compulsory. Partly as a result of Wall's efforts, the Senate had grudgingly agreed to revise the regulations in 1905 to allow one subject to be advanced for a second year. The low standard of the undergraduate, or ‘pass’, degree, which valued breadth rather than depth, combined with the system of external examining, which encouraged cramming rather than learning, were the major pedagogical concerns of the university reformers.

It was, moreover, an age of university reform. There had been several recent commissions of inquiry into British universities, including the University of London, which was now to abandon the ideal upon which the University of New Zealand was founded. In 1907 the president of Stanford University, David Starr Jordan, who was visiting New Zealand, was asked by Stout (the university chancellor now, as well as a member of Victoria's Council) to comment on the colony's university system. Stout was impressed with the American's advice (as he was by all things American), which largely foreshadowed the aims of the local reformers; he had himself been an opponent of the examining university ideal.1 But a committee was appointed and no action resulted. Senate committees were not prone to decisive action.

It was through the activist zeal of Victoria's professors that existing moves for reform now became a ‘university reform movement’. Perhaps this was because Victoria was the youngest of the four colleges and felt itself to be suffering the most, being the poorest, with the highest proportion of part-time students and denied a special school.2 Perhaps too it was because its professors were, on the whole, relatively young and new to the system. Laby, noted Stout (who was soon to turn against reform), had started criticising the university only weeks after his arrival in Wellington. ‘They are all newcomers,’ the chancellor complained, ‘and know little of our history or our needs.’3 Both of the Australians, Laby and Picken, the newest members of the professoriate, were vocal protagonists. Laby had been ready to resign within a year of his appointment. Picken later stated that if he had known about the university's examination system beforehand he would probably not have applied for the chair.4 His condemnation of the system before the Debating Society in 1908 was acclaimed and reprinted in the press.

Also, and more obviously, Wellington was the place from which to launch a political campaign. If there was some emphasis in the deliberations of the University Reform Association on the needs of the sciences, it reflected the prominent involvement of the science professors: Picken, Laby, Easterfield, Kirk and Hunter

The Professorial Board, 1909. Back: Wilson, von Zedlitz, Easterfield, Kirk, Rankine Brown. Front: Hunter, Picken, Mackenzie, Adamson, Richmond (a social scientist). Von Zedlitz too was an ardent reformer, but Brown and Mackenzie were not so revolutionary-minded. The association was formed following a public meeting at the Town Hall on 31 May 1910, called by a group of Victoria staff and graduates, and addressed by Easterfield and von Zedlitz. A further meeting at the college a week later, attended by about 60, resolved to form an association ‘to endeavour to increase the efficiency of University education in New Zealand’.5 A.L. Herdman, a lawyer and member of Parliament, was elected president, and an array of political, commercial and ecclesiastical figures of some prominence were chosen as vice-presidents. The executive committee consisted of the reforming professors and two other members of the college staff, the education lecturer William Gray, and Phoebe Myers, demonstrator (professor's assistant) in biology; Dr Fell and Augustus Hamilton from the Dominion Museum; one member of the college Council, lawyer and journalist A.R. Atkinson; the Reverend William Jollie; and Mrs Richmond Hursthouse, whose pupils donated the proceeds from two ‘entertainments’ to the cause. Hunter, embarking on a distinguished career in academic administration, was elected secretary. Easterfield was the treasurer and hosted the committee's meetings in his room.

The primary goal of the University Reform Association was a royal commission. Its manifesto was set out in a 196-page pamphlet, edited by Hunter, Laby and von Zedlitz, and published in August 1911. A brief historical survey preceded a catalogue of the defects of ‘the system’: external examining; the low standard of the pass degree (especially the arts courses, which most students took); neglect of research; the parlous state of college finances; inadequate libraries; methods of appointment (which had not always been rigorous); and an administrative structure that denied teachers ‘that democratic freedom of self-government which in varying degrees all other universities possess’.6 The reformers would give the professors a place on the Senate and the college councils and influence in academic affairs. A circular letter had been sent to 150 academics and university administrators overseas, and the 65 responses, all but two of them supportive, formed the appendices, along with the Jordan memorandum and (mischievously) a reforming speech made by Stout in 1886.

The campaign was taken to Parliament, the press, the university Senate and Victoria's own Council. A petition begging for a royal commission, signed by Laby, Picken and 11 other members of the Victoria teaching staff, was presented to Parliament in 1910. When it was considered by Parliament's education committee in September 1911, von Zedlitz, Hunter, Laby, Easterfield and Kirk gave evidence for the Reform Association. So did the Council chairman, Charles Wilson, who, although he supported the call for a commission, was less well disposed towards the reformers. The state of the college finances, he testified, was ‘horrible. If we go on as we are now, I think at the end of next year or the year after we shall have to cry a halt altogether, financially.’ But the reform pamphlet, he thought, was in parts ‘in very questionable taste’ and ‘lamentably inaccurate’, and he defended his Council against the charge of neglecting the library, blaming the professors instead. He was librarian of the General Assembly Library, and so not unexpectedly sensitive on this point (especially, perhaps, as he had once hoped to have control of the college library himself).7

Five Canterbury professors and the Victoria Council had lent their support to the petition. The committee concluded, however, that a royal commission was unnecessary. It believed the university was already making moves towards reform (a conference of professors had met in November 1910, although it was not authorised to consider the most vexed question of exams), and directed the inspector-general of schools, George Hogben, to report on university finance. In the meantime, the Reform Association lobbied members of the Senate, and Hunter was put forward, successfully, as the Wellington Court of Convocation nomination for election that year. Picken, Hunter and Laby propagated the reform case in newspaper articles. The senators reluctantly debated the reformers' demands, and agreed to an annual professorial conference; the reformers lobbied the new Massey government; and Stout became increasingly resolute in his opposition to what he labelled a ‘campaign of depreciation’ by ‘the Victoria College malcontents’.8

Relations between the professors and the Council became testy. An attempt to gain direct professorial representation on the Council in September 1912 was deflected by a deft tactical manoeuvre on the part of Stout: it passed instead his motion that the Council chairman become an ex officio member of the Professorial Board, and vice versa. At the next Council meeting he moved that a committee be appointed to investigate certain public statements made by Professor Picken which had cast ‘grave reflections on the Professors and Students of Victoria college’. ‘The University Professor,’ Picken had said (in the record of the Council minutes), ‘is a man whose value to the community should consist in his personality, his individuality of outlook, and his originality of thought but such qualities would chiefly serve to make life a burden to the men whom we call “Professors” in New Zealand.’ A ‘great majority of the students,’ he also said, ‘left the College less sound in body and mind and soul than on the day they entered, except for the salutary influence of their personal contact with one another.’9 Perhaps this was unwise. Whatever the merits of the reformers' cause, it is hardly surprising that Stout should be affronted by such a public slight to the college he had ‘founded’. However, the threat of disciplinary action and a showdown (professors were threatening to resign) were averted. The Council, while ‘regretting’ the speech, decided that an inquiry would not be in the best interests of the college. Perhaps the manner and tone in which Picken and his colleagues conducted their campaign hardened the chancellor's opposition, and harmed their own cause. So at least the commissioners who eventually were appointed (10 years later) suggested: ‘the vigour with which the agitation was conducted begat a similar vigour in opposition, and resulted in bitter and prolonged controversies, of which we do not yet see the end.’10

Support for reform from the other colleges grew, however, as Stout's and the Senate's reluctance hardened. When, in November 1912, the annual professorial conference met and the 30 assembled professors unanimously recommended the gradual abolition of external examining, the Senate abolished the conference. Six petitions now descended upon Parliament. Victoria's carried 27 signatures. The Victoria contingent who gave evidence this time included Professors Adamson, who presented the needs of the law school, and Brown, dean of the faculty of arts. (Mackenzie, however, had not been converted: he published his own pamphlet, Educational Reform: shall we Germanise our educational system?, under the pseudonym ‘Festina Lente’.) Brown argued the case for the arts and, for them especially, the paramount importance of a good library. In fact, Victoria could boast the largest of the college libraries.11 But ‘syntactical work in Latin … in which I am personally interested, I find exceedingly difficult to bring to any definite conclusion owing to the absence of books’. He suggested, too, that one college should specialise in the arts. This was a singular contribution to a debate which focused almost wholly on science and professional subjects, and one that was not taken up: ‘the word “science” in these days,’ he ruefully observed, ‘is something like the blessed word “Mesopotamia”; and science, after having been, I admit, unjustly held down by the brute force of the older arts subjects, is now threatening to exercise some oppression in its turn – it has a capacious maw, it is somewhat noisy, and very keen and enthusiastic – whilst the average Arts Professor is a quiet, studious creature whose work is sometimes undervalued in these material days.’12

There was no royal commission, but a small advance had been made. Under the New Zealand University Amendment Act which was passed in 1914, a Board of Studies consisting of five members of each Professorial Board was established, with power to advise the Senate on academic matters. It was through this body that a prolonged struggle to reform the examination and degree systems was now carried on, principally by the Victoria and Canterbury representatives. The statutory grants were raised by the 1914 act, Victoria's to £9000; in addition, each college now received a proportion (some £1000 per annum) of the national endowment, a part of this sum dedicated to libraries. Four national research scholarships were established.13 The Reform Association was disappointed, and published a second pamphlet saying so, but felt it had achieved all that it could short of the elusive royal commission, and dissolved itself.

Under the Victoria College Amendment Act passed in September the same year, the college's Council was reconstituted to include two members of the Professorial Board – a further minor victory for the reformers which Stout and Wilson fought to the end. Brown and Adamson, the more moderate members of the reforming party, were the first professors elected to the Council in 1915. Other changes to the composition of the college's governing body were also made by this act: the politicians' right to elect a member was removed (with the result that the thorny Wilson retired); representation of the Court of Convocation was raised from two members to four, and that of teachers and the Education Board reduced from three to two; and one member would now be elected by the City Council. The composition of the Professorial Board was also amended: lecturers – a rising class – were excluded.

The act also empowered the college to charge the students a general tuition fee (a ‘college fee’). And it changed the institution's name, from Victoria College to Victoria University College (just to make it clear that this was not a secondary school). A sign of a different kind, perhaps, of the college's growth as an institution was the appointment in 1915 of its first full-time registrar – that ‘objectionable functionary who carries out with gusto the unpleasant duty of collecting fees from impecunious students’, as he once described his office.14 He was G.G.S. Robison, a former schoolmaster (and one-time private secretary to his brother-in-law, William Pember Reeves), who held the position until his retirement in 1948.

The larger war that began in August 1914 affected all of the colleges in predictable ways. Student numbers fell, clubs went into recess and capping celebrations were curtailed; the work of the science departments was diverted to military purposes. Kirk made a study of fly control in military camps. The chemistry laboratory produced morphia for military hospitals and carbons for searchlights, and in the physics workshop ‘a good deal of attention has been given to signalling and bomb-throwing apparatus’.15 The number of students attending lectures fell from 377 in 1914 to 320 in 1917, and women outnumbered men (but only just): in 1914 there were 243 men and 134 women attending the college; in 1917 there were 148 men and 172 women. Of the 600 Victoria students and former students who served, 150 died.

At Victoria, the war also occasioned one of the most controversial episodes in the college's, and the university's, history: the manner in which, in the diplomatic words of the college's annual report to Parliament in 1916, the chair of modern languages was ‘rendered vacant by the passing of the Alien Enemy Teachers Act’.16 It was an instance of official capitulation to the kind of popular paranoia that is

George von Zedlitz, professor of modern languages not unexpected in wartime; but was also a chilling demonstration of the fragility of one of the more basic of those university ideals for which, in a different context, the reformers had recently been fighting – that of academic freedom.

The act in question was passed, in 1915, specifically to remove from the college staff its Silesian-born professor of modern languages, George von Zedlitz, whose German connection, tenuous though it was, became an embarrassment not to the college but to the government. Von Zedlitz had not seen his father – a baron and head of an old Silesian family – since he was four years old; he had been raised by his English-born mother and not returned to Germany since he left at 14. He had tacitly renounced his German citizenship, although he had not become an official British subject. On the outbreak of hostilities between Germany and Russia he approached the German consul (unwisely, it may be seen in hindsight) to offer his services in a non-combatant role. The gesture was declined. After Britain entered the war he offered the college Council his resignation lest his lack of formal citizenship should become an embarrassment. The Council refused to accept it. He gave the government the written assurance it required of his loyalty. But popular feeling was less easily assuaged. As anti-German feeling rose, so did a vitriolic, public anti-von Zedlitz campaign, which intensified against the background of Gallipoli and the sinking of the Lusitania in the autumn of 1915. The professor was accused of signalling to German submarines; there was a rumour that he had been shot for operating a clandestine wireless station; anonymous letters to the press demanded his removal – other Germans had been dismissed from the public service, and interned, so why not he? The Council went in deputation to the government, and was reassured that a proper authority would shortly be set up to deal with such situations.

Throughout the whole affair the majority on the Council stood by their professor. In June, when a report was adopted endorsing its support for him, an amendment that he be asked to resign was lost by eight votes to two. The two were Wilson, between whom and the professor there had existed a mutual antagonism since von Zedlitz had criticised the General Assembly Library (and it had been exacerbated, one imagines, by Wilson's criticism of the University Reform Association), and the chairman, Clement Watson, headmaster of nearby Te Aro School and a founding Council member. The Professorial Board and 50 past and present students of von Zedlitz presented testimonials in his favour, and while student numbers overall were falling because of the war, enrolments in the modern language classes alone had increased. ‘Von’, as he was generally known, was a popular professor: an energetic supporter of student clubs and a spellbinding lecturer.

Needless to say, the popular clamour continued, regardless of the college's confidence in him and the official judgement of the Aliens Board (in July) that his removal was unwarranted. In response to a question in Parliament in August 1915 the prime minister, while denying the right or intention of the government to interfere with the statutory powers of the college Council, announced its intention to introduce legislation ‘to deal with the situation, inasmuch as it is of opinion that neither in University college nor public schools is it desirable that unnaturalized enemy subjects should continue to give instruction to the youth and children of the Dominion’. If steps were not taken by the Council, or the professor himself, to remove him, the government would legislate.17

As the Alien Enemy Teachers Bill proceeded through Parliament, von Zedlitz three times asked to be allowed to resign, but was refused, and the Council petitioned the House, also to no avail. There were four members of the college Council in the legislature, and all voted for the bill. A.L. Herdman, the attorney-general (and recently president of the University Reform Association), hurriedly resigned his seat on the Council to avoid a conflict of interest. When the bill was passed, several other councillors planned to resign in protest, but an amendment to the Education Amendment Act was hastily passed to stop them from doing so. (It provided for their replacement by government nominees.) Von Zedlitz was dismissed; he was granted a year's salary (the maximum allowed by the act); and the Council set down its account of the case in a pamphlet.18

For the remainder of the war years the French classes were taken by the professor's ageing, widowed and popular assistant, Margaret McPhail, until her death (rumoured to have been from overwork) in 1918. German was taken from 1916 until the appointment of a successor to von Zedlitz in 1919 by Mary Baker, a graduate of the Univerity of Melbourne and (representing the absent professor) the first woman on the Professorial Board.

The Council of 1915 had acquitted itself honourably in its defence of von Zedlitz; it did not do so when it decided against reappointing him after the war. But this was a different Council, which, faced with protests from the Returned Soldiers' Association, school committees, and education and town boards, voted against Hunter's motion for his reinstatement. Von Zedlitz opened a private University Tutorial School on The Terrace, and kept a close association with college and university affairs: he served five years on the university Senate, and was made a professor emeritus by Victoria in 1936.19

To his chair the college appointed Edwin Boyd-Wilson. He was (reassuringly perhaps) a New Zealander who had studied at Canterbury and Cambridge, taught in Belgium, Sydney and Perth, and was now to teach at Victoria for 34 years. He was a man of prodigious energy both in the classroom and out of doors (a tramper, hunter and footballer); and a maker of wine, and of tea brewed from water drawn from the radiator in his room. (‘A professor,’ he was reported to remark on his retirement in 1954, ‘always has the right to be eccentric.’)20

The sequel to the university reform story came in 1925 with the long-awaited appointment of a royal commission, in the persons of Sir Harry Reichel, principal of the University College of North Wales, and Frank Tate, director of education for Victoria, Australia, and their damning and decisive report. The heroic efforts of the Victoria professoriate had no need to be repeated. Virtually everyone except the University of Otago was now agreed on the need for reform. The unending and undignified struggle over special schools, and a growing movement for

The professors outdoors, 1917. Standing, from left: Kirk, librarian Horace Ward, registrar George Robison, Rankine Brown, Cotton, Hunter, Mackenzie, Sommerville, Marsden. Seated: Adamson, Garrow, Easterfield

separation into four independent universities, had forced the issue. At the Victoria Council meeting in June 1925 all but Stout voted for a motion put by Hunter in favour of separation. The reforming Hunter was deputed by the Senate to provide advice to the commissioners.

The Reichel–Tate report rehearsed the charges made by the earlier reformers, but had the added weight of international authority and a more devastating turn of phrase – famously, in the opening observation ‘that the New Zealand University offers unrivalled facilities for gaining university degrees, but that it is less successful in providing university education’.21 External examining, part-time study and exempted students (Victoria's particular bane), the pass degree, the scramble for special schools, funding, understaffing, neglect of research and libraries, and the exclusion of teachers from administrative and academic responsibility were all condemned. The commissioners had been given a wide brief, which specifically included the question of separation, but this they did not counsel (yet). The University of New Zealand Amendment Act 1926 adopted only their administrative recommendations, redefining the university as a federal structure of four colleges, reconstituting the Senate to be more representative of them, and replacing the Board of Studies with an Academic Board, still with the power only to recommend (on any matters concerning the university, but especially academic). The critical recommendation of a full-time vice-chancellor, however, was not taken up until 1938, when Hunter was appointed principal of the university, but only part time.22

The question of special schools – ‘the football of university politics’, in Hunter's phrase – had exercised the commissioners greatly.23 And it is the necessary context in which to consider the development of Victoria's academic establishment in its second and third decades. ‘Each college should have at least one special school to keep it in touch with the life of the community in which it is situated, and to arouse interest in the College among the people of the University district,’ remarked the college's annual report in 1921.24 During that year Victoria initiated a joint approach to the government with Auckland, requesting the provision of special schools for the North Island colleges. This followed its unsuccessful call for a conference of colleges on the subject late the previous year. In August 1920 the Council had received a letter from G.H. Scholefield advocating the foundation of a chair of Pacific studies, and shortly afterwards a request from a group of architecture students in Wellington for the college to introduce an architecture course (a subject taught only at Auckland). The science faculty recommended that the college make ‘claims for Architecture, Agriculture, Forestry, and Studies in connection with the Pacific’; the Professorial Board resolved on just agriculture and forestry.25

Pacific studies, it must be argued, was the most appropriate of these for Victoria – as well as being the personal interest of the journalist and historian Scholefield. Did he see himself in the chair? In a few years he was to succeed Charles Wilson as parliamentary librarian, but in 1920 had just returned from London where his doctoral thesis (from the London School of Economics) on The Pacific, its past and future had recently been published. Wellington was the home of the Dominion Museum, where Elsdon Best, as honorary ethnologist, was writing his pioneering studies of pre-European Maori society and culture, and of the just-opened Alexander Turnbull Library, where the polymath Johannes Andersen, its first librarian, pursued his personal intellectual mission of ‘indigenising’ New Zealand's European culture and edited the Polynesian Society's Journal. Since the 1890s, and the formation of the Polynesian Society in 1893, Wellington had been the centre of the colony's emerging indigenous intellectual life, of an historical and ethnological scholarship which was ‘amateur’ only in the sense that it remained outside the university. The journalist–historian rather than the professor of history was the type of the colonial intellectual; the matrix of museum, General Assembly Library and Alexander Turnbull's library was his territory. The university existed on the fringes of this intellectual world, and Victoria was still to take advantage of the city's rich resources for historical and anthropological scholarship.

Instead Victoria acquired, albeit briefly, a school of agriculture, a singularly inappropriate subject for this college located on a precipitous hillside with hardly a farm in sight, except perhaps for its strength in the sciences. Whether agriculture would keep the college ‘in touch with the life of the community in which it is situated’ was at least debatable. But there was no doubt that agriculture was the coming thing. There had long been a demand in some quarters for farming education at university level, and it had gained a powerful advocate in the prime minister, William Massey, after 1912. The subject gained currency and urgency in the postwar climate of economic instability, concern about the declining fertility and productivity of the colony's agricultural industry, and the more general wartime stimulus given to scientific research. In 1923 a report commissioned by the university Senate recommended the establishment of a university-level agricultural college. The Senate agreed, but vacillated over whether it should be located at Auckland or Victoria. It had recognised the need to redress the balance of distribution of special schools which was weighted so heavily towards the South Island.

Victoria's Professorial Board had already – as early at least as 1920 – put in its bid. But the decisive development on its part was a £10,000 bequest for the foundation of a chair of agriculture from a Wairarapa runholder, legislative councillor and farming advocate, Sir Walter Buchanan. Without delay the Council appointed a professor. Geoffrey Peren, a graduate of Ontario Agricultural College, arrived in June 1924 to take charge of, in his own words, ‘surely … one of the most extraordinary Schools of Agriculture which ever accepted students’: a school without a farm, livestock, laboratories or funding (apart from his own salary), ‘jammed into a little room in the Physics Department, barely large enough to hold six students’.26 The Council took to the government his request for funding for three lecturers and a farm near Masterton, and was refused; the Dominion Farmers' Institute, however, gave £1056 to endow an agricultural scholarship. Despite these unpromising conditions, Peren started teaching in 1925 with 12 students and assistance from officers of the Department of Agriculture.

The college asked the Senate to approve the ‘Sir Walter Buchanan School of Agriculture’ for the purposes of the BSc in October 1924. A month later Auckland requested recognition of the school of agriculture it was planning to found with its own £20,000 bequest. The logical (but unlikely) thing to do was to combine

College and Salamanca Rd, 1918. Adkin collection, ATL 23178 1/4 resources and establish a single agricultural college in the North Island. Peren toured the country promoting this course. The commissioners Reichel and Tate agreed. Victoria approached Auckland, whose professor at first opposed the plan, but in due course a conference held in February 1926 agreed to an amalgamation. A site was selected at Palmerston North, the necessary legislation was passed, and Peren became principal of Massey Agricultural College in 1928. It was an unexpectedly happy outcome on all sides. ‘The Prime Minister expressed great pleasure at the two Colleges agreeing to sink local differences and combining for the general good.’27

In ‘these material days’, it was perhaps not surprising that the college's other bid for a special school should be in commerce. F.P. Wilson had in 1909 been appointed lecturer in economics, history and geography ‘with a view to the Commerce degree’. The two-year Bachelor of Commerce was a mixture of liberal and technical subjects, the latter being also the professional requirements of the recently formed New Zealand Society of Accountants. Most students taking BCom courses did so to qualify as accountants; only a third of them also graduated with a commerce degree. Wilson was to teach economics and history for the BA, and the prescribed course for the new BCom: economics, commercial and physical geography, general history, statistical method, currency and banking, and industrial law. This eclectic teaching load was not peculiar to Victoria: Wilson's colleagues at Auckland and Canterbury, where commerce was already recognised as a ‘specialisation’, had similar responsibilities.28

Accountancy was introduced into the college's BCom syllabus at the instigation of the Society of Accountants in 1912. A grant from the society of £150 per annum for five years enabled the college to appoint two lecturers, in accountancy (J.S. Barton) and commercial law (W.F. Ward, who also assisted the classics professor with Latin). Their tenure was brief, however. The number of students fell from 70 in the first year to 25 in 1913, and to eight between 1915 and 1917. The teachers thought the problem was the location of the college, and the Council agreed to hold the classes in town. Probably the war was the greater factor. When the Society of Accountants withdrew its subsidy in 1917 the classes were terminated. Ten years later the Department of Education requested the reintroduction of accountancy, but the college demurred: ‘Accountancy subjects as defined,’ reported the Professorial Board, ‘fall below the proper standard of University subjects’, and past experience of student interest was not encouraging.29

Commerce, however, was a different matter from professional examinations in bookkeeping. In 1912 the brewer T.G. Macarthy died leaving a substantial estate in trust for charitable and educational purposes in Wellington. From this new-found source of educational funding, the Professorial Board hoped to secure money to enable the introduction of day teaching; the Council wanted a chair of economics and a ‘school of economics, commerce and history’. The teaching of economics, like agriculture, was ‘a matter of national importance’, and (unlike agriculture) was ‘not only cognate to law but also eminently appropriate to a University College situated in Wellington’.30 F.P. Wilson put the case more forcefully to the 1913

Barney Murphy, professor of economics parliamentary education committee: ‘I think I can claim to be voicing the opinion of the majority of thinking men in the Dominion when I say the most important subject in the University curriculum is economics. New Zealand has been called “the world's economic laboratory” … Our University Colleges should produce men trained to analyse economic phenomena, men who will in years to come be the leaders of public opinion.’31

At first £2000 was expected, enough for the nucleus of a school. Then in 1916 the Macarthy Trust pledged £10,000 (to be paid in annual instalments of £1000) for the establishment of a Macarthy School of Economics. The money did not become available for a few years yet, but a start was made in 1918 with a lectureship. Wilson was reappointed lecturer in history and commercial geography (at a salary of £500), and a lectureship in economics advertised at £300. B.E. (Barney) Murphy was appointed after the position had been readvertised at £350.32 He was an arts, history and commerce graduate of Otago and Victoria (where he had been a student of Hunter). ‘Famed for his caustic wit and voluminous textbooks’, he was to gain a reputation as a lecturer especially to first-year students – although his wit, when it was sarcasm, was intimidating to some.33 Outside the classroom, his preferred pastimes were freemasonry, poker and rugby. In 1920, when the trust money became available, he was appointed professor of the Macarthy School of Economics, the first chair of economics in the university, which he held for 30 years. The school was to teach ‘economics, descriptive and analytic, with special reference to New Zealand conditions’; courses included economics at all stages for the BA and BCom degrees, as well as economic geography and industrial law (‘although these subjects do not fall within the scope of a Chair of Economics as ordinarily understood’). He would have preferred to teach ‘a general B.Sc. degree in Social Science with numerous options’, but the BCom was prescribed by the university.34

Another addition to the professorial complement in 1920 was education, £850 having been earmarked for this purpose under the New Zealand University Amendment Act, 1919, which had raised each college's statutory grant, Victoria's by £2500. (In the fickle nature of government funding, however, the grants were reduced again, Victoria's by £900, in 1922.) Since 1905 the principal of the Wellington teachers' training college, William Gray, had given lectures in education for the BA degree. The training colleges, one in each university centre, taught a two-year course, and selected students also did part-time university study. They made up a significant body of Victoria's students: 21% in 1925, a considerably higher proportion than at the other colleges.35 The relationship between Victoria and the city's teachers' college was also strengthened by their physical proximity. When Victoria first opened in its rented rooms, the training college was also located in Thorndon. Once Victoria moved to its site on the hill in 1906, teachers' college students joined the clerks and lawyers who made the climb from Lambton Quay, until in 1916 the training college also moved to Kelburn, a short, flat walk away.

Gray was succeeded in 1912 by J.S. Tennant, who became in 1920 Victoria's first professor of education. He was a part-time professor, however, who retained his position as head of the training college; and the Council was a little optimistic when in 1925 it observed that the ‘time appears to be ripe for considering seriously the necessity of establishing a School of Education’.36 The chair of education became a fully fledged, full-time chair, separate from the principalship of the training college, in 1927, but Victoria's relationship with the training college and its role in teacher education was not to develop quite as the Council anticipated: ‘either by affiliation of the Training College or such extension as will give the

Charles Cotton, professor of geology, 1921. S.P. Andrew collection, ATL 3482 1/2 University direct control over some experimental teaching institution’.37

The chairs of history and geology were created only after the two lecturers asked. Each had written to the Council more than once on the matter of his status and salary before Wilson was promoted to a professorship on the casting vote of the Council chairman in January 1921, and Cotton's promotion followed as a matter of course as the next agenda item. In the expansion and changing configuration of teaching and departments in postwar years, the rising subject of geography – ‘the claims of which are now compelling attention in all universities,’ Cotton observed in 1924 – fell uncertainly between the subjects of history, economics and geology, the BA and BCom degrees, and the faculties of arts and science.38

Wilson, the versatile but overburdened historian, was able to relinquish the teaching of economic geography to commerce students to the new school of economics after 1920, and with his elevation to the professoriate, history was ‘at last released from the danger of mere subordination in a school of economics and commerce’.39 When a class in geography for the BA was introduced in 1920 (chiefly to improve the standard of geography teaching in secondary schools) Murphy and Cotton agreed to share it. Cotton (‘entirely ex gratia’) took physical geography for arts students, and supervised all the practical geography work; Murphy's assistant took physical geography for both the BA and BCom. It was an unsatisfactory arrangement, with Murphy evidently resentful of the extra responsibility, and Cotton fearful that his teaching of geology (his first call) would suffer but unwilling to give up a subject in which he was keenly interested. He was also uncomfortably aware that they were not teaching the full geography syllabus. ‘I am doubtful whether, in these circumstances, the College is justified in granting Terms for B.A. in Geography,’ he told the Council in 1926. He proposed that a full-time assistant be appointed to his department to lecture in ‘the Human (and so-called “Political and Economic”) Geography … for B.A., as well as Economic Geography for B.Com…. while I retain the lecturing in Physical Geography’ (and also gain assistance in geology). But the Council declined this and his subsequent requests through the 1920s for full-time assistance. He was granted a part-time student assistant in 1930 only when he offered to contribute £100 towards the cost himself. And geography, which remained his responsibility, was not to emerge as a fledgling department, and then neither exclusively an art nor a science, until the 1940s.40

In the science faculty there were no new schools or departments in these years, but there were a number of professorial changes of a more routine kind. Laby and Picken had gone almost immediately the first wave of university reform had subsided, both to the University of Melbourne in 1915 (where Laby was to have a notable career as professor of natural philosophy). Laby was succeeded briefly by Ernest Marsden, from Victoria University of Manchester where he had worked alongside Rutherford on radioactivity; but in 1922 he made an unexpected move

A student joke: a rogue slide slipped into Professor Cotton's teaching set (in 1921). Paul Cotton to an administrative career, as assistant director of education and subsequently the first secretary of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. D.C.H. Florance, who succeeded him as professor of physics, was appointed on Rutherford's recommendation and came to Wellington via Hong Kong, but he did not distinguish the subject at Victoria. Picken's place was taken by D.M.Y. Sommerville from St Andrews, who had been beaten to the chair by his predecessor in 1907. The ‘ablest Scottish geometer of his time’, as he was then considered, and an amateur watercolourist, he ‘conferred a measure of international academic lustre upon the college without stirring controversy’.41 The new professor of chemistry, who took Easterfield's place in 1920 when the latter decamped to the Cawthron Institute, also combined artistic and scientific accomplishments. This was P.W. Robertson, one of the college's own most brilliant students, who had published nine scientific papers while still an undergraduate, became Victoria's first Rhodes scholar, and taught at Rangoon and London before returning to his alma mater for 29 years. He was a considerable linguist as well as a chemical researcher of international standing, and ‘no less famous for his papers on the kinetics of kalogen addition to olefines than for his psychoanalytical studies of great writers’.42

The college also acquired briefly in the late 1920s a research fellow in freshwater fish, when annual funding of £400 for two or three years was given by the Wellington Acclimatisation Society. A far more valuable gift in monetary terms had been the £10,000 Sarah Anne Rhodes bequest in 1915 for the education of women in home science – a subject which, unfortunately, was taught only at Otago. The Professorial Board suggested first a residential hostel giving tuition in domestic science, then a research lectureship. The Council finally decided on a research scholarship and later a fellowship attached to Massey Agricultural College, so sending promising women graduates to continue their study elsewhere. A school of economics, or of social science, or even of agriculture was one thing; a school of domestic science – ‘the instruction of farmers’ wives in diet and dressmaking', as J.C. Beaglehole remarked – apparently ‘had no real connection with the work of a university’.43

An acquisition of a different kind strengthened the college's science departments.

A professor at the chalk face: P.W. Robertson. Des Hurley In 1921 it was agreed, through the offices of Kirk, to house the library of the New Zealand Institute, following a fire in the decrepit and overcrowded Dominion Museum that had been its home. This was meant to be a temporary arrangement until a new museum was built. In the event Victoria kept custody of the library until the Institute (by now the Royal Society of New Zealand) gained its first independent home in 1981. The several thousand volumes were moved into a room in the arts block near the college library in November 1922; the Institute's office followed six months later, and its council meetings were henceforth held at the college. Staff and students had access to the Institute library, and Institute members to the college library in turn. Although the collection was not outstanding (Kirk had explained to the parliamentary committee in 1913 that its periodical runs were mostly incomplete), the arrangement promised to make Victoria's library resources ‘in most scientific subjects … the best in New Zealand’.44 It also brought the college into a closer relationship with the scientific community outside the university at a time when the infrastructure of science in New Zealand was rapidly changing: the establishment of the DSIR in 1926 followed two decades in which the balance was shifting between amateur, government and academic science.

Although the mild-mannered Cotton had not been favoured in his requests for teaching assistance, staff numbers grew significantly between 1910 and 1930, with an expanding range, and lexicon, of sub-professorial positions. Departments emerged. First there had been just the professor. Then there was the professor and his part-time assistant, or ‘demonstrator’ in the laboratory sciences. In 1911 seven of these were listed in the college calendar for the first time, four of them women. By 1920 there were nine assistants or demonstrators to 10 professors, and five lecturers – one in history and one in geology (which had yet to attain the status of chair) and three in law (in evidence, procedure, and criminal law and torts). In the 1920s ‘departments’ grew with the appointment of full-time assistants, who had some teaching to do, as opposed to professors' assistants, who marked exam papers and perhaps prepared some junior work. In the early 1920s the larger departments were entitled to a full-time assistant on a salary of £300. The nomenclature and salary of the junior staff varied as their numbers increased: there were ‘assistant and instructors’ and ‘assistant and demonstrators’, then assistant lecturers, then full-time and part-time lecturers. The scientists were also assisted by ‘lab boys’, who were paid at a weekly rate on a scale, set in 1921, ranging from 25s to 35s. In 1913 the departments had been sorted into faculties, each with a dean: arts, science, commerce and law.45

A postwar boom in student numbers necessitated the expansion of the teaching staff as well as the college buildings. Once it had recovered from the temporary wartime downturn, the college roll rose from 535 attending classes in 1920 to just over 800 in 1925. Wilson asked for help in history, for example, when enrolments in his pass class increased from 79 to 133 in 1924. A recent graduate, J.C. Beaglehole, was appointed as his assistant, and also assistant to the college librarian; when he took up a travelling scholarship in 1926, his place was taken by the young poet Eileen Duggan, who had graduated with first-class honours in 1918 (but was forced to retire at the end of a year through ill-health). In 1925 the college calendar listed 14 assistant instructors or demonstrators; in 1929 there were seven lecturers, four assistant lecturers and three demonstrators. An increase in the college's statutory grant in 1928 facilitated the rise in the status, and salaries, of the junior staff. The

The science faculty in 1919, including two of Victoria's earliest women teachers. Back: Marsden, Robertson, George Bagley, Cotton. Front: Kirk, Ethel Fenton (physics), Easterfield, Eileen Pigott (biology), Sommerville

law faculty was the college's, and the university's, largest, with two professors, six lecturers and one assistant in 1928, and 449 students.46

The emergence of the ‘lecturer’ and the ‘department’ was one of several milestones passed by the college in the 1920s. The most important, from the professors' point of view, was the introduction of day teaching. ‘The year 1926 marked a very important epoch in the history of our college,’ the annual report solemnly recorded, ‘– the first determined effort to break away from the dominating influence of evening lectures.’47 The Reichel–Tate report had been typically blunt on the ‘evils’ of the part-time system: ‘It lowers the standard of the degree, tends to degrade the university teacher into a pass-degree coach, and reduces corporate student life to an anaemic shadow.’48 As early as 1913 the Council had considered this step an ‘urgent necessity’, but it postponed a discussion of the matter when it was next brought to their attention by the Professorial Board in 1921. The professors were concerned about overcrowding in their classes. By the mid–1920s they considered the introduction of daytime teaching more important than any expansionist moves into new disciplines, new departments or new schools. It was for this reason that Hunter advised the Council against a proposal from the Australian Association of Psychology and Philosophy in 1925, for example, that it establish a department of social science. A request that the college appoint a lecturer in music was similarly declined.

The move was made tentatively and gradually. The students were consulted – science and arts students showed themselves the most willing – and in 1925 pass classes in arts subjects were duplicated during the daytime as an experiment.49 In 1926 all lectures and laboratory work in the sciences were held between 9am and 5pm. The revolution was extended gradually to the arts departments: from 1928 stage-one classes were held in the daytime and evening in alternate years. It was not completed across all faculties until the 1960s. This long-sought reform brought more problems than simply the need for more staff. Professor Florance had to ask for the physics room to be darkened for teaching in daylight hours. In 1927 the council reported a ‘rather serious diminution’ in student numbers, the first since the war, which it attributed partly to the change to day teaching in science, although the more important factor was a change in the policy of the Education Department regarding teachers' training colleges, which meant many Victoria students transferred to other colleges.50

The realisation of another cherished goal of the university reformers also came in 1926: the passing of the pass degree. The nine-unit degree was introduced this year for both the BA and BSc, with each subject progressing by year through three units or ‘stages’. Meanwhile, a less dramatic timetable change had also occurred: in 1920 the two-term academic year was replaced by three terms. The 1920s saw, too, the first visiting academic dignitaries to the college. The first was Sir John Adams, emeritus professor of education at the University of London. Lord Rutherford came in 1925 and gave a public lecture at the Town Hall under the

Building with wings, c.1924. S.P. Andrew collection, ATL F18905 1/1 auspices of the college as well as an informal lecture at the college, and in April Dr Carl Lotsky from Haarlem University gave three lectures on evolution.

And there was the silver jubilee in 1924 – a triple banger: the unveiling of the stained-glass memorial window in the new library, the 25th anniversary of the opening of the college, and the inter-college university sports tournament hosted that year by Victoria. The Education Board had agreed to close the schools in the district for the week following Easter to allow as many past students as possible to attend the celebrations. The war memorial window, designed by J. Ellis and built by Smith & Smith in Dunedin, was unveiled by Robert Stout on Good Friday, 18 April, the exact anniversary of the first college lectures.51 An ode on the occasion (this was becoming a college tradition) was composed by a recent history graduate, J.C. Beaglehole, and printed in the jubilee edition of The Spike, the college review.52 There followed a civic reception and luncheon on Saturday in the Town Hall Concert Chamber. Plans for a dinner in the evening had had to be abandoned because of the difficulty of organising catering at Easter; instead there was a ‘Social Evening at the College Gymnasium for Past Students not attending the Boxing Finals’. The entertainment featured ‘items by well-known past Students who delighted their contemporaries in former days and are still able to hold their own in good company’.53 Along with the tournament sporting contests in tennis, athletics, boxing and debating, there was a past students' tennis tournament on the Saturday morning. On Sunday afternoon an academic procession left the college for St Paul's Pro-Cathedral and a special university service.

[three] The Hunter years

IN HIS FOREWORD to the silver jubilee issue of Spike, Robert Stout referred to his 1887 bill and its plan for the new university college in Wellington to take over the scientific departments of the government: ‘Had this scheme been carried out,’ he regretted, ‘we would have had a great college of science – the first in Australasia.’1 Those who attended a conversazione at the college one August Friday evening in 1928 could be forgiven for thinking this was a college of science. The library, it is true, was open to public view, but all of the displays and demonstrations were put on by the science departments. Visitors could view, for example, the dissection of cuttlefish and the circulation of blood in the web of a frog's foot; displays of singing flames in the physics room, or star polyhedra in the Mathematics Department; ‘experiments of domestic interest’ by the chemistry students, and tests for colour-blindness in the psychological laboratory.2

By contrast, at the college's 50th jubilee conversazione, held over two days in May 1949, all of the departments were on display. Alongside the experiments of the scientists there were publications by staff, and theses by students in the social sciences and humanities. The School of Political Science and Public Administration showed documentary films and a display on government in New Zealand; the History Department displayed source material, including documents and illustrations for the college's jubilee history; the geographers showed films on mountain building and the life of primitive peoples, and relief models, maps and aerial photographs. There were readings of classical literature and performances of music by Douglas Lilburn and David Farquhar of the Music Department. French and Russian plays – La farce des bossus, ‘a costume play with music, somewhat macabre, though amusing’, and ‘scenes from a famous Russian play’, Woe from Wit by A.S. Griboedov – were staged by the Department of Modern Languages.3

The college of 1949 was both bigger and broader. In 1928, 33 subjects were taught (almost half of them for law); now, 49 were. The expansion of the teaching staff had been greater still, from 32 to 78 – although was not so spectacular as that of the student roll, which had risen by a factor of three and three-quarters. Some new, young teachers took the place of retiring, vintage ones. Mackenzie retired in 1936; Adamson in 1939; Kirk, his eyesight failing, in 1944; Brown, the last of the foundation professors, at the end of 1945. But funding was the more important factor. There were substantial increases in the college's grant in the mid–1930s, as the depression lifted and a Labour government strongly committed to state education came to power, and in the late 1940s in response to a postwar surge in university enrolments. Student numbers fell during the depression, and again in the early years of the war, but then rose dramatically (indeed alarmingly), from a wartime low of 750 in 1942 to nearly 2400 in 1948. University administration, too, was entering a new era, as increasing co-operation between the colleges culminated in the establishment by the Senate in 1948 of a university grants committee to represent their claims to the government.

By 1949 Victoria had secured two bona fide special schools – a School of Political Science and Public Administration, and a School of Social Science – and recognition of the ‘special’ status of its law faculty which, at the end of the 1940s, was revitalised by a notably impressive group of teachers. Its Department of History had risen from being the poor relation of commerce and by reputation ‘the softest option in the Arts course’ (‘History for B.A.,’ it was remarked in Spike in 1934, ‘is only one remove from light reading and History for Honours … the safest and easiest method of securing an M.A.’),4 to become unarguably the strongest history department in the university and one of the strongest departments, intellectually, at Victoria. In its academic development the college would seem to be fulfilling Stout's original vision: of one that would specialise in law, political science and history. These developments were, however, less the fruit of a well-followed plan than an expression of the prevailing intellectual and political climate of the time. The depression, and the spectacle of poverty amidst plenty, the impending collapse – it seemed – of capitalism, the rise of fascism and the inevitable slide into war shifted many intellectuals' sympathies to the left in the 1930s. This was the decade of the Fellow Traveller and the Popular Front, of documentary film, the proletarian novel, social realism and socialist realism, of the Left Book Club and Mass Observation (even at Victoria, where a Group Observation Fellowship flourished briefly). ‘Surely,’ observed Hunter in 1934, ‘the university should play a leading part in solving this problem [of “poverty in an age of plenty”] as it did in the spheres of physics and biology last century.’5 It was, he saw, the age of social science.

After an encouraging boost in government funding at the end of the 1920s, the 1930s got off to a lean start, and the economies imposed by the depression had more serious consequences for some than others. In three years the college's state income fell 42%. The statutory grant was reduced in 1931 from £11,750 to £9431 and the additional grant for the chair of education withdrawn. In 1932 the statutory

‘a fine sloping lawn and shrubberies’: the college in the 1930s grant was cut further to £7350, and was now to be subject to annual vote. Such was the experience of all the colleges, but Victoria suffered doubly with the closure of the Wellington teachers' training college at the end of 1932. This would have a ‘crushing effect’ on the college finances, the registrar reported in November 1932 as he calculated the loss of an average £1750 a year in student fees. In fact it was worse. The college roll in 1933 fell from 842 to 670 and income from fees by £2000. Victoria now promoted a proposal to take over full responsibility for teacher training in a School of Education that would offer practical and academic instruction and a special degree or courses in education. The scheme was an elaboration of its earlier expression of interest in a special school in this field, as well as an attempt to forestall imminent financial disaster. But it failed to find favour with the government. ‘We have used up all our reserves and are left with nothing,’ a Council committee on finance and staffing reported at the end of 1933.6

In the time-honoured tradition, a deputation went to the minister. The committee had weighed up the options of instituting a further ‘drastic cut’ in salaries (already reduced by 10%) or taking the ‘retrograde … and thoroughly undesirable’ step of abolishing one or more departments: geology was singled out, being conspicuously the smallest (never mind that its professor was probably the college's most prolific producer of published research).7 The minister offered an emergency grant of £760 and to raise the college's total grant to £9685 the following year, on condition that the Department of Geology was disestablished. The Council agreed, and Cotton was advised in March 1934 that his contract was to be terminated at the end of the year. The professors protested, and there was some doubt about the Council's legal position. Cotton kept his job, however, only by offering to take a substantial cut in salary: he was reappointed for three years at £500, £400 below the full professorial rate. He had argued on the grounds of the ‘very high cultural, academic, and even aesthetic value’ and ‘growing prestige’ of his subject, and pointed out that attendances had fallen by about half when the class fee was raised some years previously during his absence abroad. But one imagines it was the financial sacrifice that made the difference. Although he kept his chair, his salary was not fully reinstated until 1941.8

These years were clouded by struggles over academic freedom as well as over money (and academic status). In the politically charged atmosphere of the 1930s, it was inevitable that there would be tension between young, radically minded (or morally adventurous) students and older, more cautious, often conservative university authorities. This was particularly the case at Victoria, which in these years cemented a reputation as having the most radical student body. Conflict between university staff, their governing councils, and a political and public mood of nervous conservatism was most marked in Auckland, in what that university's historian has referred to as ‘the Anschutz affair’ and ‘the Beaglehole affair’. When the Auckland lecturer in philosophy, R.P. Anschutz, contributed a foreword to a book by a Communist Party member in which he praised the achievements of the Soviet Union, and signed it with his name and university position, the minister of education wrote to the college registrar, wondering whether a person holding such views should be employed by a state-funded institution. This unsubtle attempt at political interference in the affairs of the university prompted the Association of University Teachers to ask the governing body of each college to endorse a statement on academic freedom.9 Victoria's Council resolved (although not unanimously) that it ‘strongly upholds the principle of academic freedom of discussion as understood in Great Britain’. (A longer motion which elaborated on what academic freedom might be understood to mean was lost.)10 Auckland and Canterbury colleges passed similarly brief resolutions.

The second of these affairs affected Victoria more particularly. J.C. Beaglehole (former student, ode-writer and assistant lecturer), having returned to New Zealand from postgraduate study in Britain, held a one-year temporary lectureship in history at Auckland in 1932. In September his appointment was terminated – ostensibly for economic reasons, but it was widely, and not unjustifiably, believed to have been because of his political views. Not only had he studied in London with Harold Laski; he had also written and signed a letter for publication in the press entitled ‘Communism and hysterics’. This occasioned the infamous Fowlds memorandum, in which the Auckland college president reminded his staff of their responsibilities in the exercise of academic freedom, which might, he said, be ‘intimately related to the question of fitness for tenure’.11 Beaglehole, who formally protested against the implication of this statement, was not shortlisted for the history chair the following year.

Auckland's loss was to be Victoria's gain, but only after Victoria had experienced its own ‘Beaglehole affair’. When F.P. Wilson fell ill in March 1933, Beaglehole was appointed a temporary lecturer in the History Department on a monthly basis; the following year, when the professor submitted his resignation, he applied for the chair. The selection committee placed his name first ahead of F.L.W. Wood, of the University of Sydney and Balliol, and a British candidate. The Council, however, took the unprecedented step of disregarding its committee's recommendation, and appointed the Australian. Politics had intervened (‘direct ministerial interference’ has been alleged).12 Opposition Labour members raised the matter in Parliament; but while the finance minister would agree that ‘Dr. Beaglehole is very able and a very excellent lecturer on history’, the government would not become involved.13 This story has a happier ending, however. The thrice-spurned Beaglehole (for he had applied unsuccessfully for the Auckland chair in 1929) was a year later appointed the department's first lecturer, ahead of 24 other candidates.

The commissioning of portraits of the foundation professors in 1934 – although not all of them had yet gone – signals, perhaps, a discernible change in the academic culture of the college in this decade: a new wave, if not a sea change. Brown, Mackenzie and Easterfield, painted by Archibald Nicoll and purchased by subscription, and a copy of an oil of Maclaurin, presented by MIT, were unveiled at a function in the library on 5 May 1934 at which another ode was read (followed by luncheon at the Royal Oak Hotel). A Christopher Perkins portrait of von Zedlitz, the gift of an anonymous donor, joined them the following year. Already hanging there was a portrait of Robert Stout, who had died in 1930.14

Beaglehole was one of a number of notable new staff appointed in the mid

The new professor of history: F.L.W. Wood, 1935. S.P. Andrew collection, ATL F43331 1/2

Ian Gordon, professor of English, 1954. Dominion collection, ATL F145904 1/2 and late 1930s who can be described as a new generation who invigorated the college with their youth and the academic rigour and intellectual values they brought from the British universities of the inter-war years. Wood himself was one, a formative and elegant teacher and administrator who was to lead the History Department for 35 years (Beaglehole was rather the research-scholar). In the same year a new professor of English and New Zealand law replaced H.H. Cornish, who had held the chair, unexceptionally, for only four years before being appointed solicitor-general. His successor, James Williams, a native Wellingtonian with a Cambridge PhD,15 was later to become the college's longest-serving vice-chancellor (to date). Four years later the chair in jurisprudence passed from Adamson, retiring after 32 frustrated years, to Robert Orr McGechan, a ‘shy and charming Sydneysider’ who, in his tragically brief career at Victoria, was to preside over the rejuvenation of its law school.16

Mackenzie, the penultimate of the founding professors, farewelled his students at the end of 1936 – having been presented with ‘a beautiful and valuable study chair’ – with a speech which looked sanguinely on the prospect of the ‘old educational regime which is now very much discredited’ giving way to ‘the modernist and futurist trends in educational development’.17 He was replaced by another Scot (although it is more noteworthy that the dominance of the universities of Edinburgh and St Andrews on the early professorial staff was now being diminished). Ian Gordon, 28 when appointed, was to hold the chair of English for precisely as long as his predecessor, 37 years (during which he lost neither his Scottish accent nor his canniness). He had got it ‘by accident’, in his own account: as a temporary lecturer at Edinburgh determined on an academic career, he applied in the expectation that an interview for a colonial chair would facilitate his professional advancement in Britain.18 His accidental career was as marked by its diversity as by its longevity, and by a high public profile. His degrees were in English and classics, underpinning an early interest in comparative philology, and he was to become well known outside the university through his long-running New Zealand Listener column on that perennially popular subject, the use and misuse of the English language. Like Hunter (whose job he would have liked) he made a notable contribution to university administration, becoming vice-chancellor of the University of New Zealand, and was a long-serving chairman of the advisory committee of the State Literary Fund. His own literary period was the eighteenth century (although not exclusively), for which he made productive use of the rich resources of the Alexander Turnbull Library. (There too he acted as unofficial adviser to the librarian on English literature acquisitions and, as a founding member of the Friends of the Turnbull, began a close involvement of members of Victoria's English Department in the library's affairs.)19 But he also published an important early study of Katherine Mansfield.

Also new at the beginning of 1937 was a lecturer in Hunter's department, Ernest Beaglehole, younger brother of the historian. The precipitate departure of I.L.G. Sutherland, Hunter's assistant and then lecturer for 13 years, for the chair of philosophy at Canterbury had caused the Council, on Hunter's suggestion, to abandon the usual appointment procedure and choose a replacement from the unsuccessful applicants for the Canterbury chair. (It was usual to advertise in the United Kingdom, where candidates were screened by the Universities' Bureau, and in Australasia, and occasionally America.) Sutherland had been one of Hunter's students, and had turned his training in social psychology to a life-long study of the Maori. Beaglehole had been his student in turn, then studied and researched at the London School of Economics, for three years at Yale, and at the Bishop Museum in Hawaii with Peter Buck. He returned now to become in the 1940s and 1950s the leading social anthropologist in New Zealand, and to succeed Hunter in the Victoria chair. The sometimes controversial work of Ernest and his wife Pearl Beaglehole on contemporary Maori eclipsed that of his former teacher, whose career at Canterbury was clouded by disappointment and frustration.20

The injection of new academic blood in the mid–1930s was assisted by the college's improving financial health. As the depression receded, Victoria's annual grant was increased to £12,166 in 1935, and by another £2154 in 1936 to cover the restoration of salaries to their 1931 levels. ‘If there was anything the Government could do to further … the interests of Victoria College,’ a member of the new Labour ministry told the graduands at the 1936 capping ceremony, ‘he could only give them the Government's message in words he was sure would be appreciated at least by Professor Rankine Brown and say, “Come up and see me sometime”’. (Brown had ‘endeared himself to the students … by announcing that he had always had a secret longing to see Mae West, but had so far seen only a substitute’ in the capping Extravaganza.)21 In 1936 the conference of college councils, which had met sporadically since 1929, submitted a proposal to the government for a

Sir Thomas Hunter, principal scheme of annual increments over five years (precursor of the quinquennial system by which New Zealand's universities would be funded from 1949). When Victoria's grant was increased by nearly £3000 in 1938, it was able to raise junior salaries and appoint extra temporary assistants,22 and to appoint Hunter as the college's first principal. This was not rushed into. Almost 20 years earlier a committee of the Professorial Board had considered a suggestion from Stout that the college appoint a permanent academic head. The professors agreed on what kind of man they would want for the job – ‘a man of academic distinction, specially selected with regard to his breadth of outlook, familiarity with University methods, and business acumen’ was preferred to ‘a New Zealander with proven business capacity and known to be interested in educational matters’ or ‘a member of the teaching staff, to be nominally at the head of a department’ – but it was not unanimous that the position was needed at all, yet, and the matter was deferred.23 Six years later another committee reported that the time had now come. Seven years on, the Victoria College Amendment Act 1933 included provision for the appointment of a member of the professoriate as a part-time principal. The problem now was money.

Hunter took up the job in March 1938 with an additional £250 on top of his professorial salary (of £1000) and extra teaching assistance in his department. As principal he was also chairman of the Professorial Board and a member of the Council, so that, in effect, the chairmanship of the Board was made an executive position. He reported monthly to the Council and was empowered to act for the Professorial Board between its meetings. In 1939 he gained the authority to appoint temporary teaching assistants (these were usually students) without first obtaining

The scholar–librarian: Harold Miller the Council's approval each time. (In 1939 he was also knighted.) The appointment of a principal demonstrably facilitated the transmission of professorial opinion to the Council, and effecting change. Among the visible signs of a new regime was a redesigned calendar in 1939 (the work of Beaglehole and Gordon). The choice of Hunter had been unanimous: it was, Beaglehole has observed, obvious. But when the position became a full-time one in 1948, to face the fast-growing, more complex, postwar university world, his elevation was not automatic. The job was advertised, and Hunter was appointed to a three-year term ahead of 19 overseas and two local applicants. Similarly, the Council advertised for a replacement for Hunter in his department rather than, as he suggested, simply promoting Ernest Beaglehole to the chair, and appointed Beaglehole from the field.

It was in the same year, 1938, that Victoria became the first college to appoint a student representative to its Council, a reform for which the Council had voted in 1936 by seven votes to four. Nor was this a precipitate move. The Reichel–Tate report had recommended it 10 years earlier, and the Senate, surprisingly, had agreed – but only at the persuasion of the then president of Victoria's Students' Association, R.M. Campbell. R.S.V. Simpson, a recent law graduate (and a later chancellor), was the Council's first student representative.24

The hanging of professorial portraits was not the most important event for the college library in the 1930s. In this decade it was transformed, largely through the beneficence of the Carnegie Corporation of New York which was making a substantial investment in New Zealand libraries and education, with monetary grants and travelling fellowships; and through a new librarian. At the end of 1927 Horace Ward, now frail and ailing (he had to be helped from the college to his home across Kelburn Parade on windy days), retired, and soon after died, and the Council paid tribute to his ‘long and faithful’ service.25 The new librarian, Harold Miller, was young and ambitious. A college graduate and Rhodes scholar, he was to be a scholar–librarian rather than a custodian of forbidden treasures: he wrote two books on New Zealand history, and was a determined controversialist and an energetic High Anglican. When in 1931 the Carnegie Corporation made available to each university college a grant of $5000 a year for up to five years for its library, Victoria was the first to take advantage of the offer. Miller went to study library science at the University of Michigan in the second half of 1932. Before he left he secured the Council's agreement to his appointment as a lecturer in history as well on his return.26 The position of librarian attained the status and salary of a lecturer when the library was reorganised, in accordance with Carnegie recommendations, on the lines of a teaching department, with the librarian having full administrative responsibility in his domain.

‘We have begun well,’ Miller wrote in 1934; ‘is there any reason why we should not go on to become the Bodleian or the Yale of New Zealand?’27 The Carnegie money was restricted to undergraduate books in the arts and sciences, but it did enable him to go some way towards the ideal (an American one as much as his own) of making the library the intellectual and cultural heart of the university: to purchase books not only directly related to courses of study but also in wider fields, ‘important books, costly though they might be and little used’.28 The college's cultural resources were also enriched by two more Carnegie gifts: an art collection in 1934, comprising 230 volumes and some 2200 pictures, and a few years later ‘an excellent electric gramophone and loud-speaker, together with upwards of a thousand carefully selected records, covering a very catholic range’.29

The expanding library seriously exacerbated the college's endemic accommodation problems. Soon there were three new reading rooms and new shelving for 10,000 volumes; a new stackroom was provided in 1941. An art room too was needed – where, Spike observed, ‘free from restraint we can follow some of the strivings of man for self-expression from the beginnings of time’ – and a music room.30 Between 1927 and 1947 annual expenditure on the library increased from £600 to £3300, its staff from two to 10, and the number of borrowers from 400 to 1500.

Growth is only the most obvious theme of this period. Another is the college and the state – a relationship that was strengthened not only through more generous funding. In 1938 the Council approved the appointment of its history lecturer, J.C. Beaglehole, by the Department of Internal Affairs as research adviser to the Alexander Turnbull Library (so long as it would not interfere with his college duties). In fact Beaglehole had little to do with the Turnbull Library in this official capacity, but he became deeply involved in the historical publishing enterprise directed by Internal Affairs' enlightened under-secretary, J.W. Heenan (a graduate of Victoria, and a Queen's scholar), to celebrate the nation's first century in 1940. In his work as typographical adviser for the centennial historical surveys, Beaglehole expanded an influential secondary career in book design which also encompassed his work for the New Zealand Council for Educational Research, the short-lived Progressive Publishing Society (in which his colleague Ian Gordon was also involved) and, after the war, the University of New Zealand Press. There began, too, a 10-year collaboration between the historian and the under-secretary as Beaglehole became unofficial adviser to Heenan's larger schemes to expand state patronage of scholarship and the arts.

The centennial enterprise involved the large part of the country's fledgling academic history profession – all four history professors were among the 12 historian members of the Centennial Historical Committee – but it forged a particularly close link between the Internal Affairs Department and Victoria's History Department. Beaglehole became head of the Historical Branch which grew from the rump of the Centennial Branch, and a number of Victoria's brightest history graduates found jobs there and with its companion War History Branch. It was a mini ‘golden age’ of state employment of history graduates to do history that would not be repeated until the 1980s. Fred Wood wrote a volume of the centennial historical surveys, as did Beaglehole, in his specialist field of external relations, along with one for the monumental war history series. The centennial marks a significant moment in the shifting locus of historical scholarship – from the field of the amateur journalist–historian to the discipline of the professional academic historian – which is part of a larger institutionalisation of scholarship and the arts in this period.31

The establishment of Victoria's School of Political Science and Public Administration was quintessentially a 1930s development: an expression of a prevailing liberal–left belief in the power of an educated democracy, and a response to the demands of a rapidly expanding public service. Beaglehole put the case in both idealistic and pragmatic terms in a 1938 pamphlet which described what would be at once a school of political studies and a ‘staff college’ for public servants: ‘a combination, as it were, of the Oxford Modern Greats with the London School of Economics and the Australian Institute of Political Science’. ‘The task of the university is not to treat the tricks of the trade,’ he argued (referring to a perpetual theme in university discourse, especially where professional schools were concerned, of vocational training versus humanistic education). It was to help create ‘a real political culture’ in New Zealand, and to produce public servants who knew their Milton and Shakespeare as well as their public service manual.32 Such was the ideal. The school had its origins in a more modest proposal for lectures on public administration, put to the college in 1934 by a newly formed Public Administration Society, and an approach to the minister for funding for a chair, which he declined on economic grounds. The proposal was revived in 1936 by a new organisation, the New Zealand Institute of Public Administration, which consulted Auckland, Victoria and Canterbury colleges about the introduction of a postgraduate qualification, and chose Victoria. Funding was forthcoming from a more receptive Labour administration in financially easier times, and a chair in political science was approved by the university Senate in 1938.

From 12 applicants, the chosen one was Leslie Lipson, an Oxford graduate now at the University of Chicago whose department of political science was considered the best in this new, predominantly American field.33 An advisory committee was established, comprising members of the Public Service Commission, the Institute and the college. Eight public servants, selected by the Public Service Commission and the professor, started the Diploma in Public Administration, a two-year full-time postgraduate course, in 1940. Both Lipson, just 26 when he was appointed, and the lecturer who joined him in 1939, R.S. Parker from the University of Sydney, were uncomfortably aware that they were younger than the men they were teaching. (Parker, although coming only from Sydney, was also disconcerted by the college's small-town habitation: we ‘could scarcely repress our dismay at the archaic look of the place: two-storey buildings and the verandahs of tiny shops held up by wooden posts planted in the kerb’.)34 The new diploma – the first of its kind for the university, the herald of a postwar era of enlightened public planning led by a professionally educated public service élite35 – was soon, though, to be a casualty of the war. Losing a score of its best officers to full-time university study was a luxury a depleted public service could not afford, and the programme was suspended in 1942.

Those 20 or so public service bursars were only a small proportion of a much larger wartime fall in student numbers. The college roll dropped 42% between 1939 and 1942, from 1132 down to 750 attending classes. The number of male students fell by 51%, while women students increased by 27%, and an arts professor or lecturer – like J.C. Beaglehole – ‘gazing out sometimes over his class, might be pardoned for thinking it contained, besides women, nothing but the halt and the blind’.36 Most affected by depletion were, naturally, those faculties whose students

The college on the hill. ATL 59970 1/2 were predominantly, indeed almost wholly, male: law fell by 81%, commerce 60%. Arts enrolments remained steady, as did science, for science was useful in war: men were released from military duty for specialist study, and a special class in radio physics was instituted.

The changing face of the student body was the most visible of the many effects of the war on the college. Air-raid shelters were dug (and their removal with explosives in 1947 caused damage to the memorial window). A greater physical threat to the college than enemy fire, however, was earthquake. The Wairarapa earthquake in June 1942 caused minor damage (some £900 worth) to finials, chimneys and plaster work: it brought down the last remaining pinnacle on the library wing. The nearby teachers' training college fared worse and had to be evacuated, and for two sessions its staff and students were accommodated by Victoria. The war also hastened the demise of the external examinations system. In 1940, after more than 10 years of tedious struggle within the university bureaucracy, the colleges took responsibility for examining their own students for stage-one arts and science courses. The precariousness of transworld shipping during wartime prompted the extension of this hesitant reform to stage-two papers a few years later, and it was extended to stage three and honours from 1948.37

A less happy consequence of these times was another confrontation with the slippery concept of academic freedom. This concerned not a regular member of the college staff but a tutor in adult education, who was technically an employee of the college Council. In 1940 the Council voted (by nine votes to three) to terminate the appointment of a tutor-organiser, A.M. Richards, who had published a pacifist pamphlet. The councillors felt they were being lenient in giving him three months' notice on leave with full pay. Others were less impressed, and the action brought protest from several educational groups and the Students' Association, to no avail. It also prompted both the Council and the Professorial Board to attempt, with some difficulty, to formulate resolutions defining the meaning and extent of academic freedom of speech.38 They of course were not the only ones having difficulty coming to terms with the limits of expression in wartime, as the New Zealand government imposed censorship and emergency measures harsher even than Britain's.

The School and Diploma of Public Administration were revived after the war, although not without problems,39 and the school was formally recognised by the university in 1947. A new diploma class started that year. There was none the next, however, as the Public Service Commission argued to have the course reduced to one year (with prerequisites able to be taken at any college). It raised the issue again in 1949, having agreed in the meantime to provide another class, but the college's insistence on two years as necessary to maintain the academic status of the qualification prevailed. By now the school had a staff of four, including a new professor. Here there had been difficulty too. Lipson had returned to America at the beginning of 1947 (having been besieged with offers while attending a conference in Cleveland), and two years, and some tension between the Council and the advisory committee, passed before a new professor arrived to take his place: the former lecturer R.S. Parker, who had himself decamped to Canberra with a Commonwealth Research Fellowship in 1946.40 (During the two-year hiatus the acting head of the school was K.J. Scott, the top graduate of the first diploma class, lecturer since 1944, and in turn professor himself.)

The public service bursary scheme, while it conferred the status of ‘special school’, was only part of the new department's teaching. The formation at the college of a Political Science Society in 1947 was indicative of the burgeoning interest in this subject. There were 257 enrolments in political science courses in that overcrowded year, up from 143 in 1945 and 176 in 1949. Lipson had from the outset also taught political science for the BA. Revised undergraduate courses were introduced in 1949–50 and an MA course in 1950. Victoria's would remain the only political science department in a New Zealand university until the 1960s; and the Political Science journal founded by the society in 1948, and taken over by the school three years and three issues later, the only substantial outlet for publication by New Zealand political scientists for three decades.

The related study of industrial relations, although not taught at Victoria until the 1960s, featured briefly, but not insignificantly, in its work in the 1940s, through a privately and generously endowed five-year research fellowship in ‘social relations in industry’. This was a gratefully accepted windfall, and the fellowship is an episode worth recounting as an illustration of the potential complications of commissioned research, a relatively new experience for the college, in what was then a controversial field – as the Professorial Board's annual report for 1941 unknowingly observed:‘The importance of the problems and the fact that a leading business man has provided the funds for the research give added significance to this addition to the work of the College.’41 It provides too an interesting glimpse of public attitudes towards the university.

The benefactor was Henry Valder, a Hamilton businessman and long-time propagandist for ‘co-partnership’ (or profit-sharing) in industry.42 The offer, received in December 1939, and accepted after only a brief hesitation because of the recent outbreak of war, was for £1500 per annum for five years. The fellow appointed, a university-trained economist from Britain, A.E.C. Hare, began his work in mid–1941. He was ‘to investigate the problems of social and industrial relations, more particularly in New Zealand with special reference to the relations of capital and labour in industry, with a view to discovering means that will make for harmony in those relations’.43 The formulation of this brief was of some concern to Hare, who in his first report to the Council noted the diverse expectations of the job he had encountered – from discovering ‘a new way of life’ to establishing a new arbitration system – and discoursed on the role of the university researcher and the principle of academic freedom. In the course of the fellowship he gave public and college lectures (to regrettably small audiences), and published several interim reports and a final volume, Industrial Relations in New Zealand (1946). This was a large, important and widely disseminated document.44

His work had received extensive publicity, and the college Council was pleased. But it had not been a happy experience all round. Hare himself found the research frustrating: there was ‘profound public ignorance of the possibilities of dispassionate factual inquiry for social welfare’, so that he had to spend much of his time ‘explaining the nature of scientific social investigation and the place of the university in promoting independent research’. Employers thought he was a stooge of the Labour government, while trade unions were suspicious of the university; the Department of Labour was resentful and obstructive, seeing the very fact of his investigation as implied criticism; he was subject to personal attacks in the press and Parliament.45 Nonetheless, Hare's assessment at the end of the project was more positive. Valder, however, was definitely not pleased, informing the Council in 1946 that he was ‘deeply disappointed in the result of the Fellowship which … I consider to have been a dismal failure to attain its objective … I can only say that had I understood that the Council would leave the entire direction of the policy and control of the Fellowship to the Fellow, I most certainly would not have signed the agreement nor do I think any other business man would have done so.’46 He did not, it is clear, subscribe to the normally accepted view of the role of the university researcher – ‘to bring a calm, unbiased, and detached mind to the solution of some of the problems of public administration’, as the newly established Journal of Public Administration defined it in 1938.47 He had had a definite result in mind, but Hare did not agree that radical reform of New Zealand's industrial organisation was necessary.

Victoria's School of Social Science was established, in 1949, on the same model as the School of Public Administration: with a special grant from the government, offering a two-year postgraduate diploma (for training professional social workers) and overseen by an advisory committee. Its genesis, however, was somewhat different, for the initiative came from within rather than outside the university. In a report on new developments for the university conference in 1944, the college had put its case for a School of Anthropology, Sociology and Social Studies. Sociology and anthropology, it was argued, would benefit both undergraduates and civil servants who ‘desire to specialize for work among native peoples either in New Zealand or in other islands of the Pacific’. Wellington had, moreover (as G.H. Scholefield had pointed out 24 years earlier), exceptional resources for study in this field in its libraries and the Dominion Museum, and as the seat of government. Social studies was a necessary complement to both these subjects, as it was to economics and public administration in which Victoria already specialised. Unfortunately, Auckland had put up a similar proposal. Hunter, the tactician, suggested a compromise: Auckland could have anthropology, Wellington would take sociology.48

A committee of the Professorial Board proceeded to draw up a plan for a School of Social Studies that would teach sociology at all levels, give practical training for those working in the social services, and undertake research in this ‘relatively unexplored field’.49 In the event, sociology was not to be introduced as a general BA subject until 1957, and the school concentrated at first on training for professional social work. This, no less than the academic study of sociology,

Top line: Professors Robertson, Florance, Gordon. Centre: Sir T.A. Hunter. Bottom line: Dr J.C. Beaglehole, Professor Wood, Mr Page. Cappicade, 1948 was unexplored territory. A visiting overseas expert was consulted, and the newly appointed professor given a year to reconnoitre and plan. In his inaugural lecture in March 1949 he illustrated how little understood the concept was by citing a prospective student who thought it meant ‘organising dances and things of that kind’.50 The story is also told that when the minister of education, Peter Fraser, was approached for funding for a school of social work he refused, replying that the Labour government had done ‘all the social work necessary in New Zealand’ – although a year later he was happy to fund a school of social science. While this may sound apocryphal, it is documented that some ‘misunderstanding’ on the minister's part delayed the securing of a grant for the school – the name of which had transmuted from social studies, to sociology, to social work, now to rest at social science – until late in 1949.51 Hunter had looked first to America, but the new professor of social work, D.C. Marsh, was ‘an ebullient Welshman’, joined part way through 1949 as a senior lecturer by Jean Robertson, ‘a straight-backed Scot’.52 The first 14 students, eight of them government bursars, began the Diploma in Social Science in 1950.

So, it might be said, the development of the ‘new-fangled’ social sciences at Victoria came in on the coat-tails of professional training for civil servants. To an extent, however, the college already had a certain social science bent in the work of Hunter, Sutherland and Ernest Beaglehole. In education too, W.H. (Nat) Gould, professor from 1927 to 1946, brought to his teaching a sociological and anthropological approach, as well as an aversion to ‘dogmatism and pompous authoritarianism’ to match Hunter's. He was an economics graduate and had been director of education in Tonga, ‘a dynamic and, when aroused, awesome figure, small and swarthy … sharp beaked and hawklike of visage’, and his theme was the social forces that shaped education systems and the place of education in social reconstruction.53 His sociological approach was shared by his lecturer from 1930 to 1938, Arnold Campbell, ‘considered by his academic colleagues the College's finest teacher’.54 Now too there was H.C.D. Somerset, a new lecturer in this department in 1948, who had already published his landmark study in rural sociology, Littledene (1938). Thus, the social research and socialist currents of the 1930s reinforced the existing social science bent – the Hunter theme, it might be said – of the college.

Among the unfinished business of the fellowship in social relations in industry was a chair in industrial relations. It had been proposed by the Council in 1949, but rejected by the Professorial Board (which recommended instead that the subject, already under consideration by the university following an approach from the New Zealand Employers' Federation, be included if possible in the work of the new School of Social Science). The fellowship had, however, had a practical result in the establishment in 1942 of the industrial psychology division of the DSIR, which was based for four years at the college under the direction of the lecturer in psychology, Leslie Hearnshaw.55 The success (popular and financial) of a public lecture series on this subject in 1944, a request from the Health and Labour Departments in 1949 for a special course in it, and the expectation of more approaches of this kind prompted Hunter to draw up guidelines for incorporating such work into the regular responsibilities of departments.

In the science faculty, links with outside agencies, notably the government, were formed through research rather than teaching. In addition to wartime work, in the 1940s the DSIR funded research projects on low temperatures and the humpback whales in Tory Channel, and the Marine Department a study of the spiny crayfish. The zoology professor directed research on rat poison for the City Council. The arrangement of science within the college was also changing through a natural process of academic cell division, although this – the creation of new subjects and departments through increasing specialisation – was to be more a feature of the following decades. When Kirk retired at the end of 1944 his chair was divided, and separate professors appointed in zoology (L.R. Richardson) and botany (H.D. Gordon). Geography too was now to come into its own. It had survived the threat to its principal sponsor, Cotton, and in the 1940s pressure grew, from the New Zealand Geographical Society and the newly established University Entrance Board, for the expansion of geography teaching in the university. D.W. McKenzie was appointed part-time assistant in physical geography in 1945 (the Professorial Board insisting that no part of his salary was to be borne by Cotton, who had offered) and the college's first full-time geography lecturer the following year. A professor of geography was on the Professorial Board's wishlist from 1947, but it was not until Cotton's retirement in 1953 that a separate chair and department were created.

In stepping out from under the sheltering wing of geology, the new department was also to reposition itself closer to the humanities than the sciences. The professor, Keith Buchanan, brought from Birmingham a background in human, or social geography – ‘human ecology’, he defined his subject in his inaugural lecture – which was to have an enduring influence. This, and an interdisciplinary or ‘holistic’ approach, Victoria's Geography Department would come to claim as its distinctive, indeed renegade, character.56

The late-wartime surge in student enrolments – classes bulging with returned servicemen and women – was experienced most acutely in the science departments. It produced a bubble effect, with very large stage-one classes followed by large stage-two and stage-three classes a few years later. With constraints on staffing, and an accommodation crisis which the acquisition of surplus army huts did little to alleviate, the college was ‘forced to put into operation temporary plans to mitigate increasing evils’: making greater use of part-time and student assistants, and restricting enrolments. The alarm was first raised in 1944 when stage-one psychology and chemistry classes had to be divided. The next year there were 240 students in Physics I, and similar numbers in chemistry and zoology. The long-suffering Cotton had to vacate the physics building and move into the music room, and from 1946 enrolment restrictions on first-year science classes were imposed.57 The professors declared themselves ‘strongly opposed’ to the measure in principle, but found that it had a beneficial effect on the academic performance

Choir practice in the music room. M.D. King photo of many students. (A contingency plan for limiting stage-one arts classes was also drawn up – English and education were of particular concern – but was not required.)

It should not be thought, however, that all important academic developments in the college in this period were in the sciences, social, political or physical. The war and its aftermath had a distorting effect. Laboratories may have been overflowing, but in 1949 there were still more than twice as many students taking arts courses as studying science, as there had been 20 years earlier; twice as many as were taking commerce, and six times as many as were doing law.

In the same year as the lectureship in geography, 1946, a Department of Music was established under a lecturer, Frederick Page. He did not have to wait for students: ‘they were clammering for attention’.58 Music, Beaglehole observes, flourished in the college during the war years, in clubs and societies and the music room, where the Carnegie gift was supplemented by a donation from the newly established British Council in 1947.59 One stimulus to this, and one of the incidental benefits of cohabitation with the teachers' training college in 1942–43, was the use of the training college piano; now the college had to have its own. An instrument was acquired at the end of 1943, and replaced in 1947 (with the assistance of the High Commission in London) by a Steinway grand.

More than that, in the 1940s a serious musical culture and infrastructure was emerging in the country at large, or at least its cities, and especially Wellington, through the stimulus of government patronage and the presence of European refugees – emissaries of western high culture in a seemingly cultureless land. There had been centennial music festivals and an orchestra in 1940; a new National

Douglas Lilburn, New Zealand composer. ATL C21854 Orchestra was formed in 1947, and there was talk of a national conservatorium of music to be established in Wellington; a chamber music society was founded in the city in 1945, a national federation in 1947; soon there would be opera, and ballet. A mutual attraction developed between the European refugees and members of the college, including the new music lecturer (and especially staff and students of the History Department). Music was one of its means.

Victoria was belated in its acquisition of a Music Department – the subject had been taught in the university since the 1880s. But Victoria's would be different. The MusB syllabus was very academic, English, and old: ‘it seems,’ Page wrote in 1949, ‘to be an adaptation of the course set by examiners in London up to about 1930’.60 Page, whose taste leaned to Schoenberg and Hindemith, thought the only objects of studying music were better performance and better composition. To this end he recruited from Christchurch as his assistant in 1947 Douglas Lilburn, who had already a reputation as New Zealand's foremost composer, having scooped the prizes in the centennial competitions. But he had no degree: ‘The southern professors, full of letters, went round in circles deploring’ his appointment, Page later remarked, while ‘Professor Hollinrake at Auckland was so impressed by our orchestration papers that he suggested that he might come down to study with Lilburn’.61 Between them, Page and Lilburn founded a Music Department at Victoria distinguished by its creative rather than musicological approach, by its emphasis on performance and composition.

‘All true university education merges into research, and active research is a vital part of the university,’ stated the college's submission to the Senate in 1946 on the ‘aims and functions of the university’. This was hardly a new idea: university reformers had been arguing this point since the 1870s; Easterfield had done so in his inaugural lecture in 1899. Research, it continued, included not only ‘finding something new in a test-tube, or deciphering an ancient manuscript’, but also ‘informed commentary on public questions, the application of scholarship and critical intelligence to problems of economics, literature, philosophy, education and other fields of endeavour’.62 The centrality of research to the work of a university may not have been a new idea but it was one which received considerable emphasis in the immediate postwar years. It was the subject of the first address to the Senate in 1946 by the university's new chancellor, Mr Justice David Smith (‘the reforming chancellor’, the university's historian has called him, a Victoria graduate and a member of its Council from 1939 to 1945), and of a pamphlet by Karl Popper and others at Canterbury University College published in 1945. It was encouraged by the establishment of a university research committee in 1946, to dispense a £10,000 annual government grant (most of which went to science departments); the reintroduction that year of the PhD degree (after a brief experiment in the 1920s); and the institution of refresher leave.

At Victoria, in addition, there was the appointment in October 1948 of a senior research fellow and lecturer in colonial history – a new, and singular, position. Hunter explained to the Council: ‘although provision was to be made for the establishment of a Senior Research Fellowship at Victoria University College it was intended in the first instance for research in the History of the Pacific and that Dr. J.C. Beaglehole was to be the first appointee’.63 Actually, the genesis of this appointment was not exactly as he implied. It had originated as a proposal for a research chair to be established to enable Beaglehole to take up invitations to edit the Cook journals for the Hakluyt Society and the Joseph Banks papers at the Mitchell Library in Sydney. Thus relieved of normal teaching duties, he would be able ‘to do these and other major researches, and at the same time to act as a stimulating force within the College Department of History. It is an opportunity that ought not to be missed,’ Hunter urged. The Council approved the plan, but the minister, when approached for funding, demurred, suggesting that instead of a chair in Pacific history they establish a senior research fellowship at an appropriate salary.64 In this way Beaglehole, who had regretted when he returned to New Zealand from London in 1932 ‘that I could not for ever be a research student’, now found himself in the enviable position of a full-time research scholar, embarked on his career as the foremost editor and biographer of Captain James Cook.65

The promulgation of research through student theses and staff publications, as much as the growth of classes and multiplication of departments, is an index of the college's intellectual progress – although a more difficult one to read. Theses (13 of them) were first listed in the college calendar and annual report in 1928. From then until the mid–1940s between 20 and 30 theses were completed each year, with the exception of a sharp wartime drop in 1942–44, and then a sudden increase (to 57) in 1947. (In not all subjects, however, was a thesis for masters compulsory; in some it was not an option.) For most of the period around half were for science degrees (fewer in the late 1920s, slightly more in the war years). Those submitted for an MA or MA (Hons) were mostly in history, education and psychology. A considerable number in educational psychology were evidently the fruits of the psychological clinic for children established in 1926, in Hunter's domain, in co-operation with the Departments of Education and Health. History dominated in the arts theses (perhaps it was true that history was ‘the safest and easiest method of securing an MA’). They were until the mid–1940s virtually all on New Zealand subjects – political history and biography, local history, missionaries, explorers and race relations (the one exception was a political study of Fiji) – although as undergraduates the students encountered their own country only as a segment of the stage-one course on empire and colonisation.66 A new departure is marked in 1947 by ‘An examination of some recent criticism of the materialist conception of history’ and ‘A defence of historicism’. Perhaps this showed the presence in the History Department of Peter Munz, a junior assistant in 1944, senior lecturer from 1948, later a professor. A Canterbury graduate and a German refugee, he was to be one of the intellectual heavyweights, and individualists, of the Victoria department, with an internationally distinguished career in medieval history and the philosophy of history. At the least, both these developments promised a broadening of the subject of postgraduate work that might have pleased his colleague Beaglehole,

Graduation, Town Hall, 1947, J.C. Beaglehole at the organ. ATL PA Coll 4877 who wrote in 1946: ‘It is not, paradoxically perhaps, the duty of a New Zealand university to devote a major amount of its attention to the history of New Zealand’ (but rather ‘to teach the validity and importance of historical thinking, to preserve the integrity of historical thought’).67

From 1932 there were also theses in commerce, a handful each year, exclusively on New Zealand topics. A rare but outstanding contribution in English was E.H. McCormick's on ‘Literature in New Zealand’, which won him a travelling scholarship and grew into his Cambridge MLitt, which in turn became the centennial survey Letters and Art in New Zealand, a classic text of New Zealand literary criticism. An impressed councillor (later chancellor, Duncan Stout, doctor, historian and son of Robert) suggested in 1933 that the ‘worthiest’ of the student theses be published. They weren't, but it was decided in 1936 to ask students to donate one copy of their thesis to the college library, or to procure one in cases of ‘outstanding merit’.68

Publications by staff listed in the college calendar had numbered fewer than 10 a year through the 1920s until the late 1930s, and science (and Cotton) reigned. All but one before 1937 were in the physical and natural sciences, or occasionally the social sciences – these mostly by Hunter in psychology and Sutherland's work on the Maori.69 The single exception was J.C. Beaglehole's Captain Hobson and the New Zealand Company (his MA thesis, published while he was a research student in London in 1928). From 1938 production increased rapidly, with 20–30 publications listed in most years until 1946; 63 in 1947–48; 50 in 1948–49. Half or fewer were in science, its dominance now challenged by more sociological work (notably by Ernest Beaglehole), history, law in the 1940s (most by I.D. Campbell, who joined the faculty in 1940), Hare and Hearnshaw on industrial relations and industrial psychology, and Lipson and Parker on politics and administration. The English Department was a slow starter: the first publications were two articles by Ian Gordon in the newly founded Turnbull Library Record in 1940.

In the 1940s the college also ventured into publishing on its own account, beginning with the first of Hare's interim reports. Towards the end of 1941, from an initial suggestion by Gordon, a publications committee of the Professorial Board was established and a publications fund created (with £200 a year). Its first fruits were Nicholas Copernicus: quadricentennial addresses, three lectures given in May 1943 to mark the 400th anniversary of the astrologer's death;70 and Greek Tragedy Compared with Modern Drama by L.H.G. Greenwood, fellow of Emmanuel College and a temporary lecturer in classics. There had been a plan to publish Lipson's study of government in New Zealand, The Politics of Equality (a work that had been the cause of an official complaint to the Professorial Board from the librarian about the professor's keeping some 100 volumes of the parliamentary debates in his room for months), but the University of Chicago Press did this in 1948. Victoria's first book proper was published in 1944 and was the product of another series of lectures, on New Zealand and the Statute of Westminster (Hunter's idea, edited by J.C. Beaglehole). It was followed in 1946 by a festschrift – the first in a New Zealand university – to Tommy Hunter. Designed by Beaglehole, these were classics of the Beaglehole typographical style. So was the college's 50th jubilee history published in 1949 – not, however, by the college, but by the New Zealand University Press.

Through adult education too the college extended its influence into the community – beyond the city to ‘the Middle District’, and to the working class, as Stout had meant it to. Since the Workers' Educational Association movement had been established in this country (from Britain) in 1915, the provision of adult education had been the joint responsibility of the university colleges and the district committees of the WEA, and was carried on during the depression with a Carnegie grant when government funding was withdrawn. It had quickly flourished since the first three Wellington classes were organised in 1915 in economics, English and electricity: 21 were held in 1920; in 1937 there were eight, 10-lecture courses in economics, ‘thinking and speaking’ (taken by Hunter), modern literature, art, drama, child psychology, man and his environment, and current history. By the late 1940s some 20 city courses were offered along with country courses, box courses, discussion groups and craft groups. It was work to which several of the Victoria staff made a strong commitment, not least Tommy Hunter, who had been the founding president of WEA in Wellington, and chaired the Tutorial Classes Committee for many years until the demands of university administration interfered. It also contributed to the college's reputation as a place of liberal (or dangerous) ideas.

Public lectures on topical issues were a means by which, increasingly, the college published itself. There were series on totalitarianism in 1940, ‘Problems of the Pacific’ (in aid of patriotic funds) in 1941, and a postwar reconstruction series held at the RSA hall in 1945. In this period too there was inaugurated, briefly, an address to mark the college's Foundation Day: not the anniversary of the first Council meeting, 23 May, but the day after, which was Queen Victoria's birthday. Arnold Campbell, now director of the Council for Educational Research, did the honours in 1944, and another former college teacher turned administrator, Ernest Marsden, was invited the following year. These developments suggest a growing awareness of and desire to enhance the college's public role. It ‘is not dully academic,’ stated the dustjacket of The Statute of Westminster, ‘and it will interest every New Zealander who wants to know where his country is going, and why’. The Council did not, however, take up the innovative suggestion of one of its members, who in 1943 ‘asked leave to ventilate the question of the possible appointment at some future date of a Publicity Officer’.71

Of course, the burgeoning output of published research, especially in the late 1940s, did not express only a new ethos. It also signified a bigger college. The university was fast moving into a new era. In the second half of the 1940s a substantial increase in the college's income facilitated an equally dramatic expansion of the academic staff. Between 1944 and 1947 Victoria's annual recurring grant (excluding that for special schools, which was comparatively little in Victoria's case) more than doubled, from £19,700 to £50,700. In 1948 its total income from government was £65,500. With fees contributing £28,600, and a negligible sum (some £3000) from other sources, its annual income at the end of its first half-century was nearing £100,000. As student enrolments climbed after the war, there was a rash – indeed a rush – of appointing. At the beginning of 1947, for

J.T. Campbell, professor of mathematics, 1954. Dominion collection, ATL F145666 1/2 example, the college welcomed 10 new senior lecturers, 10 junior lecturers and seven temporary staff (pending permanent appointments), and 42 student assistants were engaged for the session. It was not only Victoria that was growing, nor only the University of New Zealand. International competition in the academic market – aggravated, for New Zealand, by comparatively low academic salaries – meant that one could not always have the staff one had chosen. It was not uncommon for

Jubilee procession in lower Cuba Street, May 1949 the college's first choice of applicant to turn the job down. A retiring professor might be asked to stay for another year.72

Now, too, the professors were outnumbered. In 1930 they had made up half of the teaching staff; in 1940 they were just over a third; in 1949, 22%. Only two new chairs were created in this period, compared with 45 sub-professorial positions. This altered not only the classroom experience of the students but also the academic organisation, and politics, of the college. A Committee of Lecturers and Assistant Lecturers had been formed in 1932 to promote the status and salaries of the expanding academic underclass. It was chaired by mathematics lecturer F.F. Miles (who soon became the professor, though, when Sommerville died in 1936). The secretary was Hilda Heine, a graduate of the college who had done her postgraduate work in Berlin before joining the commerce faculty in 1928, teaching economic history and statistics, and who rose to senior lecturer by her retirement in 1953 (to write psychological thrillers). They sought in the first instance representation on the Council and Professorial Board, in recognition of the increasing teaching responsibilities of the lecturer, who was no longer merely a professor's personal assistant, deputed to mark papers and help out in the lab, but ‘a junior colleague’. Two lecturers were duly appointed to the Professorial Board, but the councillors declined to admit the sub-professorial class to their table (with an argument that would have surprised a previous generation of university reformers: ‘that the present representation of the [Professorial] Board on the Council is designed not as a means of representing the interests of the staff, but as a means of facilitating the smooth working of the College’, and for this purpose two professors were quite enough).73 This gain was not made until 1948, when an elected representative of the teaching staff was added to the Council along with an additional member of the Professorial Board. From 1947 there were not simply lecturers but junior lecturers and senior lecturers, and a new rank of associate professor was created that year for a teacher ‘who has attained eminence in the work of his lectureship’.74 The first to be so promoted, in November 1949, were A.D. Monro of the Chemistry Department and J.T. Campbell of Mathematics (on the staff since 1921 and 1935 respectively). In the higher echelons of academic administration, a Committee of the Principal and Deans was established in 1947.

The growth of the staff had a social as well as a political effect. The Staff Common Room was fitted out during 1940 (the ubiquitous Beaglehole convened the committee on the decoration and furnishing) in a room vacated when the Royal Society library moved to the new biology building, and opened in 1941.75 Councillors were welcome for afternoon tea, and cups and saucers were purchased in 1945 for serving tea after the Foundation Day address and similar occasions.

[four] Wayfarers together

THE COLLEGE CELEBRATED its golden jubilee over a week in May 1949 in much the same manner as it had its silver anniversary in 1924: with church services (two this time), an academic procession, civic and Council receptions in the Town Hall, the conversazione, a Jubilee Ball, and matches and reunions of some of the earliest founded college clubs (hockey, tennis, football, debating). Former residents of the women's hostel Victoria House attended an afternoon tea. Ex-‘Weir men’, veterans of the male students' hostel Weir House, had a Reunion Smoke Concert in the Savage Club Hall. There were three jubilee publications: special issues of Spike and The Old Clay Patch, an occasional anthology of college-inspired verse, and the ‘essay towards a history’ of the college by J.C. Beaglehole.

A review of Beaglehole's jubilee history in the student newspaper Salient (founded in 1938) occasioned a comparatively rare instance of disciplinary action by the Professorial Board – excluding occasional fines for the unlawful ‘abstraction’ of books from the library and reprimands for smoking in corridors (and one explosive Guy Fawkes incident in 1929).1 The reviewer considered the work ‘a scientific and artistic triumph … balanced, philosophical and amusing’, and ‘both readable and accurate – a rare achievement in the Twentieth Century’. He (Salient articles were unsigned, but it was less likely a she) especially noted Victoria's ‘tradition of heresy’, its habit of respect for freedom of speech as a central theme. In a paragraph captioned ‘Victoria's sons’, it was suggested that the college could take more pride in a graduate like Gordon Watson, a classics scholar (and grandson of a founding member of the college Council) who was secretary of the New Zealand Communist Party in the 1930s, than in those who had followed more respectable careers – such as the governor-general, the mayor and the chancellor of the university, about whom some less than respectful comments were made.2 It was this paragraph that caused the trouble. A member of the Council, C.A.L. Treadwell (a well-known lawyer and author of military memoirs), complained: the article was ‘generally communistic in outlook’ and ‘grossly insulting’ to the personages named.3 The Professorial Board, displeased by both this review and an editorial in an earlier issue of Salient on the quality of food at Weir House (a topic of perpetual complaint), banned the paper and fined the editor £5.4

The dissident tradition to which Victoria laid claim derived in part from the role of its young professors in spearheading the ‘epic and glorious’ struggle for university reform;5 from its brave stand against the persecution of von Zedlitz; to a considerable extent, perhaps, from the guiding spirit of the rationalist Hunter; and also from the political temper of its students. Peter Munz, a student at Canterbury in the early 1940s, listened in awe ‘to a report that some students in Wellington had actually demonstrated about some political issue or other; and that at some crucial moment in the history of mankind they had painted a hammer and sickle on the roof’ of the college building. When he came to Victoria's History Department in 1944, Munz later recalled, ‘I felt as if I had been tossed into metropolitan life.’ The professor (Wood) was ‘a youngish man who actually talked to students’.6 Victoria's jubilee history itself represents something of this character in its focus, unusual for the genre, on the students. But Beaglehole's larger theme was not the college's radicalism, but rather its ‘astonishing corporate feeling’.7

Of course, as Beaglehole himself acknowledged, not all students, perhaps not even many, are imbued with ‘corporate spirit’ – or that manifestation of corporate spirit required. This is the perennial complaint of student newspapers and activists. Victoria's student representative before the Reichel–Tate commission in 1925 bemoaned the ‘deplorably small’ membership of intellectual clubs at the college: ‘I should put the active membership of the largest of them at not more than twenty or twenty-five, and it is very largely the same small band that takes an active interest in all these societies and in college affairs generally. I should estimate that the number of students who take a real active interest in the University, and in university problems, and in intellectual affairs, apart from their own special line of study, is certainly less than fifty. And the number of students attending the College is somewhere in the vicinity of eight hundred.’8 Among the evidence collected by the commissioners was a student questionnaire, one section of which asked about their non-scholastic activities. Twenty-one per cent of the Victoria students who replied reported that they were members of both intellectual and sporting clubs, a higher percentage that at the three other colleges. Victoria also led (although only barely) in the proportion of its students who professed to purely intellectual pursuits (30%), and its sporting enthusiasm (51%) was surpassed only by Otago's. But 40% confessed to taking no part in extracurricular college activities at all. Reichel and Tate cited the student evidence quoted above in support of their criticism of the part-time system which, amongst its other evils, they blamed for reducing ‘corporate student life to an anaemic shadow’.9 However, Victoria's comparatively healthy demonstration of corporate student life – of which its students' initiative in the acquisition of a gymnasium was further evidence – also suggested to them that part-time study was not wholly to blame for the

Women students, c.1940 failure of the New Zealand university colleges to secure more general participation in that elusive thing known as ‘university life’.

There are many dimensions to student participation in university life – student politics and journalism, cultural and academic societies, sports clubs and Tournament, flats and hostels, ‘Extrav’ and ‘procesh’, not to mention lectures and exams. So too there are as many different student experiences as there are students themselves. This is obvious, but worth stating. It has been argued that university students in New Zealand have a stronger sense of collective identity than their peers overseas (for reasons which include the society's historical anti-intellectualism and the university system's egalitarian, meritocratic basis). And it has been suggested too that at Victoria the distance between ‘town’ and ‘gown’ – the students' consciousness of themselves as a culture apart – has been particularly strongly felt.10 Yet, apart from the shared territory of the class and exam room, how much was there in common in the college experience of the full-time arts undergraduate, the postgraduate science student, the teacher or teachers' college student doing a few BA units, the law clerk-cum-law student, the civil servant and part-time commerce student, and the exempted student who never set foot on the campus at all?

About a fifth of Victoria's students came into the last category. The percentage of exempted students fell between the college's foundation and its golden jubilee year, but only slightly – from 21.5% in 1901 to 17.5% in 1949. This was twice as many as in the university as a whole.11 Part-time study remained the norm. In 1949 still only a quarter of those attending classes at Victoria were studying full time. With the brief exception of the war years, women were a shrinking minority of Victoria's student body. In 1899 a little over a third were women (35.6%); by the late 1940s this had fallen to about a fifth. The decline in the proportion of young women enrolling that began after the First World War has been accounted for by the assistance given to ex-servicemen, the changing character of the feminist movement (the 1920s were a less optimistic decade) and, perhaps more importantly, by the opening up of new occupations for women that did not require a university education, notably in the secretarial and nursing fields. A more dramatic fall occurred in the early 1930s with the closure of the teachers' training college, when the number of women students fell from 32% in 1931 to 22% in 1933. Teaching remained the preferred occupation of women who graduated throughout this period, and accordingly they were enrolled mostly in the arts faculty.12

Given Victoria's historical claims for specialisation, the notable trend in the distribution of its students among faculties over this period is the decline of law. In 1910, 33% of students who passed sections or finals for their degree were taking law. Between 1924 and 1949 the percentage of students enrolled in law fell steadily from 29% to 7% (indeed, down to just half that during the Second World War). Commerce showed a reverse trend, rising from about 8% to just over 20%, with a notable increase in the late 1930s. Commerce students outnumbered law from 1932. Since the late 1920s accountancy had been one of the fastest-growing professions in the Dominion, while the law in the 1930s was overcrowded. Leaving aside the temporary effects of the war, the proportion of students in the arts faculty over this period ranged between 40% and 50%; in the science faculty, between 17% and 22% or about a fifth.

Victoria's 100-odd founding students unarguably demonstrated an enthusiastic interest in the institution of college culture. They began organising themselves within a month of attending their first lectures. A decision to form a Students' Society was made at a meeting at the Girls' High School on 6 May 1899, presided over by the youngest of the professors, Maclaurin. The society was formally constituted on 16 May; an executive was elected (a law student, James Prendeville, was the first president) and the chairman of the Professorial Board was appointed patron. Clubs and societies followed apace: firstly a Debating Society, inaugurated on 6 June with Professor Mackenzie as president and Maclaurin leading the first debate on the motion ‘that any system of control of the drink traffic is inimical to

The gymnasium the highest development of civilization’.13 A Christian Union also began, but falteringly, in 1899 – indeed, before the college was opened, with Friday evening Bible studies held by a group of intending students – but was not properly established until the second year. A Glee Club made a hesitant start and reappeared at intervals. Tennis was Victoria's first sport. A Tennis Club was formed late in the first session after permission had been obtained to use the parliamentary tennis courts – but not (on the ruling of the Professorial Board) on Sundays. The prohibition against Sunday tennis was not lifted until 1923, after prolonged and public debate. (In a lengthy discussion of the matter in Council in 1919, Hunter led the reforming argument, with helpful contributions from Robert Stout: ‘I have played tennis on Sunday with an English clergyman’, ‘John Calvin played bowls on Sunday, and so did the early reformers’, ‘Don't they have boating on the river at Oxford on Sundays?’)14 There followed Hockey in 1901; a Football Club, which lost all its games in its first season, in 1903; a Ladies' Hockey Club and an Athletics Club in 1904. In these early, homeless years, balls, concerts, card parties and amateur theatricals were held in the Sydney Street Schoolroom in Thorndon (the first ball on 18 July 1899), and later on the top floor (the ‘hop floor’) of the college gym. When the college moved to Kelburn, the Football Club at first practised on the unfinished top storey of the new building, to the dismay of Easterfield as plaster fell from the ceiling of his laboratory: the need for a gymnasium was manifest.

The Spike, the college review, was launched in 1902 with a jaunty appeal to collegiate fellow-feeling: ‘We be wayfarers together, O Students, treading the same thorny paths of Studentdom, laughing at the same professorial jokes, grieving in common over the same unpalatable “swot,” playing the same games, reading the same indigestible books.’ The Spike (‘a free lance’) declared three aims: to provide an official record of college activities; ‘to bring out the dormant talent, perhaps even genius, in both art and literature, that cannot help but exist, and too often lie hidden, amongst two hundred University students’; and above all ‘to strengthen the bonds of union and goodfellowship amongst us, to foster that brotherly comradeship which, to our mind, is the chief charm of studentdom’.15 There was as much humour as satire intended in the title. It appeared biannually at first (the literature in June, statistics in October) and from 1931 annually. The relative balance of club news, literature and opinion varied with the predilections of editors and the flavour of the times. It is arguable how much dormant talent, let alone genius, found expression in its pages. There was a good deal of fairly execrable verse, and some memorable; there was at least, it was thought, enough worthy of republication in an anthology, The Old Clay Patch, the first edition of which appeared in 1910.16

The Students' Society changed its name to the Students' Association in 1903. The clubs were affiliated but free to manage their own affairs and finances. In 1924 club membership subscriptions were consolidated into a single fee payable by all students (10s 6d at first, rising to £1 12s 6d by 1948) which was collected by the registrar and paid into a consolidated fund in the name of the Students' Association, which dispersed an annual grant to each club. The college Council

The Students' Society executive, 1901. VUWSA reserved the right to withhold any sum necessary to pay for damage to student common rooms and cloakrooms. Along with this formalisation of the Association's affairs within the college administration, the student clubs and their officers were now listed in the college calendar. From 1935 certain disciplinary powers were delegated to the Association by the Professorial Board: to reprimand, fine up to £1, or suspend a student from the Association or any club for breaches of college, and especially Students' Association, rules. Since 1932 its responsibility had also extended, at the students' request, to management of the college cafeteria, which had been less than satisfactory since the death in 1928 of Mrs Brook, two years after that of her husband, the college's first caretaker (‘Brookie’), whose mantle had then passed to their son (‘Young Brookie’). They lived in a cottage behind the college building, and pastured their cow on the southern slopes. (If the Stouts are Victoria's original dynasty, the second were the Brooks.)17

There are three salient characteristics of student and social life of Victoria in those first few decades. One is the involvement of the staff in student activities; this, it has often been stated, fostered a particularly happy level of understanding at the college. Perhaps this had something to do with age. The professors were not so old, and, because of the delay in founding a college in Wellington and its predominantly part-time nature, many of the students were not so young. Perhaps it also had its origins in the college's difficult infancy: the six-year battle for a site, Easterfield observed when the foundation stone was laid in 1904, had united them ‘with a bond of sympathy almost unparalleled’.18 Picken would later write of social functions in these early years having the atmosphere of ‘a happy and well-bred family’.19 The memory is no doubt exaggerated by nostalgia. But later generations of student clubs did not, as was the norm until the 1930s, elect professors as their presidents, vice-presidents and patrons.

The Hockey Club, for example, elected as its first president Robert Stout, and among eight vice-presidents professors Brown, Easterfield, Maclaurin and Mackenzie. These titles were not merely honorary. The college was small and its members played together. Hunter, a footballer, captained the senior team and was made a life member of the club; he, Murphy and Boyd-Wilson rotated the presidency, vice-presidency and patronage of the college Football Club for years. Hunter also served as president at various times of the Athletics, Cricket, Rowing and Ladies' Hockey clubs, while Hunter the rationalist was a leading supporter of the Heretics Club and Free Discussions Club. Easterfield, a Cambridge miler, coached the athletics team. Wilson played college tennis and golf, and was a leading member of the Glee Club; Boyd-Wilson was the legendary stalwart of the Tramping Club. Picken gave his time to the Christian Union; Murphy his patronage to the Haeremai Club (a sort of student Savage Club). Students of other colleges were reportedly astonished when three professors and two lecturers accompanied the Victoria contingent to the first inter-college Tournament at Christchurch at Easter 1902. (The event itself was a Victoria initiative.)20 The students delighted the Mackenzie children by practising college hakas on the professor's front lawn. There were, too, less muscular games in which the students and their teachers competed and communed, such as the baby show ‘that Kirk almost won with a photograph of himself, aged three, playing with a pet frog’.21 Professors' wives played an equally

Spike 's founding editors: Fanny Irvine-Smith, Hubert Ostler, Froggy de la Mare prominent role as patrons and vice-presidents of the women's clubs (Mrs Mackenzie, for example, of the Basketball Club; Mrs Picken, a graduate of the University of Glasgow, of Ladies' Hockey), as chaperones, and as hosts at social functions.

Notable too (but not remarkable) is the recurrence of a handful of names in the record of student activities: names like de la Mare (F.A., known as ‘Froggy’ or ‘the Frog’), an arts and law student, a founding editor of Spike and compiler of The Old Clay Patch, a passionate athlete, tennis, rugby and cricket player, later an outspoken penal reformer and champion of academic freedom; and Siegfried Eichelbaum, another tennis-playing law student, and Seaforth Mackenzie, assiduous writers of odes and capping songs. Above all there was G.F. (George) Dixon, later memorialised in a plaque in the student union building, who might be described as Victoria's original perennial student. A foundation student, he served as president of the Students' Association for three years; single-handedly completed the excavation of the tennis courts although he did not play tennis; was founder of the Hockey Club and Easter Tournament (‘Clad in a new Norfolk suit each year, with increasing badges and presentation walking-sticks and a tremendous air of here-comes-my-team–dont-show-any-of-em-a-bun-till-Tuesday, the man was an institution in four cities’); chair of the silver jubilee committee in 1924; treasurer of the foundation portrait fund in 1934, and of a collection to inaugurate academic prizes in honour of Brown and Kirk in 1946; organiser of the jubilee student union appeal. He never took a degree.22

Thirdly, and equally unsurprisingly, there is the ‘robustly masculine’ tone of student culture, at least in its public expression, in capping activities and the college review.23 This is not to say that Victoria was a hostile environment for women students. On the contrary, the testimony is that the college generally was liberal towards women, and a number of members of the staff were particularly supportive (notable exceptions were Murphy, Brown and the librarian Horace Ward). Not all colleges permitted their female members to smoke. In 1920 the Professorial Board investigated appointing a supervisor of women students – inquiries were made overseas – but decided that none was necessary, for the time being at least. From the outset there were women office-holders in most student clubs. Indeed, the first students' executive has the appearance of being deliberately representative: one of the two vice-presidents was a woman (Mary Blair, one of Victoria's first two science graduates), which became the rule, and five of the 13-member committee. Spike was first edited by a collective of three: H.H. Ostler (another lawyer), ‘the Frog’ and Fanny Irvine-Smith, later a stern but stimulating history lecturer at Wellington teachers' college and author of the popular local history The Streets of My City, who wrote and drew sketches for Spike for several years. No women, however, were elected president of the Students' Association before 1969. On just three occasions a woman vice-president deputised in wartime or assumed the position when the incumbent left mid-year.

Athletics on Kelburn Park, 1930s. Evening Post collection, ATL G5464 1/4

Clubs and societies proliferated as the college grew, some perennial, some ephemeral. There were 16 in 1924, 40 in 1949. They waxed and waned with the enthusiasm and talents of the students and the fashions of the times. Consistently throughout this period, half of them were sporting. Along with tennis, hockey, football and athletics there was cricket of course: formed in 1906, the club was congratulated by the college Council on winning the senior championship for the first time in 1946. Other sports also had their devotees: rifles, swimming, boxing (the first college boxing club in the university, in 1910), fencing and women's fencing, harriers, soccer (but not until 1944), swords, miniature rifles, table tennis and chess. The women found sport liberating, and they were more successful in the college's earliest, tennis and hockey; the Ladies' Hockey Club was also famed for its picnics.24 A Women's Indoor Basketball Club – a relatively new sport – was formed in 1918 and flourished.

It would appear that Victoria sport went into a general decline in the 1930s, in competitive terms at least. The Football Club, after its unpromising start, thrived in the 1920s but in the next two decades periodically fell from the local first division. Hockey, the biggest club in New Zealand at the beginning of the 1930s, also experienced a post-depression slump. In athletics Victoria won the Tournament shield eight times between 1919 and 1929, but only twice more by 1949; it received the Wooden Spoon 15 times.

It was in debating that Victoria excelled, apparently because of its comparative strength in law. The prominence of law students among its prize winners, one noted in Spike, ‘has led to the criticism that the Debating Society is merely a school in sophistry for budding criminal lawyers’.25 Before 1929 Victoria's debaters won the Joynt Scroll at Tournament 12 times – twice as many times as their nearest rival, Otago. The society modelled its debates on the Oxford Union. The Union Prize which was awarded to the best debater each year was named, however, for the Wellington Literary and Debating Societies Union which had funded it. The more prestigious Plunket Medal contest for oratory – in which contestants spoke on a famous person in history – was endowed by the governor-general and always attracted a large public audience to the Town Hall.26 (It was an index, perhaps, of its celebrity – or perhaps just of her affection for the college – that Fanny Irvine-Smith's The Streets of My City listed as appendices the mayors of Wellington, premiers of New Zealand and Victoria's Plunket medallists.) The predominance of law students also meant a predominance of men. Women (who had their own debating society between 1908 and 1916) won the Union Prize only twice before 1948 and the Plunket Medal five times.

The arts were a slower growth. A Literary Society, in various guises, made an intermittent appearance from the mid–1920s; but not until the end of the 1940s would a literary ‘movement’ emerge at Victoria comparable with that at Auckland – the famous Phoenixers – in the early 1930s. The Dramatic Society, formed in 1921, until the 1940s presented an unremarkable repertoire of Coward and Milne and the occasional revue. Science students were the keenest at forming academic societies: a Chemical Society in 1910, followed by the Mathematical and Physical Society in 1921 and a Science Society in 1928. A Law Faculty Club was formed only in 1930, a Commerce Society in 1932. Of other non-sporting associations, there were the political – of which more will be heard – and the purely social.

For the latter, men and women marked out their separate territory. Women students had their own common room and founded a Women's Club in 1918 whose activities ranged from supper and debating to wrestling and 30-a-side rugby in the gym. It went out of existence, in the way of college clubs, in 1930, to be succeeded briefly by the Hui Marae. A new women's common room was opened under the library in the newly built northern wing in 1921. If it provided a sanctuary in a predominantly male institution (although its intention no doubt had more to do with decorum), it could also be an intimidating place for new students: ‘it really mortified me,’ one later recalled, ‘to go into the common room and see sophisticated young women sitting on the edges of chairs or tables, puffing cigarettes and looking superior’.27 When the gymnasium was opened in 1909 the men promptly founded their own Men's Common Room Club for ‘light mental recreation’ and ‘social evenings on odd Saturdays’ (the rules of the gym forbade the presence of women after 5pm).28 This was succeeded in 1918 by the Haeremai Club, devoted to smoke concerts, haka parties, saveloy evenings, drinking and other forms of fun. (Its club note in Spike in 1930 lamented that for new members it ‘had to contend with the more gentle type of fresher this year owing to the fact that all the two-fisted beer-craving he-men had joined the rowing club’.)29 A ‘common common room’ would be a 1950s innovation.

And there was the Tramping Club, which was at once a political, social and sporting affair. Founded in 1921, the Tramping Club enjoyed its heyday in the 1930s and 1940s, reaching a membership of 80 before the skiers seceded in 1947. The Tararuas became as important a venue for discussion of the political issues of the day as the Free Discussions Club or Debating Society, the French Maid (Wellington's first coffee bar and bohemian haunt) or the Grand Hotel. Its other reputation was social: ‘The Tramping Club is Every Girl's Problem. “Shall I marry into the Varsity, or shall I not?”’30 Boyd-Wilson, president until 1954, contributed his enthusiasm not only for the outdoors but also for brewing: the Mulled Wine Reunion of 1942 is famous. For some, a veteran of this era recalls, the Tramping Club was ‘the real essence of varsity life’.31

It was the common wisdom that residential university hostels (not tramping clubs) were essential for the cultivation of ‘corporate spirit’, and for the students' proper intellectual, cultural and spiritual education. Scattered in lodgings around the city, ‘they are in their home life removed from an atmosphere of thought; they lack the refining and stimulating influences which are found in community life directed by a capable and cultured head. Hostel life,’ observed the college's annual report in 1927, ‘provides a nucleus about which the true university spirit will grow.’32

A small number of women students of both Victoria and the teachers' college were accommodated by the establishment, later known as Victoria House, run by the Wellington Women Students' Hostel Society.33 This society was formed in 1905 on the initiative of Margaret Wallis, wife of the Bishop of Wellington, after the death of a woman student from tuberculosis. It was a joint project of the Wellington Presbytery and the Anglican Church, and opened its first hostel on The Terrace in 1908 – without the support of the college Council and Professorial Board who were suspicious of its religious affiliation. The hostel was to be ‘of a Christian character, though no one will be forced to go to Prayers or Church’,

The Women Students' Hostel, 1915–16 Mrs Wallis reported to Spike in 1907. She hoped it would foster ‘a good wholesome esprit de corps, such as that which now pervades Victoria College’. It was to be a proper hostel, not ‘a clique residing in a small and poky house’. Designed by William Gray Young, it was built to accommodate about 40 students. Thirty-three young women were in residence in 1910, and a neighbouring property was purchased in 1915.34

As well, smaller numbers were catered for by the Society of Friends, which operated a hostel for women teachers' college students in The Glen from 1915 until it closed along with the college in the early 1930s, and by the Bishop Hadfield Hostel for men built by the Anglican Church in 1908 (in what is now Hadfield Terrace). In the Reichel–Tate survey taken in 1925, 17% of Victoria's women students and 10% of the men were living in hostels run by religious or philanthropic organisations; of the remainder, 23% and 36% were in private lodgings, the rest lived at home. What the college wanted, but couldn't afford, was a hostel of its own. Its opportunity came in 1926 with the death of William Weir, a timber merchant, bachelor and friend of Robert Stout, who left the bulk of his estate – £77,500 – to the college for a hostel for male students. A contract was let to Fletchers in 1930 for a palace on the recently acquired Kennedy estate, just north of the college across the Kelburn Cable Car track, a site endowed ‘with many fine trees’ and ‘a magnificent view of the harbour’.35 Anticipation soon turned to frustration, however. Work was already under way when the Napier earthquake struck in February 1931, and the building had to be redesigned in ferro-concrete instead of brick. Then the government reneged on the subsidy payable on the bequest. The result was one building instead of two – a separate dining block and staff quarters was abandoned – and accommodation for about 90 rather than 120 students.36 Nevertheless, the thus compromised building, designed by Gray Young & Swan in ‘English Renaissance’ style, would once be described, somewhat generously, as ‘one of the finest structures to catch the eye of the traveller sailing into Lambton Harbour’.37

The governor-general planted a pohutukawa and officially opened Weir House (initially it was to have been called Weir College) on 1 March 1933. Sixty-five students took up residence that year. By 1935 there was a waiting list and senior residents had to be evicted to make room for ‘freshers’. The hostel was overseen by a committee of the Council, and a member of the teaching staff appointed as warden (the first was I.A. Henning, lecturer in modern languages, succeeded shortly by I.L.G. Sutherland). A residents' association was formed and an annual Weir magazine inaugurated. John Rankine Brown proposed the house motto: Ex contubernio robur, Strength comes from living together. Weir proceeded to acquire the reputation that is only to be expected of a residential male student hostel: for bawdry, debauchery, illicit drinking (alcohol was first allowed, at the annual house dinner, in 1950), the most offensive capping antics and an excessive devotion to rugby – as well as a fine academic record. Stimulating it no doubt was. Whether it was refining, and Weir fostered the true college spirit – was ‘the real voice, centre and leader of the Varsity’ – is another matter.38

Weir House, 1948. NPS collection, ATL F33269 1/2

Nor did it fully meet the demand for hostel accommodation. Although a second, smaller Victoria House was opened (further north on The Terrace) in 1938, a survey taken the following year indicated that the two establishments, Victoria and Weir, were catering to only half the demand: 76 respondents were living in hostels, but 78 more would have liked to.39 A joint Students' Association–Council committee was established, for the college believed it was losing students because of the accommodation problem. The lack of hostels and competition for private lodgings from teachers' college students and public servants were identified as the cause. An approach to the minister was rebuffed, however, and a proposal that the college lease nearby houses apparently not pursued. An attempt to purchase Antrim House in Boulcott Street for a women's hostel also failed, as did a hopeful suggestion that the government pay up the subsidy on the Weir bequest as a jubilee-year gesture.

Capping, rather than public lectures or conversazione, represented the college's closest encounter with the city. ‘Diploma Day’ was held in late June until the 1920s, then (after the change from two to three terms) in May, the mid-winter timing evidently due to the wait for exam results which were shipped from England. The formal graduation ceremony in the Town Hall in the afternoon was followed by the students' carnival and dance, while the undergraduates had a supper in the college gym. From 1910 the day began with the midday procession of graduands and students from the college via Courtenay Place to Post Office Square in Customhouse Quay.

The tradition of ‘procesh’ was already established by Canterbury and Auckland students, who had themselves copied it from the University of Sydney. The graduation ceremony too was essentially the same at Victoria as it was at the other New Zealand colleges and at universities overseas (‘capping’ is a Scottish term). In its structure and spatial arrangement, it has been observed, the capping ceremony ‘bears a close resemblance to … both a Royal investiture in England and a head-hunting ritual in Borneo’.40 Organised disruption by the undergraduates was an integral part of the occasion. Heckling, chanting (the soft Scottish burr of John Rankine Brown was easily drowned out by a vigorous rendition of ‘John Brown's Body’), mass rustling of newspapers, musical instruments, car horns, even, on one occasion, a dead chicken were employed. While the women graduates received bouquets from flower girls after receiving their degrees, the men were presented with bunches of ‘cauliflowers and other products of the garden’.41 These undergraduate antics produced periodic threats from the chancellor to abandon the proceedings, and it was after one particularly trying experience in 1913 that the conduct of the ceremony was handed over from the University of New Zealand to the colleges.42 A suggestion made in 1923 to shorten the formal proceedings and leave the hall to the students to stage their own mock ceremony afterwards rather missed the point. When the event was moved, as an experiment, to the smaller venue of the college library in 1927, Spike vigorously protested at the undergraduates' exclusion. None was held at all the following year.

In the capping carnival, held at first in the Sydney Street Schoolroom and later the Town Hall Concert Chamber, the students gently lampooned the college and their professors in a collection of musical items and a revue. Carnival became the Extravaganza after a hiatus during the First World War, and the Students' Association dance the Capping Ball. As the productions became larger and more elaborate, so did the logistics of the event. Debate raged in the early 1920s – should it be professionally managed from outside or remain an amateur, in-house affair? – and there were no Extravaganzas at all between 1925 and 1928. By the 1930s Diploma Day had grown to capping week, and the Extrav played to packed houses over several nights. The male ballet was the staple curtain-raiser to an elaborate satirical revue involving large choruses, extravagant costumes, Gilbert and Sullivan tunes, and a mix of bawdy humour and irreverent debunking of local and national figures of authority, rather than a domestic comedy of the college and profs. The

Graduation, c.1950. ATL PA coll 5389

Extrav cross-dressers, 1935 capping revue was a feature of other colleges' graduation too, but in the 1930s and 1940s Victoria's excelled. They were very popular and, on the whole, indulgently reviewed in the local papers. They were also predominantly male productions. When Brown addressed the undergraduates' supper in 1936, he dared to suggest that the women students should play a more prominent role in capping week activities – ‘I know it was meant to be grotesque,’ he observed of procesh that year, ‘but you can get that by contrasting beauty with ugliness’ – at which point he ‘was loudly counted out from the back of the hall’.43

‘Pleas … sometimes received by newspapers for the suppression of the college students’ annual extravaganza,' commented the Evening Post in 1938, were unlikely to succeed ‘so long as the “extrav.” does not exceed the bounds of commonly-accepted decency’.44 It was procesh that was more likely to do so. Like Extrav, procesh was a popular spectacle: crowds lined the streets to watch the students' floats go past and filled Post Office Square to hear satirical speeches. The essential elements of the procession were topical satire, drunkenness, transvestism, the exchange of missiles with onlookers (from flour bombs to sausage strings), and displays on sexual and scatological themes. In 1921 a young spectator received a broken collar bone, the college Council three letters of complaint and a bill for damages from the Grand Hotel. Procession was banned by the Professorial Board in 1923 and 1924; one student was suspended in 1925 for his impersonation of the governor-general; it was banned again in 1927 and 1928, and revived on a guarantee from the Students' Association executive of good behaviour. In 1931 it was the executive who reprimanded the students responsible for an unauthorised float which, it conceded to the Professorial Board, was ‘in bad taste’. The commissioner of police embargoed the event in the early 1930s, but after a brief reappearance it was banned again, indefinitely, by the Professorial Board in 1936, and the Haeremai Club fined £5. A float based on the advertising slogan for a brand of petrol, ‘Flat out on Ethyl’ – ‘a piece of blatant and pointless vulgarity’, the Dominion opined – caused a public outcry. (The Dominion, however, counselled self-government and the cultivation of good manners by the students rather than punishment.)45 Student morals were giving particular cause for alarm this year, it seems. After Victoria had hosted the 1936 Easter Tournament, the Professorial Board reaffirmed its ban on alcohol at student dances and appointed a ‘commissionaire’ (or proctor) to patrol the campus after such functions, ‘and pay particular attention to what goes on in motor-cars parked in the college grounds’.46

In a sober article on this subject in Spike in 1937 the relationship between ‘Town and gown’, city and college, was described as ‘almost a tradition of mutual resentment’, for which fault was found on both sides: in the intolerance of the town and the impertinence of the students. The writer looked back to the von Zedlitz affair of 1915, but referred particularly to the 1930s, a decade when the normal ‘frivolity and moral turpitude of students’ was compounded by a heightened

Procesh on Lambton Quay, 1920s. S.C. Smith collection, ATL G48201 1/2 political climate to alarm both college and public authorities.47

In the early 1930s the conviction that the nation's university and teachers' colleges had become breeding grounds of sedition gripped the popular imagination, or at least the imagination of those who read the popular press. Truth discovered ‘Hotbeds of Revolution’, ‘sneers, jeers, bellicose blasphemies, red rantings and sex-saturated sophistries’.48 Student publications were censored at each of the university colleges, more often for moral than political transgressions. Beaglehole lost his job and a professorship. Academic freedom seemed a fragile thing.

The scene had been rehearsed in Wellington a decade earlier. In 1921 a young teachers' college student named Hedwig (Hetty) Weitzel, a founding member of the New Zealand Communist Party, and a graduate the previous year of Victoria, was convicted of selling seditious literature to an undercover policeman. A number of teachers' college and some university students (mostly law students) attended the court, and some contributed towards a collection to pay her fine. An inquiry was held, Weitzel was suspended from the college and barred from teaching, and the minister of education (C.J. Parr) then turned his attention to seeking out revolutionary influences at Victoria, about which he aired his suspicions in a public statement. ‘Victoria College sadly needs purging of a Red Revolutionary and Disloyalist Section,’ the New Zealand Free Lance reported.49 On the Professorial Board the professors of physics (Marsden) and commerce (Murphy) put a motion denying Weitzel use of the college letter rack.

At the behest of the minister of education the Council launched an inquiry, which was conducted by its chairman, Phineas Levi, after the minister declined an invitation to participate. He concluded that there was no evidence that Weitzel had acquired her political views at the college, nor had she disseminated them. She had not been a member of the Debating Society or the Free Discussions Club, whose activities over the last six years he had surveyed. Debates on political subjects (‘That only Socialism will solve the problems of poverty and social and industrial unrest’, or ‘That it is the People's Duty to uphold the cause of the conscientious objector’) ‘appear to have been carried on in a decorous fashion’, while the Free Discussions Club had discussed mostly moral, social and religious topics, which ranged from ‘The historicity of Jesus’ and ‘Eugenics’ to ‘Imperialism’ and ‘The part of Women in Modern Progress’. The Council accepted his report and its affirmation that the students should be free to conduct and to choose the subjects of their own debates. The development of radical tendencies among a minority of student minds, he even went so far as to say, was not only not harmful, but proof of the intellectual vitality of the institution.50

The governor-general was not so easily reassured, and declined to accept his customary role as patron of the Debating Society in 1922; the vice-regal patronage was not reinstated until 1925. Regardless, in these years the society flourished, with a series of popular, controversial debates which attracted the occasional alarmed attention of members of Parliament – visitors crowded the gymnasium, and a separate visitors' ballot was instituted – and were crowned by a visit from the Oxford Union team in 1925. Meanwhile, the Free Discussions Club invited the likes of Harry Holland, Walter Nash and Elsdon Best to their smaller but no less lively meetings. An attempt by conservative members of the student body in 1925 to publicly discredit the Debating Society failed – although it went on to suffer a decline from more natural causes at the end of the 1920s.

A decade after the Weitzel affair, another inquiry was held into the extra-curricular political and intellectual activities of Victoria's students. But now the principle and practice of freedom of speech, the freedom to inquire and to criticise, were more complicated matters. In 1932 the Professorial Board informed the Free Discussions Club that persons ‘who are known to advocate physical violence as a means of changing the social order’ should not be invited to address student clubs, and the Council decreed that outside speakers must be vetted in advance by the Board (a condition that was not removed until 1946).51 This was only the prelude to the commotion of the following year. In April the Debating Society, following the example of the Oxford Union, passed the motion ‘that this House will not fight for King and Country’. In May Student appeared, a poorly cyclostyled, militantly left-wing fortnightly review issued by the Free Discussions Club, which renounced its earlier incarnation as ‘a place devoted to the polite discussion of such daring topics as Humanism, Psycho-Analysis and Sex’ and declared its commitment to ‘militant organisation’.52 The editor, Bart Fortune, was a struggling arts student who left university soon after this for health and financial reasons and ‘to get down to working class level’.53 After two numbers Student was banned by the Students' Association executive. When the club defiantly issued a third, it was disaffiliated from the Association and the editor (Gordon Watson) reprimanded by the Professorial Board.

The matter was discussed by the Council, and the Board's action approved (with two dissensions). And there it might have rested had it not come to the

Truth exposed by procesh. Evening Post collection, ATL G164 1/2 attention of Truth, the New Zealand Welfare League and Canon Percival James. Truth, a newspaper given to sensationalism, fulminated about ‘Twisted teaching’. Canon James and the Welfare League wrote letters to the papers accusing the college of exposing young minds to communist and other influences subversive of religion, morality and patriotism. Taking this as a direct accusation against the teaching staff, Hunter initiated an inquiry, entrusted to a special committee of the Council, which concluded ‘that there is no evidence in any way reflecting upon the teaching staff of the College, and … that they deserve the entire confidence of the Council’. The Professorial Board, directed to investigate the general conduct of the students, found, again, no cause for alarm. ‘Where there is no ferment there is no life,’ W.H. Gould, chairman of the Board, concluded its report. A ‘University ceases to be a University if it fails to provide for that clash of mind with mind out of which character and conviction emerge’. These statements were omitted from the amended, rather more conciliatory version of the report issued publicly by the Council.54

Then came the banning of Spike. When the 1933 issue appeared in September, in the midst of these flurries, ‘strong exception’ to certain articles was taken by a member of the Council, Justice Ostler (who, it might be noted, had been one of the founding editors of the magazine in 1902).55 The magazine was withdrawn on the direction of the Professorial Board and later reissued with three offending items removed. Two (unsigned) were deemed to be ‘capable of a seditious interpretation’.56 The other was a trenchant attack on the teaching of law in the university. Entitled ‘Untwisted teaching’, it began with the observation, ‘It is surely in witless jest that Victoria was once called “The Law College”’, and proceeded to condemn the law faculty as out of touch with modern, sociological approaches to the subject.57 Professor Adamson was not amused. The author of the article and editor of Spike, I.D. Campbell – a future professor of law and deputy vice-chancellor of the university – persuaded the Board that he was unaware of any seditious implications in the first two items and (disingenuously) that he had intended his critique to refer to the university generally and not to Victoria's law faculty especially, but they were suppressed nevertheless.58

As this tense decade proceeded and war approached, student life at Victoria continued to register the political currents of the world outside. Although the Free Discussions Club died in 1937 (at one of its last, memorable meetings the German consul walked out of a discussion of ‘Germany under Hitler’ before an audience of 130), the Debating Society became increasingly political and the Student Christian Movement (successor of the Christian Union) nurtured a lively left-wing fringe. A Labour Club, founded in 1934, inaugurated the VUC No More War Movement (stimulated by a lecture by A.D. Monro of the Chemistry Department on modern chemical warfare). Yet, when the New Zealand University Students' Association conducted a ‘Peace or War?’ ballot in 1935, the local press was pleased to be able to report the result ‘remarkable in so far as it clearly demonstrates the fact that the true opinions of Victoria College as a whole are not those that are thrust before the public by certain sections of the students themselves

and by the outsiders who believe that the University is a hotbed of Socialism. Only 22.1 per cent. of the voters believe that the overthrow of Capitalism offers hope of permanent peace’; a ‘large majority’ (65.4%) professed more confidence in ‘the general acceptance of Christian doctrines as explained in the Sermon on the Mount’.59

Spike had become an annual in 1931 and, the controversy of 1933 notwithstanding, more a literary than a critical review. It was complemented now by Smad, which was launched in August 1930 and published at first six times a year, its name an acronym of the college motto, its aim to be ‘a University publication, devoted to the everyday life that we all know’.60 In 1935 Smad evolved into a weekly newspaper, and briefly assumed a more critical and outward-looking editorial policy, but by 1937 it had returned, fatally, to its more humble original purpose of reporting purely college news. It was superseded in 1938 by Salient, a paper which more accurately expressed the intellectual temper of its time, and endured. Salient aimed to be sharper than Spike: not a ‘free lance’ but ‘the swift satiric point/To smart the sluggard mind awake’.61 The ‘spirit of the times demanded that any suggestion of Olympic grandeur or academic isolation from the affairs of the world should be dropped and should be replaced by a policy which aims firstly to link the University more closely to the realities of the world’, declared the founding editor, A.H. (Bonk) Scotney, true to the Popular Front spirit of the late 1930s. In contrast to its predecessor, it would ‘comment upon rather than report in narrative style the activities of the College Clubs’.62Salient continued through the 1940s to be energetically, but not humourlessly, anti-fascist and left-wing: in 1947 a prize was offered ‘to anybody submitting for the next issue an article which does not include the letter “f” (or “F”), as this letter on our typewriter has had it’.63

A.H. (Bonk) Scotney, first editor of Salient (at the 50th anniversary reunion, 1988). Salient

Other expressions of Popular Front ideology appeared at Victoria University College in the late 1930s. Mass Observation, for example, a proto-social science research movement founded in Britain, had its adherents in a short-lived Group Observation Fellowship of New Zealand in 1939. This was the initiative of a lecturer in zoology, C.E. Palmer, and a philosophy graduate, A.G. Bagnall (a disappointed candidate for the lectureship given to L.G. Hearnshaw in 1938, and later Alexander Turnbull chief librarian).64 Extravaganzas also developed a more biting political edge in these years, notably those which came from the pen of Ron Meek, a law and economics student and dedicated Marxist (later a distinguished political economist at Glasgow and Leicester), who was responsible for most and the best of the main Extrav items between 1936 and 1946, as well as memorable Tramping Club songs.65 His satirical takes on the Labour government and national and international affairs featured such easily recognisable characters as Mickey the Super Savage, Stanley Sausage and Oliver Mash, the Bobadolf (Tomorrow magazine's caricature of Robert Semple), Jonnalio, Scrimguerilla and, closer to home, Dr Weevilbole. The normal rules applied: capping was licensed disrespect, even if the author's laboured programme notes suggested his more serious political purpose. But occasionally offence was taken. A scene in 1939's The Vikings, in which Nev, ‘an ancient British merchant’, offered to sell Hit a length of red, white and blue cloth, provoked ‘certain reactions of a hysterical or even pathological jingoism expressed in a certain quarter’: some members of the audiences walked out, and ‘the attorney general put up a hell of a stink about the whole thing’.66 In 1941 the original script (by John McCreary) of a show featuring John A. Lee as Jonnalio in an adaptation of Pinocchio and The Ascent of F6 was withdrawn by the Students' Association executive on legal advice that it would breach wartime emergency regulations. A replacement was hastily prepared. Even the college Dramatic Society ventured beyond its standard repertory fare. There was a celebrated production of Clifford Odets' anti-fascist play Till the Day I Die, a staple of 1930s left theatre, in 1937; the following year there was ‘an evening devoted to Spain’ with a screening of Defence of Madrid and an address by W.B. Sutch. A wartime performance of Where's That Bomb? was interrupted by an air-raid warning.

In 1941 the Students' Association issued a manifesto (strikingly produced for it by the Caxton Press) declaring its commitment to the common struggle for democracy, and distancing itself from its earlier pacifist tendencies and its popular repute. ‘A spectre is haunting New Zealand,’ it began, ‘– the spectre of the University Red. He is unpatriotic and addicted to foreign philosophies; his attitude to political and social problems is irresponsible and immature; he is defeatist and unwilling to defend his country against aggression.’ It concluded with the resolution, ratified by a special general meeting: ‘we, the students of Victoria College University [sic], deplore the slanders which have from time to time been brought against us, and pledge ourselves to maintain those principles of freedom for which British, Soviet, and allied youth are giving their lives.’67 In 1941 it was easier to be on the left and on side with respectable opinion.

Student concerns were not all political. In the 1940s the Students' Association concerned itself with the salaries of demonstrators, with curricula reform and faculty committees, with restoration of the gymnasium and fundraising for a new one, and with an innovative student health scheme. In 1943 a general meeting of the Association voted in favour of a medical scheme, and with the approval of the Council a trial was conducted the following year. Voluntary examinations, in which 331 students (about a third) participated, were carried out during the winter term. The medical examiner judged it a successful experiment in preventive medicine. About 80% of the students showed average or excellent health; others were given advice, or directed to their general practitioner or a specialist for treatment. (‘The women in general were of a higher physical standard than the men’, with the exception of the incidence of thyroid enlargement. Other observations included the ‘large number of students who had had “nervous symptoms”’, clearly due to the ‘high tension of University life’, and 45 cases of flat feet.)68 The students voted overwhelmingly in favour of a compulsory scheme, and a joint student/Council committee was appointed to investigate. Other university colleges expressed interest, and the Council offered up to £300 and the Students' Association to increase its fee to contribute its share of the cost. All was abandoned, however, when it was discovered that the Council could not legally spend its money for this purpose. A student health scheme was not to be established at Victoria for another 20 years.

The college, it has been said, was a more serious place after the war, partly perhaps because of the high proportion of older, ex-servicemen students (who also gave a temporary boost to college sport). But capping was still capping. In 1946 Froggy de la Mare was moved to complain about ‘grossly indecent’ material in Cappicade, the capping magazine; the next year the Professorial Board declared Cappicade ‘unworthy of the College’ and insisted that all student publications bear the name of the Students' Association and not just Victoria University College.69 The late 1940s also saw a series of highly publicised incidents which revived, in a time of growing Cold War paranoia, the spectre of the university red. A Socialist Club, formed in 1946 ‘for the purpose of uniting all politically conscious students in their advance to Socialism’, laid claim to Victoria's radical tradition and introduced a new means of its expression: the demonstration. There was an unauthorised march against the Dutch presence in Indonesia in 1947 – a permit had not been obtained from the City Council, but the students were acquitted in court and the Council's by-law declared ultra vires – and equally controversial anti-conscription marches in 1948 and 1949. The former was also the year of the so-called Gottwald telegram incident – although it was hardly an incident at all – which involved a telegram (which was never sent) congratulating Klement Gottwald on the triumph of Czechoslovakian ‘democracy’ following the communists' coup. It had been a flippant motion passed by the Students' Association executive, but resulted in the dismissal of the executive and a vituperative anti-left campaign by a conservative element that had already attempted, unsuccessfully, to have the Socialist Club disaffiliated.

On the Hunter steps in the 1950s. M.D. King photo

Victoria also flew its political colours on the national student stage: it passed the reddest resolutions at the national students' association's biannual councils, and founded the Curious Cove Congress. At this annual talkfest-cum-summer camp, held at a former Second World War convalescent camp in Queen Charlotte Sound (the first in 1949 organised by Victoria Students' Association president Harry Dowrick), like-minded students and university staff and invited public figures debated the important topics of the day. Resolutions passed at Congress were not normally ratified by the NZUSA Council. (After the second Congress, Otago delegates to Easter Council had the timing changed to February so that it would not be so dominated by ‘Arts students from Vic- toriaVictoria’.)70 By the end of the decade the dominance of the left as the organised political voice of Victoria's students was challenged by the establishment of the Charter Society late in 1948, and the brief appearance of its journal, Charta – but this was to be a passing phenomenon, gone by 1952.71

Cappicade, 1948

However accurate a description Picken's ‘happy and well-bred family’ might have been of college life in its early years, it was clearly not so now. Size alone was the major factor. Spike had worried periodically about the disappearance of the ‘corporate whole’; anticipated, in 1909, the sad day when ‘students will be split into groups according to their sympathies and faculties’. It lamented that year that only a fourth of the students attended the occasional social functions organised by the Students' Association ‘to bring students together’, ‘and it is ever the same fourth’.72 Victoria's roll in 1909 was around 400. In Beaglehole's view, this was the ideal number to make a ‘college’.

The political organisation of student affairs became more complex as their numbers grew. The democratic election of an executive at the annual general meeting became problematic when students numbered several hundred. In 1931 a system involving a college of electors, with voting by clubs rather than individuals, was accepted by the executive but rejected by the larger student body after a series of stormy meetings. The system, it was particularly noted, would have severely disadvantaged women students – giving them three votes to the men's 31. Instead a general ballot over several days was instituted. First-year students, however, were not enfranchised until 1946, which was a year of sustained controversy in Association affairs. Even more so was 1948, the year of the Gottwald telegram, in which four general meetings were held and four executives elected.

And there was the rest of the student body, uninvolved, perhaps uninterested, in these goings-on. In 1931 Smad enjoyed a circulation of 500; the students numbered 800. In 1948 Salient had a circulation of 800 while the college roll was 2400.73 Neither the readers nor the non-readers were likely to have described themselves as a cosy band of ‘wayfarers together’.

[five] The whole ramshackle machine

THE COLLEGE'S FIFTIETH jubilee is an arbitrary place to pause in its story – although it offered, irresistibly, an occasion for celebrating and recording it so far. There were, nevertheless, several significant moments in the years around 1949: the half-century is not an entirely fictitious narrative device. There was the retirement of Tommy Hunter, ‘the very essence of’ Victoria, in 1951, and his replacement by a man of quite different temper.1 In 1949 the college acquired 13 more acres, twice its original site. Its occupation of this enlarged estate was, however, to be a prolonged and sometimes controversial process. The first year of Victoria's second half-century was also the first year of operation of the new quinquennial system of university funding, negotiated by the grants committee established by the university Senate in 1948. This new regime brought a more adequate level of government funding (albeit, in the eyes of the universities, never enough), and a new order of planning, both economic and academic. It was one step as well in the slow process, already under way, of devolution, which culminated in the colleges acquiring the status of universities, firstly in name (in 1957) and then in fact (in 1962).

For its second principal, and in due course first ‘vice-chancellor’, Victoria appointed one of its own: James Williams, professor of English and New Zealand law for 26 years, save for a brief absence (in 1942–46) as Challis professor of law at the University of Sydney. (Williams also had a particular family connection with Victoria: his father-in-law was Hubert Ostler, a Council member and one of the founding editors of Spike.) As a teacher, he had impressed as a tutor rather than a lecturer; as a scholar, as the author of a standard work on the statute of frauds and a revised edition of Salmond's Torts. As principal, Williams was to earn a mixed reputation as an efficient, hard-working but tough-minded administrator. The citation for his honorary degree bestowed after he retired at the end of 1967 mentioned his ‘earthy cooperativeness among academics and laymen alike’, and his being ‘always in the thick of the fray’.2 His was not the amiable personality of Hunter. He did, however, share his predecessor's passion for rugby.

The college had also recently acquired a new registrar. In 1949 George Robison was succeeded by L.O. Desborough, a Victoria commerce graduate and registrar at Auckland University College for the last 11 years, who was to stay at Victoria for 24. At some point a personal and irrevocable enmity developed between Williams and Desborough, prompting Williams to move his office to another floor of the administration building. That its vice-chancellor and registrar did not speak was only one of the peculiarities of Victoria's administrative arrangements. Williams was to enjoy a much closer relationship with his assistant principal, war hero and energetic manager of the university's postwar building programme, George Culliford. Some things, however, did not change. Duncan Stout, the college's longest-serving Council member – ‘almost an embodiment of our tradition,’ a later chancellor observed – was still there.3 With the exception of a period of war service, he remained chairman of the Council of the university his father had founded from 1939 until 1966.

The question of separation which had occupied university reformers and royal commissioners in the 1920s had also not gone away. By the 1950s it was no longer an ideal but a prospect, due not so much to the campaign of a reforming party as, simply, to the growth and growing complexity of the system itself. In 1946 the Academic Board had recommended to the Senate that ‘serious consideration’ be given to the creation of independent universities in the near-ish future.4 On the Senate, de la Mare moved a motion for dissolution of the University of New Zealand forthwith but failed to find a seconder. The Senate responded with

Jim Williams, vice-chancellor and principal, 1951–67

The 1933 Students' Association executive included a future registrar, L.O. Desborough (back left), founding editor of Salient A.H. (Bonk) Scotney (front, second from right), and a future councillor and chief justice, Richard Wild (back, second from right). VUWSA

characteristic caution as the Academic Board proceeded to draw up detailed proposals for a period of transition to independence. By 1954, under the University of New Zealand Act, it was prepared to delegate power to approve course regulations to a new Curriculum Committee, and power to prescribe courses and subjects to individual college councils. By late 1955 the university's vice-chancellor was describing autonomy ‘within a comparatively short space of time’ as an ‘underlying assumption’.5

The much longer-held assumption that the colleges were indeed the true universities was recognised two years later in legislation which made them such in name. A formality this may have been, but at Victoria it was a matter of some debate. In 1955 the Professorial Board had voted, on a recommendation from the Committee of the Principal and Deans, that the college should be renamed the University of Wellington. The Council was divided, and a poll of students and the Court of Convocation was taken. The result was a compromise: the Victoria University of Wellington. It was not an entirely happy one, as evidenced by the occasional use of ‘the University of Wellington’ in its publications over the following few years and the persistent efforts of one councillor in particular (Owen Conibear) to have Victoria officially removed, and by the periodic revival of the debate in later times.6 Williams declared himself to be neutral, but lamented that ‘college songs will never be the same’ (it being harder to find a rhyme with ‘w’ than with ‘c’).7 The Victoria University of Wellington Amendment Act, passed in October 1957, also renamed the chairman of the Council the chancellor, his deputy the pro-chancellor, and the academic head of the university the vice-chancellor – although in practice Williams used the title ‘vice-chancellor and principal’.

Independence proper waited for another commission of inquiry. When the government announced in 1958 its intention to appoint a royal commission on education, the universities asked for a separate commission on themselves, in view of an anticipated doubling of university rolls in the next decade and of the recently reported committee on university education in Australia. The three-person Committee on New Zealand Universities was chaired by David Hughes Parry, an emeritus professor of law of the University of London; it began its work in September 1959, received 138 submissions and reported on 8 December.8 That its recommendations, which involved a substantial increase in university funding from the government, were accepted with alacrity and implemented with reasonable speed, in marked contrast to the fate of its predecessors, had more to do with its context than its particular persuasiveness. Universities, the need for them and the needs of them, were in the air. They were sprouting like mushrooms. The two decades after 1945 saw a tertiary education boom, a product of the postwar economic, technological and baby booms. In Australia, which had six universities before the Second World War, seven more were established between 1945 and 1964; nine new universities were founded in the United Kingdom in this period, and Britain too was about to appoint a committee on higher education. The tone of the Hughes Parry report was imperative: New Zealand's understaffed and underfunded universities must be equipped for the postwar world. Its premise, as of the Murray report in Australia, was that the economy and society needed more graduates, urgently. Graduates, Victoria's submission argued, were ‘one of the most valuable forms of the nation's capital’. It defined the first function of the university

The chancellor's farewell cake. M.D. King photo as training professional experts, then research, the conservation and transmission of knowledge, and the provision of advisory services to public authorities.9

The most pressing of the multitude of problems which the universities represented to the committee were salaries and buildings. Both the number of academic staff leaving for positions overseas and the difficulty of attracting overseas academics here had been worrying since the late 1940s, and the situation was getting worse. It was ‘scarcely possible to exaggerate the gravity of the problem’, Victoria reported, noting a conspicuous falling off in both the number and quality of applicants for positions in 1958: ‘for all practical purposes overseas interest in our positions has been virtually non-existent during this year’. It calculated the rate of ‘wastage’ – the loss of staff through resignation, retirement and death – as 63.5% over the past five years. Of Victoria's first-class honours graduates between 1950 and 1957, only 11 had gone to positions in New Zealand universities while 17 were overseas and 32 had gone into the government service (only five as school teachers). As a career choice for their own graduates, clearly New Zealand universities were neither internationally nor nationally competitive.10

The committee agreed, and recommended increased grants for staffing and salaries, improved bursary and scholarship provision (to overcome the pernicious habit of part-time study, on which it fully concurred with Reichel and Tate), more money for research and libraries, and an accelerated building programme. On the subject of autonomy, as J.C. Beaglehole observed, ‘there was nothing for this committee to do but to agree with everybody else’.11 The University of New Zealand was duly dissolved on 1 January 1962, and the same day four independent universities came into being (along with two university colleges of agriculture), each under its own act of Parliament. The reform of ‘the whole ramshackle machine’12 of university government did not entirely dispose of a central infrastructure, however: a Universities Entrance Board, a permanent Curriculum Committee, and a new University Grants Committee (an unnecessary encumbrance, in Williams' view) were created.13 Beaglehole, who had thoroughly damned the University of New Zealand system in his 1937 history of it, and again in his jubilee history of Victoria in 1949, farewelled ‘our too-aged academic relative … superfluous, useless’ without regret.14

The growth that characterised the 1959s through to the late '60s was both real and imagined. This was, one could say, a bullish period in the university's history. The immediate postwar surge in student numbers had peaked in 1948, and nationally did not pick up until 1957, but then did so sharply. Victoria's roll had fallen from approaching 2500 to just over 2000 by 1952, then began to rise, at first slowly, then with gathering speed. It increased by 1000 in the first half of the 1960s and reached nearly 5500 by the end of the decade. Full-time students increased disproportionately, outnumbering part-time students for the first time in 1962. By 1968, two-thirds of Victoria's students were studying fulltime, where only a quarter had been in 1949. With this came the final ascendancy of day teaching. The decisive moment was the introduction of a new arts timetable in 1961 that allowed full-time students to take all of the classes for their degree in daytime hours. (Encouraging and meeting the needs of full-time students was one motivation; another was the growing problem of scheduling large classes when there were only two lecture theatres that held more than 200 students, and three hours – 9–10am and 4–6pm – available.) The pugnacious councillor Conibear was incensed when the student newspaper Salient referred to Victoria by its historic epithet as a ‘glorified nightschool’.

The number of academic staff more than quadrupled over this period: there were 78 in 1948, approaching 400 by the early 1970s. It was perhaps a sign of the growing size of the academic community that the Lecturers' Association proposed in 1964 that a file of staff photographs be kept in the Staff Common Room. There were 20 departments in 1950; 30 in 1970. More spectacularly, the range of courses taught doubled in the 1960s, partly because of the universities' newly acquired autonomy, partly because of the expansion and diversification of the business of knowledge: ‘Themes that are virtually entirely new in our generation (such as computer science) must now be included in any adequate programme of university education.’15 University Grants Committee strategies to encourage advanced study contributed to a ‘spectacular increase’ nationally in numbers of postgraduate students – who were 10% of Victoria's roll by the beginning of the 1970s.16 There was growth of more material kinds too. Victoria fared well (at first) in the national university building programme instituted in the 1950s. Its annual income grew from just under £100,000 in 1948 to £1.3 million in 1966, the year before the change to decimal currency, devaluation and the onset of significant inflation rendered such comparisons more complicated and the economic climate for the universities less secure.

In staffing, comparability with British provincial universities was aimed for. On this basis a target staff:student ratio of 1:14 in arts and general faculties was set in 1949 for the first quinquennium. Improvement was slower than desired. At Victoria the ratio was a disappointing 1:19 in 1959, but improved to an admirable 1:13.5 by the mid–1960s (before beginning to worsen again). For salaries, parity with Australian universities was sought. A general academic salary scale for all the colleges had been introduced in 1945. The first grants committee could secure only a niggardly improvement in 1949 but a 30% increase in 1951, and a new salary scale was the first recommendation of the Hughes Parry report to be implemented in April 1960. The recruitment crisis persisted through the 1960s nevertheless. Professors combined refresher leave with talent scouting. New Zealand's disadvantage was not only in salaries, as Ian Gordon reported to Williams: ‘The young Englishmen (or rather their wives) don't want to leave England, & all my good graduates of the last 10 years are very comfortably placed in either Oxford or Cambridge & don't want to leave either. All they talk about is food & drink & the next trip to Europe – I believe it is that rather than staff/student ratios that makes recruiting difficult’; while at Edinburgh, ‘They have a quite marvellous staff club right in the middle of the university area, full lunch & dinner menus, fifteen different types of whisky in the bar, billiards, snooker, squash … I gather that Edinburgh finds this is the easiest way to keep staff.’17 ‘The University's difficulties in filling positions are well enough known not to require setting out in this submission,’ Victoria reported frankly to the grants committee in 1968.18 It also warned, as it had in its submission to the Hughes Parry committee 10 years earlier, about the danger of succumbing to the temptation to recruit substandard staff. (Inevitably, some mistakes were made. Gordon's own department, for example, acquired an irredeemably racist and misogynist lecturer from South Africa, who expelled women wearing trousers from his classes; to general relief he stayed only 18 months.) Even the cost and effectiveness of advertising for staff was a concern in this expansionist period.

The new University Grants Committee retained the five-yearly funding system devised by its predecessor. Each university presented a quinquennial submission setting out its financial needs and planned academic developments, and the committee negotiated five years' worth of grants from the government. The system had introduced a measure not only of economic security and autonomy, but of forward planning. Gone was the era of ad hoc delegations to the minister (although not of inter-college rivalry). It was based on projected enrolments, which were in turn based on Department of Education forecasts of school rolls. It did not take into account other factors that might influence the propensity of eligible school leavers to enter the halls of academe, such as the state of the national economy and therefore the job market. Forecasting five years ahead, let alone 20, proved to be a treacherous business. The accelerated growth from 1957 took the system by surprise.

Enrolment projection, 1963 A Victoria newsletter that year observed, with amusement, that the newly established Student Union Planning Committee had predicted in 1935 (after consultation with the Department of Statistics) that in 50 years the college roll would have doubled to 1500.19 By 1962, with 3600 students, Victoria was anticipating a roll of 10,000 by 1985. This figure, inflated, it would turn out, formed the basis of the university's planning – the ‘10,000 plan’ – until the mid–1970s.

A consistent theme of Victoria's quinquennial submissions until the end of the 1960s was an old refrain: its lack of special schools. It must, in the vice-chancellor's words, develop ‘from what has sometimes been called an overgrown liberal arts college into a true university with an appropriate range of general, professional and postgraduate studies’.20 Victoria suffered from ‘a case of arrested development’. British universities of comparable size had no fewer than three professional schools in addition to commerce and law. That Victoria had none, save for its tiny departments of public administration and social science, made it an ‘academic oddity’.21 On the basis of this model of normal university development, and the importance of integrating pure and applied scholarship – a subject on which Williams had been strongly impressed during a Carnegie-funded trip to North America in 1954 – Victoria believed it had a prior claim to any new professional developments in the university system. Williams' particular ambitions, in this postwar technological age, were in the fields of applied science and technology: engineering, architecture, veterinary science, medicine, nuclear science. This was a strikingly different idea of the university from that held by Hunter and Beaglehole at the end of the 1940s. Hunter had observed, in response to a university memorandum on new chairs in 1949, that there was ‘too much emphasis on the physical sciences, especially in their applied aspects’ (Victoria's bids were for chairs in music, philosophy, geography and Asiatic studies); Beaglehole in his preface to the jubilee history believed that it was the duty of the college now to cultivate the arts.22

The postwar reconfiguration of the university system also involved the establishment of two new university institutions, at Palmerston North and Hamilton, both of which developments were attended by controversy. The former particularly involved Victoria. It also raised an historic bone of contention, the exempted student. At the end of the 1940s still nearly a fifth of Victoria's students were studying externally, more than at any other college. The tide of academic opinion was firmly against this invidious practice both on pedagogical grounds and because of the burden it placed on university staff. It had been condemned by two royal commissions. In 1948 the Academic Board succeeded in having a statute passed which would limit external study to stage-one arts and science courses, sparking protest from the teaching profession (whose members made up the majority of external students) and a decade of debate. Four years later it adopted a report by Victoria's Professorial Board against extramural study.

By now, however, pressure was growing from teacher organisations and the Department of Education for expanded provision of university-level education for teachers and teacher trainees, of which there was a national shortage, and resentment was growing at the universities' begrudging attitude towards them. This demand was the major but not sole factor in the events leading to the establishment of a new university – Massey – at Palmerston North. Among other factors was the proposed development of a veterinary school at Massey Agricultural College, which would require that college to expand its teaching programme beyond vocational agricultural training to include pure science. There were local political considerations. Palmerston North was not the only North Island provincial centre harbouring ambitions for a university in the 1960s. Its member of Parliament was Labour's minister of education in 1957–60, and his electorate was a marginal one; the member for Manawatu was National's from 1960 to 1964. With frightening projections being made of future university rolls, new provincial colleges were planned as ‘safety valves’ to relieve overcrowded Auckland and Victoria of a substantial amount of junior and non-specialised work.

In the mid–1950s Victoria, although reluctant at first, had acceded to the Department of Education's request that it provide teaching at Palmerston North in stage-one English, education and history. A teachers' college was opened in Palmerston North in 1956, and Victoria given resources to enable staff of those departments to be employed or to visit there regularly. That same year the Academic Board, on a motion of its two Victoria members, opposed a proposal that Massey enter into a liaison with the new teachers' college to develop pure science courses. A degree of suspicion on Victoria's part to the perceived ambitions of Massey is an underlying thread in this story. So is the continued opposition of academics, including most of Victoria's staff, to extramural study. When Victoria was asked at the end of 1956 to extend its service at Palmerston North to include geography, the Professorial Board suggested that the Council instead consider establishing a branch of Victoria there on an internal basis: ‘There was, however, some concern at this proposal among the academic staff outside of the Professorial Board’ and it was deferred for further consideration.23

The Academic Board maintained its philosophical opposition to extramural study, but by the late 1950s had come to accept its expediency. Under outside pressure the Senate appointed a committee, all of whose members were favourably disposed towards it: the vice-chancellor of the university, the director of education, Victoria's principal, and the professor of English, Ian Gordon. Gordon had been impressed by the distance education he had observed during wartime service in the Pacific and in postwar Japan, and his department was one of those most closely involved with external students. He himself travelled to Palmerston North regularly to teach the students there. The other was Education, whose professor, C.L. Bailey, had also become a key academic supporter of Victoria's Palmerston North work. Williams was, perhaps, open to opportunities to extend the work of his adolescent university, the only one without a professional school. This committee produced two reports, in 1957 and 1958, recommending, in brief, that a branch of Victoria be established at Palmerston North to teach a limited range of stage-one subjects internally and take national responsibility for extramural students. The Academic Board endorsed the concentration of extramural work in one centre as the best solution to a necessary evil; the Senate agreed to entrust the responsibility to Victoria (at either Wellington or Palmerston North); and the establishment of a Victoria branch at Palmerston North was publicly announced in March 1959. The city fathers made available a 30-acre site at Hokowhitu, on the city side of the Manawatu River from the agricultural college. An offer from Massey to host the new college on its own more extensive and developed grounds was declined.

Palmerston North University College, known locally as ‘the Twig’ and around Victoria as ‘PNUC’ (and referred to by a member of its own staff as ‘a fragment of a glorified night-school plus a correspondence college, the whole a monument to the ambition of Victoria’),24 opened in March 1960 with 189 students (three full time) and 562 extramural enrolments in an unfinished, prefabricated building. Victoria had found the University Grants Committee's decision not to provide a grant for long-term development of the grounds ‘very peculiar’.25 There were 10 lecturers (in English, education, history, geography and mathematics) forming a sub-faculty of Victoria's faculty of arts. The founding principal was George Culliford. He was to play a brief role in Palmerston North, staying there only a year, but a much larger one at Victoria. An English graduate of the college, his academic career had been interrupted by a more illustrious wartime one for which he was twice decorated – with the Distinguished Service Order and the Virtuti Militari of Poland, the latter for piloting an unarmed Dakota into German-occupied Poland in 1944 to retrieve parts and plans of Germany's secret V2 rocket that had been captured by the Polish underground. After postgraduate study in London he had joined the English Department at Victoria in 1950, and since 1956 been part-time assistant and ‘administrative troubleshooter’ to the principal, to which position he returned from Palmerston North in 1961. His ‘colourful Service phrases’ and similar operational approach – ‘hitting the target and leaving the opposition to pick up the pieces’ – were something of a shock to the small staff of the new college.26 Reg Tye, one of the foundation staff of PNUC, would later describe its early years as ‘a combination of “A Bridge Too Far”, Kafka's “Trial” and Fred Carno's Circus’.27

There was already an expectation that the Palmerston North branch, and Auckland's smaller one at Hamilton, would in time become autonomous universities. The Hughes Parry report, released at the beginning of 1960, questioned the wisdom of establishing branches in the first place before observing that the obvious course of events, following the dissolution of the University of New Zealand, was a merger of the Palmerston North branch and Massey Agricultural College on the Massey site, initially under the aegis of Victoria and eventually as an autonomous institution. Two single-faculty institutions in the one provincial city was both academically and economically untenable. (In fact Hunter had envisaged an eventual merger between Victoria and Massey – as ‘The University of?’ – in 1949, although Victoria had rejected a similar suggestion from the agricultural college only a few years earlier.)28 An amalgamation based on Massey was not so obvious to Jim Williams – who, it has been observed, regarded the

War hero, English lecturer and assistant principal George Culliford. M.D. King photo Palmerston North development with a proprietorial attitude that was ‘less than helpful’, despite the equivocal if not hostile feelings of (by his admission) most of his own staff.29

Through 1960 and 1961 formal and private negotiations continued between the grants committee, Victoria and Massey over the future, preferably orderly development of university education in Manawatu. Victoria had argued for the desirability of the Hokowhitu site for the branch on the grounds of its cultural value (a university should be located in the city) and its proximity to the teachers' college. But there were other concerns behind its (or at least Williams' and Culliford's) continued opposition to the amalgamation plan: a suspicion of expansionist ambitions on the part of Massey (‘a special school and no more’), a concern that ‘the concentration of advanced pure science in this district must remain in the hands of Victoria’, and a desire to protect its protégé from the designs of an assumed rival. Palmerston North University College was described by Culliford as ‘a preparatory institution … more or less along the lines of a State College in the United States’, which would not be anything more for ‘many years’; while Massey, Williams told the chairman of the grants committee, was ‘not competent to cope with the Manawatu’.30

The matter was settled in just the way the Hughes Parry report had envisaged, if more expeditiously. Palmerston North University College and Massey Agricultural College were merged to form the Massey University College of Manawatu in 1962, as a constituent college of Victoria, to become independent with the passing of the Massey University of Manawatu Act of 1964. It was located on the Massey side of the river. A farewell dinner for the Palmerston North staff in December 1962 was reportedly ‘a night of maudlin bonhomie’, at which Williams appeared ‘deeply upset’ at the outcome.31 So Victoria was relieved, sooner than anyone had anticipated, of its controversial provincial offshoot, having effected its transformation ‘from a rough paddock to an efficient, going concern’.32 Massey grew, too, more quickly and robustly than anticipated, and later developed expansionist tendencies that Victoria would justifiably regard as a threat.

The rebirth of the colleges as universities evidently prompted some thinking about identity, in more obvious forms than academic specialisation or territorial control. Inspired perhaps by the debate over the renaming of the institution, Victoria initiated the novel practice (in New Zealand universities) of naming its buildings after professors. The initial suggestion came from Ernest Beaglehole in 1958, in anticipation of the completion of a new science building, the first new university building since before the war. The Council referred the choice of names to its house and finance committee, although the Professorial Board was also to be consulted. The choice of Hunter for the original arts building may seem obvious, but the committee's first and unanimous decision was to name this building after Sir Robert Stout. (In view of the building's structural frailty it was perhaps as well that it did not.) The selection of Hunter instead entailed renaming Hunter Field – formerly Te Aro Park and now the new training ground for the university rugby club – as (just as appropriately) the Boyd Wilson Field. The administration building was named the Robert Stout building; the biology block Kirk; the brand new chemistry block was to be Easterfield.

The newly named university also embarked on a public relations programme. In October 1957 the first issue of The Middle District appeared, a 16-page ‘review of university affairs’ edited by Culliford (whose responsibilities as assistant to the principal included information). The genesis of The Middle District was in fact Williams' 1954 tour of America, where he found that one of the most important functions of university administration was the cultivation of public opinion (and raising of funds). By contrast, he told the Council on his return, ‘I think it may fairly be said that in the matter of public understanding and support Victoria University College has fared just about in proportion to the effort which it has put into explaining itself to the public.’33 In fact, a survey conducted by psychology students in 1953 found a ‘strongly favourable attitude toward the university’, a ‘markedly liberal view’ of its functions – ‘the most commonly agreed upon function is that of bestowing a generally widened outlook on life’ – and that most people thought the universities were insufficiently funded.34 A Public Relations Standing Committee was formed nevertheless, and it considered a recommendation from the principal for a publication on the theme of ‘service to the community’ to appear two or three times a year, and an internal monthly newsletter. Enthusiasm appears to have soon waned, however. There were only two issues of The Middle District, and a monthly newsletter was not inaugurated – as the University Gazette – until 1963.

Foundation Day disappeared from the university calendar after 1959. The Foundation Day lecture appears to have been only a fleeting experiment in the 1940s. In 1963 a new annual celebrity lecture series was inaugurated with a highly successful visit by the British art historian Herbert Read, and named the Chancellor's Visiting Lectureships as a compliment to Sir Duncan.35 The Chancellor's Lectures in 1964 (the first so called) were given by Sir Basil Spence, renowned then as the architect of Coventry Cathedral (only later as the creator of Wellington's Beehive). Over the years, the Chancellor's Lectures played a part in maintaining the university's profile in the city: on occasion, they captured a moment of real popular interest and debate. The visit of R.D. Laing in 1973 was one such occasion, as was that of the Czech president Vaclav Havel in the 1990s. It was also, perhaps, in consciousness of the university's new status that the Council in 1964 formed a permanent Ceremonial Committee. It decided that there should be a university mace; then on reflection it was felt that a gavel would suffice: the Wellington City Council presented one in 1965 ‘as a recognition by the City of the part played by the University in the development of Wellington’.36

The Gazette launched in June 1963, a modest, multilithed newsletter prepared by the vice-chancellor's office, was primarily for internal consumption, containing news of staff movements and summaries of Council and Professorial Board business. Not until September 1968 was a designated information officer appointed – 25 years after the suggestion had first been made on the Council. Within months, the humble Gazette had been superseded, briefly, by the Reporter, a more ambitious, newsy, larger-format university review modelled on the Oxford University gazette. It did not find favour, and after one issue a wider-ranging and twice-monthly Gazette returned. It continued until the arrival of a new information officer in 1974 and a new publicity regime. From 1974 a version of the university's annual report to Parliament was produced for popular consumption as the Vice-Chancellor's Report, and from this time too dates the still familiar weekly Staff Circular and the first incarnation of the pronunciation-challenging News VUW.

VUW was a more complex organism than VUC, as well as a more difficult one to say. When George Robison retired at the end of 1948 after 33 years as registrar he remarked on the growth of the college office in that time, from just himself and one assistant in 1916 to a staff of 12. Fifteen years later, by 1963, the administrative staff of the university numbered 86; its total non-academic staff, including the staff of the library, technicians and laboratory assistants, nearly 150. This figure had doubled in just the past three years. Unionisation was one by-product of this development. An Association of Technical Staff was founded in 1965, and in 1969 the VUW Staff Association which represented, in 1970, 148 out of 340 eligible non-academic staff.

‘There has, we feel, been a tendency to allow the administration to become the Cinderella of this university,’ the report of a committee on administration remarked in 1960. Comparative figures compiled in the early 1950s suggest that

The public office in the administration building, 1939. Evening Post collection, ATL 89921 1/2

this was so: the ratio of administrative staff to students at Victoria was 1:70; at the universities of Sydney and Melbourne it was around 1:30.37 Still, Victoria was a comparatively small and simple enterprise then. It was suggested in 1955 that a detailed administrative handbook should be produced each year for heads of departments, but it was then decided that this was unnecessary. By this year 22 staff worked in the administration building, the mansard roof of which had been converted from a caretaker's flat to offices in 1951. The central administrative establishment consisted of the registrar's office, the vice-chancellor and, from 1956, his part-time assistant (Culliford).

By 1960 attention was being focused on the administrative implications for the university of the coming new order of rampant growth and independence.38 A committee appointed to look at the administration of the arts faculty decided to broaden its brief to include the whole administrative structure. Its recommendations included recognition that ‘a Vice-Chancellor should not be his own records clerk’, and that he was ‘the academic head and chief executive officer of the University’.39 The deans too needed more secretarial support in their faculties to allow them to concentrate on policy matters through the Committee of the vice-chancellor and Deans, which Williams regarded as ‘partly of the nature of the vice-chancellor's academic cabinet’.40 Its role had expanded considerably beyond the routine business of sabbatical applications and scholarship awards that had largely occupied it a decade before. A new grade of middle-management positions below that of assistant registrar was needed to create a career path in university administration – ‘such as to attract young men’, in the vice-chancellor's words.41 In fact, Victoria's first assistant registrar, so promoted when Hunter had reorganised the growing office in 1945, was Sheila Ogilvie, who had begun her 40-year career in the college office in 1919, belying the opinion of one of her colleagues (and evidently Williams) that the university needed ‘a cadre of trained male staff, from which we may expect pro rata, much more value than female employees, and also much more continuity of service’.42

A staff handbook was also recommended, and ‘suitable office machinery’ such as ‘a well-designed punched card system’ for student records. Over the next few years these innovations were effected (although not quickly enough, the Lecturers' Association complained).43 Data processing machines were purchased, to ‘produce with great rapidity and accuracy, combinations and permutations of basic elements of information recorded on cards and fed into the machine’ (it was the dawn of the computer age).44 A faculty clerk was appointed to assist the deans of arts and science, and two more in 1964, and various secretaries. The registrar's office was enlarged with more assistant registrars (eventually seven). And a vice-chancellor's office was built up – creating what Williams' successor, and the University Grants Committee, would describe as an ‘unusual’, ‘top-heavy’ central administrative structure.45 Culliford returned from Palmerston North to become a full-time assistant to Williams on a professorial salary, retaining a seat on the Professorial Board (which he had held since 1956), with special responsibility for the university's building programme. He and Williams enjoyed a close relationship (too close, in the eyes of some): they shared a similar attitude towards strong leadership, and a passion for rugby (and gin).

Ian Campbell, who had succeeded Williams as professor of English and New Zealand law in 1951 (and had been, longer ago, the editor of the censored 1933 issue of Spike), was appointed in 1962 to a new, part-time position of deputy vice-chancellor. It soon became a full-time one, as Campbell found the combination of academic and administrative responsibility untenable – and that, given the choice, he would rather administer than teach: the ‘literature of a learned discipline cannot be read while one is studying the records of candidates competing for scholarships or attending a meeting of the Executive Committee of Council’. In so advising Williams, he discoursed on the perennial issue of academic versus lay control. Despite some risk that ‘authority in academic matters will gradually slip from the academic body’, to continue with a system of part-time professor-administrators would, he believed, be ‘doctrinaire, unrealistic and ill-advised’.46 But in 1964 another, part-time position of assistant vice-chancellor was created, to which the professor of chemistry, Stanley Slater, was appointed. Culliford's title was changed from assistant to the vice-chancellor to assistant principal ‘to recognise the importance of the work he is doing’.47

One more administrative restructuring in Williams' time, and enlargement of the vice-chancellor's department, was not the inevitable result of university growth but was precipitated by a crisis. The university accounts were in disarray.48 In 1967 the assistant registrar (finance), who in 1960 had informed the registrar that the work of the accounts section ‘has been precariously on a knife-edge’ and ‘floundering in shallow water’, was transferred ‘for health reasons’ to a new position

W.E. Dasent lecturing to Chem I. M.D. King photo (‘personal to him’) in charge of publications.49 The accounts were taken over by W.E. (Bunt) Dasent, a senior lecturer in chemistry, who had had three years' experience in an accounting firm before taking a science degree at Victoria and joining the faculty staff in 1951. He had become a part-time assistant to the vice-chancellor (in practice, to Culliford) in 1964, and was now appointed to a new full-time position of bursar.

In 1966 the venerable chancellor Duncan Stout, in his eighties and growing increasingly deaf, was eased out of office. (He retired from the Council two years later, and retains the record for longevity.) He was succeeded by the pro-chancellor, Patrick Lynch, a pathologist and expert in forensic medicine, for a two-year term. The uncontested elevation of the deputy remained the pattern for the election of Victoria's chancellor. Lynch was succeeded by R.S.V. Simpson, a lawyer with Bell Gully (a legal firm with a long and close connection with the university) who had been the first student representative on the Council in 1938; he in turn, in 1975, was succeeded by the difficult and dominating Kevin O'Brien. O'Brien, a commerce and political science graduate of the 1940s, looms considerably larger over Victoria's postwar history than 10 years as chancellor suggests. He brought a record of personal commitment to the university to rival the Stouts' – had been president of the Students' Association for a record three years, a student representative on the Council, and an elected member since 1959 – along with a mastery of meeting strategy and a ‘zest for the cut and thrust of debate’.50

The appointment of vice-chancellors tended to be more complicated. Williams retired at the end of 1967. The choice of his successor, D.B.C. (Danny) Taylor, took many in the university by surprise, simply because he was unknown to them.

Retiring chancellor Kevin O'Brien sits for his portrait (by Garth Tapper), 1984 He represented a break with a number of other traditions as well: he was an Irishman, an engineer, and he was not a rugby man. A graduate of Queen's University, Belfast, he had taught at Liverpool and Nottingham before beginning his Cambridge career as a lecturer in mechanical sciences, becoming senior tutor of Peterhouse – the position he left for Victoria – in 1965. His research interest was metallurgy. His sport was rowing: he was a member of the Ireland eight at the 1948 Olympics. He had a New Zealand connection through his marriage and a term as a visiting lecturer at the University of Canterbury in 1963. He had, on paper, probably the least administrative experience of the 14 candidates (five of them internal).51

Taylor's managerial style was in marked contrast to his predecessor's. The Professorial Board when farewelling him in 1982 appreciated his ‘cordial and egalitarian style of chairmanship’. The registrar (Dasent), with whom he worked closely and well, reflected on a style that was ‘anything but orthodox’ and to some ‘inscrutable’. A natural sociability, charm, and a democratic approach to decision-making (which some would construe as weakness) co-existed with an ‘almost paradoxical reluctance to move about in University departments and meeting places (like the Staff Club)’.52

The superstitious might have seen it as an omen that the formal function to welcome the new vice-chancellor was scheduled for the day of the storm which sank the ferry Wahine at the entrance to Wellington harbour. This is too dramatic. It is true, however, that Taylor arrived at the dawn of more difficult times for the university, a time of difficulties not (always) of its own making. Ripples from the international student unrest of the late 1960s had reached New Zealand. In the 1970s controversy over its plans to demolish the Hunter building did greater damage to Victoria's public image. For half of his vice-chancellorship the Council was led by a chancellor – O'Brien – who by his own admission could be ‘extremely short; quite violent and vulgar in comment’, and who took a more active part in the university's affairs than was customary at Victoria, and perhaps in New Zealand universities generally.53 O'Brien was a strong believer in the role of the lay members of the Council (as opposed to the academics), entrenching what some have seen as a distinctive feature of Victoria's Council.

Above all, these were difficult economic times. Williams had reigned through a period of growth. The theme of the next two decades was restraint. The neglect of the university accounts had been only a minor crisis. As the country entered its first postwar economic downturn the new minister of finance, Robert Muldoon, commented threateningly in his 1967 budget address on the upsurge in university rolls in recent years and the disproportionate amount of taxpayer money being spent on them. He returned to this theme two years later. ‘On occasion,’ the new vice-chancellor observed, perhaps with conscious understatement, a year after his arrival, ‘I have been disheartened by the noises I've picked up on the grapevine to the effect that – put most bluntly – the attitude in Government is that universities are an expensive luxury which a small country like New Zealand can ill afford.’54 The universities' response was an increased emphasis on the relevance of their business to the national interest, and a certain amount of self-scrutiny – expressed, for example, in a three-day national universities' conference initiated and hosted by Victoria in October 1969. This was an era of national conferencing: of the National Development Conference held at Victoria in 1969; an educational planning conference in 1972; a national universities' conference in 1974, at which the deteriorating relationship with the government and a corresponding emphasis on the importance of public relations were major themes. Taylor himself was of the opinion that the universities were too inclined to be defensive in the face of public criticism of their costs, the behaviour of their students and their relevance, or lack of it, from ‘those who visualised the university as a sort of service station to the community’.55

The oil-shocked, inflation-racked economy of the 1970s brought to an end the interlude of relative financial largesse ushered in by postwar prosperity and the Hughes Parry report. In 1976 a new National government dramatically cut scholarship and research grants. Additional funding given in 1978 to offset the effects of inflation was followed by further expenditure cuts at the end of that year. From the late 1970s university funding became increasingly political, and the Treasury began to assert itself. Universities did not escape the state sector-wide 3% cuts imposed at the end of 1981.

The impact of a cooler economic climate was exacerbated by, and contributed to, the unpredictability of student enrolments. In 1965 the University Grants Committee after several boom years was anticipating intensifying growth over the next five, in line with overseas trends – and still underestimated the rolls in 1969 for all the universities except Waikato and Victoria. At Victoria the slowing down of the '60s boom towards the end of the decade was thought to be due in part to the unexpectedly precocious development of the infant Massey. In fact both Victoria and Otago had (according to Culliford's calculations) attracted a diminishing share of national enrolments in the mid–1960s, while Auckland's and Canterbury's had increased.56 Then in 1971 there was a ‘sudden, unexpected rise’ of 650, twice that of the previous year, causing ‘great anxiety’ (it may have been caused in turn partly by the imposition of restrictions by Auckland). ‘The university appears to have entered into an unforeseen and unprecedented period of growth which could mean a total of as many as 8000 students by 1974,’ Culliford reported. In the next two years there was an ‘unexpected’ decrease. ‘We are not clear about the causes of recent movements,’ the quinquennial submission remarked frankly that year. There was a ‘dramatic’ and again unexpected increase in 1976.57 Thereafter Victoria's roll fluctuated around 7000 until the early 1980s. It passed 8000 in 1986, and in the second half of the '80s increased by just over 40% in five years.

Uncertain funding and unpredictable enrolments, and perhaps too the influence of a new vice-chancellor, prompted a new approach to academic planning. The 1968 quinquennial submission talked of ‘organic growth’ rather than ‘a sudden and massive investment in a particular subject’ as the best means to achieve ‘distinction’. Quality rather than quantity was the theme, although there remained the perennial concern to ‘correct this gross deficiency in the spectrum of disciplines we offer’.58 An Academic Development Committee was established in 1972, consisting of the vice-chancellor, three professors and the registrar, their terms of reference ‘to produce a broad realistic policy statement on the academic development of the University as it moves towards and achieves a roll of 10,000 students’. In their first major report, in 1975, they advised of ‘the desirability of deliberately and explicitly adopting a conception of Victoria as a smaller institution – say of 7,000–8,000 students – and of adjusting our planning accordingly’. Academic development ‘must be considered in a situation where, at worst, each new venture must be financed by discontinuing an existing one or, at best, the additional funds available for new developments are slim’.59 By 1977 new courses were being introduced ‘only with great caution’. The University Grants Committee was now adjusting its own planning to ‘The Steady State’.60 Vice-chancellors were advised that a more rational, orderly development of the university system was desired.

Although the steady state proved illusory as regards student numbers, it was efficiently achieved in terms of staff. The postwar recruitment crisis eased in the 1970s: although the university was still not competitive in all fields, an increased interest in vacancies was ‘pleasing’. Victoria's academic staff increased by about a third in the first half of the 1970s, but by only 15% in the 10 years after that. By the mid–1970s redeployment processes were being established in view of uncertain student numbers and the funding climate. Since 1973, all academic positions falling vacant were systematically reviewed with the aim of disestablishing or downgrading them where possible; this was extended to some non-academic positions in 1978. By the end of 1981 the equivalent of 51 lectureships had been redeployed (‘with remarkably little dissatisfaction and an absence of rancour,’ the vice-chancellor remarked).61 The Academic Development Committee's 1975 report had also recommended early retirement provision (which was not, in fact, to be introduced until 1986), and more rigorous use of the three-year probationary period. Some ‘very unpalatable alterations to the leave scheme’ were also under consideration.62 However, a controversial proposal from the deans' committee to limit the tenure (to three years) of 10% of academic positions of lecturer grade and higher was abandoned in the face of staff opposition. (In the course of this debate it came as a surprise to everyone that some 20, or 5%, were already temporary positions or appointments.)63

Taylor had been quick to turn a reforming eye on Victoria's ‘rather unusual’ administration, from which he hoped – in vain – to fashion ‘something “new”’.64 He went to North America and the United Kingdom in the summer of 1969–70 to study the problems of university administration and to assess the possibility of engaging consultants to solve them. This was disappointing, as were discussions on his return with local management consultancy firms. It proved cheaper and more effective to hire an overseas expert, A.J. Dale, director of the North Eastern Universities' Operations and Management Unit in York. Dale spent five and a half weeks at Victoria in September–October 1971. As was his brief, he concentrated on the registry, and financial planning and control. The central thrust of his report was his advice to strengthen the registry, and in so doing largely dismantle the vice-chancellor's overgrown department: to restructure Victoria on the more conventional model of university administration based on the two key figures of the vice-chancellor and the registrar. In place of a full-time deputy and part-time assistant vice-chancellor he recommended there be one part-time position held by a professor. The assistant principal should lose all responsibilities not directly related to the building programme, and his position eventually be disestablished. Other recommendations included the establishment of the Academic Development Committee, so that forward planning could occur ‘not as some intermittent confection of current good ideas but as the logical expression of continuing deliberation on ultimate objectives’; a permanent Administration Review Committee (advice that was not taken); and the development of a personnel policy, as the university was ‘a significant employer of labour’ and needed one ‘just as much as any industrial or commercial undertaking’.65

The vice-chancellor did not entirely agree: not, for example, with Dale's opinion that universities ought to be run by professional administrators and not academics and therefore the vice-chancellor's deputies should be retrenched. (He also thought Dale's recommendation of devolving budgetary control to faculties, although appealing, was premature.)66 He had, however, come to agree that ‘the well established Vice-Chancellor/Registrar axis is the only viable structure’, and that the role of the registrar should be enhanced – to the extent of his greater involvement in policy matters.67 When Desborough retired early in 1972, the offices of registrar and bursar were combined with the appointment of the former bursar, Dasent, as his successor. This came as something of a surprise to Dasent. He had retreated to a readership in the Chemistry Department a year before with no intention of returning to administration, having found working in the vice-chancellor's department increasingly frustrating, with its six full-time administrators ‘chasing each other's tails’ around the first floor of the Robert Stout building.68 He was asked to return because it was proving difficult to fill a position which had not carried the status of a registrar at other universities.

The disestablishment of the vice-chancellor's department that Dale recommended was gradually effected, nevertheless, by a process of attrition. When the assistant vice-chancellor, Slater, retired at the end of 1974 he was not replaced, and when Campbell retired from the deputy vice-chancellorship the following year he was replaced by a professor (J.D. Gould, of economic history) in a part-time position, retitled the pro-vice-chancellor.69 Culliford was not replaced when he retired at the end of 1977. Soon, though, this slimmed-down machine was under strain, as managing the university became increasingly challenging (not least because of the ‘sharp deterioration’ in its finances), and the new pro-vice-chancellor decided to return full time to his books. At the risk of returning to bad old ways, two more positions were created. By the end of the 1970s, the vice-chancellor was supported by a deputy vice-chancellor (J.W. Tomlinson, professor of physical chemistry), a pro-vice-chancellor (Dasent) and an academic pro-vice-chancellor (Stuart Johnston, professor of English). W.E. Harvey, also from the Chemistry Department, was appointed registrar in Dasent's place. Chemists, it appears, have a particular penchant for university administration.

Victoria's third vice-chancellor, Ian Axford, did not remake ‘the whole ramshackle machine’ to his own design – but then, he would hardly have had time to, staying as he did only a few years. He arrived in a blaze of controversy. Before he arrived, in fact, the Evening Post reported under the headline ‘Victoria's academics fear for

Registrar Ted Harvey and staff count Court of Convocation votes for Council, 1981. Evening Post their jobs’ that when he came for his interview in May 1981 he had announced that he would not tolerate mediocrity, would be upgrading efficiency, that academics should not be running universities and that they would not be allowed the luxury of doing only pure research, all of which Axford denied (from overseas). The chancellor in characteristic style told the paper, ‘If you choose to print that sort of garbage, then let it be on your head.’70 It was an inauspicious introduction.

Another surprise appointment to many, Axford was an expatriate and brilliant scientist. Born in Dannevirke, a graduate of the University of Canterbury, he had been professor of astronomy at Cornell, professor of physics at University College, San Diego, and was now director of the Max Planck Institute for aeronomy in Katlenburg-Lindau in Germany. He had an asteroid named after him, and was to be knighted in 1996. He contracted to stay at Victoria for seven years, and left after three. It was believed by some that he had taken the job in the interests of his family rather than the university. He brought nevertheless an energetic, innovative approach to a number of areas, including, most visibly, the physical appearance of the campus (not an easy assignment at Victoria), academic structures and public relations. A revamped, illustrated annual report, the Victoria University Review, replaced Taylor's Vice-Chancellor's Report.

It is not surprising that staff were sensitive to talk of efficiency drives in the early 1980s. Victoria has perennially complained of being the poorest of New Zealand's universities. In 1978 News VUW reported that it enjoyed the lowest income per student, lowest library grant per student, and lowest expenditure per student on buildings and site maintenance.71 Victoria's quinquennial submission in 1978, observing that this university received the smallest grant per student overall, reminded the University Grants Committee of the ‘Wellington effect’, a long-observed phenomenon whose causes included the capital's high cost of living, occupational shortages and thus difficulty in recruiting staff in some fields, and Wellington's notoriously tight inner-city property market, and resulting staff recruitment and student accommodation problems. (There was also, in this sense, an ‘Auckland effect’. But then, Auckland did not share another disadvantage of residence in Wellington: some political sensitivity, on the part of both the government and the grants committee, about the amount of attention and resources being devoted to the capital city.) True, Victoria lacked high-cost professional schools like medicine and engineering, but in a modern university humanities and social science departments increasingly required more than blackboards and chalk.

The library was one of the conspicuous casualties of tougher economic times, which again was not only Victoria's story; but it had long since ceased to be comfortably the largest university library in the country, as it had still been in the 1930s. In 1945 Victoria's was the third largest – or the second smallest, it would be more appropriate to say – in numbers of volumes; by the end of the 1950s it was the tiniest of the four (they were all by international standards ‘tiny’).72 One result of this was longer opening hours, along with the development of more intensive reader services (such as closed reserve). ‘Gathering gloom’ – the librarian's words73 – is not the only plot in the library's postwar story, but it is hard not to see it as the dominant one. Devaluation, inflation and a reduction in its grant had by 1970 left the library facing ‘severe financial trauma’, reported John Sage (who had succeeded Harold Miller in 1966).74 Library grants were briefly increased in 1973 in the wake of a sobering report commissioned by the Vice-chancellors' Committee, before the oil shocks came. Inflation hit particularly in the area of periodicals, an important and expensive part of academic libraries: Victoria along with others began culling its journal subscriptions in the mid–1970s. Reductions in library hours brought protests from the Students' Association.

Other factors besides the economy were also putting the library under pressure: expansion of the fields of study in the university, and an explosion in the amount of written and printed material to buy; changes in assessment and teaching styles in the 1970s (students writing essays and assignments as well as swotting for exams); an increase in postgraduate and research work, particularly in the social sciences and arts. Students used the library more, and used it more consistently through the year. Between 1966 and 1970 when the university roll increased by 21%, book and periodical loans increased by 110%; a 5% growth in student numbers between 1979 and 1983 was matched by a 27% rise in circulation. To those who argued that a country the size of New Zealand didn't need, or could not afford, for every one of its universities to aim for a library of international, graduate standard, Sage was blunt: ‘A nation that can afford colour TV or turn over $49 million in a year betting on horses can afford a financially modest degree of support for its academic libraries.’75

The 1978 quinquennial submission also noted for the first time a ‘substantial’ contribution to the university's income from external sources, principally in the form of research funding and grants towards new chairs in the faculties of commerce and science. (Private benefaction remained negligible.) But although this was an observable trend, income from sources other than the government grant and student fees remained small. It had amounted to 6.4% of the college's income in 1945 but dropped to less than half a per cent in the 1950s – the result not of a sudden decline in civic generosity but of the sudden increase in the state's. By 1978 ‘other’ sources contributed 4.6% of Victoria's total income; by 1985, 5.9%. Systematic fundraising from the private sector has never been a feature of the New Zealand university system. Back in 1950 a Council committee had been established on the recommendation of the Professorial Board to investigate ‘ways and means of raising additional funds from sources other than Government grants’, but it appears not to have been productive.76 Suggestions made by chemistry professor James Duncan in 1968 that Victoria establish an alumni association, a graduate research foundation, a ‘Unisearch’ or public relations agency to solicit private research funding and ‘establish an aura about V.U.W. which attracts graduate students and external finance’, and pursue other ‘self-help activities of a primarily business character’ such as erecting parking buildings or motels on university land, were somewhat ahead of their time.77

It seems, however, that Victoria's financial woes were partly of its own making. The University Grants Committee looked askance at the number of non-academic positions that were paid on the academic salary scale, and at the amount Victoria appeared to be spending on student welfare services compared with the other universities. In 1983, in the course of heading off a Treasury threat to set numerical quotas for grades of academic staff, it noticed that Victoria had rather a lot of professors (especially science professors). To be precise it had 28 too many. Of Victoria's academic staff, 14.8% occupied chairs, compared with a national average of 12%, a situation the grants committee feared it would find embarrassing in its negotiations with the Treasury. The number of EFTS (equivalent full-time students) per professor was 80 while the average for the other universities was 122 (or, if one excluded the professional schools, 137). Put another way, Victoria's academic salary bill represented 24% of its expenditure, compared with the norm of 18%– 19%. Something had to be done. A five-year moratorium was imposed on the creation of personal chairs and a plan adopted to downgrade or disestablish about 20 professorships over the next five years. The academic establishment accepted these measures ‘with regret’.78 Departments would have the opportunity to argue for the retention of any chairs identified as expendable. The first chairs targeted (in November that year) were in law, philosophy and religious studies. Naturally these departments protested. The exercise had, however, at least part of the desired effect: Victoria had 10 fewer chairs in 1989 than in 1983.79

Victoria's story from the 1960s is not solely one of uncertainty and economic stress. Democratisation is another, happier theme in its institutional history. In May 1968 a joint committee on student participation was established by the Council, the Professorial Board and the Students' Association, on the initiative of the students, but fully supported by the vice-chancellor as a means of forestalling any outbreak of the student insurrection experienced in universities overseas. The report of this committee, presented in February 1969, invoked Victoria's radical tradition – its historically ‘enlightened attitude towards student involvement in its affairs’ – but saw evidence of a breakdown in communication owing to the rapid growth of recent years.80 It resulted in the representation of students on the Council being increased to two, the appointment of three students to the Professorial Board, their representation on various Council and Professorial Board committees, and an encouragement to faculties to improve consultation. It was a radical move, and arguably a successful one. So at least it seemed to the vice-chancellor after his overseas tour in 1969–70: ‘one would need to travel far,’ he observed, ‘to find a more contented university than Victoria.’81 The committee continued in existence for a time. There were limits, however: its tendency to assume executive power was checked, and student representation on some university bodies, such as appointments committees, was deemed inappropriate. Taylor's hope was for ‘a genuine feeling of involvement throughout the university’ rather than ‘simply representation of the Students’ Association on every conceivable committee'.82

On their way to an historic meeting of the Professorial Board: vice-chancellor Danny Taylor and Candy McGrath, women's vice-president of the Students' Association and the first student representative to attend a Professorial Board meeting. Evening Post

The implications of participatory democracy were not always foreseen, moreover: the commerce faculty in the early 1970s very nearly elected a student (Trevor Mallard) as dean.

Inevitably, formal student participation had implications for the role of sub-professorial staff in university government. An additional representative of the teaching staff (as opposed to just the professors) was also added to the Council in 1969 (one having been appointed in 1947). This was one impetus behind a controversial review of the role of professors as heads of departments instigated in 1971. The major one, however, was the advent in the 1960s of multiple professorships: either when a second chair was created in a sub-discipline (as, firstly, in theoretical and inorganic chemistry, applied mathematics, English language, and theoretical physics) or simply when another professorship was established (in law in 1963, economic history in 1964, psychology in 1965). Uncertainty over where the second professor stood in the departmental hierarchy had caused ‘considerable unhappiness’ in some departments, but Williams had not been amenable to the idea of rotating heads. ‘Few in any walk of life enjoy such independence, security and freedom of action as a professor who is Head of his Department at this University,’ commented one.83

The Council in 1970 confirmed the policy that had been adopted in 1964: that the senior professor in terms of date of appointment would be the administrative head of the department unless otherwise approved by the deans committee (which could also recommend the removal of a professor from the position when ‘necessary in the interests of the University’).84 At the same time an ad hoc committee of the Professorial Board began canvassing departmental views on possible alternatives. It was a delicate and in some cases divisive issue. The committee found a widespread consensus against the automatic right of succession in order of seniority that was part of professors' conditions of appointment, and considerable support (‘sometimes with marked enthusiasm’) for administration by departmental committees.85 Opinions differed over who should be eligible for the top job and who should be eligible to choose them. Professor Munz of History, for one, ‘strongly opposes election of Heads or Chairman by members of the staff of the Department’. Professor Bailey of Education thought the proposals for control by committee ‘smack too much of American thinking’.86 Most departments appeared happy for all permanent staff from senior lecturers and above to be eligible to take charge. After two years of discussion, a new system was adopted. Heads of department became chairs, who were elected for a three-year term by and from a policy group consisting of the professors and one or two members of the staff above lecturer grade. Consultation with all members of staff on matters of academic policy and administration was expected.

A parallel development was the emergence of non-professorial deans; and the growing impact of non-professorial staff in the work of the Professorial Board and its increasing array of standing and ad hoc committees (some of which were forums of considerable power, such as the leave committee, the research committee and the accommodation advisory committee). History's Tim Beaglehole (son of J.C.) and Wilf Malcolm of Mathematics (in time an associate professor and a professor respectively) were two who made a notable contribution – and later in the loftier realms of the central administrative machine.

A slower reform, but an area in which Victoria took a lead, was in the position of women in the university. Victoria was the first university in New Zealand by 10 years to establish an organisation of women staff, in 1975 (as well as the first to introduce women's studies, the same year). This coincided, of course, with the flowering of ‘women's lib’, as well as reflecting changes in the institution itself, in the number and the makeup of its members. Germaine Greer visited New Zealand, and Victoria, in March 1972, and the first national women's liberation conference was held at the university in April. In its wake, and in response to an approach from students, Ngaire Adcock (senior lecturer in psychology) took three proposals to the faculties of arts and languages and literature: for the appointment of a dean of women, and of women to appointment committees, and the introduction of women's studies. At a meeting called by linguistics lecturer Janet Holmes and history lecturer Phillida Bunkle, most (certainly not all) of the university's women staff supported the cause. There were some 40 of them among the full-time academic staff, but they were unevenly distributed across faculties: none in law, four in science and two in commerce: they made up around 3% of these faculties; 22% of arts, languages and literature. There were three women professors out of 66.

The proposal for a dean of women was rejected, but the Professorial Board convened a committee on the status of women members of the academic staff, on whose recommendation the Association of Women Academics was founded. This was a somewhat different affair from the Women Associates of Victoria University College that had been formed in the early 1940s – a social committee of staff wives and women students whose main activity was acting as hostesses at college functions. Its aims were to protect and promote the interests of women staff, and to undertake research relating to university women, and support and encourage their academic work. In the 1980s it tackled the more specific issues of sexist language and sexual harassment. Correcting the gender imbalance of the university staff, though, was a larger project than changing its culture. By 1990, nearly 30% of Victoria's academic staff, but only 8% of its professors, were women.

The early 1970s saw as well a number of major academic reforms: this was an age of reform. The unit degree was replaced by the credit degree in 1972, to allow greater flexibility and the diversification of courses of study.87 Mid-year examinations followed in 1973, prompting much discussion about the layout of the academic year. In-term assessment was introduced – a reform hard fought for and soon regretted by the students. The foreign language requirement for the arts degree was removed. A University Teaching and Research Centre was established in 1973 (with a five-year grant from the McKenzie Foundation), as academics as well as their students began to look harder at how as well as what they were teaching. Interdisciplinary experiments were in fashion. Like internal assessment, mind you, flexibility and diversity had its downside: it would not be too many years before concern was being raised about the proliferation of tiny courses and the coherence of the arts degree.

Democratisation invaded the social arena as well. A Staff Club was established in 1965, in the comparatively luxurious premises of the new Rankine Brown building, with membership by subscription open to all full-time and part-time teaching staff (the old Staff Common Room Club, in a single small room in Hunter, had been reserved for full-time staff of lecturer grade and above) and senior administrative and library staff. Councillors became honorary members; spouses were welcome. Associate membership for full-time PhD candidates was

Exam in progress, 1968. Dominion

Pat McKay retires in 1980 after 20 years as chief examinations supervisor

introduced in 1970, and membership opened to all non-academic staff in 1982. There may not have been 15 different types of whisky, but Victoria's Staff Club, its president stated in 1979, was possibly ‘unique among universities for the fluency with which it is possible for scientists and non-scientists to engage in mutual discourse; for a technician, an administrator, a junior lecturer, or a Ph.D. candidate to take part in casual interactions with people who are older, senior, or from very diverse disciplines…. Indeed, the club is the only genuinely integratory body that is continuously and informally operational across the whole range of university staff.’88 Its physical location in a chronically overcrowded campus became, however, a cause of some dispute.

[six] Cribbed, cabined and confined

LITTLE DID ANYONE know then that the ‘Battles of the Sites’ recounted with satisfaction in Spike in 1903 was only the prelude to a much longer history of struggle. The story of the physical development of Victoria is partly a story of bigger buildings, better classrooms, new laboratories, covered walkways, cafes and carparks: a story of progress. It is also about the shifting geographical focus of the university (it was literally an uphill struggle). But the dominating factor in the physical development of Victoria has been the site: its size, its topography and its location. It is a site that has inspired some grandiose statements, assorted metaphors (of ivory-tower detachment or social aspiration) and, in the days of ode-writing, stirring lines of verse (such as J.C. Beaglehole's ‘Dear hill of many visions’). Contriving to call this patch carved out of a precipitous hillside a ‘plateau’, a journalist introducing a six-part series on the newly independent university in 1962 pictured it ‘gaz[ing] in solemn dignity over Port Nicholson and the Hutt Valley’.1 The site ‘has more than a touch of magnificence’, the university's submission to the Hughes Parry committee agreed, but ‘its contours are difficult’.2

The idea of moving the college from its hillside perch was considered in the 1940s in response to three unsolicited suggestions. In July 1945 the Students' Association asked the Council to consider moving down to the Te Aro Flat area (around Adelaide Road), where the City Council was planning a programme of slum clearance. In the present buildings students suffered in ‘cramped lecture-rooms’ and staff in ‘indifferent cubby holes, termed studies’, but further building to the south – the only possible direction the site could expand – would result only in ‘an untidy, drawn out, heterogeneous collection of buildings devoid of any beauty whatsoever’ (a not entirely inaccurate description of the future campus, in fact), and would ‘detract from presenting the University as an imposing and magnificent structure that it should be as the University of the Capital City’.3 The following month Massey Agricultural College, once Victoria's protégé, formally approached the Council with a suggestion that the two institutions consolidate their work in pure science, sociology and education, and that Victoria (with the exception, possibly, of its commerce and law faculties) move to the Massey site, where the government had recently acquired another 263 acres for educational use. There would be room as well for a teachers' college.4 A few weeks later came a letter from the Masterton Trust Lands Trust with an offer of 70 acres, the patronage of the Trust and a grant of £500 a year. The Trust had heard that Victoria was considering moving: ‘Obviously if Victoria College is to develop as a University it would be impossible to remain where it is. Even in its foundation years we knew that it was cribbed, cabined and confined’, and as a result had developed into ‘what is known in Germany as a Technical College rather than a University’.5 The Council appointed a committee to investigate.

The suitability of restricted inner-city university sites was being widely debated about this time, when lecture rooms were bulging with returned servicemen. Auckland University College had just acquired 120 acres of farmland at Tamaki to which it planned to move – but subsequently shifted its sights to a proposed reclamation of Hobson Bay, before opting, in the mid–1950s, to remain in the city. Canterbury was soon to decide, in 1949, to move to Ilam (although it did not do so until the 1960s). Victoria elected to stay. The credit for this decision has been accorded to Hunter.6 In November 1945 the Council resolved on the motion of the principal that ‘the immediate development of Victoria University College

Hunter watches excavation work on the new college site, November 1948. ATL C23836 shall take place on the present site, with such extensions as may prove possible’, and the subject was broached with the minister.7 By 1947 the City Council had agreed to an exchange of land with the government, and by late 1949 to hand over to Victoria 13 acres of the Town Belt immediately south of the existing college site: 13 acres a considerable part of which ‘possessed the quality of verticality in even greater degree than the original six’.8 Its leveller part included the Kelburn Bowling Club, whose lease expired in 1969. It was envisaged in 1949 that the Wellington teachers' college would occupy the southern end of the site.

The decision was reconfirmed a few years later in response to an elaborate 12– point plan being promoted by a city councillor which involved moving the university college, teachers' college and Wellington Girls' College to the vice-regal site on Mt Victoria (Government House would shift to the site of the gaol on Mt Crawford, and the gaol to Makara). But the land proposed was too small, the Professorial Board reported, and the present location had the advantage of proximity, its magnificent outlook and ‘fifty years of affectionate tradition’.9 Just how the university has used this site has been an important part of its relationship with its city: its history of ‘town and gown’.

In the immediate postwar years the college had begun laying plans and levelling ground for a new science building south of the biology block, and in the meantime was able at least partly to alleviate its ‘acute accommodation problem’ with the acquisition from 1947 of ex-United States Army huts. (These became a feature of other college campuses as well as Victoria's.) Eight were erected on the Kelburn Parade frontage, and six – home for the next decade of the Geography and Geology Departments – on City Council land across Salamanca Road. All but one were

The Geography and Geology huts. M.D. King photo

The Easterfield building: ‘this imposing edifice could well have been imported direct from the United States of America’. Gordon Burt collection, ATL 37137 1/2

made of steel, ‘very hot in summer and very cold in winter’, and leaked chronically.10 ‘To whom it may concern,’ political science lecturer Joachim Kahn addressed a memo: ‘the undersigned would like to make it known that he has now taken possession of Cell 6 in Hut 7 which was assigned to him in a damaged condition. That he managed – suffering bodily injury in the process – to shut the damaged window, and as he knows that no help will ever come from either principal or registrar or maintenance officer, he will regard said cell (or kennel) as his refuge.’ The School of Political Science subsequently moved into the wooden Little Theatre building, erected in 1948 above the gymnasium, and shared with the teachers' college. Here, the professor, R.S. Parker, informed the principal in 1953 (after he had submitted his resignation), maintenance and security were ‘scandalously poor’, ‘so flimsy are the door and window fastenings’, ‘The lino floors … are never polished. The rooms, papers, and desks of staff are never dusted, from one year's end to another, except by themselves. Everywhere is dirt, damage and neglect.’11

But things were looking up. At the end of 1952 the grants committee asked each college for a 15-year building plan, and with these in hand was able to persuade the government that a university building programme was a matter of national urgency. Annual expenditure on university buildings increased 15-fold between 1953 and 1959, and Victoria fared best, as the Hughes Parry committee remarked: ‘We have been impressed with the size of this programme … and with the vigour with which it has been pursued.’12 Victoria reported £1,682,000 worth of major works in progress or planned for the period 1954–64. A third floor was added to the biology block in 1953–54. Early in 1955, work began on the construction of a seven-storey science building to house Chemistry, Geology and Geography, planning for which had begun in 1944. The ‘Easterfield building’ was ready for occupation in 1958: Victoria's first ‘modern’ building, ‘soaring’, the Evening Post admired, in ‘majestic grandeur … above the older buildings … this imposing

The Easterfield foyer. M.D. King photo edifice could well have been imported direct from the United States of America’.13 It was the work of the firm of Gray Young, which had also been responsible for Victoria House and Weir House. As with the college's first – now named Hunter – building, an extra storey had been added in the early planning stages at the request of the government, and another later. The higher the building, the greater the floor space was a logical approach to building on such a restricted site, but one which would become problematic.

The next priority was a new library and arts building, for which an application was submitted to the grants committee in October 1955. The library had long outgrown its cramped (albeit charming) home in the Hunter north wing. Its book stock had increased from fewer than 18,000 volumes in 1922 to nearly 100,000. It had swallowed five staff rooms and five classrooms, but still the reading space was ‘grossly inadequate’, storage space ‘desperate’. ‘Our students,’ observed councillor O'Brien in 1963, ‘are out of the habit of using the university library because of the lack of seats.’14 It had been hoped that construction of a new building could begin as soon as the science building was completed. (The one-building-at-a-time approach taken by Victoria's planners, in contrast to the other universities', was later widely considered to have been unwise.) In fact, authorisation for the library was not given until 1958. Construction began in 1962, and the Rankine Brown building was officially opened in June 1966. It had been ‘especially designed to be precast in large units in Bulls and Tauranga in an effort to avoid the shortage of labour in Wellington’ (and won an architectural award for its innovative engineering design), but there was no planning for the weather. ‘Once the upper levels … became exposed to the full blast of the southerly, the rush of carpenters leaving the job became a serious menace to student circulation’.15

The plans had been considerably modified in those 10 years: it was originally to have had six (not 10) storeys, to house the college office, administrative staff, and the Council, Professorial Board and committee rooms, as well as the library, staff studies and classrooms, and the Staff Common Room. By now, however, the administration had been accommodated in extensions to the Robert Stout building, completed in 1961, and the separate law library was left behind in Hunter. The main library occupied only half the new building; teaching and staff rooms took up the top four floors. This meant that even when it opened there were fewer seats per reader than the figure set by a university libraries conference in 1957. The ideal was four students per seat, the reality nearer five, but this was a vast improvement on the ‘fantastically low’ ratio of 1:12.5 the university had had to report in 1957. The librarian, Harold Miller, who had been closely involved in the design of the building, was pleased, although there were a few regrets: ‘I am myself very sorry that metal-frame tables had to be substituted for the more massive all-wood refectory-type tables upon which I had set my heart’, and there had been ‘some trouble over colour schemes. On the whole, the appearance of the public rooms is somewhat more subdued than I would have liked; but the effect is pleasant enough.’16 Award- winning or not, the building was, however, execrably designed for academic use. Circulation, of both people and air, was a particular problem: staff complained, students petitioned.

Old library, 1948. NPS collection, ATL 30003 1/2

In addition, government approval had been given in 1957 for a new student union building, for which the students had been accumulating funds since 1932, and it opened, along with a new gymnasium, in 1961. The tennis courts, so arduously claimed by Dixon and friends, had to be sacrificed, but agreement had been reached with the City Council for four new courts to be built on the site of the Geology and Geography huts (their removal when the science building was completed had been a condition of the university's use of the land). In the 1950s Victoria also began acquiring residential properties on the west side of Kelburn Parade – the start of its creeping, and controversial, expansion into its suburban hinterland. Number 20 Kelburn Parade was purchased in 1951, to be used for a caretaker's flat and the School of Social Science; number 42, shared with the teachers' college, in 1956; and a third house in 1959. (Further afield, a vice-chancellor's residence was purchased, in Kinross Street, in 1962.)

The Hughes Parry committee's congratulations notwithstanding, Victoria was anything but complacent about its accommodation situation at the end of the 1950s. The 10-year plan it prepared for the grants committee in December 1957 ‘discloses a very grave situation’, Williams reported to the university Council: it must either immediately embark on an adequate building programme or adopt ‘a drastic policy of limitation of student numbers’.17 (This, though, was an oft-repeated threat in reports on building development.) The delay in getting approval for the library building was alarming – but delay was to become a constant in university building, and worse was to come. The most pressing immediate problems were identified as staff accommodation (in anticipation of 150 new full-time academic staff being appointed between 1960 and 1964 when the new building was expected to be available), and the biological sciences. ‘Dangerous pressures are developing in the Departments of Botany and Zoology.’18 Immediate authority

New library, 1965. M.D. King photo was requested for an extension to the biology block.

Victoria's submission to the Hughes Parry committee in 1959 took a wider and longer view of the university's prospects on its 20-odd vertical acres. Already, eventual occupation of a large part of the west side of Kelburn Parade below Glasgow Street was assumed, while to the south properties on the east side of Kelburn Parade, edging the gully that comprised much of the 1949 extension, had been zoned for university use under the Town and Country Planning Act 1953, and the government was buying them (three to date) as they became available. The Council believed 6000 students could be accommodated on the present site, but that did not allow for new developments. It was modestly suggested that the government set aside an area of about 200 acres, ‘within easy commuting distance of the Kelburn site’, for the university ‘and such institutions and agencies as might advantageously join with the University in advanced scientific research, high level technological research’, and other space-requiring activities. (‘The Council regards this matter as of major importance in the national interest.’)19

Early the following year Ian Reynolds of the Auckland firm Kingston, Reynolds and Thom, architects of the Rankine Brown building, and of all of the university's major new academic buildings until the 1980s, was commissioned to produce a report on Victoria's building and site requirements for the next 25 years. (The assistant principal, meanwhile, had visited the United States to investigate university campuses there.) From this report dates the figure of 10,000 – students enrolled at Victoria by 1985 – as a planning principle.20 The report, prepared in association with the vice-chancellor's office (Culliford had a large hand in it), was completed in 1962 and remained the basis of the university's physical development until 1982, although its magnificent vision would never be fully realised.

Reynolds calculated that the university needed 103.35 additional acres for its present and future requirements up until 1985, including 30 acres in reserve for ‘at present unforeseeable needs’.21 He included at least 25 acres for sports fields, three acres for the engineering school of which Williams was then hopeful, halls of residence and car parking. On the existing site, the proposed extension of the Kirk building was to be completed by 1967, to be followed by an adjoining multi-storey research tower, and a physics and earth sciences building in the vicinity of the bowling green by 1968. Longer term, the student union building and gymnasium would be extended, and an indoor recreation centre (with a 33-yard pool) built adjacent to the gym. Student halls of residence were pencilled in around Clermont Terrace and Salamanca Road to the north and the Fairlie and Adams Terrace area to the south. Somewhere (the report did not nominate where) there should also be a building for staff recreational and cultural activity, ‘in a pleasant setting with a reasonable area of ground [an acre at least] adequately laid out, reasonably close to but not amongst the most densely built up area of teaching buildings’.22

On the west side of Kelburn Parade Reynolds drew in two tower blocks, a low administration building and an auditorium, with underground parking and an underpass beneath Kelburn Parade. It would, the report suggested, be helpful if the City Council would consider constructing a new road to relieve the pressure on this major suburban thoroughfare which inconveniently bisected the campus – an idea that had been proposed at least as early as 1949. (Even in 1930, Hunter had been complaining about the noise of the rush-hour traffic disturbing his classes.)23 A new road was also planned running from Kelburn Parade by an underpass beneath Fairlie Terrace, to Adams Terrace and Aro Street, linking the main campus with a proposed southern appendage in Mitchelltown. Here, a likely site for playing fields and student car parking had been identified in Polhill Gully, a steep, dark, undeveloped valley (once the route taken by Karori farmers to bring their milk into town) and inaccessible except by foot. The adjacent valley, Holloway, would be an ideal location for departments engaged in advanced scientific and technological work where there might be risk of explosion or radioactivity. It was a ‘climatically bleak’ area, ‘a small backwater of houses of indifferent quality’.24 Culliford proposed a minibus service between the Aro Valley and Kelburn Parade sites. Discussions were already under way with the city engineer.

Sir Basil Spence was impressed: visiting 18 months later to deliver the Chancellor's Lectures, he is reported to have described the scheme as ‘way beyond pioneer stuff … quite sophisticated and sensitive’.25 Williams wrote in his preface to the report: ‘I believe that with skilful planning the Victoria University of Wellington could become, in a physical sense, one of the most impressive city universities in the world and a great ornament to the capital city of New Zealand. And it is no accident that greatness of thought and intellectual achievement is very often found in matching circumstances of natural beauty and architectural distinction.’26

The mayor was also impressed. At a meeting in February 1964 between the university, the grants committee, local planning authorities and government departments, he declared himself ‘delighted’ with the proposals, the Polhill Gully scheme ‘imaginative’. It seemed to fit well with City Council plans for residential development in the Fitchett's Farm area behind Mitchelltown and further south on the ridges above Happy Valley, and for new roads to improve traffic flow between Aro Valley and the western suburbs (a cable car was also being mooted). He wondered, even, if the 165 acres proposed was enough – 250 might be required – and envisaged the university taking over Te Aro School, the Central Park hospital and Central Park.27 A few years earlier, at the opening of the student union building, he had spoken warmly of the ‘strong bonds’ between the university and the city, and ‘look[ed] forward to the time when the university buildings extend on to city land’. (‘The only thing wrong with [Victoria],’ the mayor of Lower Hutt had observed on the same occasion, ‘is that it is in the wrong place.’)28 Another city councillor urged that 300–400 acres be set aside as well at Judgeford just north of Wellington for future university development. In fact this area was earmarked in the 1960s for a possible second university for the capital, but this thought was abandoned in the early 1970s when the growth of university rolls was stabilising (at the same time as the second Auckland university at Albany was also scuttled). The meeting endorsed the development plan, with some specific reservations (especially from the Treasury representative); and later that year 130 acres were designated under the Wellington City District Scheme for university use. Only the requested site for the engineering school – at the southern end of The Terrace – was refused.

The execution of the Reynolds–Culliford plan was beset by a multitude of problems. Some were caused by economic conditions, the fluctuating state of the building industry and of university funding. But for the most part they were more localised. They witnessed a deteriorating relationship with the City Council, and tense relations with the university's immediate neighbours, who often resented and sometimes resisted its encroachment on their suburb. The very assets that made the Kelburn site worth having – its proximity to the city and its stunning views – also meant that the university was situated in what was becoming an increasingly desirable and wealthy residential area, whose residents included Cabinet ministers and former university professors. Victoria was not alone in its conflict with the city over its buildings and site. Auckland University, too, had become engaged in a bitter public battle (in its case about whether it would be allowed to stay in the city) which had retarded its building progress in the 1950s. But while the national university building programme accelerated in the wake of the Hughes Parry report, Victoria's lost momentum.29

Before the district scheme designation was made, there had already been adverse publicity about the university's claim on the Salamanca Road/Clermont Terrace area: about its likely effect on the residential character of the area, on property

The Rankine Brown courtyard, 1960s. M.D. King photo values, and the loss of rates to the city. Indeed, discussions between the university and the city over the development plan had been initiated by a deputation of concerned Clermont Terrace residents to the City Council.30 The university was periodically at pains to explain that the designation did not mean that it was in the business of commandeering private property. Houses in the designated area were purchased by the Crown as they came on the market, and if not immediately required by the university were leased by the Public Trustee. Residents would not be obliged to sell to the government (although the Crown did have the power of compulsory acquisition), but there were restrictions on what improvements they could make to their properties. By the end of 1965, 22 houses were being used for academic purposes, including four in Clermont Terrace (a far-flung outpost of the Geology and Geography Departments and the School of Social Science), although in the longer-term plan this area was set aside for halls of residence. Drawings were being prepared for a high-rise hostel in 1968. An appeal in 1969 to the Town and Country Planning Appeal Board by 17 Clermont Terrace residents seeking to have the designation lifted was disallowed. Culliford responded to criticism that the university was ‘destroying’ Kelburn by arguing that its development would consume only 1.5% of the residential area of the suburb (a fair point); but to add that Clermont Terrace was not strictly part of Kelburn anyway was hardly helpful.31 Resentment continued, and in other parts of the suburb grew, as did the ‘university city’ envisioned in the 1962 plan.32

By the mid–1960s planning was in hand for a major science complex – which

The Quad, 1970s. ATL F21658 1/4

Site works for new science building, 1969. Dominion was to be named after Cotton – south of the Easterfield and Rankine Brown buildings, which it was hoped to have completed by 1971. In the meantime a smaller project went ahead: construction started in 1967 on a lecture theatre block, which by ‘a remarkable effort by the contractors’ was ready for the first lectures in 1968. Its two (300- and 150-seat) theatres were ‘an outstanding success’.33 Development of this area was facilitated when the Kelburn Bowling Club decided to amalgamate with the Wellington club and give up its lease two years early. The university took possession of the greens at the beginning of 1968, and converted them immediately into carparks. (The turf was used to make a lawn for Weir House.) Car parking – a perennial university and Wellington problem – was henceforth prohibited in the courtyard between Easterfield and Rankine Brown (although motorbikes continued to reside there for a time). Also on the drawing board were two more floors on the Easterfield building (which were never built), and a major expansion of the accommodation for biological sciences, which had been presented to the grants committee as an urgency 10 years earlier: adjoining eight- and three-storey wings that would completely dwarf the original building from almost every vantage point. Construction began in 1968 and the whole was completed by the end of 1972.

New Kirk, as it was unimaginatively named, was primarily a functional building. Its long, narrow, ceiling-level windows were designed to keep sunlight out of science laboratories, the exposed aggregate finish to keep maintenance costs down. (Weatherproofness and low maintenance costs were the first considerations in designing university buildings, in Culliford's view.) An ancillary function was to

New Kirk in construction, 1972. ATL F20329 1/4 improve pedestrian access about a university site where ‘the student ascends the equivalent of a four storeyed building without the aid of a lift’, mostly out of doors and often in bad weather: ‘the mysterious stairway at the Student Union end,’ Culliford reported in December 1969, ‘is becoming recognisable as something that people may ascend and descend’ (although comparatively few actually would). New Kirk was also to be ‘the main take-off point’ for a pedestrian bridge across Kelburn Parade – a bridge having superseded the more expensive plan for a tunnel by 1965.34 It was arguably the ugliest university building to date (although Rankine Brown would be a close contender).

Working drawings for the new physics and earth sciences building, meanwhile, had gone to the University Grants Committee in November 1969. The committee's first response was to ask Victoria to consider a staged development of this huge – 250,000 square foot, $7 million – project. This was agreed, and it was reconfigured in five parts: the first scheduled for completion by the end of 1973, the fifth by the end of 1977.

It might seem that the university was primarily interested in the proper housing of its science departments. The continuing priority given to the Cotton complex even when it was in the humanities and social sciences that pressures were rising encouraged some to continue to think so. Moreover, the single-minded pursuit of the Cotton building, some have argued, was seriously detrimental to Victoria's relationship with the grants committee. By early 1970, however, a proposal was also before the committee for a new arts building, the first of a planned four- towerfour-tower development on the west side of Kelburn Parade. (This was a departure from the 1962 plan, which had envisaged two taller towers and two lower-rise buildings.)

In 1970 the Professorial Board invited suggestions for naming the university's first new-era buildings. Disappointingly, only seven responses were received, and were assessed by the assistant principal. A decision to retain the name of Kirk for the whole biology block was unanimous.35 Cotton won for the new science building ahead of Maclaurin and Marsden. Nominations for the yet-to-be-built arts tower had not been sought, but the Student Representative Council requested anyway that it be named after the first professor of modern languages. The only question was whether it should be the Zedlitz building or the Von Zedlitz building. (A suggestion that major lecture theatres be named too was rejected by the Professorial Board.)

Suddenly rising student numbers combined with a series of planning delays injected an element of panic into the building programme at the beginning of the 1970s. In March 1971 Culliford presented a report to the Professorial Board advising that unless there was an immediate acceleration of building progress, which was ‘lagging seriously behind’, the only option was to contain student numbers for at least three years.36 Delays had occurred at both national and local level. Relations between the university and local planning authorities were becoming strained by 1966 when the city engineer advised that the planned lecture theatre building was too close to the road. By 1967 the City Council was asking for a revised development plan because the university's current proposals appeared to depart from those submitted in the 1962 report. By 1971 a ‘total failure of communication’, reported Culliford, resulted in a building permit for the Cotton building being withdrawn and ‘a good deal’ of hostile publicity.37 At issue was the amount of off-street parking provided for – an issue on which the City Council was mounting a wider campaign aimed at educational and commercial organisations – and the

University parking, 1990. Salient proximity of the building to the proposed new road down to Aro Street, neither the status nor precise location of which had been determined. This impasse was resolved by the middle of 1972, but obstacles had risen at higher levels. At the end of 1971 the government delayed the start of construction of the first stage of Cotton for several months for economic reasons, and authority was still pending to begin architectural work on the Von Zedlitz tower.38 However, by the end of 1972 preliminary earthworks for Cotton were under way, which was progress at last. It also meant the loss of 240 carparks and the introduction in 1973 of a parking scheme. ‘Parking will be a campus problem for some time to come,’ the acting registrar reported.39

So Cotton began to grow along the southern ridge, although rather more slowly than originally planned. Stage one would finally be completed in 1979; construction of stage two commenced the following year. ‘Notably intrusive for its bulk and massing in a dominant position is the “urban wall” of the Cotton Building,’ commented a City Council-commissioned report on protecting the integrity of the urban skyline and view shafts in the mid–1980s.40 Such things had not been thought about in 1962.

1973 saw the return of the prefab. Like the army huts 40 years before, they were a temporary solution to an accommodation crisis at a time of suddenly swelling student numbers that proved to be rather more permanent than planned. An archipelago of prefabs appeared to the south of the lecture block and more were squeezed into the spaces behind houses on Kelburn Parade. Plans to erect four more on the Hunter lawn in 1974, however, were thwarted. Local residents and university staff protested in outrage; students pulled up the surveyors' pegs and filed a writ in the Supreme Court; the City Council refused to grant a building permit. Culliford would have gone ahead anyway, but others exercised wiser political judgement. The vice-chancellor was as concerned about the issue's divisive effect on the university community as about the disruption to the building programme.41 The prefabs were erected on the southern carpark instead.

This was only a skirmish. On the morning of 26 March 1973 two moderate earthquakes caused visible damage to the Hunter building, and began the 20-year battle that would pit the university authorities against its staff and students, the City Council, the growing urban conservation movement, and the constraints of university funding. The university Council immediately commissioned a report on the structural soundness of the ‘handsome pile’, and in August the City Council declared the building an earthquake risk that would in due course have to be either strengthened or demolished. The seismic report submitted to the university in 1974 by its consultants (now Kingston Reynolds Thom & Allardice) presented four options, which ranged from strengthening the building to partially or completely demolishing it. Costings were sought, and a programme of evacuation was authorised.

The problem with Hunter seriously exacerbated the university's perennial

Salient, 1975 accommodation shortage. Pressure to vacate the building, which in 1973 housed the departments of Law, Music, Physics and Education, a bank and a post office, combined with the expansion of the university library (displacing other departments from successive floors of Rankine Brown) and delays with other building projects saw a complicated game of musical chairs, and the dispersal of faculties, even departments, across several, sometimes distant, locations. Commerce, the largest faculty, was the worst affected. The prefabs to have been erected on the Hunter lawn were for the Economics Department which was moving out of Rankine Brown to make way for the law faculty and library which was evacuated from Hunter over the summer of 1974–75.

It is as well that it had been decided not to proceed with a proposal to floodlight the Hunter building during the university's 75th year in 1974. In fact the 75th anniversary was not observed at all, at least partly because the ‘expenditure of public money in celebrating one's own birthday might well do the University … harm’ at a time when the cost and purpose of universities generally were under scrutiny, and Victoria's public image in particular was felt to be ‘not very high’. Lighting up the Hunter building had been one of a number of celebratory suggestions considered during 1972: a commissioned piece of music; a commemorative stamp issue; the publication of a social history of the university; a brochure of photographs of the university at work; public relations activities with an emphasis on Victoria's positive contribution to the city and government, and highlighting, perhaps, its accommodation problems (‘slum living conditions for students and semi-slum for certain academic activities could be very photogenic,’ a professor of economics, Barbu Niculescu, suggested); and that ‘hoary old chestnut’, changing the name to the University of Wellington.42 This too would have been an unfortunate debate to have been engaged in when the university was facing criticism for squandering its own and the city's heritage. (Moreover, it was suggested more than once during the Hunter saga that the statue of Queen Victoria in Cambridge Terrace be moved to the Hunter lawn.)

In 1975 the university successfully appealed to the Town and Country Planning Appeal Board when the City Council decided to list the Hunter building in the district scheme (as ‘a place of historic interest worthy of permanent preservation’), and began planning for its replacement. The Appeal Board had agreed that the building was of historic interest and was hopeful that its demolition could be forestalled. The money was the problem – whichever figures one accepted. The mayor, and architect, Michael Fowler – who was rather less indulgent towards the university than his predecessor, Frank Kitts – publicly called the university Council a ‘bloody pack of rascals’ for, he claimed, knowingly accepting from its consultants an inflated estimate of the cost of saving the building, a statement the university felt compelled to deny. The university was, he charged, ‘abrogating its responsibility’ by not committing itself to its preservation.43 During 1976 the two councils met to discuss the cost of restoration and who should pay, for the University Grants Committee had already advised Victoria that it would not support an appeal to the government for funding. But relations remained tense. They were not helped by a public spat at the beginning of 1977 between Victoria's retiring assistant principal and the mayor. Culliford accused the City Council of using the university as a whipping boy on which to ‘vent its frustration and bitchiness’ (‘There has always been a bit of political kudos in being bestial to the university,’ he stated), to which the mayor replied in kind.44

A further investigation of the safety of the building in the first half of 1977 saw the evacuation schedule and, as a result, plans for the Cotton complex revised. Stage two of Cotton, destined for the Physics Department, was downsized from 100,000 to 50,000 square feet at the request of the grants committee to allow the earlier evacuation of the Hunter physics wing. Some months earlier, the Professorial Board's Accommodation Advisory Committee had reported that in the event of a moderately severe earthquake before the second stage of Cotton was finished ‘the teaching of physics will cease’.45 Towards the end of this year the Music Department held its last weekly lunchtime concert in the room in the chemistry wing in which they had been held for nearly 30 years: David Farquhar composed a ‘6 October parade’ to the theme of ‘Now is the Hour’; Page played Bach; and some Schubert and a Lilburn violin sonata completed the programme.

Hunter abandoned. Evening Post

In September 1977 the university Council resolved by a majority decision to demolish Hunter and replace it with ‘a building of architectural distinction’, prompting a public outcry, the formation of the Friends of Hunter, and a 2000– signature petition. That it was of historical and local significance is without doubt. Whether Hunter was a building of architectural distinction is debatable. It was certainly a handsome building in some aspects, although it was generally agreed (by those who had worked in it) to be poorly designed for its purpose. It was later described by the university's professor of architecture as a bad example of revival Gothic.46 To many it was the only university building possessing any aesthetic merit. ‘The historically-minded talk of it as one of the few remaining examples of late perpendicular Gothic and Kiwi do-it-yourself, and certainly the only interesting piece of architecture on campus.’47 There was a sentimental element too. The building, wrote a graduate in the Dominion, ‘symbolises the traditions of pleasant days spent at the university before being caught up in the money-making swirl of the real world’.48 It was observed by one journalist prominent in the save-Hunter campaign that most of the university's sub-committee making decisions about its future were outsiders; nor had it been lost on another commentator (although himself a visiting Australian) that the vice-chancellor, Taylor, was ‘a foreigner’. Chancellor Kevin O'Brien, however, was known to favour demolition and was anything but an outsider to either Victoria or Wellington.49

The Friends of Hunter engaged their own consultants,50 and at the December 1977 meeting of the university Council offered to undertake a feasibility study of the building's restoration. The offer was accepted and the demolition plan was suspended. The Friends' Hunter Feasibility Study, presented to the university in July 1978, was based on the then-novel concept of ‘retrofitting’: saving the facade, at least, and rebuilding the interior. The $4 million plan, in brief, was to save the east facade, the library wing and main staircase. The 1920s physics and chemistry wings were, it was agreed, expendable. Two new buildings, a five-storey lecture tower and a larger New Hunter, would be erected in their place. The university's committees and consultants proceeded to evaluate the plan, and students and staff were asked for their opinions. Of the 220 responses to a questionnaire distributed amongst the (7000) students, 204 wanted the building saved in whole or in part. The staff too were generally opposed to demolition – although the faculties of architecture and law preferred to express no opinion. By the end of 1979, although agreement on the details of the Friends' proposals had not been reached and estimates of the cost still differed widely, the Council had confirmed its stay of execution and agreed that a design competition be held, with the New Zealand Institute of Architects advising. The University Grants Committee was approached for approval to proceed – but funding was not forthcoming.

Over the next few years Hunter remained half empty and in a state of deteriorating repair, while two series of tests of the strength of its brickwork were carried out. Concern rose over the safety, let alone comfort, of the building's last occupants, the Physics and Music departments. They languished in the chemistry wing which was structurally the soundest part of the building, but, in the words of the chair of the Music Department, Margaret Nielsen, ‘dirty, dangerous, vermin-ridden, water-damaged’.51 Plaster fell from the ceiling and peeled from the walls; the roof leaked. Music, ironically one of the university's highest-profile departments, had been housed since its beginning in 1946 in the building that had looked to Fred Page then like ‘an institution for bad girls’.52 ‘We think we are a very special department in the university,’ Nielsen commented, ‘and we have good contact with the musicians in the city. But we can hardly invite them into this grot.’53 The Physics Department staff were due to move to the new Cotton wing in 1983; the fate of Music remained uncertain.

At the beginning of 1982 the Historic Places Trust classified the Hunter building

Vice-chancellor Ian Axford (right) investigates the state of the Hunter building

Harbour view from Central Terrace, 1977. Evening Post category ‘B’ – worthy of permanent preservation – in its first listing under the Historic Places Act 1980. This gave it the power to seek a protection order from the minister. The City Council followed suit, listing it in the district scheme as a building of local importance for its ‘Victorian architecture, its collegiate charm and above all, its historic association with the advancement of the city as a seat of learning’.54 The university Council opposed both these moves. In October the new vice-chancellor, Ian Axford, presented the councillors with a one-and-a-half-hour slide show (Hunter, he demonstrated, was being held up by the weight of its bricks, gravity and wind) and the university's latest action plan: reconfirming its decision not to immediately demolish the building, to do more tests and to hold a design competition. At the end of 1982, the mid-point in this story, the situation was much the same as it had been three years earlier. Hunter's future was far from assured. Axford held an unsentimental view of the old building. The plan ‘left open’, News VUW reported, ‘the possibility of the permanent preservation of some part of the building’.55

Meanwhile, the university's new-building programme had been attracting its share of controversy, in particular its plans for the high-rise development of the west side of Kelburn Parade. An application for a building permit for the Von Zedlitz tower (to house the languages and literature departments and Sociology and Social Work) was submitted in July 1973, and the university was waiting for government authority to call tenders when the City Council requested an environmental impact report on the whole tower-block plan. This was undertaken in 1974. One outcome was the subsequent decision to abandon the third and fourth towers and replace them with low- or medium-rise buildings. In December the Council informed the university that a building permit for Von Zedlitz was conditional on the height of the 10-storey building being reduced by two storeys or 20 feet. The question of whether the Council was empowered to make this condition (or whether, like the Crown, the university could claim exemption from town planning regulations) was eventually resolved by the Supreme Court in the university's favour in 1975. It was towards the end of this year, about the same time that Victoria also successfully opposed the first attempt to list Hunter in the district scheme, that a university/ city liaison committee was established. (It met, however, infrequently.)

As if the height of the Von Zedlitz building wasn't irksome enough to the university's immediate neighbours whose outlooks were affected, soon four 50– foot ventilation chimneys began rising above the squat services block behind it: the ‘Von Zedlitz rockets’, they were dubbed. Robert Muldoon, the prime minister, was one of the Central Terrace residents whose harbour views were compromised. The Evening Post described them as ‘downright ugly’ (which was true) and ‘surely a blatant case of gown deliberately aggravating town’ (which was provocative).56 As the university pointed out, the chimneys would have been 15 feet shorter if not for the environmental impact report. Its efforts at damage control, however, were not entirely successful. A Kelburn Newsletter, intended to be the first of a regular issue to keep residents informed about university development plans and to promote ‘mutual understanding’, was distributed in July 1976 – at a time of continuing complaints as well from Clermont Terrace residents, and the looming shadow of Hunter. It was dismissed by one Central Terrace inhabitant as a ‘“soft-soap” newsletter’ and by the Greater Kelburn Progressive Association as ‘insidious propaganda’.57 The chimneys, however, were there to stay. And Von Zedlitz rose to its full height – to be officially opened, along with Cotton, an architectural sciences laboratory and new Recreation Centre, by the National government's minister of education, Merv Wellington, in May 1979.

Its companion commerce and administration tower had been approved by the government in 1976. The very idea of a companion tower was disconcerting to those who now worked in the rabbit-warrenish interior of Von Zedlitz, but that is not this story. By the time the design report had been completed for the second, 11-storey building – to be named after the first professor of economics, Bernard Murphy – new town planning laws required the university to submit the proposal to the City Council. It at first asked the university to reconsider the height of the building, then threatened court action. A suggestion that Victoria simply disregard the request because of a technical breach of the new regulations was not encouraged by its solicitors.58 Then the project became mired in the larger, muddier field of university capital works. The days when the government accepted University Grants Committee applications for funding ‘without demur’ were long gone. The Treasury recommended early in 1980 that no further major buildings be approved for Victoria until (among other conditions) the fate of the Hunter building was decided, and authority to call tenders for the new tower was withheld. The vice-chancellor publicly described the delay as ‘outrageous’. It was widely accepted that Victoria was the worst accommodated of the country's seven universities. It had 9.2 square metres of usable space for every equivalent full-time student compared with the national average of 11.6. Nearly 40% of that space was in substandard or temporary accommodation, which included by now some 50 old houses. It lacked the equivalent of eight Von Zedlitzes, or six Hunters, of permanent space. But the grants committee was able to authorise only two major new building projects, and Victoria's was not one of them.

The Treasury dissented when the University Works Committee finally recommended a grant and approval to call tenders in late 1983.59 But Cabinet agreed, and work began on clearing the site (of four houses) in March 1984. No longer was it the Bernard Murphy building, though. In response to public comment and a family request, it was agreed to rename it the Murphy building. Barney Murphy had never been known as Bernard.

At the request of the government, Victoria commissioned a new campus development plan in 1979, the first comprehensive review of its building and site programme since 1962. The job was entrusted again to Kingston Reynolds. It presented, nevertheless, a significantly different approach from the previous plan, a general scaling-down commensurate with the cooler funding climate and an expectation that student numbers would not significantly increase over the next 10 years (although here they were wrong again). It was also more cautious in looking ahead only 15 years. The new plan was released at the end of 1981. In addition to major buildings already in progress, the university remained committed to the third and ‘final’ stage of Cotton as it was now described (although Cottons four, five and six would be back on the drawing board within a few years). A ‘retrofitting’ programme was planned for Kirk and Easterfield. Otherwise, small- or medium-scale buildings replaced the concrete monoliths of the '60s planners. A history and philosophy building was planned (but never realised) for the prefab site behind the lecture theatre block (now named Maclaurin); and a low-rise, multi-building music complex on Kelburn Parade proposed on the edge of the Cotton zone. This was in development by late 1984, and the Music Department was finally rescued from the crumbling chemistry wing of Hunter in 1988. Old houses were no longer regarded as a temporary evil but would themselves be retrofitted for permanent accommodation where appropriate. With the third and fourth Kelburn Parade towers now definitely abandoned, houses here would be upgraded, and more open, green space created.

The new development review proceeded with a welcome degree of consultation (an expression of the Taylor rather than the Williams style, at least in part). In the submissions that were received, another change was made explicit: the shift in the geographical centre of the university from north to south, away from the Hunter building. This had in fact already started by the beginning of the 1960s, well before the progressive abandonment of Hunter, with the opening of the student union building and Easterfield, in whose large, all-purpose lecture theatre arts as well as science students attended a good number of their classes. Now the geopolitical centre of the university was recognised to be the open space – once carpark – between Easterfield and Rankine Brown. The library, surely, was the intellectual centre of the university, and was becoming the social one too. The representation from the Staff Club president argued that the Staff Club's central situation on the third floor of Rankine Brown, and its need to expand, must be the primary consideration in planning discussions. (The location of the Staff Club, which was taking up space desperately needed by the library – which was now short by 500 seats, or one-third the reader space of grants committee guidelines – had been a matter of contention for some time. The vision of the 1962 report, of a staff recreation building situated in some peaceful, sylvan glade, needless to say had not been realised.) Non-academic amenities should also be developed in this area: ‘a bank, post office, telephones, a book store, dairy/milk bar/cafeteria, and a drapery/stationery/general goods outlet…. The failure of university planners to make any sort of provision whatsoever for the elementary needs of its captive population,’ it was argued, ‘represents an inexcusable indifference towards the welfare of those they purport to plan for.’60 The Association of University Teachers similarly envisaged the further development of the Rankine Brown area as a ‘university campus centre’. At the end of 1979 work began on landscaping the courtyard ‘to create a sense of unity and significance to the space that befits its central location and its heavy pedestrian usage’ – with a curve of broad low steps to create ‘a shallow amphitheatre’, a covered walkway between Easterfield and Rankine Brown, and the planting of deciduous trees and a sculpture (by George Kojis).61 Earlier generations of students had slouched, smoked and socialised on the Hunter steps; now they congregated in ‘the Quad’.

The Students' Association and the director of student welfare services also argued for the development of the Wai-te-ata Road area behind the library, a

Campus under construction, 1975. Evening Post

Commerce graduate, advertising chief and benefactor Jack Ilott (right), with Council member Frank Corner at the opening of the Ilott coffee bar, 1985 string of not-so-old houses extending from the union building to the gym, for student welfare and recreational facilities (including, perhaps, the indoor swimming pool?). The development review, however, left the future of this area ‘in abeyance’. Its potential development as an exclusive student zone was thwarted when the new vice-chancellor moved the vice-chancellor's office into Berendsen House – the last, and most stately, of the Wai-te-ata Road properties acquired – in 1983, ‘bringing him much closer to the active centre of the University’ (or, looked at another way, taking him further away from the registry).62 Axford's vision for Wai-te-ata Road, which came at least partly into being, was a string of research schools.

Submissions to the review were also severely critical of the incrementalist, ‘essentially engineering approach’ of campus planning in the past, which had resulted in ‘a fragmented collection of discrete structures without much pretension to any integrated vision of what might constitute an ideal campus’ (much as the Students' Association had predicted in 1949), and the proliferation of what were now known in the trade as ‘sloips’ (spaces left out in planning). They were critical of its failure to take account of pedestrian needs, the microclimate of the site, and aesthetics.63 In the early 1970s, as work on the Cotton building began, as prefabs were sprouting like mushrooms and a large part of the campus resembled (or in fact was) a construction site, concern about the conservation of the natural environment was also growing. The accidental death by bulldozer of a walnut tree and a kowhai prompted a statement from the grounds supervisor (Joe Short) that ‘no trees, shrubs or flower patches are ever thoughtlessly removed’.64

These issues, of comfort, beauty, and the (dis)integration of the whole, were addressed with the launch at the end of 1982 of the ‘precinct project’, the initiative of the new vice-chancellor, Ian Axford, and Helen Tippett, professor of architecture (who was quoted as describing Victoria as ‘the worst campus in the developed world’), and ably managed by the university's building supervisor, Jan Rotman.65 It is true that the university's planning consultants in the 1960s had been aware of ‘the relevance of the fabric of the University – its accumulated building materials,

Axford's ‘crystal palace’: a clear polycarbonate roof rises over the Quad. Evening Post its spaces and climate, its site and situation – to the whole educational process it serves’ (to quote Reynolds). They knew about the wind-tunnel effect which was to some extent endemic to the site, but which had been considerably exacerbated by the construction of Easterfield, and the problem of the ‘spaces between buildings’ which had a tendency to turn into carparks.66 The university Council, Culliford had told a journalist in 1962, ‘will avoid a conglomeration of buildings stuck together haphazardly and is planning extensions to form an organic and functional unit’ – an aim it spectacularly failed to achieve.67 The precinct project represented the first concerted effort to ameliorate these conditions, and to view the university campus as an environment rather than just a space. It was an exercise in ‘creative pragmatism’, at effecting ‘major improvements in the working conditions and campus environment at substantially less cost and in less time than the projected major capital works’.68 Journalist David McGill, an erstwhile opponent of the university in the 1970s over the Hunter controversy, enthused (if a little facetiously) after a guided tour by the vice-chancellor, whom he described ‘striding ahead like Clark Kent about to activate an x-ray vision of the future campus’.69

The campus was divided into six precincts, and architectural consultants appointed for each. In the Kelburn Parade precinct, houses and the Von Zedlitz building were painted to a harmonious colour scheme (brick-red, mud-brown and concrete-grey). Power lines went underground, and the long-planned overbridge was widened to be a concourse rather than merely a conduit between science, commerce and arts. The 25-metre-long, 8.5-metre-wide, 35-tonne steel construction was lifted into place in the early hours of one morning in February 1987. Across the bridge the balcony of New Kirk was enclosed, and with a gift of $55,000 from retired advertising chief and commerce graduate Jack Ilott, became the Ilott coffee lounge. Returning to Victoria to study politics at the age of 70, Ilott had looked back nostalgically to his undergraduate days in the 1930s when there had been only about 700 students and ‘constant discussion and debate’, and decided that students in the 1980s worked too hard. A coffee lounge, he hoped, would help to foster ‘the important, informal side of University education’.70 Towards the top of Kelburn Parade a new university marae including a carved meeting house, Te Tumu Te Herenga Waka, was developed where there was once to have been a tower block or two. The single most spectacular innovation of the beautification project, however, was the $1.25 million, Athfield-designed, clear plastic roof over the Rankine Brown courtyard. This was Axford's special project, although he was gone before it was completed at the beginning of 1986.71

The precinct project ran into some problems of its own as well, including cost overruns and others resulting from having several architects working on several projects at the same time. When the courtyard scheme in particular was threatened, management of the university building programme was reorganised: a new position of assistant to the vice-chancellor for buildings and site development was created (into which the director of student welfare services moved), and at the request of nervous Council members a consulting civil engineer was appointed. And plans for scaling back the Cotton monolith had to be revised in the plain light of space requirements.

It was of course too late to start over with a completely fresh vision – of, perhaps, ‘hill-hugging unified sweeps and terraces of campus buildings designed to take advantage of the site and its views’, as the Evening Post commented wistfully when contemplating an architect's drawing of the Murphy building in 1983.72 Touring vice-chancellors could only look with envy, as Taylor did in 1970, at American universities like Stanford: a university founded in the same decade as Victoria, but by a railway millionaire rather than a reluctant state, endowed with some 9000 acres, in the area that was to become the international capital of the information technology industry known as Silicon Valley; its ‘Quad’ was half the size of Victoria's original site. There is a school of thought that such things do not matter: that a university comprises brains, not buildings, that scholars will think and create regardless of – in spite of, even – poverty and squalor. But the precinct project made an appreciable difference to the appearance and experience of Victoria's modest campus: it was without doubt a more comfortable place to be. It even attracted the congratulations of the minister of education, Merv Wellington – when he opened the second Cotton building, Laby, in June 1984 – for demonstrating ‘a sensible self-help attitude which is refreshing’.73

An equally significant outcome of the new approach to ‘the fabric of the university’ in the 1980s was the decision, in late 1985, to dispense with the services of Kingston Reynolds as its sole planning consultants and to appoint a campus planning group, including four architects. The creative result of new architectural input can be seen in the music complex (by Bill Alington of Gabites Porter & Partners), and the semi-circular works and services building (by Maurice Tebbs of Stephenson and Turner), sited on ‘a grassy knoll’74 south-east of the Cotton–Laby complex and completed in 1990.

Part two of the Hunter saga was less complicated and confrontational than the first, and it too has a happy ending. In May 1984 it was publicly announced that the university, the Friends of Hunter, the Historic Places Trust and the government had agreed that the essential features of the building would be saved. Eight architects were invited to take part in a Hunter ideas competition: the brief included retaining the library, main foyer and staircase, the eastern facade and the roofline of the original arts wing. The prize was shared by Grahame Anderson and Gordon Moller. Anderson was appointed architectural consultant, Moller secondary design consultant. By the beginning of 1987 the Friends and Historic Places Trust had given their blessing to a plan for restoration of the northern parts of Hunter and the Robert Stout building for the registry, and a new multi-storey building adjoining the old physics wing for law. The university Council approached the grants committee, which (on the advice of the Ministry of Works) would fund the restoration only if the cost was less than for a new building on the same site – which it was, but only just. The total cost of the project was more than $20 million.

Once again, the money was the problem. The government gave a preliminary grant; sketch plans were prepared (and approved of by the Historic Places Trust); working drawings were commissioned. Construction was scheduled to begin in February 1990. Then university capital works allocations were slashed in the July 1989 budget. (Already, 1987 budget cuts had delayed university building projects for two years.) The project was further frustrated by the new funding regime brought in after July 1990 as part of the fourth Labour government's larger ‘devolutionary’ restructuring of the education system. The University Grants Committee was gone, and the universities would now be individually ‘bulk funded’ on the basis of student numbers. Their capital assets (and liabilities) became their own. The cost of the Hunter project was more than Victoria's newly devolved capital works budget could manage.

The university was seeking a transitional grant of $4.8 million for strengthening the building (restoration would cost just under $10 million more, the new law tower another $14.5 million). Why, it asked, couldn't the money come from the government's profit from the sale of Telecom, which the minister of education had promised for educational buildings? He turned them down. The press advised the university to look to corporate sponsorship and in the pockets of its ‘old boys and girls’. (Few in the city ‘would want to see the end of the Gothic building, which gives Victoria University almost all of its negligible character,’ the Evening Post unkindly observed.)75 Meanwhile a 6.3-magnitude earthquake in southern Hawke's Bay in May 1990 focused renewed attention on the structural integrity of the building. It had lain empty now for two years, used only as a film set: an Edgar Allan Poe-inspired television horror movie starring Patrick MacNee and Ian Mune was filmed there in March 1990.

Finally, in the face of the building's rapid deterioration and the students' burgeoning numbers, which threatened another official ‘accommodation crisis’, a $12 million contract for the Hunter restoration was let in December 1990, the price to be paid by drawing on the university's reserves, deferring other works and borrowing if necessary. The work began early in 1991: strengthening the brick walls with bolts and a spray-on concrete lining; restoring timber, moulded ceilings, architraves and archways; cleaning and repairing the memorial window; virtually gutting and rebuilding the physics wing; adding a three-level glass atrium between Hunter and Robert Stout. (The new law tower was deferred.) Registry and administration staff began moving back into the arts and library wing and restored Robert Stout building in May 1993, 20 years and two months after the earthquake that had appeared to spell the building's demise.

The Polhill Gully dream remained unfulfilled. It had been seen in 1962 as a medium-term rather than an immediate prospect. Aside from earthquakes, the complex of factors involved in the Polhill story is familiar. Although it was a scheme that never happened, it is part of the narrative of the university's uncertain relationship with its neighbourhood. The designated area, bounded by Aro Street, Durham Street and Holloway Road, contained 119 acres of largely ‘goat country’ (in the chancellor's words), from which Victoria could expect to gain about 60 acres of usable land.76 It was owned variously by the Crown and the City Council. By 1970 the university had taken possession of the old Mitchelltown School and the former Unity Theatre premises in Aro Street for a carpenters' workshop and store. Some 24 other properties had by the mid–1970s been acquired by the government for which it had no immediate use.

When it submitted a five-year building programme to the University Grants Committee in 1972, the university considered the Polhill Gully development ‘both necessary and practical’.77 But now the government, City Council and property developers were eyeing the empty gully and surrounding areas for housing. Developers planning a residential subdivision of Fitchett's Farm above Holloway Road wanted an access road through Polhill. When the City Council endeavoured to have the university designation over the area lifted, Victoria would agree only to the road, and would not relinquish its interest in the land. The Polhill question was also closely entwined with the Council's and university's respective, and not quite coinciding, proposals for the new road to link Aro Valley and the Kelburn Parade campus. ‘The situation is now so complicated,’ Culliford reported in 1976, ‘that it can be resolved only by administrative action of an almost primitive kind.’78

By the time these issues were back on agendas in 1979, having been over-shadowed by the Von Zedlitz and Hunter controversies, the need for new residential development in the area was uncertain and the City Council was anxious to retain as much housing in Holloway Road as possible. In September that year, much-publicised direct action by local residents stopped the demolition of a derelict university house in Holloway Road. When the university designation had first been agreed, Clermont Terrace residents immediately protested over the feared desecration of their neighbourhood. Now, the ‘small backwater of houses of indifferent quality’ that was Holloway Road was seen to have its own character. A Mitchelltown Society was incorporated, and lobbied for the area to be zoned a ‘village’ and the surrounding open hillsides protected. The thought of the university relinquishing its claim on Polhill was raised at this stage, but in passing.79 Instead, the university designation over the residential properties in Holloway Road and Aro Street, which it had found it did not need anyway, was removed at Victoria's instigation. In 1982 the Planning Tribunal further reduced the Polhill area, and also modified the district scheme designation from ‘tertiary purposes’ to more specific uses: for ‘university purposes (recreation and minor works)’ in the case of Polhill, for student accommodation around Clermont Terrace and Landcross Street, and for general university use elsewhere.

There was opposition, as anticipated, when the university began planning in earnest for the use of the Polhill site over the next few years, and pressure from students for the development to proceed. Victoria had some 63 sports teams and one outdoor field, the students' Sports Council complained to the university Council in March 1984. It had 1.9 square metres of recreational space per student, compared with 6.9 at Otago, 15.9 at Auckland, 18 at Massey, 29.8 at Waikato, 29.3 at Canterbury and 91.5 at Lincoln. These figures were quoted to the university/ city liaison committee in a bid to persuade the City Council to undertake a joint development which would include a children's play area and retain the ridgelines and regenerating native bush. A feasibility study was commissioned by the university,

Ian Boyd points to Polhill Gully

The Polhill plan and the development tentatively scheduled for the late 1980s. The $4 million scheme which emerged included six assorted playing fields, two tennis courts, cross-country tracks, a pavilion, a botany field station and 100 carparks, along with an $11 million redevelopment of Boyd Wilson field. The Polhill Gully Action Group cried ‘environmental rape’ and picketed the university Council meeting when the plan was considered.80 Further confrontation was avoided, however, when the university concurred with University Grants Committee advice to defer the project until the next, 1990–95 quinquennium (which never came).

Neither Victoria nor the City Council, moreover, was certain now of the need for the proposed new public road which would join Aro Street, by a still undetermined route, with the southern bend of ‘Culliford Drive’ – as the university's access road around the Cotton–Laby site had come to be informally known. When a third comprehensive site development review was undertaken in the early 1990s, both the Polhill and Boyd Wilson schemes were still on hold. Both would subsequently be abandoned (in return for an arrangement with the City Council for use of its recreation grounds). The Reynolds–Culliford plan to transform the quiet backwater of Holloway Road into an advanced and dangerous scientific research establishment had, of course, long been abandoned.

[seven] Mites and earthquakes

IN THE FESTSCHRIFT published for Hunter in 1946 the newly appointed professor of zoology, L.R. (Larry) Richardson, made the only contribution from the science departments. It was a lament for the arrested development of biology since the heady days of the nineteenth century, diverted to utilitarian purposes during two world wars and by narrow ‘fadism’ in the years in between, while the physical sciences had marched steadily forward. There was ‘desperate need for fresh vision in all aspects of biology in New Zealand’ and to exploit the country's unique advantages in this field: its isolation and its dependence on primary industry.1 A decade later, his survey of science at Victoria in the 1954 issue of Spike had an altogether more optimistic tone. This was an appreciation of triumph over adversity. In spite of understaffing, underfunding and grossly overcrowded laboratories, between 1940 and 1952 Victoria had produced more MSc graduates in the laboratory sciences, he reported, than any other college (a third of the total, and over half in zoology). Even if four zoology students had to share one light to illuminate their dissections, and classes conducting elementary physics experiments on electrical currents and magnetism were so crowded that ‘one compass can hardly be free from the magnetic fields in the next set-up’, yet there was ‘a richness and variety of research such that it is difficult to describe’.2 It would become more so.

The story of science at Victoria in its second 50 years is, in its broad contours, the story of science and universities elsewhere, and is not solely one of progress. The two or three decades after the war were a period of confidence and growth, especially at first in chemistry and physics (the queen of the sciences in the first half of this century), stimulated by the ‘exciting glamour’ of nuclear science in the atomic age. This was the era of ‘big science’. ‘We are,’ observed Victoria's new physics professor in 1951, ‘in the midst of an era of amazingly rapid scientific progress.’3 Slightly later the application of physical and chemical knowledge to biological science opened new and equally exciting fields in ecology, molecular biology and genetics. The priority given to science blocks in university building in the 1950s and 1960s was literally the concrete expression of the postwar science boom.

It was followed by a period of relative stagnation, with the spectacular exception of computer science, and by retrenchment and ‘painful redistributions of resources’.4 Science students were just over a fifth of Victoria's roll in the 1950s and '60s, peaking at 23.5% in 1962, but they began losing ground in the early 1970s, marking a low of 15.7% in 1976. This too was a larger phenomenon: the ‘famous “swing” from science’ to the arts and social sciences that was already observable by the late 1960s.5 Permanent staff in the science faculty quadrupled between 1950 and 1975 – the most spectacular growth occurring in the 1960s, and in chemistry and physics – but thereafter remained constant. The general ‘steady state’ of university staffing from the 1970s had differential effects, and was acutely felt in some of the sciences. A decline in postgraduate study also had a particular meaning for science, for it was mostly science students who took PhD or ‘research’ degrees, and the characteristic form of scientific research in the university is the collaborative work of teams of staff and graduate students.6

The growth of applied science is another general postwar theme, encouraged, here, by the insistence on relevance in local political and educational discourse in the 1970s; and, along with this, the attraction of research funding from sources

Zoology laboratory, 1950s outside the university, although never as much as hoped for. As the new professor of physiology remarked in his inaugural lecture in 1971: ‘To be “with it” in the 1970's we should also consider its relevance.’7 In 1955 the dean of science (chemistry professor Stanley Slater) began a report on the development of applied science at Victoria by posing the question, ‘whether it is in fact proper for the University in any systematic way to cultivate applied research’.8 Only five years later the Hughes Parry report berated New Zealand's universities for their neglect of applied science and technology, and recommended that science departments generally be expanded as a matter of urgency. Victoria's science faculty executive debated in 1960, but rejected, the establishment of a separate faculty of applied science. Nevertheless, in the early 1960s a number of specifically ‘applied’ positions were created – senior lectureships in applied electronics, pedology (soil science) and applied fisheries, termed ‘industrial development’ appointments – and the Professorial Board convened an Industrial Developments Committee to investigate ways in which the university might ‘make its contribution to the national wealth of New Zealand’.9 A Diploma in Applied Science was introduced in 1978 in response to the growing demand for vocationally oriented graduate qualifications, while applied research was going on across the faculty, from the feasibility of commercial prawn farming at Lake Grassmere (in zoology) to the extraction of titanium oxide from ironsands (chemistry) – if, in the large analysis, not with the success that had been hoped.

The use of science, however, also became problematic in the postwar era. Charles Watson-Munro, the flamboyant ‘atom scientist’ who succeeded Florance in the physics chair, gave his inaugural lecture on ‘Peacetime applications of atomic energy’. Twenty years later, in 1971, a new professor of organic chemistry contrasted the ‘sinister side effects’ of modern science with what he imagined to be the ‘untainted wholesomeness’ of pre-war chemistry, and argued that the potential misuse of chemical knowledge (in the form, for example, of pesticides or genetic manipulation) was as insidious as that of nuclear physics.10 Environmentalism (or ecology) was a prevailing theme in science in the 1970s.

Growing specialisation, the proliferation of courses of study and the fragmentation of disciplines also caused anxiety in the academy. The founding professors were polymaths, partly out of colonial necessity, and partly because the field of scientific knowledge and its academic study was so much smaller then. The first professor of applied mathematics referred in his inaugural address in 1964 to this university's custom, in creating a second chair, ‘to associate with it some title, however bizarre, other than that of merely the second Chair in that Department, and thereby apparently to create a whole corpus of new academic subjects’ (although, of course, his own subject had a long and honourable independent history). To argue, he observed, that there was as much danger in a superficial general education as in narrow specialisation was a controversial view.11 In 1965 J.T. Salmon, a biologist by training, a botanist by inclination, and newly appointed professor of zoology, looked forward to a return to the teaching of biology as a unified subject. A new chemistry professor discoursed to his colleagues in 1967 on ‘Pantology: a futuristic view of physical chemistry’. Such comments are not unrelated to the traditional inaugural theme of claiming one's own subject to be the centre of all knowledge. But a wider concern about excessive specialisation also showed in the nature of the Victoria science degree. When all the university science faculties were examining their degree structures in 1959, Victoria rejected others' moves towards compulsory specialisation, and introduced (not without debate) the ‘Type B’ BSc for students wanting to take a broad undergraduate science degree.12 The principles of flexibility at undergraduate level – offering a choice of a general or a specialised course – and that ‘undue specialisation … is undesirable’ were explicitly reaffirmed when the faculty recommended the introduction of half-units in 1964, and moving (along with the rest of the university) to the credit degree in 1969.13

The interdisciplinary tendency of the modern university and modern science is a related (and narratively difficult) theme. In institutional terms this saw the establishment of multi-disciplinary laboratories, and a research centre and an institute in the 1970s; and the reconfiguration of departments into larger schools – of earth, biological, mathematical, and chemical and physical sciences – in the 1980s and 1990s. Science also became more technological, and expensive. Victoria's 1973 quinquennial submission remarked on a ‘veritable explosion’ in instrumentation in the 1960s, in accelerators and spectrometers; the proliferation of computers had barely begun.14 Chemistry and physics continued to take the lion's share of all University Grants Committee research funding and Victoria followed this pattern. (Indeed, the grants committee research fund was explicitly biased towards the physical sciences.) Of the $105,778 Victoria received from this fund in 1967, for example, all but $1500 was for science.15

This story is also particular to Victoria in some of its broad themes. One is location: Victoria's often-noted ‘Wellington locale’, which has meant a particular relationship with the government science establishment, although not always as close as or in the particular form hoped for. It has been closer in some fields (earth sciences and applied mathematics, for example) than in others (such as chemistry and physics). R.H. Clark, professor of geology, once thought of ‘a National Science Faculty, involving all the scientific personnel in the Wellington area’, a vision reminiscent of Robert Stout's in 1886 (when he planned for the new college to take over the Colonial Museum).16 Victoria's submission to the Hughes Parry committee proposed (hopefully) that the DSIR set up research units at the university, headed by a senior academic. The reality has been co-operation in a more ad hoc fashion, established by individual initiative at a personal or departmental level.

The absence of an engineering or medical school also influenced the character of Victoria's science faculty. The pure science departments at other universities (except Waikato) could develop a mutually supportive relationship with their professional schools. In practical terms, the possession of an engineering school facilitated the development and maintenance of research equipment, while Victoria's lack of a medical school (not for want of trying, as we shall later see) largely shut it out of the single largest source of scientific research funding outside the University Grants Committee – medical research organisations. In the 1960s the establishment of an independent Massey University with its strong agricultural science base was felt by Victoria, and Williams' and Culliford's suspicions of Massey's expansionist plans were to prove not wholly unfounded. So was a tendency, first remarked in the late 1960s, for medical and engineering students to do their intermediate year at the same university as their professional course.

Despite Hunter's pioneering efforts, what constitutes ‘science’ at Victoria has been fairly narrowly defined. In faculty terms, the social sciences have been identified with the arts rather than science; and psychology and geography, with a foot in both, have resented the ‘amused tolerance’ with which they have been regarded by the ‘proper’ sciences, and fought hard for recognition as (and the resources appropriate to) a laboratory science. Victoria has never been a predominantly science-oriented university – except perhaps at the moment of its founding, in the initiative of Easterfield, the chemist, and the brilliance of Maclaurin, the mathematical physicist. This is not to say, however, that the sciences in later years have not contributed their share of lustre and academic personality to the university. It is perhaps typical of the small university that distinction is found with individuals rather than schools, and sometimes in unlikely places. Arguably, however, it has not been in chemistry or physics that Victoria has made its greatest scientific contribution, but in the field of another of its very distinguished early professors, Cotton: in earth science.

Within 10 years of the end of the war, all of the science departments had new professors. Of the two who succeeded Kirk, in the newly independent departments of Botany and Zoology, H.D. Gordon, the botanist, also shared something of his character: a gentleman-scholar and much-loved teacher, unassuming, and academically conservative. He came from Edinburgh via Tasmania, and specialised in fungal associates of the rhododendron, plant geography and morphology. Richardson was something else. He is distinguished in Victoria's history in at least two ways. He was Australian born and North American educated, with a degree from McGill University in Canada, at a time when it was still the norm to find professors in the United Kingdom. He resigned from his chair in circumstances of controversy surpassed only by the departure of von Zedlitz – although that was a case of quite different complexion.

In the 1950s Richardson was the most talked-about member of staff among the science students. Small but intimidating, he affected a Bogartian manner and a Canadian drawl. He was charismatic, idiosyncratic and autocratic. Through his character and research he brought kudos to the college and enthusiasm to his department, evidenced by an impressive phalanx of research students. Although trained in parasitology (by world authority T.W. Cameron at McGill), his notable contribution at Victoria was in pioneering its programme of deep-sea fisheries research, taking advantage of the proximity of the deep waters of Cook Strait, and

Larry Richardson, zoology professor, about to embark on the Peewee. Dominion collection, ATL F58934 1/4 in exploiting the press to publicise it. These collecting expeditions began in 1952, initially on commercial trawlers. Later Richardson purchased for the department its own fleet of boats (Doris, Peewee and the Hawera). He recruited Edwin Slack, a slightly eccentric English biochemist who had migrated to New Zealand to pursue an alternative lifestyle, to the new senior lectureship in applied fisheries. Richardson was instrumental in establishing Victoria's Marine Laboratory on Wellington's southern coast, something Kirk had dreamed of 60 years earlier.17 In 1963 he acquired for the university the old Glaxo fish-oil factory between Island and Houghton bays. Its conversion into a research laboratory, however, was carried out after he had gone.

Richardson's departure at the end of 1964 was the culmination of two or three years of growing personal and professional tension within the Zoology Department. His personal manner, always unusual, had become increasingly difficult; research students were turning away.18 He had, it was claimed, become increasingly autocratic and secretive (some thought paranoid) in his administration of the department. There were also larger academic issues at play. Richardson's teaching and scholarship was in the classical mould, strongly based on morphology and taxonomy; ‘precise description and record’ was the essential discipline, he believed.19 Others were seeking to introduce the modern trends in biology: experimental research, ecology, physiology and genetics. Matters came to a head in the second half of 1963, after one of the two associate professors, H.B. (Barry) Fell – himself something of a maverick thinker, who had joined the department as a lecturer in the same year as Richardson and was establishing an international reputation in his field of fossil sea urchins – accepted a position at Harvard in June 1963 (taking a top graduate student with him), and after a verbal altercation between Richardson and the vice-chancellor at a staff function in October. A committee of inquiry was convened,

Victoria Richardsonia – procesh 1957. Evening Post collection, ATL F1957–2201 before which staff and graduate students of the department were invited to formally present their complaints. It was effectively a coup. Richardson was held to be solely to blame for the irrevocable state of ‘unrest and disaffection’ in the department, and was given six months' notice that ‘thereafter his headship of the department will be at the absolute discretion of the University Council’.20 In the meantime the department would be run by a committee of its permanent staff, chaired by Richardson but with a secretary provided by the registry. After six months Richardson submitted a choleric letter of resignation; when he tried some weeks later to withdraw it, the Council refused.

In effect the management imposed on the Zoology Department during 1964 anticipated the reform introduced across the university in 1972.21 However, at the end of the academic year the committee unanimously dissolved itself and the department reverted to the normal ways. Fell had been only on leave of absence for the year, but chose to remain at Harvard, where he pursued a controversial career (especially in his excursions into epigraphy – the deciphering of ancient scripts – and archaeology).22 It was Salmon, the other associate professor, who succeeded to the chair. Richardson returned to enjoy ‘the climate of the “banana belt” of Australia’, and to his early research field of leeches.23

There was trouble in Physics in the early 1960s too; but, compared with the Richardson affair which was discussed throughout the university (the other science professors were outraged at the way he had been treated), it was not widely known outside the department itself. The discovery of radiation contamination in the Physics Department was made by a technician trying out a new geiger counter in late 1961. The Dominion X-Ray and Radium Laboratory was called in in the new year and a quantity of contaminated material was removed, encased in concrete and dumped at sea. In March 1963 further evidence of radium contamination was found when the department acquired a new portable radiation monitor. Meanwhile, in February a lecturer in the department, Ron Humphrey, had died of leukaemia. A graduate of the college, Humphrey had joined the staff in 1949, had conducted experiments with radon and been responsible for the storage of isotopes. He had been ill for two years, and his family were suing the university for compensation. More extensive and varying levels of contamination was found when the Radium Laboratory was investigated a second time, on equipment, benches, papers, light fittings, in dust, on floors and walls. Much of it was low level and fixed (and therefore of little hazard). There were some hot spots, and evidence that Humphrey's hands had been contaminated. In the conclusion of the investigating officer, ‘contamination found in various parts of the building indicates that at some time in the past materials (mostly, but not exclusively, radium) either have been handled without such care as present knowledge of radiation hazards would require, or, after accidental spillage, have not been removed from the affected area’.24 Such an accident or mishandling could have happened up to 10 or even 20 years earlier. Decontamination was carried out between March and July 1963: sanding and scrubbing surfaces, lining some walls, and the removal of irredeemably contaminated material (some of which had been locked, and possibly forgotten, in the cosmic ray laboratory on the third floor pending a possible court case) to a garage in Wai-te-ata Road. Three years later this material was buried at the Wilton landfill and the garage was destroyed.

Burial of radioactive waste at sea or under landfills was standard practice at this time, but careless handling should not have been. Reading the national laboratory's report 25 years later, the university registrar and former chemistry professor, Ted Harvey, described such apparently ‘slap-happy procedures’ as ‘incredibly inept and inadequate’ even by the standards of the day (chemists, he observed, would have been more careful).25 The story had reached the press in 1963, but a decision was made by the acting vice-chancellor, Ian Campbell, to play it down (‘cover-up’, Harvey later insisted, was too strong a word). The contamination, it was reported then, was ‘believed to have resulted from the accidental splashing or spilling of a weak solution of radioactive materials’.26 Whether it had resulted in Humphrey's death was not determined. The case was settled out of court.27

The suggestion made when Victoria's radiation ‘scandal’ hit the headlines properly in 1988 that Charles Watson-Munro ‘used to walk around with a couple of hunks of radium in his pocket’ is hardly credible.28 But Victoria's Physics Department, like every other, had a nuclear science bent in the 1950s. Watson-Munro had started his career at Victoria as a lab-boy in the 1930s, graduating MSc in 1937. He had begun his atomic career at the DSIR surveying the country's uranium resources; moved on to cosmic rays and radar during the war; and spent a year after it at Harwell helping build Britain's first nuclear reactor. At Victoria, where he took up the chair in 1951, his research was in atmospheric radioactivity. He left after four years, however, to become scientific head of the Australian Atomic Energy Commission (where he would claim to be ‘the only atom scientist whose swearing has figured in a scientific report’).29 His successor, Darcy Walker, was a less flamboyant figure, and one described on his retirement in 1980 as a ‘stabilising influence’ in the university.30 An Auckland graduate who had done his postgraduate work and then taught at Birmingham, Walker was appointed as a good all-rounder, but his postwar research had been in nuclear physics (and then in high-energy and ionospheric physics). He fostered nuclear physics, solid-state physics and geophysics as the three main fields of the Victoria department (and university rugby as his main extracurricular interest).

Walker also played a leading role in the establishment of the Institute of Nuclear Science – although this, from Victoria's point of view, was one of the ones that got away. He was a member of the Committee on Atomic Energy set up by the government in 1956, and responsible for a report from Victoria's Professorial Board which the university Senate adopted as its bid to get in on the action (there was resentment in the university that the government was preparing to take New Zealand into the nuclear age without it).31 The Walker plan was for a single nuclear science institute to be established on a university campus, jointly sponsored by the university and the DSIR, to engage in both applied research and postgraduate teaching. The hardware – an accelerator and a small nuclear reactor – would remain the property of the government. The need for an institute, and soon, was generally agreed: ‘A country backward in nuclear science can only stumble blindly in the atomic age, ignorant of opportunities, deficient in technique and the pawn of countries more advanced,’ the Victoria report began.32 Naturally, Victoria thought the best university site was its own. While others were also at work in the field – on cosmic rays at Auckland and Otago as well as Victoria – and Auckland was already in possession of a small accelerator, Victoria offered its central location and the lack of any other professional school to compete for the attention of its pure science departments.33 But the DSIR had other ideas (fuelling university suspicions of its becoming ‘a sort of National University’) and these prevailed.34 The Institute of Nuclear Science was established in 1959 as a branch of the DSIR, at Gracefield in Lower Hutt.

A Tramping Club group, c.1935 (Charles Watson-Munro, atom scientist, left). John Pascoe photo, ATL C23839

Open-day visitors contemplate nuclear physics, 1971. Evening Post

When the government then invited the universities to apply for funding for nuclear science development, Victoria submitted requests totalling £26,000 from the Physics Department and £11,500 from Chemistry, which was already heavily engaged in isotope research and had appointed a nuclear chemistry specialist. It was given a £16,500 non-recurring grant. The rejection of its bid for a chair and senior lectureship in nuclear physics was especially disappointing. Subsequently, the appointment of a professor, who would work in association with the new institute, was approved in July 1960, but the university was unable to fill the position.35 Its difficulty in attracting applicants (there were only two) was blamed at Victoria on the sluggishness of the DSIR in getting the institute established. The 400-watt van de Graaff accelerator Victoria installed in 1963 (in a concrete bunker beneath the Hunter building) was made available to the institute pending the arrival of its own. Eventually Victoria established its chair of nuclear physics in 1968, and the sole applicant this time, a senior lecturer in the department, was appointed.

Other developing fields in physics in the 1960s included radio physics and applied electronics, in which senior lectureships were created in 1962 (these were briefly seen as the basis for the future establishment of an engineering school). The first professor of theoretical physics, N.F. Barber, who was appointed in 1964, was a geophysicist who had been with the DSIR since 1953 but had more recently headed the radio research division of the Dominion Physical Laboratory. (The loss of its staff to the universities was a sore point with the DSIR in this period.) A professor of physical electronics, David Beaglehole (son of Ernest), was appointed in 1969.

Professors proliferated. So (in turn) did associate professors and readers. By the end of the 1960s the Physics Department had five professors (of physics, theoretical physics, geophysics, nuclear physics and physical electronics), two associate professors and a reader: eight out of a permanent staff of 19. In 1985 there were three physics professors, one associate professor and four readers out of 17. Physics was not alone in this (although it might have been slightly ahead): across the science faculty as a whole, 35% of academic staff in 1983 were readers, associate professors or professors, compared with 24% for the university as a whole. It was this, as much as the number of professors per se, that incurred the disapproval of the University Grants Committee. Expansionist and competitive recruitment policies followed by a period of steady or falling enrolments, at a time of retrenchment in university science departments worldwide, created a bottleneck at the senior lecturer/reader rung of the professional ladder. It also contributed to the science departments continuing to enjoy the most favourable staff:student ratios in the university. Nor was it lost on some that the university was determinedly pursuing the ‘think big’ Cotton building project at a time when the spectacular postwar growth of science had slowed down. It was recognised by the end of the 1980s that some parts of the science faculty were ‘over-resourced’. Still, it could not be denied that Physics' move out of its original home in the Hunter building in 1984 was long due.

Watson-Munro's address on the peacetime uses of atomic energy had looked to the development of thermonuclear energy resources. Victoria's nuclear physicists were doing other things with atoms and ions in the 1970s and 1980s: researching ion implantation to harden metals, for example, with funding from the Development Finance Corporation, and the potential use of nuclear fusion in cancer therapy, assisted by the Cancer Society. The department's 16-year-old van de Graaff accelerator was upgraded when it moved into the Laby building in 1983. Predicting solar eclipses and observing the phenomenon of moon drift diverted three staff members, including its two Americans, with an astrophysical interest. (As early as 1948, in fact, the faculty had hoped for the appointment of an astronomer.) It was superconductors, however, that generated the real excitement in physics in the 1980s. Research in this area began at Victoria (and also at Canterbury) in the mid– 1970s under David Beaglehole. In 1987 a Victoria team led by Joe Trodhal, with a DSIR colleague, succeeded in producing a superconducting ceramic material only months after this had first been achieved in the United States.

Without dispute, though, Victoria's special contribution in science has been at the intersection of physics and geology: in geophysics, and the wider field of earth science. A chair of geophysics was tentatively suggested by the science faculty in 1951 (only if it would not impair the development of the rest of the faculty), but was not to be established for another 15 years. In the meantime, geology, geophysics and geochemistry were areas of rapid growth in New Zealand science, and of government investment: a special grant, established in 1965, was distributed by a mineral resources committee of the University Grants Committee. At Victoria, Walker had fostered geophysics in his department, as had Clark in Geology, where DSIR geophysicists were brought in as honorary lecturers and research supervisors; and a lectureship in geophysics was created in 1965. Frank Evison joined both departments as New Zealand's first professor of geophysics in 1967. A Victoria physics and mathematics graduate, he had begun working in geophysics with a postwar PhD at London, and subsequently at the DSIR, becoming head of its geophysics division. He became internationally known for his work on earthquake prediction (while in scientific circles his name has been attached more importantly to a ‘seminal’ discovery during his early research on coal mines, the ‘Evison wave’).

Evison was behind the ‘wild innovation’ of an Institute of Geophysics, established in 1971 to highlight Victoria's now well-established but, to the uninitiated, virtually invisible pre-eminence in this field, and to enhance the status of geophysics as a discipline.36 Formal teaching in the subject was extended to graduate level. Evison became director of the Institute whose members included all staff in the science faculty working in this field – at its establishment, 21 of them, from Geology, Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics and Geography. Thus there were mathematicians specialising in seismic waves, plate tectonics or meteorology. A lecturer in meteorology had been appointed in the Mathematics Department in 1968 (but, despite strong support from the New Zealand Meteorological Service, the university's efforts to get a chair in meteorology in the 1970s did not succeed). Evison and others conducted seismic research by his ‘micro-earthquake’ technique, armed at first with a home-made portable magnetometer; Jim Ansell, who succeeded him as director of the Institute in 1989, would continue in this field in the 1990s with the aid of the satellite Global Positioning System. There were physicists working in oceanography. Geology met chemistry in the comparatively new discipline of geochemistry, in which the Chemistry Department established a lectureship in 1964, and Victoria could make some claim to specialisation with

Harold Wellman, geologist. M.D. King photo the only honours course in the subject. The Joint Mineral Sciences Research Laboratory set up in 1968, an interdisciplinary facility for work at high temperatures and pressure in mineral chemistry, geochemistry and geophysics, was the only such laboratory in New Zealand.

Geology attracted the university's first personal chair, in 1969. This honour went to Harold Wellman, whose distinguished contribution to geological knowledge was in the then controversial field of plate tectonics, as the ‘discoverer’ of New Zealand's alpine fault – a decisive moment in the development of the theory of continental drift. Wellman had an unconventional academic career. Arriving in New Zealand from Britain as a teenager, he began his working life as a surveyor before the depression and a period of gold panning on the West Coast intervened. He was recruited by Ernest Marsden to the New Zealand Geological Survey, where he also studied for his MSc and made his ground-breaking observations of the movement of mountains in the Southern Alps, and worked as chief geologist for the oil company BP before accepting a senior lectureship at Victoria in 1958. He was a researcher rather than a teacher, known for his blunt expression of opinion and as an intrepid fieldworker: measuring the temperatures of Antarctic lakes, crossing from India to southern Russia by caravan to observe the geological structure of the Middle East, or making the first descent into the crater lake of Ngauruhoe. As the debate over plate tectonics went on in the 1950s and 1960s, Wellman's presence made Victoria's Geology Department an exciting place to be. It put itself in the vanguard of international scientific thinking, while the government scientific establishment – the DSIR – toed the conservative line.

Vice-chancellor Ian Axford (left) and geology professor Bob Clark on White Island, 1982

It is unsurprising that earthquakes and volcanoes should be a focus of interest for geologists in New Zealand, situated on the Pacific ‘rim of fire’, and Victoria's Geology Department has also maintained a strong line in volcanology. This was the main research interest of Bob Clark, who succeeded Cotton as professor in 1954. He had an MSc from Auckland and a PhD from Edinburgh, and was lecturing at Edinburgh when he applied for the Victoria chair (this was the conventional career). Clark led a long-running research programme which began in 1967, monitoring the volcanic activity of White Island. His larger reputation, however, was less as a scholar than as an astute political operator: he was the most flamboyant of a triumvirate of scientists – with Walker of Physics and Slater of Chemistry – who were a powerful presence on the Professorial Board in the 1950s and 1960s during science's expansionist phase. (He was, in other words, quite the opposite of his predecessor.) Among his achievements can be counted the completion of the first stage of the Cotton building for Geology. His practical interest in his students, News VUW observed on his retirement, was matched only by the ‘crusading vigour’ with which he defended the independence of the geology library, the only part (then) of the university library allowed to live somewhere else.37 Pre-eminently, he was the organising power behind the university's long-running and successful Antarctic research programme.

Victoria's expeditions to Antarctica began, audaciously, in 1957: International Geophysical Year, and the first year that New Zealand established a permanent presence in the Ross Dependency. This was the very start of modern scientific exploration of Antarctica. Two geology students, Peter Webb and Barrie McKelvey, aided and abetted by Clark, ‘effectively hitch-hiked’ to Scott Base aboard HMNZS Endeavour, kitted out in Clark's Second World War battledress, arriving ‘uninvited, unheralded and unwanted’.38 Nevertheless, Victoria parties have been going to the ice every summer since. By 1990 some 100 students and 25 staff had been. Their research had generated over 200 papers, eight PhDs, seven masters and 17 honours theses, some important scientific advances; and a good deal of positive publicity for the university.

Continuing the work of Webb and McKelvey, early expeditions undertook geological, topographical and biological surveying of the Dry Valleys around McMurdo Sound, the largest ice-free area in Antarctica, which Victoria made its own. They named the valley where the two students had first ventured Victoria, and other geographical features in the way of explorers – with names like Lake Porkchop, Dismal Ridge, Chancellor Lake and Williams Peak. In 1959 the Professorial Board established an Antarctic Research Committee, with Clark its convenor. Funding came from the university Council, the University of New Zealand's research committee and the DSIR. The Americans provided transport; local businesses contributed clothing and stores. (Provisions taken in 1960–61, for example, included 36 jars of peanut butter, 36 jars of Marmite, 52 pounds of chocolate and 144 packets of jelly. They came back that year with 600 pounds of rocks for the Admiral Byrd memorial on Wellington's Mt Victoria.) The expeditions were family affairs, including geologists, geographers, zoologists, physicists and chemists. The first to be led by a student (who was made a junior lecturer for the occasion) went in 1962–63. Student members each received a grant-in-aid of £100 from the university Council. Those learning their final results at Scott Base were considered to be ‘commissioned in the field’.

There was a ‘kiwi, do-it-yourself’ character to the early Antarctic expeditions, the passing of which Clark would later regret. He was proud of their economy and flexibility. Fieldwork in Victoria Land did not involve long-distance travel over ice, heavy equipment or special training: ‘New Zealand tramping and

Peter Webb and Barrie McKelvey, Victoria's Antarctic pioneers mountaineering already experienced by members are ideal preparation.’39 An American scientist with them in 1959–60 cabled from Scott Base: ‘returned filled wonder admiration loads carried distances and heights covered by N.Z. party’.40 By 1964, though, Clark feared that Victoria's Antarctic adventure was coming to an end, both because of changes in funding (following the dissolution of the University of New Zealand),41 and because there were no more ice-free areas left to map. New opportunities were opened, however, by Harold Wellman's measurements of the temperatures of Lake Vanda (leading to his solar-heating theory for Antarctic lakes). From this point the expeditions became less mobile and more specialised, at first in limnology (lakes) and petrology (rocks), their equipment heavier and more expensive. Pre-season training began in 1964. Another milestone was reached in 1970–71 with the inclusion of the first woman in a Victoria party: Rosemary Askin, one of three field assistants chosen from 15 applicants that year. The presence of women in other expeditions had been noted the previous season (‘There seem no problems in allowing women in Antarctica,’ it was reported, ‘provided they accompany persons who have previous experience in this region’). The 1970–71 expedition was ‘outstandingly successful’, with the discovery of the continent's richest-known site of fossil-fish remains, on which Askin then based her PhD.42 The presence of women, Victoria's professor of psychology, Tony Taylor, would observe in 1985, ‘has brought a more civilised, sensitive and sophisticated tone to emotional and social activities’ in what was still essentially a male domain.43 Taylor's own involvement in the Antarctic programme had begun in 1966, assessing potential expedition members and advising in the field. He later turned his trips to Scott Base to experimental use, for a case study of the long-term effects of isolation and exposure to sub-zero temperatures.

In the 1970s the Antarctic programme became more geologically focused, in part reflecting renewed scientific interest in continental drift and Gondwanaland, in part because of an institutional change. The university's Antarctic Research Centre was established, in 1972, at a time when extra-departmental forms of academic organisation (like the Institute of Geophysics) were in vogue. It was prompted, however, by more opportunistic motives than keeping up with institutional fashions. Clark, in proposing an Antarctic Research Unit in 1970, wanted to keep at Victoria a post-doctoral research fellow in geology, Peter Barrett, an Auckland graduate who had studied at the leading Polar Research Institute in Ohio (the director of which, Colin Bull, had led Victoria's first ‘official’ expedition in 1958–59). The vice-chancellor agreed with Clark that Barrett was ‘the right man in the right place at the right time’, but could not promise funding in the current fiscal climate. Clark was persuasive.44 Barrett was appointed director of the Centre, which was attached to the Geology Department, and a senior lecturer. His own speciality was the Gondwana stratigraphy of East Antarctica. Volcanology (of Mt Erebus) was also a major interest in the 1970s and 1980s, while, from 1973, Antarctic investigation moved into a new gear with the beginning of deep-sea drilling. (Victoria participated in the scientific work of the two international drilling projects launched that year.)

For Webb and McKelvey's pioneering adventure Clark had found £100; the 1989–90 programme cost $110,000. By the 1980s the context of Antarctic research was changing, and not only in its technical and economic scale. Initially, Victoria had the field to itself. Canterbury University began a programme of biological research in 1961, but Victoria had been the first New Zealand university there and maintained the most substantial ongoing programme for many years. Now there was competition: five other universities were seeking funding for major expeditions by the end of the 1980s. In the 1984–85 season Victoria's was one of 46 research projects undertaken by the New Zealand Antarctic programme, in collaboration with scientists from overseas. Antarctic exploration had always been an international business, if not always happily. There Victoria scientists enjoyed the company of the best in their field. In the 1980s, however, it also became increasingly politicised as concerns rose over the exploitation of the continent's mineral resources. Enhancing New Zealand's political presence in the field was a new rationale for the university's involvement in an increasingly expensive enterprise, in addition to those already accepted: Victoria's pioneering role; the science; public relations; and – to some the most important – its character-forming value for the students involved (teaching them ‘a sense of responsibility, resourcefulness, leadership and patience’).45

Victoria's major contribution in the ‘big science’ era of Antarctic research in the 1980s was the CIROS (standing for Cenozoic Investigation of the Western Ross Sea) offshore drilling project in 1984–86, the largest single scientific project to be undertaken by the New Zealand Antarctic research programme, initiated by Victoria and co-sponsored by the DSIR. Drilling to 702 metres below McMurdo Sound, Victoria scientists found fossilised termites and a 30 million-year-old beech

Big science in Antarctica: the CIROS deep-sea drilling project leaf, the first evidence that forest had once grown in Antarctica, and an important clue to the history of glaciation.

Biological science, although perhaps lacking the glamour of Antarctica, has also had a comparatively high profile among Victoria's sciences – notably zoology. Botany is traditionally the quieter, more conservative of the two, and this was also the character of the professor, Hugh Gordon (his quiet wit and good sense a foil to the more flamboyant zoologists). The second professor in this department, J.K. Heyes, appointed from Edinburgh in 1970, had been one of Gordon's first students in the 1940s. Botany was also smaller. Its permanent academic staff increased from five to nine between 1950 and 1985, while Zoology's grew from six to 17.

The Botany Department acquired its own field station in the same year as the Island Bay Marine Laboratory, but this was to be a less successful venture in the long term. It was the initiative of a senior lecturer, J.G. Gibbs, who, learning in February 1963 that the Pokaka Timber Company was looking to dispose of its settlement at Taurewa on the volcanic plateau, persuaded the university to buy it: a 40-year-old cookhouse and hall, a large store and a score of cottages in poor repair, on leased government land. A resident caretaker was appointed and Gibbs became the field officer, a position he continued to hold after his retirement from the department in 1970. In its new life as a field station Taurewa was used mainly by Gibbs' own ecology classes and by other Botany staff, occasionally by the Geology Department (which also had its own field stations, in Golden Bay and Marlborough), by other universities, teachers' colleges and school parties.46 It also provided a cheap winter holiday base for university staff, their families and friends, and for miscellaneous social and youth groups – though not without occasional qualms about whether the university should be involved in leasing its property on a commercial basis. (The principle of renting the facility to non-university users was established early, when a request from Travelana Tourist Services of Auckland in 1964 hastened the village's upgrading by a year.) In 1974 Taurewa was taken over by the university Extension Department, with ambitious plans to rejuvenate and upgrade it as both a recreational and research facility; but two years later the university decided to sell it rather than pay $10,000 for repairs.

Zoology, a more popular science before and after Richardson, continued to attract strong postgraduate numbers in the 1970s and 1980s. Salmon, in contrast to his predecessor, had been a distant and enigmatic character during the Richardson years. He was a graduate of Victoria but worked at the Dominion Museum for 14 years as an entomologist and photographer before joining the college staff in 1949. His main teaching responsibility was stage-one biology for the BA, a course taken mostly by teachers: nuns were a conspicuous presence in the lectures. Salmon's research was on collembola (primitive forest insects), but he was not really a specialist, and gained a wider reputation in other fields. Heritage Destroyed (1960) was an early salvo in the conservation campaign which gained momentum in the 1970s; his Native Trees of New Zealand (1980), combining his botanical and photographic interests, became an instant classic. A review of Victoria's biological science departments in the 1980s noted its traditional strength in systematics (the legacy of Richardson) and in ecology, although it was a late developer here, despite Salmon's

Botany students in the field. M.D. King photo dedicated efforts. Courses in environmental science, in biology, geology and geography were introduced in 1975 (but hopes for a Centre for Environmental Studies were not then realised).47

In the move against Richardson there had been some desire to redress the balance of the department's postgraduate work away from marine to terrestrial zoology. Nevertheless, fish, in various sizes and habitats, have remained a prominent part of the department's research interests. Richardson's boats were sold, and a Golden Kiwi lottery grant (a small but significant source of university research funding from 1964) financed their replacement in 1964 by a purpose-built research vessel, the Tirohia. Although successive plans to expand the Marine Laboratory into a fully fledged ‘research institute’ failed to come to fruition – for a variety of reasons including the usual, money48 – it had by 1981 supported 38 postgraduate theses and 90 research papers. The Tirohia was used by other science departments, and by the Wellington Harbour Board when not in university use (it was involved in the Wahine rescue in 1968), although rising fuel costs had by the 1980s restricted its operations to the inner harbour.49

Jack Garrick, who had been a student of Richardson and was appointed in 1971 to a personal chair, went further afield in his 20-year study (funded in its initial stages by the United States Atomic Energy Commission) of the taxonomy of the whaler shark Carcharhinus: his definitive study of this shark genus was published in the United States in 1983.50 Salmon was succeeded in 1975 by John Wells, a specialist in the taxonomy of microscopic sand organisms, meiofauna. Marine zoology was also the interest of Patricia Ralph, who had enrolled at the college in 1936, became a junior lecturer in 1945, and in 1967 Victoria's first woman reader in science: there is a hydroid named after her.

Yet the larger story of marine science has arguably been one of disappointment. Victoria's most energetic practitioner of applied marine research in 1970s and

Victoria's botanical field station at Taurewa on the volcanic plateau, c.1964

Biology class, 1950s 1980s was another graduate, Bob Wear, who made local headlines when working as a consultant in the Philippines in the 1970s with his discovery that removing one of the eyestalks of the female tiger prawn made her more fertile, a ‘breakthrough’ discovery for commercial prawn farming (‘One in eye for prawns and Japanese,’ the Evening Post reported).51 Back in New Zealand he turned his hand to the feasibility of commercial brine-shrimp farming at Lake Grassmere, and then to the soft-shell paddle crab in an (unsuccessful) attempt to turn a sudden, ecologically threatening explosion in the crab population into a gourmet food industry. As early as the 1960s, in fact, Victoria's Marine Laboratory had pioneered the mussel-culture industry in the Marlborough Sounds. (Thus, although it had long ago forgone its opportunity to establish the study of home science, Victoria has made its small contribution to New Zealand's late-developing culinary industry.) In 1987 Wear became director of the VUW Coastal Marine Research Unit, created to formalise the growing amount of contract research being done by the laboratory, particularly in the field of environmental impact studies. In the 1990s it would develop a new, more visible role in public education. But in terms of pure research and postgraduate work the Island Bay Marine Laboratory, a more modest enterprise than Otago's at Portobello or Auckland's at Leigh, had not fulfilled the promise of the Richardson years, when Victoria had been undeniably the leader in the field. Perhaps the geography also had something to do with it.

Victoria's terrestrial zoologists have been less entrepreneurial than the marine biologists in their studies of New Zealand's primitive and indigenous species. George Gibbs, the department's entomologist, a student of the 1950s, was a grandson of New Zealand's pioneering lepidopterist G.V. Hudson, author of The Butterflies and Moths of New Zealand (1928), and published his own New Zealand Butterflies (1980). He had a particular interest in primitive moths, and later in wetas. Another member of the department studied New Zealand's primitive native frogs, successfully breeding all three species in captivity; and Kazimierz Wodzicki, DSIR ecologist,

Tuatara research, 1950s: Jack Garrick and Bill Dawbin. M.D. King photo Polish count (or at least the son of one) and honorary lecturer, established a Polynesian rat colony at the university to support his research on New Zealand's native rodent.52 But it was the ancient tuatara that, in the 1980s, Victoria's biology school adopted as its prestige zoological research project. If one excludes the student Biological Society's journal, Tuatara, founded in 1947, Victoria's involvement with the tuatara in fact goes back to the early 1950s, when Bill Dawbin began his pioneering field studies of the tuatara in their natural habitat, on Stephen's Island in Cook Strait, one of the 28 offshore islands on which New Zealand's most endangered species has survived. In the mid–1980s a three-year study of the reproductive system of the Stephen's Island tuatara by two postdoctoral fellows marked the beginning of an ongoing project, and the establishment of a breeding programme at Victoria. It attracted international interest; produced baby tuatara for zoos and wildlife centres (and in turn, in 1990, the first tuatara breeding colony outside New Zealand, at the Berlin zoo); and in 1989 gave scientific confirmation to a separate species of the reptile living on Brothers Island.53 Meanwhile, an incidental find during tuatara surveys on the Mercury Islands was the rare giant tusked weta. Wetas may lack the curious charm of the tuatara, but this, according to Gibbs, was ‘one of the most exciting insect discoveries of this century’.54

Others looked at the larger picture. Excitement and international attention were generated in the late 1970s by a group of graduate students who challenged the orthodoxy in promoting the neglected field of panbiogeography – the analysis of broad patterns of animal and plant distribution across the globe – and provoked fierce international debate. They were championing a theory that had first been developed in the 1950s, and was later given support by plate tectonics, in which Victoria has also made its mark.

In its submission on new developments to the University of New Zealand in 1948, Victoria had listed microbiology and biochemistry as ‘urgent’ requirements for its science programme. A department of microbiology was, it seems, an unrealistic ambition for a university without a medical school. In the 1960s the science faculty urged its introduction as an integral part of modern biology (not just of medicine). But when a chair was finally approved, both applicants turned it down because the government would not commit itself to Victoria's plan to establish the country's third medical school in Wellington. A professor of physiology was appointed, however, in 1971.

Biochemistry began, it can be argued, with Easterfield's work on tutin, the toxin in the native tutu berry. But it was in the late 1950s that biochemistry teaching was introduced in the Chemistry Department, under a senior lecturer, Richard Truscoe, a London-born Pole, 58 when appointed and still possessed of ‘quite remarkable … physical and intellectual vigour’ when he reached retiring age in 1962.55 At this time, Victoria and Otago were the only universities in New Zealand teaching biochemistry. A chair was established at Victoria in 1964 (to which J.N. Smith was appointed from the University of London, while Truscoe remained for a protracted period of semi-retirement); and in 1969 a separate Department of Biochemistry. It was an expanding professional and academic field in the 1960s and a popular subject, with twice as many applications as places in the stage-two entry course. Smith's early plan for the DSIR and Victoria to set up a Pesticide Detoxication Unit at the university under his direction did not eventuate ($83,500 was requested). But he established toxicology as the department's main area of work, and its research and postgraduate strength: Biochemistry had 14 postgraduate and 33 undergraduate students in 1968.56 He complained, as professors are wont, about lack of money: Victoria was lucky, he observed, that Wellington Hospital and the government's Wallaceville research station were prepared to give it animals free of charge. After his retirement at the end of 1984 the chair of biochemistry was not filled. However, with the appointment the following year of a molecular biologist (from Harvard), the department moved into the new and cutting-edge field of DNA fingerprinting.

The reconfiguration of the departments of Zoology, Botany and Biochemistry into a School of Biological Sciences in the 1980s may be seen as a return to Kirk's single Department of Biology, or a realisation of Salmon's ideal of teaching biology ‘on a co-ordinated and unitary basis’.57 It also followed (a little belatedly) the international trend of the discipline, and one of the most significant advances of twentieth-century science. With the development of genetics and molecular biology, the disciplinary division between animal and vegetable (zoology and botany) has become smaller. Victoria's two departments first integrated their genetics teaching in 1975.

Another impetus behind the restructuring in the 1980s was quite practical, however. Moving the Department of Biochemistry and the planned new molecular biology laboratory from Easterfield (with Chemistry) to New Kirk (with Botany and Zoology) was a more economical use of space and facilities. From this followed further-reaching discussions about co-ordinating the departments' work, the appointment of a review committee, and finally the creation in July 1988 of the new school, organised around six research units – biochemistry and genetics; cell and developmental biology; animal physiology; terrestrial and marine ecology; systematics and biogeography; and applied biology. There was some restructuring of undergraduate courses, but it was decided to retain the basic shape and nomenclature of the degree, with majors in the four recognised subject areas of zoology, botany, physiology and biochemistry (‘Bitter experience tells us that names matter a great deal,’ commented the first chair of the school, John Wells).58 The timidity or wisdom of this decision, and the potential for conflict between research and teaching structures, remained in debate. But in the experience of those in the school, and as judged from outside, the experiment, an innovation for university biology in this country, was a success.

It followed the creation in 1985 of a Research School of Earth Sciences. This was an Axford initiative to build on the university's international repute in the area, especially in geophysics, and further enhance its interdisciplinary nature. The school brought together 25 academic staff and more than 60 graduate students in its first year, four boards of studies (geology, geochemistry, geophysics and physical geography), the Antarctic Research Centre and the Joint Mineral Sciences Research Laboratory. It was a less radical makeover than that of biological sciences, in leaving undergraduate teaching the responsibility of the old departments (for the time being at least). It was also more complex, in bringing together departments (and institutes and centres) whose relative commitments to graduate and undergraduate work differed widely. The longer-term vision of a fully integrated graduate and undergraduate school was endorsed by a review in 1989, but the potential problems – of divided loyalties, allocation of resources, lines of responsibility – remained unresolved. Victoria's international standing in this field, however, continued. A measure of that was the election in 1991 of Richard Walcott, professor of geology from 1983 (succeeding Clark, from whose department he had graduated 20 years earlier), as a fellow of the Royal Society – a rare distinction in New Zealand science – for his work in plate tectonics.

Consideration was also being given at the end of the 1980s to a similar integration of Chemistry and Physics. The creation of a School of Chemical and Physical Sciences did not come about, however, until the late 1990s, imposed from above in the context of a wholesale review of the university's academic and administrative structures. That Physics and Chemistry resisted, or ignored, the restructuring trend (until it became an imperative) reflected at least in part a lack of confidence and sense of common purpose in these two departments – especially in Chemistry.

Like Physics, Chemistry experienced its boom in the 1950s and '60s. In the 1950s it had the largest student numbers of the laboratory sciences, ahead of Physics. The department grew more quickly than Physics, trebling its staff between 1950 and 1965 (with 22 in 1965 to Physics' 16). The dean's 1955 report on applied science had observed ‘the essentially creative nature of chemistry as a discipline, forward-looking rather than directed towards the maintenance of an established order’, and saw Chemistry taking the lead in the establishment of research institutes (a disappointed plan).59 An ‘explosion’ of interest in graduate work since the move into the Easterfield building was observed in 1960: MSc and PhD enrolments had increased from eight in 1958 to 14 in 1960, and 26 were anticipated in 1962. In 1988, Chemistry had about 7% of science faculty enrolments and a permanent staff establishment of 11, and had made no new appointments since 1975.

The post–1970 downturn in chemistry was a general condition, but Victoria's chemists have seen themselves as the poor relation of the country's university chemistry departments, in both size and support. Chemistry has also suffered from two particular kinds of depletion. One is the curious phenomenon – although not one exclusive to Victoria – of chemistry professors abandoning their labs and lecture theatres for administration (here Slater, Dasent, Harvey and Tomlinson). It has also lost whole sub-disciplines: biochemistry to the biological sciences; geochemistry, a subject of revived student interest in the early 1980s and one which attracted considerable external funding, to earth sciences.

Organic chemistry at Victoria goes back to the founding professor, Easterfield, who had studied under the celebrated organic chemist Emil Fischer; and then Robertson, whose work on halogens placed New Zealand at the forefront of changes in teaching in this field. Stanley Slater who succeeded him in the chair in 1950 was also an organic chemist, but although he had been active in research at the University of Otago, at Victoria he was soon diverted by planning for the new building, and then into administration (his name is remembered in the Slater

New chemistry lab, Easterfield building. M.D. King photo laboratory, the first of the new postwar science laboratories). Nevertheless, the department has maintained a strong field of organic chemists, notably Brian Halton (one of its graduates) and Robin Ferrier, a specialist in carbohydrate chemistry who was appointed in 1970 to New Zealand's first chair of organic chemistry (and Victoria's fourth chemistry chair). Coming from a readership at the University of London, at Victoria Ferrier directed research on the development of synthetic chemicals for pharmaceuticals (‘wonder drugs’).

The department's second chair, established in 1962, was dedicated to theoretical and inorganic chemistry. James Duncan, appointed to it from the University of Melbourne, succeeded Slater as head of department in 1968. He was a radiochemist, and in this field introduced at Victoria, and to New Zealand, the new technique of Mossbauer spectroscopy, with an $80,000 grant from the United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research (the subject of some student protest).60 In the course of eight years nearly 30 graduate students and research assistants, and several postdoctoral fellows, did their work in this field. Outside his own subject he fostered solid state chemistry (to complement the university's strength in geochemistry) and industrial chemistry, directing a number of students into ceramic and dental research. An applied interest of longer standing, meanwhile, was ironsands research, beginning with the appointment of a research fellow, W.R.B. Martin, in 1955. Martin had left the DSIR for the university to pursue what became a personal crusade: the extraction of iron and titanium from Taranaki ironsands and South Island ilmenite sands. He played a prominent, but not in the end the decisive, part in a century-long effort to establish a New Zealand steel industry.61

Duncan was also instrumental in establishing the faculty Analytical Facility in 1971, an interdisciplinary collection of spectrometers of several varieties, managed and housed by the Chemistry Department (although used more by Geology). John Tomlinson, appointed to a new chair of physical chemistry in 1967, had charge of the Joint Mineral Sciences Research Laboratory. Chemistry has, however, been a department characterised by individual achievement rather than corporate strength (and by a stronger commitment to research than teaching). Of most note perhaps is Neil Curtis' work on macrocycles, which earned him a Marsden Medal and the department a $1 million scholarship fund – and other spectacular results (‘there are various tales told of explosions in his lab causing a certain amount of damage and leading to dire warnings from the university’).62 In fact, if its public profile has been low compared with the earth and biological sciences (the ‘field sciences’, which by their nature more easily find an indigenous niche), when the scale of fellowship of the Royal Society of New Zealand is taken as a measure of standing in the local scientific community, the Chemistry Department has scored well: it has had seven fellows on its staff to date.63

On the wider university scene Duncan was also an energetic propagandist for progressive (or unorthodox) approaches. He argued for Victoria to pursue business opportunities; increase its teaching, research and economic links with industry; and redress ‘the emphasis on non-science subjects at this university’.64 But he was disappointed. His (unsolicited) 1968 policy paper for the Professorial Board, in which he proposed car parking and motel investments, management studies courses and a graduate research foundation, was met with polite uninterest. His colleagues carried more influence in the regular channels of university government. The disestablishment, following Harvey's defection to the registry in 1978, of one of the department's diminishing positions in organic chemistry prompted Duncan's resignation from the chairmanship and an increased involvement with his second, more public career in ‘futures thinking’: he was appointed to chair the National government's new Commission for the Future in 1976, and after its demise in 1982 formed the New Zealand Futures Trust. A considerable number of the Chemistry Department's occasional research papers series were in fact on ‘future science’.

Axford had turned his reforming attention firstly to Mathematics, which was thus subjected to the first external review of a university department in 1985. Predictably, the review committee recommended the creation of a School of Mathematical Science, but this was not immediately pursued, despite – or perhaps because of – mathematics' intrinsically interdisciplinary nature. In the opinion of the new chairman of the department, Rob Goldblatt (its professor of pure mathematics), they were working happily enough as they were. This was why Axford chose it.

Maths' cross-disciplinary character is exemplified in Victoria's first professor, Maclaurin: an applied mathematician, or mathematical physicist, who also excelled in philosophy and law. In the field of logic, maths is allied with philosophy and the arts; applied mathematics sits with, or in, the sciences. New Zealand universities have followed the British (as opposed to the American) tradition of developing applied mathematics within their maths rather than science or technology departments. At Victoria the Department of Mathematics has been part of the faculties of both arts and science, but with a stronger orientation towards the latter. The 1960s saw the growth of applied maths, and the advent of computers. A new demand came in the late 1960s from the biological and social sciences, economics, accountancy and business administration for courses teaching basic skills in statistics and probability (subjects accorded little priority by the physical scientists), in response to which a new first-year general mathematics course was developed. Maths' distinctive service function would increase further with the rapid development of computing in the 1980s.

The 1985 review observed (critically) Victoria's Maths Department's traditional focus on teaching.65 This came pre-eminently from J.T. Campbell, one of the university's first associate professors, who succeeded Miles in the chair in 1952. He was an enthusiastic teacher of algebra and calculus, and one of the ‘founding fathers’ of mathematical statistics in New Zealand,66 whose reputation as a dedicated teacher includes his encouragement of women students, at a time and in a faculty (science) where this was not conspicuously the case. This department was to demonstrate the familiar postwar pattern of growth: from an establishment of four in the early 1950s to 21 in the early 1970s, then settling into the ‘steady state’. Its second professor, of applied mathematics, was appointed with some difficulty. A specialist in fluid dynamics from St Andrews came in 1962, but was lured away in two years by an unsolicited and irresistible offer of a research professorship at an American university; the next incumbent – a fellow of the Royal Society from Oxford – stayed only a year (he was welcomed and farewelled at the same Professorial Board meeting). Finally the chair went to the associate professor, C.J. Seelye (who had been on the staff since 1947). Two more professorial appointments were made after he became head of department on Campbell's retirement in 1968, one to a new chair of pure mathematics in 1972. Here too the first incumbent, a young American, did not remain long (retiring to Waiheke Island to practise as a sexologist). One of the strengths of this department, however, has been its ability to retain top graduate students on its staff. And it is fitting, in view of its longstanding reputation as a teaching department, that in the 1980s it should also develop mathematics education with notable success under associate professor Megan Clark.

It had been through Campbell's initiative that Victoria entered in the late 1950s into a long-term and fruitful relationship with the Applied Mathematics Division of the DSIR, one which has contributed to its productive research output in this field. It was purely a marriage of convenience. There was no formal organisational, teaching or research relationship. The Applied Maths Division shared the university's space (moving into the Rankine Brown building from an attic in Courtenay Place in 1966); the university shared the DSIR's Elliott 503 computer.67

Computers were a new toy. There were 19 in New Zealand at the end of 1964, reported a newly appointed lecturer in computing mathematics, and likely to be more than twice that number by the end of 1965. The other universities had acquired IBMs (Canterbury first in 1962), which were less powerful than the Elliott. Victoria also acquired a small IBM for administrative use and hired another, larger one in 1970 for research work, but this was seven or eight times slower than the DSIR's. Victoria was planning the rapid development of computing, its 1968 quinquennial submission reported, but would first await a report to the government on university computer needs nationally. In the wake of this report, $3.5 million was committed to computer hardware and the University Grants Committee accepted a tender from the American company Burroughs (though the government would have preferred British)68 to provide medium-sized computers for five campuses. Victoria's Burroughs 6700 was installed in September 1973; a special function was held in its honour. An American, Bob Gordon, was appointed head of a new Computing Services Centre (he went back to southern California after just three years, however, with plans to open a restaurant specialising in fruit soups). With the Elliott and its Burroughs, Victoria could for a time claim to be at the forefront of the new technology; and the Computing Services Centre also serviced government departments and businesses, until the private sector caught up. When another special grant was given for replacing the now outdated university system in 1980, and each university was allowed to go its own way, the Burroughs was replaced by an IBM mainframe and the Computing Services Centre's VAX network was enhanced.

The Computing Services Centre, 1979

Computer science as an academic study developed unusually at Victoria, in association with statistics and operations research within a new Department of Information Science which was established in 1967. This was an expanded version of an earlier proposal for a chair of operations research – a subject seen as ‘particularly appropriate in the context of the present range of studies in this University, and its location in the capital city’69 – which had met with little enthusiasm from the several departments involved. A specialist in operations research from the Applied Maths Division (Tony Vignaux) was appointed professor of information science, and the computing mathematics lecturer transferred to the new department. Its lecturing staff was boosted from one to three after the Burroughs arrived. An Institute of Statistics and Operations Research was also fashioned, in 1974–75, as an ‘umbrella’ for the several staff around the university interested in such things. They were found mostly in Economics (seven) and Maths (four). A diploma was introduced in 1975, jointly taught by the departments of Mathematics and Information Science.

At beginning of the 1980s the Department of Information Science had seven permanent staff, three (including its professor) in operations research and four in computer science. This concerned the Academic Development Committee which examined the university's computing establishment in 1981–82. In computer science, it concluded, Victoria was seriously underpowered: its four staff compared with between six and nine at other New Zealand universities. As a result of this review, the Department of Information Science was renamed in 1983 the Department of Computer Science; a professor was appointed (another American); and the staff was boosted by four plus a new Unix system. The ‘rump’ of the old Information Science Department became the responsibility of Mathematics for undergraduate teaching, and the Institute of Statistics and Operations Research in postgraduate work. (Eventually, in the 1990s they would all come back together again, in a School of Mathematical and Computing Sciences.) It is in its association with mathematics – and earth science – that the somewhat amorphous ‘discipline’ of statistics and operations research has gained prestige, in the work of David Vere-Jones, a Victoria graduate and Rhodes scholar, professor of statistical mathematics and an international authority in mathematical seismology (the application of mathematical models to the behaviour of seismic waves).

Computer use as well as computer science grew rapidly in the 1980s: enrolments in computer science courses nearly doubled between 1981 and 1982; the VAX network was being used by 12 departments and 2000 students in 36 courses by 1985. The Computer Science Department performed two teaching roles: training computer professionals, and providing basic courses in computer literacy for a number of disciplines. In the latter, ‘service’ area, the traditional demand was from maths and the physical sciences, but now came too from the biological scientists (computer use by botany students, for example, increased tenfold in 1981). There was a ‘spectacular’ demand in commerce and administration, where some departments were already moving to develop their own courses. (Whether numerical and computing skills should be taught to non-science – especially commerce – students in their own departments or by Maths was an ongoing debate.) Arts and social sciences would quickly catch up with the late twentieth-century imperative to be ‘computer literate’. (So would the university library, which joined the New Zealand Bibliographical Network in 1984.) The university's computer hardware was given a major overhaul at the end of the 1980s: the two mainframes were upgraded; the Computer Science Department got a new system 100 times faster than its old when it moved into Cotton 3; and a fibre-optic cable electronic network was installed, in preparation for the proliferation of desktop computers across the campus. Less exciting aspects of the rapid development of computing both in and outside the university were a high staff turnover in the Computer Science Department and a staff:student ratio almost half the University Grants Committee average.

The story of maths at Victoria is not only about number-crunching, however, and nor is it only about science. Two new appointments in the wake of the 1985 review purposely strengthened its pure maths group. Here, its most important work has been in logic, its leading thinker Rob Goldblatt, a Victoria graduate (1971) who was appointed to a personal chair in 1981 after the publication of Topoi: the categorical analysis of logic (1980). One of the distinctions of mathematics at Victoria is in its creative connection with philosophy: where it meets the arts.

[eight] Hits and misses

IN 1949 J.C. Beaglehole lamented the young college's ‘if only’ approach to academic development: ‘if only’ the government would give it a few more pounds it might teach geology, or surveying, or commercial law. ‘It is obvious that every step in the development of the college was taken, not as part of the logical fulfilling of a well thought-out plan, to give a particular community the particular sort of university it needed in a particular age of history, but simply as an expedient dictated by the balance, for the time being, at the bank’ – an expression, he thought, of the colonial, not just the Victorian, mind.1 This was harsh, but probably fair of those first few decades of which he wrote.

The grants committee regime after 1948 encouraged the habit of forward planning. Later, academic planning according to ‘a consistent “idea”’2 in the form of the vision statement and strategic plan would become mandatory. But the springs of the university's growth, its direction and shape, were always more complex than the pursuit of a single vision. It grew along with the growth of the university-going population, and of the resources provided by the state. It expanded in different directions in response to the tastes of students and teachers, or to the demands of professions (like accountancy), or through the reputation of particular courses (like creative writing), or the charismatic pull of particular teachers (like zoology's Richardson). It followed institutional fashions, for centres or institutes or schools, as well as intellectual fashion. There were successes and failures. This chapter considers some of each. The old-fashioned quest for ‘special schools’ was not a thing of the past.

In 1948 the college had requested chairs of music, geography, philosophy and Asiatic studies: three out of four, by the end of the quinquennium, was not bad. Architecture and communications engineering were Victoria's bids for new departments in its 1953 quinquennial submission. It continued to pursue engineering vigorously for another 10 years or so. The context for this perhaps

The campus plan, 1950s curious ambition was a national debate on technological education, an apparent national shortage of engineers, government planning for large-scale industrial development (oil, steel and ‘other schemes of comparable magnitude’), agreement by the profession and the government that professional engineers should have a university degree, and concerns in the university about the encroachment of technical colleges on their territory (technical colleges could train technicians, it was decided; the universities would educate engineers).3 And, of course, the idea of what a ‘real’ university should be. ‘The Council has observed,’ the vice-chancellor informed the New Zealand Institute of Engineers, ‘that every English University with a roll exceeding 1,300 has an engineering school or faculty.’4 As for the university's responsibility to contribute to the national wealth and well-being, physics professor Darcy Walker reported back to the Council from the Industrial Development Conference in 1960, ‘The present lack of technology at Victoria is embarrassing. In the future it will be disastrous.’5 It was, the Hughes Parry committee was told, ‘somewhat extraordinary’ that engineering had not been established here already.6

The early plan, devised by the science professors, was to develop postgraduate work in electronics and radio physics as the nucleus of a future engineering school; but on the advice of the Institute of Engineers that this approach was ‘unsound in principle’, it was decided instead to start with the first two years of an engineering degree (after which students would go on to one of the two existing schools, at Auckland and Canterbury). The Hughes Parry committee, however, was cautious, and recommended against the early establishment of a third engineering school. The government took heed. In 1960 Victoria was informed that the third school, when it was needed, would indeed be established here, and that planning for it should begin within the next 10 years; but by 1965 the University Grants Committee had decided that on the basis of the country's need for engineers there was no longer any justification for another school. Victoria had continued to refine its plan nevertheless, taking notice of overseas trends in engineering education towards greater science content and the ‘miniaturisation’ of engineering laboratories and buildings: convenient for a university so physically constrained, and especially perhaps in view of the city planners' refusal in 1964 to include the proposed engineering school site in the district scheme.7 By the next quinquennial round, however, Victoria had abandoned its quest for a full-scale engineering school, and subsumed ‘engineering science’ within the more realistic ambition of architecture – which, the chancellor observed, was by comparison ‘cheap to teach’, and had received the blessing (if not yet the commitment) of the grants committee.8

Victoria had had architecture in its sights since 1920 (architecture having been formally recognised as a ‘special school’ at Auckland in 1919), but not with intent until the 1950s. It was supported, at least initially, by the New Zealand Institute of Architects, which asked the university Senate in 1957 to establish a second

The first Reynolds– Culliford plan (the proposed engineering school, bottom left) architecture school in Wellington. Asked for their views, Auckland opposed it, Canterbury wanted it and Otago supported Canterbury; the Senate procrastinated.9 The superiority of Victoria's case was advanced – through the usual process of quinquennial and Hughes Parry submissioning – on both economic and educational grounds. There were almost twice as many architecture students living in the Wellington region as in the whole of the South Island,10 and as the capital city Wellington had the largest concentration of architects' head offices, the greatest amount of building activity outside Auckland, and thus a supply of buildings, both government and commercial, to furnish ‘a stimulating environment and wealth of illustrative examples for the teaching of architecture’. It also had, over Auckland, a more ‘rigorous’ climate and a propensity to earthquakes (phenomena attractive to architects, engineers and geophysicists, if few others).11 Individuality was a key theme. Auckland's school was seen to be in the traditional ‘beaux-arts’ mould, with an academic and design orientation; Victoria's would be more practical and technological. Thus Victoria's proposal was by 1965 for a School of Architecture and Architectural Engineering, possibly offering a postgraduate diploma in structural engineering as well as an architecture degree. (Kingston and Reynolds had been consulted, and confirmed the wisdom of this strategy: engineering was playing an increasing part in architecture training and practice.) An architecture school of this character would also complement Victoria's strength in terrestrial geophysics. A more detailed plan prepared at the request of the grants committee in 1966 proposed two chairs, of architecture and structural engineering, and an intake of about 40 students a year.

It was not until 1973 that the committee finally gave Victoria the go-ahead to appoint one professor, a secretary and a librarian to found its architecture school. In its enthusiasm the university went ahead and acquired five teaching staff by the beginning of 1975 (without ascertaining whether Victoria or the grants committee would be paying for them) – and a parrot belonging to the secretary. The German-born professor, Gerd Block, had taught for 10 years at the University of Melbourne; his wife and he had established a practice in Australia with a particular reputation for office (or ‘work environment’) planning; and he described his approach when he arrived as ‘very much management, technology and science orientated’.12 The school as built roughly followed the blueprint prepared for it, offering a ‘distinctly profession-oriented course’ with ‘a thorough grounding in building science and technology’ – although the ‘organic growth’ of an engineering school did not follow.13 A two-tier, five-year degree structure was designed, with a Bachelor of Building Science after the intermediate, plus two years and a Bachelor of Architecture after two more. (Masters in both and a PhD in architecture were added later.) The school and its degrees were officially recognised after the first BArchs graduated in 1979.

Twenty-five students enrolled in the first year, 1974. By 1983 the first-year intake had been raised to 35 and there were 18 academic staff, including two professors. Helen Tippett, who took up the second chair in 1979, like Block came from the University of Melbourne, and had a background in both architecture practice and management. The school also initiated that year a unique course in architectural history, but hopes of further development in this field were frustrated in the 1980s by staffing constraints. The Victoria architecture school's predominantly practical and industry orientation was also expressed in its energetic involvement in consultancy and contract research in the fields of building energy performance, post-occupancy evaluation, and building industry research; and in the innovation of appointing a leading (and notably idiosyncratic) local architect, Ian Athfield, as a professorial teaching fellow – following the American model of an ‘adjunct professor’ – in 1986. This, however, was not to be a wholly successful experiment.

The periodic professional reviews of the school through the 1980s had high praise for its research output and public profile. They also consistently faulted it for a lack of attention to design and drawing skills – and, however well planned Victoria's architecture school was in these terms, there was to be a lingering internal tension between the technical- and the design-minded. The reviews also criticised the school's accommodation, although this was hardly the fault of its members. The ‘nature and quality of this space’, two adapted old houses in Fairlie Terrace and the purpose-built Architectural Sciences Laboratory, ‘does not have the vitality or provide the stimulus expected from a school of architecture’.14 (Both of these issues would be addressed in 1990s.)

If architectural science at Victoria has been a qualified success, in the field of health science the experience has been less happy. In the 1950s when the university Senate was looking at the establishment of a veterinary school (aspiring vets then were given bursaries to study in Australia), Victoria offered to develop a pre-clinical course, with clinical training to be taken at Massey. Auckland, Otago, Massey and Lincoln also made representations: Massey was chosen. The college also put in a bid for a proposed three-year pharmacy diploma in 1955, but the powers-that-be (this time the director-general of education) decided that pharmacy training could happily be left to the technical colleges. Victoria's Council was ‘shocked by this decision and made the strongest possible protest to the Senate’, to no avail.15

The real prize, however, was a medical school. Otago had got in first, of course, when it established the country's first medical school in the 1870s, a quarter of a century before Victoria was even founded. From 1927 the final, clinical year of the medical course was shared among the public hospitals in the four main centres (Victoria's chancellor, Duncan Stout, taught surgery to the students in Wellington), and in 1937 branch faculties of the Otago Medical School were established at Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch hospitals to take responsibility for all final-year medical students. When a Senate committee addressed the question of a second medical school in 1952–53, Victoria submitted that it should be established in Wellington (Wellington's Otago branch faculty, although it believed that the country really needed only one school, agreed).

It was Auckland, however, that got the second medical school. In the year that it was opened, 1968, Victoria's quinquennial submission casually suggested that it would soon be time to start planning for the third. And as Wellington had ‘the best developed single hospital in the country’ and Victoria a strong science faculty and sociology department, it was logical to site it here.16 The University Grants Committee would agree that Wellington was the place for a third medical school; the issue was not where but if, and if so, when. In October 1970 a joint committee convened by Victoria and Wellington hospital issued a report arguing for a full medical school in Wellington, to open in 1975–76.17 Specifically, it opposed the government's recently announced plan to meet the country's anticipated need for more doctors by expanding the existing schools and establishing clinical schools at Wellington and Christchurch hospitals under the jurisdiction of the Otago Medical School (to train fourth-, fifth- and sixth-year students from Otago). It would, Victoria argued, be no more expensive to establish a proper medical school in Wellington, and academically unsound to separate pre-clinical and clinical training. Victoria could easily accommodate a medical school within its current site development plans (an anatomy building was pencilled in south of the Maclaurin lecture block). The grants committee, however, was not convinced. It would commit itself only to considering, at the appropriate time (probably the early 1980s), the transfer of financial and academic responsibility for the Wellington clinical school from Otago to Victoria, and agreeing that when a third medical school was required, Victoria would get it: ‘an ambiguous statement worthy of a Greek oracle,’ Lincoln reader in microbiology A.P. Mulcock remarked when he turned down Victoria's microbiology chair.18 Resorting to that time-honoured strategy, deputations went to the prime minister and the grants committee, who remained unmoved. Victoria lost its chair in microbiology, and ‘was forced to accept that it had missed out again’.19

It had not given up all hope, however. The debate was revived when the grants committee informed the university in 1977 that it was deferring for another quinquennium the question of its taking over the Wellington Clinical School of Medicine. There was briefly talk of convening a working group to look at relations with the clinical school, with or without a proper medical school in view, until it became clear that the still-coveted third medical school was now ‘very remote’.20 Still later, in the early 1980s, a plan was prepared for a merger between Victoria and the Wellington Clinical School of Medicine to form the ‘Victoria University School of Medicine and Health Science’ (incorporating the prevailing, broader conception of health training). But the grants committee's position had not changed. A medical school at Victoria was not to be.

The university had been involved in nursing education, on the other hand, since the 1920s. From 1928, students of the New Zealand Post-graduate School of Nursing had come to Victoria for courses in psychology, education and (briefly) economics. At first there were only seven or eight students each year, but their numbers increased after the war, until by the end of the 1950s teaching them

The campus plan, 1968, including the gymnasium (1), carparks (2, 5, 9, 16), Rankine Brown (4), Easterfield (6), lecture theatres (7 & 8), Kirk (11), Hunter west wing (12), Robert Stout (14), Hunter (15), the student union building (17), tennis courts (18), SCM cabin (28), and university-occupied houses on Wai-te-ata Road (3) and Kelburn Parade (19– 27). Not shown: houses on Clermont Terrace and Fairlie Terrace

involved four or five staff in Education, and the department's head, C.L. Bailey, was suggesting that either a university lecturer be appointed to the nursing school to take over the work full time, or that a special school or department be established at Victoria. Informal discussions were going on at the same time with the Department of Health, resulting in a proposal going to the grants committee at the end of 1960 for a School of Nursing Studies at Victoria to teach a two-year diploma in nursing administration. Unfortunately, the Health Department was not interested enough to fund the development from its own vote, and for now the plan lapsed.

The context in which nursing studies was introduced into Victoria's BA curriculum in 1973 was complex. There was renewed government interest in nursing education, and mounting competition from other universities, notably Massey. The Department of Education was seeking to remove nursing training from hospitals to polytechnics, while nurses sought the status of a university degree. In the wake of the Carpenter report on nursing education (1971), the Department of Health invited Victoria to discuss the introduction of an undergraduate course (which Victoria had until now resisted), and the government set up a committee, the universities' representative on which was the entrepreneurial vice-chancellor of Massey. Massey began laying its own plans for undergraduate nursing courses, and Auckland too began to show an interest in an area that Victoria until now had had to itself. Taylor viewed the establishment of the government's committee, and Massey's pursuit of the quarry outside the normal grants committee channels, as ‘rather suspicious’.21 So Victoria continued to develop its own plans, with support from within the nursing profession. The C.L. Bailey Nursing Education Trust was established, and with the $12,000 it had raised by August 1972, and another $10,000 from the New Zealand Nursing Education and Research Foundation, the university was able to appoint a senior lecturer, Beatrice Salmon, and begin a stage-three nursing studies course in 1973. Honours and masters programmes were envisaged and, from 1978, a nursing option in the new MA (Applied) degree (external funding permitting).

It was Victoria's suggestion that the University Grants Committee take stock of the situation in 1978, as it and other universities included plans to expand their nursing offerings in the quinquennial round. The resulting (Langer) report took Victoria by surprise, however, with its recommendation of a faculty or department of nursing and a greatly expanded undergraduate programme at Victoria (which it had not put forward), and advice that if Victoria was not willing, Auckland was. By 1980 the University of Otago was planning a full undergraduate nursing degree; the Wellington Clinical School of Medicine was urging Victoria to establish one; and the Department of Health, it seemed, could not make up its mind. This uncertainty, the imminent retirement of Beatrice Salmon, and the small numbers of students enrolling in the courses lay behind the decision taken early in 1980 to suspend nursing studies after 1981.22

The proposal, a year later, to establish a department and chair of nursing studies and a Bachelor of Nursing degree – the country's first – was initiated outside the university, by the Department of Health. A joint programme of the university and the Wellington Clinical School of Medicine, the degree was intended, much like Victoria's 1960 plan, to ‘produce graduates, with the habits of mind inculcated by university study, who will provide leadership in nursing practice, management, teaching and research’.23 Michael Clinton, from the South-west Thames Regional Health Authority in London, was appointed professor of nursing in 1985 (to protest from ‘Concerned Nurses’ of Wellington over the choice of an English man rather than a New Zealand woman). In October 1986 the small department (of three) took up residence in the ‘Fieldhouse Centre’ on Kelburn Parade, named for Arthur Fieldhouse, retired professor of education (‘Victoria's own self-styled overstayer’)24 who had succeeded Bailey as nursing studies' chief protagonist at Victoria, and Alice Fieldhouse, his wife, whose long career in nursing had included part-time lecturing here. About 20 students per year were anticipated: five times that number enrolled in 1987. Outside funding supported additional appointments.25

Despite such a promising start, in what seemed to be becoming the pattern of nursing studies at Victoria, the department and degree were disestablished at the end of 1993 – for now. That failure was due in no small part to a conflict of purpose between the professor and senior lecturer (while a collaborative relationship with the School of Medicine had also been difficult). An internal review found the fledgling department ‘fraught with major difficulties which have never been successfully resolved’: it lacked academic focus, produced little research, was out of touch with the students' and profession's needs, and (here was the rub) attracted disappointing numbers.26

In the saga of Asian studies at Victoria, the politics were internal rather than external. The troubled fortunes of Asian studies were not, or at least not primarily, determined by economics. Nor was the issue whether to teach about Asia at this university; but rather, how. The creation of an Asian Studies Centre in 1965 was an early, and arguably misconceived, experiment in organising teaching across disciplines. Victoria was the only New Zealand university to take an ‘area studies’ approach – when it was in vogue – to the study of Asia, and it was not a success.

This story begins at the end of the 1940s, when the college was hoping for a chair of Asiatic, or ‘Oriental or Far Eastern’ studies: ‘the study of the civilisation of China, India or Japan’, in which, Hunter had argued, New Zealand was ‘probably at least 30 years late … already’.27 By the time a committee of the Professorial Board reported in 1955, the subject had been redefined as Asian studies, its geographical focus narrowed to South and South East Asia (being appropriate to New Zealand's geopolitical interests), and its intellectual framework updated to a ‘social science’ approach, as opposed to the now old-fashioned interest in Eastern literature, art and religion denoted by the term ‘Oriental studies’. Although not exclusively of the humanistic approach, the focus of Asian studies at Victoria would be on ‘recent and contemporary conditions and problems’.28

Interest was quickened by a series of six public lectures given in 1956, the first by visiting British historian Arnold Toynbee.29 Already, however, Asia was making an appearance in the college's curriculum, notably in the new Department of Geography, whose foundation professor, Keith Buchanan, was to become by the 1960s an international figure in the field of China, South East Asia and ‘Third World’ studies. A third-year course in Asian geography was introduced in 1953, and Buchanan was on the Professorial Board's Asian Studies Committee which was formed that year. Buchanan was a man of powerful invective, prolific pen and sometimes controversial left-wing views. In March 1956 (a month before the Asian lecture series began) his application, and that of English lecturer James Bertram, for special leave to accompany a New Zealand party invited to the

Graduands waiting, 1971. Dominion People's Republic of China was declined by the college Council. (Bertram was subsequently given permission to go – on leave without pay and the understanding that he did so as an individual with a personal knowledge of China which would be of assistance to the group.)30 Several other members of the university staff meanwhile also pursued a personal or academic interest in Asia largely separate from the formal development of an Asian studies programme.31 This was part of the problem.

An Asian Studies Department was established with the appointment in 1957 of an associate professor, Leslie Palmier (a research fellow at Yale, with a degree from the London School of Economics and a sociological interest in Indonesia), and the introduction of Asian Studies I in 1959. The department would be concerned ‘with the social, political, and economic problems of modernizing societies, typified in Asia’.32 By 1961 students could take an Asian studies major for their BA. Victoria was well ahead of the field here, locally speaking: it was almost 10 years before Auckland's more traditionally styled Department of Asian Languages and Literatures was established.

As a department, Asian Studies was tiny (a lecturer was appointed in 1960) and its life was short. The Asian Studies Centre which replaced it was closely modelled on the recommendations of a recent British report – the Hayter report – which emphasised the same modern, social science approach to Asian studies that Victoria had chosen, and looked to America for its institutional model of a ‘studies centre’. Victoria's own Holmes–Palmier report (November 1962) acknowledged that there were problems with Asian Studies: few students, and competition and overlap with other departments. But following the current model, rather than a crisis in the status quo, seems to have been the main impetus behind its call for a ‘radical change’. Its proposal was for a Hayter-style Asian Studies Centre, consisting of a director and a small specialist staff (eventually six), who would do research as members of the centre but their teaching in other departments. The Asian studies courses per se would be discontinued: the appointment of Asian specialists in Political Science, Economics and Sociology would form the ‘hard core’ of Asian studies, along with a general introductory course to be taught in History.33

Languages were seen as an ancillary rather than essential part of the programme at this stage. Simultaneously, the New Zealand Vice-chancellors' Committee was discussing the distribution among the universities of non-European language teaching (of which there was none, yet). When suggestions were invited in 1962, Victoria's faculty of arts decided that Asian languages should be concentrated at this university, and drew up a plan for a department of Oriental languages, to begin teaching in 1966. They had in mind Chinese and Japanese at first, and later Malay; a staff of six; and enrolment of about 60 by 1969.34 The Students' Association, on the other hand, lobbied for the immediate introduction of courses in Chinese and Malay, with preference for Malay.

While Asian studies enrolments may not have been large, students were definitely interested in Asia in the mid–1960s, for political and cultural reasons, and because of the increasing presence of Asian students on their campuses: numbers of Colombo Plan students grew dramatically in the first half of the decade. Both the Asian Studies Centre and a department of Oriental languages were put before the University Grants Committee in 1963 as interdependent developments, although it was admitted that the former could proceed without the latter – as, in fact, it did. The committee was briefly concerned about a possible proliferation of Asian studies developments as four universities made representations in the 1963 quinquennial round; but Canterbury and Massey soon abandoned theirs, and Victoria's and Auckland's were seen to be suitably different: the latter oriented more towards languages and civilisation, Victoria's, according to the original plan, to social science.

A director of Asian studies, with professorial status, was appointed in February 1965: K. Janaki, a graduate of the University of Travancore (South India) and Tufts (Boston), and New Zealand's first woman professor outside Otago's home science school.35 By 1967 the centre had a ‘theoretical establishment’ of three lecturers: S. Puvirajasingham (from Kuala Lumpur) in Economics; R.K. Vasil (Lucknow) in Political Science; and A.M. Khan (from the University of Dacca) to teach, with Tim Beaglehole, the keynote Asian history course. The latter proved a particularly difficult appointment in a context of fierce international competition in this burgeoning field.36 The lecturers were appointed jointly to the Asian Studies Centre and a disciplinary department, responsible to both the director of Asian studies and their departmental head. It is clear, perhaps, that this arrangement was likely to cause difficulties. Professor Wood's insistence that Khan have his study in the History Department rather than in Asian Studies across the road was a small warning.

There had been hopes of getting some American money, from the Carnegie Foundation or from the Ford Foundation as the Australian National University recently had. But the grant for the centre did cover Janaki's scheme of a research collection, compiled largely of clippings from English-language newspapers to which the centre would subscribe – a plan from which the university librarian dissented. (The scale of this operation was substantially cut back when subscription costs rose sharply in the early 1970s, but the final review of the Asian Studies Centre in 1975 also asked whether ‘well over $20,000’ might have been better spent.)37 There was another flurry of controversy in 1967, aired in the pages of Salient, when the Asian Studies Centre was accused of contributing to the nation's ‘brain drain’ by sending its students to do postgraduate study in Australia or to the East–West Centre in Hawaii, and from there on to careers in America.38 (It had never, in fact, been supposed by its designers that the centre would be able to support significant postgraduate work here, at least for some time.) But conflict of interest and confusion of purpose were the deeper issues that made the Asian Studies Centre if not doomed from the start, at least problematic, while the condition of university finances in the mid–1970s dealt the final blow.

A visiting American professor in 1963 had noted the ‘amiable disagreement’ within the university over which part of Asia its centre should study. The director's terms of appointment narrowed the field down to ‘selected areas of South and East Asia’, and the initial staff were all specialists in this sphere. A 1967 paper on the future policy of the centre advised the appointment of someone in Chinese or Japanese to give regional balance, as well as the introduction of an honours

The new lecture block, 1968. M.D. King photo programme and language teaching. The accepted principle was to provide an ‘informed awareness’ of the major cultures of Asia for undergraduates, but a regional focus at graduate and research level.39 Later that year Janaki recommended renaming the centre the Centre for South East Asian Studies, and warned about the ‘tendency which could produce sporadic, fragmentary and unco-ordinated teaching of isolated Asian subjects which may reduce us to being purveyors of “a little knowledge” on a great many segments of Asia’. She also observed the debilitating effect that the ‘unhealthy expedient’ of joint appointments had had on the centre, as its interests were sacrificed to those of the other departments, and its staff physically scattered.40

In fact Britain's six ‘Hayter centres’ had developed somewhat differently from Victoria's. They each had a strong regional focus, a teaching programme centred on languages, a core of full-time staff, and resources to develop research and postgraduate work. At Victoria, more modestly, an Asian studies honours programme commenced in 1970, based in political science. Indonesian, the first choice for languages, was introduced in 1969. The addition of Chinese in 1972 came, however, not at the instigation of the Asian Studies Centre but from what has been termed the university's ‘China lobby’ (the faculty of languages and literature's committee on Oriental languages, convened by James Bertram).41 The University of Auckland was already teaching courses in classical Chinese, but Victoria's was the only one in modern Chinese, and there were ambitions, for a time, of building on this distinction to establish a centre or a chair of Chinese studies. Some thought it would have been wiser to concentrate on Indonesian.42

The 1975 report which precipitated the end of the Asian Studies Centre counted a number of reasons for the university's ‘disappointment’ in it, although it was careful to lay the blame on the university as well as the centre itself. The shared appointments had been a source of ‘serious embarrassment’ (the introduction of Chinese and Asian studies honours were cited as particularly fraught demarcation disputes). There had always been, its author, dean of arts John Gould, observed, those who questioned the academic integrity of area or regional studies generally, and the diversity of geographic and disciplinary interests among the centre's staff had resulted in a lack of intellectual rapport and stimulus to research. Honours and postgraduate enrolments were disappointing, and undergraduate courses attracted, ‘for the most part, only a modest degree of support from the student body’.43 Even the geographers admitted that, in the second half of the 1960s when student interest was noticeably stimulated by the Vietnam war, ‘in truth there never has been a great interest in Asia amongst the general student body’.44 The report observed that there was plenty of opportunity for Asian studies at undergraduate level in a casual fashion – as had been, in fact, the original plan. The most popular of these courses, Gould also observed, predated or had developed independently of the Asian Studies Centre, in History and Religious Studies. The centre had developed its own undergraduate courses in 1973–74, in an unsuccessful attempt to lower its staff:student ratio. At a time of redeployment when vacant positions were being frozen, a ratio more than twice as comfortable as the university average was the cause of palpable resentment towards Asian Studies. (Asian studies teachers, one commented, were widely regarded as ‘lazy or under-worked’.)45

The vice-chancellor annotated his copy of Gould's report ‘AMEN R.I.P.’. The decision to dismantle the Asian Studies Centre was made at the end of 1975. The teaching staff were transferred to their other departments, happily in most cases. The teachers of Chinese and Indonesian were appointed to the faculty of languages and literature.46 Janaki was retitled professor of international relations, and continued to teach ‘a small number of courses reasonably well patronised’ until taking early retirement for health reasons in 1990.47

Asian studies at Victoria were still alive, however (if not as well as some would have liked), in the form of a motley array of courses, research and professional links in the faculty of commerce and administration, as well as the social sciences and humanities, not to mention the geophysicists' ongoing collaboration with Japanese and Chinese scientists in earthquake prediction. It was decided in the late 1970s, in the interests of rationalisation, not to extend beyond stage two the teaching of Indonesian or Chinese, in which Auckland already offered majors. A decade later, Asian languages, and Asian studies generally, were entering a new period of development. A board of studies for Asian languages was established, covering Japanese (new in 1989), Indonesian and Chinese. Japanese was the popular choice. (Enrolments in Chinese were still modest, and the once-anticipated chair of Chinese studies did not eventuate.) Growing interest in the 1990s would see an Asian studies major introduced in 1996; but the Asian Studies Centre was not revived.

When it was still a dream and not yet a disappointment, the Asian Studies Centre had been the model as well for a Pacific Studies Centre. This one, however, was stillborn. The proposal, included along with Asian studies and Oriental languages in the 1963 quinquennial submission (40 years after G.H. Scholefield had written to the college Council suggesting a Pacific studies chair), came from a newly established Pacific Studies Committee of the Professorial Board, convened by Colin Aikman, dean of law and an adviser to the government on constitutional matters relating to the Cook Islands and Western Samoa. He was also the president of Volunteer Service Abroad, which had been established the previous year (in the wake of an NZUSA-organised conference on developing countries held at Victoria) and in which a number of Victoria staff would continue to play a prominent role.48 Wellington ‘could become one of the foremost centres in the world for study of the South and Southwest Pacific,’ contended the Professorial Board's Pacific Studies Committee, mounting the usual arguments in the university's favour, with the addition of the city's pre-eminent research facilities. Compared with Asian studies, the field of Pacific studies was ‘so much smaller, and existing holdings in Wellington libraries are so notable, that it should be the aim of this University to make available to postgraduate students unrivalled materials for research,’ a report from the faculty of arts concurred.49 The development would also be contingent on the early introduction of anthropology and Maori studies, and the extension of sociology (it was admitted that Victoria was not strong enough in the social sciences). Auckland was already at work in Pacific studies, particularly in anthropology and archaeology, but there was room for two.

As with Asian studies, there was no intention to teach separate undergraduate units in Pacific studies – although a masters course was considered. Then the scientists got interested, and suggested doubling the size of the proposed establishment from five or six staff to 10 or 12. The grants committee, however, was worried (again) about duplication of resources in a suddenly expanding field: it had received 20 research grant applications in three years. No specific provision was made for a Pacific Studies Centre in the 1965 quinquennial grants, and Victoria and Auckland were advised to co-operate.50

The Pacific Studies Committee continued to meet, although not frequently. Enthusiasm waned, partly in the face of the ‘opposition associated with regional studies’ from which Asian studies also suffered.51 A new proposal emerged in 1973 for the ‘organic growth’ of a Pacific Studies Institute from the appointment of an existing staff member (Nancy Pollock of Anthropology) as a part-time ‘co-ordinator of Pacific studies’. In 1973 there were 11 courses (most of them in Anthropology), and 14 staff in the social science and arts departments and seven in biological sciences with a Pacific interest. In the context of the country's increasing political and commercial involvement in the region, the establishment of an institute somewhere was ‘virtually inevitable’, the convenor of the committee, Sociology's John McCreary, observed.52 When the idea was raised again two years later, 34 staff expressed interest in becoming members of an institute. The plan was approved in principle by the Professorial Board, but there was not, it seems, enough activity, will or common intellectual ground to turn an interest into an institute. The Pacific Studies Committee discharged itself in 1979.

The changing complexion of the student body was an integral part of the establishment of Victoria's English Language Institute. A unique venture in 1961, this has been Victoria's most successful ongoing involvement with Asia and the Pacific. In contrast to the Asian Studies Centre, the English Language Institute was developed by design outside the mainstream programme of the university, drawing its initial impetus, the bulk of its funding, and its students from elsewhere.

Within the university it started out under the wing of the English Department. It was established to meet two specific needs, which had nothing intrinsically to do with Victoria: to provide English language tuition for the Colombo Plan students who had been coming to New Zealand from Asia since 1951 (more of them to Victoria than the other universities), and to train teachers for an English language project in Indonesia with which New Zealand had been involved since 1957. These were the responsibility of the External Aid Division of the Department of External Affairs, whose deputy secretary, Frank Corner, after a casual meeting with Victoria's professor of English Ian Gordon on The Terrace one day (as Gordon tells the story), enlisted the professor's help to hold a summer course at the university

The first English Language Institute language laboratory in January–February 1960, which was taught largely by new graduates of Gordon's department. The two of them, meanwhile, cooked up the plan for an institute.

In terms of academic planning this was a little unorthodox. The deal was struck before Gordon took it to the vice-chancellor.53 Cabinet approved a proposal from External Affairs in November 1959; the University Grants Committee assented in December; and by February the government had agreed to provide the money. The Department of External Affairs covered the operating costs, including salaries. The Department of Education bought and renovated the house at 14 Wai-te-ata Road that remained the institute's home until 1981 – and which in 1960 was the university's southernmost habitation (excepting the Boyd-Wilson gym). Gordon took a fact-finding trip to Australia before the position of director was advertised, and an Australian, George Pittman, was given the job. This was not, presumably, because his initial training had been as a geologist. He had had a major role in Australia's postwar English language programme for its (mostly European) new immigrants, and was director of education in Nauru before coming to Victoria in December 1960. His work was informed by American structural linguistics and behavioural psychology, and in practice based on situational teaching. The other foundation staff of the institute included a retired teacher of English in Japan, Arundel del Re; Helene Woolston, trained in Hawaii, who was recruited to run New Zealand's first ‘language laboratory’; and two recent graduates of the English Department as junior lecturers.

Having established the institute Pittman moved on, to the South Pacific Commission, at the end of 1963. His successor, H.V. George, brought by contrast a vocabulary-based approach to the task, in the ‘British Council’ tradition of language teaching (language as words rather than structure), and teaching experience in Liverpool, Malaysia, India and Iraq. He was described by one of his first Victoria students as a ‘future-oriented guru’:54 iconoclastic and considerably ahead of his time.

The first-year intake was a group of teachers from Indonesia and a class of students from Vietnam. The institute's main teaching programme continued to meet those two original needs: a one-year Diploma of Teaching English as a Second Language (the DipTESL), and a proficiency course taught over the summer months to equip overseas students for academic work. The ethnic mix of its students expanded along with the reach of New Zealand's external aid programme. The first Pacific Island students came in 1963; in the 1980s they outnumbered those from ASEAN countries. The Department of Education began sponsoring New Zealand teachers to do the DipTESL course in 1976. But of the total of 3653 students from 83 countries who enrolled at the institute in its first 25 years, the best-represented countries were Thailand (17.5%) and Indonesia (15.5%). The institute's extracurricular involvement has been primarily in these two countries, in Singapore and more recently China.

Its third director, Graeme Kennedy, had been one of the first junior lecturers. When he returned to the institute from the English Department in 1982, he noted the changing political climate of English language teaching – in the post-colonial context the spread of English could no longer be regarded as an unquestionable good – and the growth of similar programmes at two other universities and further afield. His concurrent appointment as professor of applied linguistics signalled an intention to develop the institute's work in that area, and to integrate it more fully with the rest of the university – notably with one of principal strengths of Victoria's English Department, linguistics and lexicography.

Criminology and industrial relations, an institute and a centre established in the 1970s, take us into a different disciplinary area. Like the English Language Institute, however, both were unique to Victoria, and supported by funding from outside the university system.

Teaching in criminology began in law but later migrated to the arts. It was to America that the law professors looked in the 1960s for developments in this new field (Victoria's law faculty generally has looked to America). A visiting professor of sociology from Boston had given a short course for law students in 1960; in 1964 senior lecturer Don Inglis investigated institutes of criminology in America while on leave there, and Ian Campbell later made a similar inquiry in Britain. A committee of the Professorial Board subsequently reported, however, that the creation of an institute would be premature and that the practicable course was a more gradual, inter-departmental and inter-faculty development. The difficulties included Victoria's smaller resources compared with the American universities: in the way of money, obviously, and also in supporting disciplines other than law, especially sociology. (A chair in sociology, another new-fangled ‘American’ subject, was established in 1966.) Law introduced its criminology course for third-year students in 1969. Later that year, retiring secretary for justice John Robson was appointed to a three-year position as visiting fellow and director of criminological studies, with the brief of co-ordinating the development of criminology and introducing a BA course. This began in 1972, with teaching from arts and law departments (at which point law's quite different criminology course was renamed the criminal justice system).

The establishment of an institute in 1974 was prompted partly by the lure of funding, the government having made available to the universities in 1973 $20,000 for research into crime and delinquency, and partly by the imminent expiry of Robson's contract. He was disappointed by the university's failure to develop criminology as he had hoped, but (despite his age and occasional health concerns) was eager to stay on. The vice-chancellor, acknowledging that criminology had been ‘struggling to get off the ground’, as well as the university's financial situation and existing commitments, thought this one was worth the risk: ‘I am all too aware,’ he wrote candidly to the deputy vice-chancellor, ‘of the pended developments (Microbiology, Survey Research Centre, etc.) and it might be difficult to side-step them but they may simply have to go to the wall in the light of student numbers and what is best, in the round, for the University.’ They could ‘sell’ criminology within the university by emphasising its social value.55 Pre-empting any move by Auckland, which had made the only claim so far on the government

Easterfield lecture bench. M.D. King photo grant, also figured in the decision. If Victoria didn't take the initiative, Auckland might, Robson observed (adding that ‘Auckland could not mount a case as strong as ours but they could argue with eloquence about the need for research at the grassroots’).56

The plan was for a small institute, consisting of a director, a senior lecturer and four research fellows, allied with the arts rather than law. It received the sanction of the grants committee and of government funding as the national institute for criminology research, after some hesitation over terminology (reminiscent of Peter Fraser's about social work in 1949). Criminology, wrote the minister of justice to Taylor, ‘to the layman … has a rather ugly appearance and perhaps an ominous connotation as if it were concerned with encouraging rather than understanding criminal offending’: Cabinet members had asked him ‘to enquire whether the word could not be avoided by entitling the proposed institute as say “The Institute of (for) Criminal Research”’.57 The minister agreed nevertheless to fund two research positions, and a third in 1976. Robson was confirmed as the director and joined by a senior lecturer, Michael Stace. The existing stage-one course was upgraded to second- and third-year courses, and an MA introduced in 1981. Criminology flourished as a teaching subject in response to student demand, although that had not really been the original plan. After Robson's (reluctant) retirement in 1980, the appointment of Warren Young consolidated the institute's national status. He was a lawyer and part-time lecturer in criminology at the University of Auckland. When Victoria introduced a certificate course for criminal justice personnel in 1982 (with funding from the Justice Department) Auckland discontinued theirs.

The Industrial Relations Centre, established with impressive speed in 1970, was an offshoot of the Department of Economics. In one sense it was an organic growth from the work of this department, in which labour economics and industrial relations had been introduced into the stage-three course in 1964; but it had a direct external stimulus, and from the outset a predominantly extracurricular role.

Although the idea of an activity of this kind had been raised a decade earlier by psychology professor Ernest Beaglehole, it was in response to a climate of industrial uncertainty, a recommendation of the National Development Conference in 1969 and encouragement from minister of labour Tom Shand that a formal proposal was before the university Council in March 1970, and the centre in existence within six months. Its staff were formally members of Economics, but what would later be described as an ‘odd’ administrative relationship within the normal workings of the university was based on a close partnership between the centre's founding director, F.J.L. Young (reader in industrial relations in the Economics Department), and the then pro-chancellor, Kevin O'Brien.58 Three academic staff were initially required: the director, a visiting fellow (former secretary of labour Noel Woods) and a senior lecturer (E.J. Keating from the Department of University Extension, and a former Labour MP). A large advisory committee chaired by the pro-chancellor, with representatives of the university, the government, organised labour and employers, was convened, in the first instance to find the $16,000 a year over 10 years that it was estimated the development would need when fully established. The university committed $20,000 and accommodation, and the government, through the Department of Labour, a ‘handsome’ annual grant of $4000.

The first funding appeal brought pledges of $7000 per annum for the first three years and more than that again in single donations. ‘The response to the Centre's establishment,’ recorded its first annual report, ‘has been quite astonishing even to those with a vested interest in the teaching of industrial relations.’59 University courses in industrial relations and labour economics were extended from 1972, to stage two through to the supervision of postgraduate work. But teaching outside the university, to meet the ‘“felt needs” of organised labour and management’, was the centre's busiest work.60 Its academic staff spent one third of their time on internal teaching. Their lectures and seminars to employers and trade unions, schools and service clubs proved gratifyingly popular. In the second year they gave over 50 lectures and held over 45 seminars (including a particularly popular role-playing exercise) around the country. An appreciative letter from the chairman of Fletcher Holdings was, the vice-chancellor responded, especially cheering at a time when ‘too often the University and, in particular, its Vice-Chancellor are on the receiving end of criticism’.61 The centre hosted international visitors too, mostly from America. A visiting professor from Johns Hopkins University produced its first research monograph, on Attitudes of New Zealand Workers, in 1975.

An ancillary project, and part of Young's original plan, was the establishment of a Labour Archives Trust. By the time a trust had been properly established in 1973, and the library prepared, the university had already received a bound set of the Maoriland Worker on permanent loan from the Federation of Labour, and the papers of labour leader (and father of a Victoria professor) ‘Big Jim’ Roberts, for which the university librarian ‘had to commandeer the men's staff cloak room’. Although quite how much material could be expected and where he was going to put it was unclear, he was ‘prepared to take drastic action to take custody’ of it.62 Subsequent significant donations would include the records of the Federation of Labour and the Wellington Trades Council.

By 1973 the centre was crying poor in the face of demand. As the end of the initial three-year funding period approached, another appeal was drafted (although not in fact sent out until 1975); in the meantime a loan was sought from the university Council, and the government considered a request to raise its direct contribution from $4000 to $10,000. In 1976, with the centre now threatening to retreat from its ‘closer-to-industry objectives and activities’, the Department of Labour increased its grant to a total of $21,000 over the next three years plus the salaries of two additional staff.63 It was the Treasury's intention that the University Grants Committee should thereafter take over this financial commitment, but the grants committee thought otherwise, and the Industrial Relations Centre continued to be supported by three-yearly guarantees of funding from the Labour vote, as well as independent donations. The third fundraising campaign in 1979–80 attracted contributions from more than 40 sponsors, ranging from $10,000 from the Reserve Bank to $50 from the New Zealand Journalists' Union; the single largest industry donation was $5000 from the Mobil oil company. Still, the university remained the centre's largest and most reliable funder: in 1981 Victoria contributed 62% of its income, the Department of Labour 30% and outside sponsors 7%.

The centre's extrovert character also raised sensitive questions of status. It was misunderstood, Noel Woods argued, because of the extent to which it operated like a business organisation: ‘I have the impression that this type of activity is so novel to the University that the university authorities still have a very inadequate idea of what it amounts to.’64 The denial of the professorial title which Young coveted, when the university had created seven personal chairs in the last three years, and when comparable irregular activities, like Asian Studies, had professors, was felt to be a rebuff. Others, including the chair of the Economics Department (himself a frustrated associate professor), questioned whether the centre was well enough established or academically enough based to merit a chair. Concerns were also raised about the procedure by which this matter was handled. However, in 1976 Young became a full professor, and Victoria could claim the country's first industrial relations chair.

Although the status of industrial relations as a field of academic study still needed to be argued in the academy, at least the centre did not experience the frustration that the university's first fellow in industrial relations had in the 1940s, when the very idea of academic inquiry in the field was foreign to the government, employers and unions (not to mention the fellowship's private sponsor) alike. Nevertheless, as the minister of labour was reminded, ‘academic work in industrial relations is almost as sensitive as industrial relations themselves’.65 The national status of the centre and the importance of its work were recognised by continued government funding and the representation of both employers and organised labour on the advisory committee. But it did not enjoy the degree of support from the trade union movement that it would have liked, nor total trust. A lecturer's involvement in the production of a trade union video in 1984 brought a complaint from the Employers' Federation and an assurance from the university that this did not compromise the centre's ‘industrial neutrality’.66

Its monopoly in its field began to be diluted as early as the mid–1970s, when there were occasional territorial skirmishes as other universities seemed to be venturing onto the turf. Still, Victoria retained its position as the recognised national centre for the academic study of industrial relations. By the end of the decade, though, the expansion outside the university of the short-course, guest-lecture and one-day-seminar field prompted a change in the centre's priorities. It would shift its focus now to the certificate and diploma courses that had been introduced in 1976 and 1977, and to broadening its internal teaching programme, more professional and intensive seminars, and research.

The campus in 1981

Woods had been wrong if he thought the Industrial Relations Centre was misunderstood because it was totally foreign to the way the university taught. In fact its external teaching activities complemented the already rapidly expanding field of university extension, from which one of its staff had come, and in which the commerce faculty was prominent. When adult education became the responsibility of each university in 1963, it was remade as a regular department of this one.67 J.C. Dakin, appointed in 1959, remained its director until 1974 (during which time he also wrote Education in New Zealand, 1973). Already in the postwar years, adult education had moved closer to the universities and further from its origins in the labour movement and WEA. The continuing trend was fewer and fewer adult education courses and more and more university extension-style and refresher courses, more closely linked with the regular academic programme of the university. There were new refresher courses in 1964 – the new department's first year – for lawyers, post office officials, history teachers, insurance executives, farm managers and bank officers. The first university extension certificates (sub-degree qualifications) were introduced a few years later in social studies, industrial relations and personnel administration. The number of lecture courses arranged by the department halved between 1964 and 1965, while short refresher courses, seminars and ‘schools’ were an expanding field. The change in demand was acknowledged by the change of the department's name in 1967 from Adult Education to University Extension, along with its physical move from Tinakori Road onto the campus (technically, at least: it remained to a real extent an outpost, at the farthest southern reaches of the campus in Fairlie Terrace, until the rest of the university stretched up there).

Business management, trade union education and public administration continued to be growing fields in university extension in the 1970s. Economics professor Frank Holmes had for a decade been a strong advocate of the rapid expansion and closer integration of external teaching into the regular work of the university, across all faculties, that was presented in its 1973 quinquennial submission. He was by then also promoting a scheme for a residential centre for university extension (a new facility alongside and in association with Weir House was an idea). This did not come to fruition, however; and some stagnation is evident in the 1970s after the robust develoments of the 1960s. There were 271 courses and some 6400 enrolments in university extension in 1968; in 1976, 158 courses and enrolments just below 5000 (an enrolment of 5284 in 1985 was the highest for a decade). At the end of the 1970s, a clutch of staff vacancies, including the directorship, presented an opportunity for a ‘fresh start’, and the refashioning of the department into a Centre for Continuing Education – which was really a reaffirmation of the existing trend. With that trend, though, the legitimacy of university extension and its precise place in the academy remained a point of some tension, as the university as a whole broadened its reach and changed its style.

University extension was about taking the university out there, but it also demonstrates a movement from the outside in – not only in broad institutional terms, but as fields of teaching that started on the fringe came inside. Industrial relations was one of these; so, for example, have been creative writing and art history, languages (such as Spanish), and Maori studies.

The failure of the Survey Research Centre that Taylor had been prepared to sacrifice for criminology might better be called a lucky escape. The plan for an academic unit devoted, at least in part, to what would later become the market-research industry, evolved in the 1960s from the social science departments, at a time when research in the social sciences was largely conceived in terms of social surveys. A committee chaired by economics professor Frank Holmes presented to the Professorial Board in 1965 a proposal for ‘a programme of substantive and methodological research in the social sciences, using the survey method as its principal tool’.68 This would include a laboratory for advanced training in social research technique, and contract research undertaken for the government and commercial organisations. Suggested fields of investigation for the centre's own research programme included population movement, elections, socio-economic studies of communities and suburbs, leisure activities and opinion surveys. A chair was advertised in 1970, and accepted by R.E.A. Mapes of Keele University; but when he changed his mind in September 1972, the position was frozen.

In these inflationary years this rejection was considered a welcome breathing space. In time it also came to be realised that survey research was essentially a skill, or tool, rather than an academic discipline, while the proposed centre was overtaken by other developments. These included the creation of the Institute of Statistics and Operations Research, the arrival of the Burroughs computer and establishment of a Computing Services Centre, the provision of courses in statistics and research methods in a number of departments, not to mention the growth of commercial market-research companies. No feathers were ruffled or eyebrows raised when the idea was formally abandoned and the committee discharged in 1978.

[nine] Wisdom and gold

THEN, IN 1902, the professors were debating the precise formulation of the college motto, and Easterfield quipped that wisdom was surely also to be desired for the sake of more gold, he could hardly have imagined that there would one day be a chair of money and finance, endowed by the financial community, a chair of marketing and a Department of Business Administration. The disinterested pursuit of knowledge versus the mercenary pursuit of a degree is a theme that is not particular to, but which has particular resonance in relation to the faculty of commerce. So, perhaps, does the question of academic respectability: of what is a proper field of university study. As put rather bluntly by a professor of accountancy, Edward Stamp, in 1966, ‘What has accountancy, for example, to offer to place alongside the study of the birth and death of the stars and of the atoms? How can economics, the dismal science, compare itself with the soul-stirring contemplation of the products of Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Milton, and Goethe?’1

Within the spectrum of disciplines that make up commerce, the miserable science economics, first known in the university as political economy, has always been the academically respectable part, allied as much with the arts as with commerce. The rise, in both status and numbers, of the more ‘professional’ subjects, accountancy and business administration, is the large theme of the postwar commerce story. Ironically, the crass commercial town that was considered in the 1870s and 1880s to be incapable of supporting a university college would have at Victoria a century later arguably the strongest commerce faculty and perhaps the strongest department of economics (but certainly the largest) in the country.

The faculty of commerce in 1950 consisted of Economics, headed by the Macarthy professor, and Accountancy, consisting of a senior lecturer and a temporary part-time lecturing staff. Horace Belshaw, who followed Murphy in the Macarthy chair in 1951, used to say – according to his successor, Frank Holmes, who disagreed with him – that economics was ‘basically a “useless” subject, like history, philosophy or political science, not immediately applicable to earning money or solving problems’.2 Belshaw's career as an applied economist would appear to contradict the latter point at least. A Canterbury graduate, he was Auckland's foundation professor of economics, appointed in 1926 after having done a doctorate in agricultural economy at Cambridge, where he was involved with J.M. Keynes' Political Economy Club. He was a scholar of progressive views (unlike his predecessor Murphy on both counts, some would argue). He wrote extensively in the 1920s and 1930s on New Zealand's farming economy, actively debunked social credit and advised the minister of finance as a member of Coates' famous ‘brains trust’. In America from 1944, he became director of rural welfare with the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation. He came to Victoria when that organisation moved its headquarters to Rome in 1951; it was, ironically, in Rome on an FAO assignment that he would die suddenly in 1962, three years after taking early retirement from the university.

At Victoria, in charge of a department of typically 1950s proportions – two staff plus a professor in 1951, three and a half in 1958 – Belshaw pursued his interest in the economies of developing countries, both on UN assignments (when he could) and in writing on economic development theory.3 His department enjoyed far the largest economics enrolments of the four colleges, although the number of masters students, he lamented, was small – in common with all the colleges – and their quality ‘not, in general, high’.4 Concerned at the want of locally applied research, he set about founding an independent research institute, a project endorsed by the 1955 monetary commission and supported financially by the Reserve Bank and enlightened businesses.5 The New Zealand Institute of Economic Research was established in 1959 in a house on Kelburn Parade, and continued to have a close, although informal, relationship with this university.

Economics at Auckland and Canterbury universities by the 1960s was strongly mathematical – econometrics having been the growth area of the discipline. Victoria's was a little different, characterised, if this can be said, by its eclecticism, which included a greater openness to the aspirations of those ‘lowly’ professional subjects accountancy and business studies, and perhaps too by its attention to applied research and the local scene. From the outset, the ‘Macarthy school’ (as it was established, but not generally known) was to teach economics ‘with special reference to New Zealand conditions’, the college calendar announced – an applied focus that was emphasised by Belshaw and which by the late 1960s had become a ‘tradition’ of this chair.6 By the 1980s the department had come to identify a focus on ‘the needs of the country in fields of applied economics’ as its special character, just as the Hughes Parry committee in 1959 had said it should.7

The third incumbent of the Macarthy chair, Frank Holmes (incidentally one of that committee's joint secretaries), had taken his MA at Victoria and joined the staff of the department in 1952. His three-stage professorial career at Victoria (as Macarthy professor from 1959 to 1967; as professor of money and finance from 1970 until 1977; and as a visiting professor of public policy in the 1980s) enhanced

Sir Frank Holmes, professor of money and finance. ATL F23939 1/4 the Victoria department's strong reputation in public economics, the university's public profile, and its links – generally individual rather than institutional – with government, especially in the early 1960s through his chairmanship of the Monetary and Economic Council. He built up the department in the 1960s with an eye for the leading trends in the discipline. When a second chair was advertised in 1963, he created two. To one was appointed Barbu Niculescu, a development economist, Romanian born and British educated, who had spent 11 years in Ghana and three in Melbourne. With his experience in Africa (where he had become a critic of the Nkrumah regime), Niculescu brought to the provincial university an aura of romance, along with an unassuming manner and a healthy lack of interest in academic empire-building. He returned to Ghana several times in the 1970s, and in Wellington made some contribution to government policy in the electricity and transport fields, but he kept a lower profile outside the university than many of his colleagues. An additional chair in economic history had been created at the same time for J.D. Gould, who had come from Auckland to a senior lectureship in 1961. This was New Zealand's first economic history chair, and a subject, albeit small in terms of student interest, in which Victoria would establish a reputation. It had been introduced as a separate unit only in 1962, although a chair of economic history had been in the commerce faculty's sights back in 1948, along with, equally optimistically, chairs in economic theory, public finance and – more hesitantly – accountancy.

By the end of the 1960s the Economics Department had almost achieved the seven-year development plan it had made in 1963: to increase its staff establishment from 10 to 24 (there were 20); and to develop the fields of public economics, development economics, economic history, theory and quantitative methods. Specialist lectureships had been created in transport economics (one of the ‘industrial development’ appointments, along with those in science), in Asian economics (part of the Asian studies programme), and in econometrics – although the latter remained unfilled until a professor (senior lecturer Fraser Jackson, who had missed out on the chair of information science) was appointed in 1968, to bring the department's complement of chairs to the planned four.

The robust growth of accountancy in the 1950s and 1960s is part of the larger story of accountancy's coming of age, as both a profession and an academic discipline: its progress, as Victoria's founding professor put it, from ‘a miscellaneous collection of book-keepers to an influential and diverse association of experts in financial affairs’.8 At Victoria it seems to have been an especially fertile growth. Accountancy subjects were reintroduced into the college curriculum (after that brief experiment in the 1910s) in 1934, taken by a full-time lecturer (H.R. Fountain) courtesy of the New Zealand Society of Accountants, but lapsing after 1936 to a part-time affair. It was back by popular demand: the students' Commerce Society had been established in 1932 expressly to achieve this end. Their numbers escalated immediately after the war: enrolments in Bookkeeping I jumped from 72 in 1945 to 192 in 1946 (though fell gradually after that to just over 100 by 1950). The BCom was clearly the degree of choice, or rather accountancy was the career of choice, for a large number of returning servicemen. Increasingly, the BCom degree rather then merely the professional requirements of the New Zealand Society of Accountants became the qualification of choice for accountancy students. In 1962, 98% of students enrolled in first-year commerce classes were intending to complete a degree (although rather fewer actually would).

Accountancy attained proper departmental status in the 1950s following a general revision of the BCom prescription and the appointment, in 1951, of a full-time senior lecturer, W.G. Rodger, an enthusiast for his subject more than a scholar, who had been teaching since 1941, and in the 1950s served three turns as dean of commerce. It became further entrenched in the university with the gradual introduction of internal examining (before the 1940s the Society of Accountants set, and nominated the examiners for, all accountancy papers).9 But it remained a predominantly part-time activity. In 1961 just 10% of commerce students were full time. The second full-time appointment to the staff was made in 1958. Whether accountancy was ‘worthy’ of a chair had been under discussion since the late 1940s. The case was tentatively accepted in Victoria's commerce faculty development plan in 1948, and actively pursued by the Society of Accountants (which had also proposed when the BCom was being revised that it be renamed the Bachelor of Accountancy which, in effect, it was). It was promoted in the 1950s by Belshaw and Holmes. The Commerce Faculty Club petitioned the principal in 1957, pointing to the ‘extremely rapid’ growth of accountancy as a body of knowledge and of the body of accountancy students, while Rodger sent a memo the following year describing an ‘emergency situation’. Enrolments in Accountancy I had increased 58% in the past two years; total accountancy numbers had grown by 150% since the beginning of the decade.10 Having been level-pegging with Auckland in the early 1950s, by the end of them Victoria had the most accountancy enrolments – half as many again as Auckland – and the most commerce students in the country. In 1960, 30 of a total of 68 BComs graduated from Victoria. It also had the worst staff:student ratio in accountancy by a considerable degree.

Professors of accountancy were appointed at each of the colleges in the next few years. Roy Sidebotham came to Victoria from the University of Manchester in 1961. It was a good appointment. He was a stimulating academic accountant, his own field being public sector accounting (he introduced here the first such courses in New Zealand or Australia); a talented academic administrator; and determined to enhance the status of accountancy as a graduate profession, and to create at Victoria ‘an outstanding school of commerce studies’. The opportunity was there. There was only one internationally known accountancy school in Australasia in the 1960s (Melbourne's); Victoria could have one too.11 His mission was cut short by his early death, at 43, in 1970, but not before he had played a leading role in designing a commerce degree and an Accountancy Department at Victoria of some distinction.

In his first few months on the job Sidebotham divined the essential problems: standards, staffing and the staff:student ratio. The very high failure rate in accountancy was patently related to the preponderance of part-time students.12 Sidebotham's idea, for two years of full-time study followed by three years part time – and his insistence in the first instance that accountants needed degrees – was not well received by a traditionally minded profession.13 Nevertheless, with changes to degree regulations, accountancy in time caught up with the university

Roy Sidebotham, professor of accountancy. M.D. King photo trend towards full-time study. By 1968, 75% of first- and second-year accountancy students were full time.

The dual objective of raising standards and reducing student numbers was also approached by more direct measures. One was ‘February specials’, or second-chance exams, a common British university practice employed at Victoria only in commerce and law, and controversially: the ‘thin edge of the wedge’, the Evening Post suspected, while there were those in the professoriate who feared a lowering of standards.14 (The exams were soon abandoned as unpopular with full-time students and ineffectual.) Another was the more rigorous use of powers to exclude unsatisfactory students, combined with a more demanding first-year exam, ‘the idea [being] to kill students mercifully whilst young, rather than to allow them to linger on painfully in the middle courses of the degree’.15 ‘“Dead wood” to be eliminated: commerce students must measure up’, the press reported after Sidebotham told Wellington members of the Society of Accountants that there were too many part-timers and ‘loafers’: ‘the “billiard-players” would have to go’.16 By 1966 he could report ‘a very encouraging measure of success’: ‘The accounting courses, which were regarded as “soft options” in 1961 are now of at least equal standing with any in the university. We are having the (for us) gratifying experience of poorer students transferring from accountancy to some other less demanding subjects.’17 Unit enrolments had actually fallen.

Staffing was more difficult. There were three full-time positions in the department, including Sidebotham's own, in 1961; in 1968 there were 19, but eight of these were vacant, including two chairs. A second chair was created in 1964, from which the first incumbent, from Melbourne, left within a year. The second appointment was more impressive, but also short lived: Edward Stamp, a Canadian-born, Cambridge-educated, pugnaciously tempered public accountant

Eddie Stamp, professor of accountancy. M.D. King photo (a partner in the Canadian accountancy giant Clarkson Gordon) who had come to Victoria as a senior lecturer in 1963. It was his first teaching job, and he went from here in 1967 to a prestigious academic career in the United Kingdom, as the first full-time professor of accountancy at Edinburgh, then founding director of the International Centre for Research in Accounting at Lancaster, and by the 1970s ‘the best known accounting academic in the UK’. But during his ‘exhilarating’ New Zealand sojourn Stamp as much as Sidebotham was responsible for changing the culture of the department.18 His North American background was significant, and there was some tension with his very English colleague. His pungent critical commentaries on the accounting practices of major New Zealand companies for the morning daily Dominion in 1965–66 (‘Looking at balance sheets’) also stirred up the local business commmunity.

After Stamp's departure his chair remained vacant for a year. A third, in management accounting, was established in 1967, but not filled until 1969. While recruitment was a problem throughout the university in the bullish 1960s, at least two factors exacerbated accountancy's plight. It was a comparatively new academic discipline and there was an acute worldwide shortage of academic accountants. And as an academic field, the cutting edge in accountancy was North America. In the 1960s it was barely established in British universities (although more so in Scotland than in England) from which New Zealand traditionally recruited its academics. (The exceptions were Manchester, from which Sidebotham came, and Lancaster, to which Stamp went.) The response to this situation was a ‘grow our own’ policy: appoint graduates to junior lectureships, and encourage the brightest to do postgraduate study in America, from where they would (so the plan went) return. ‘Encouraging’ might even mean holding open a chair; and hopes were sometimes disappointed. When the academic employment market eased generally in the 1970s, in accountancy it got worse, as the growing attractiveness of accountancy and business management as career choices swelled student numbers and graduate salaries. The Accountancy Department seemed to suffer a perennial staffing crisis.

Devolution, the slow but sure dissolution of the University of New Zealand which brought a greater degree of curriculum autonomy, also loosened the tie between the accountancy profession and its qualifying requirements, and the university and its degree. In the new era Victoria took the opportunity to design a significantly different commerce degree, and a new faculty. The Bachelor of Commerce and Administration replaced the old BCom in 1966. The aim was to broaden the degree. The BCA regulations prescribed five compulsory stage-one subjects – economics, politics and law, accountancy, quantitative methods, and administration – to give students ‘an interdisciplinary grounding’ before they specialised. In accountancy, providing students with a broad, liberal educational background remained a guiding principle of Victoria's degree through the 1970s and 1980s. The change was not welcomed by the Society of Accountants: Victoria's was now the only commerce degree that did not give complete exemption from the Society's professional examinations, and the BCA was regarded as harder than the other universities' old-style BComs.19 Sidebotham's determination to keep control of accountancy education with the university and out of the hands of the profession, as he told the vice-chancellor, ‘has not made me personally very popular with some people in the City’.20 Developing postgraduate work was also part of the plan, and an accountancy honours programme was introduced. The proceedings of the Advanced Accountancy Seminar, held annually by the department since 1952 for staff, graduates and members of the business community, were regularly published from 1964. Bad blood between the profession and university should not be overemphasised: the Advanced Accountancy Seminar was highly regarded.21

The new degree, and the concurrent broadening of the commerce faculty into a faculty of commerce and administration, while expressing the interdisciplinary trend of the 1960s (and facilitated by the various departments' move into the Rankine Brown building), also made explicit Victoria commerce's strong public-sector and public-policy inclination. The BCA was designed ‘to give students a better unified knowledge of the nature and activities of public and private organisations’.22 The faculty reorganisation made the School of Political Science and Public Administration formally a member of this faculty as well as arts. The commerce faculty already contributed to its diploma and a recently introduced undergraduate course. Holmes in Economics had a strong interest in public policy and administration, while Accountancy claimed a special interest in public sector accounting. Broadly, the change suggested a social-science orientation to commerce at Victoria, although the larger idea of a faculty of social science was raised here only to be discounted. The new faculty proposal came, in 1963, from the four departmental heads of Economics, Accountancy, Political Science and Public Administration, and the brand new Department of Business Administration.

In business administration, in which Victoria established the country's first university chair in 1962, it had made, however, a false start. Like accountancy, business administration was well entrenched in American universities by the 1950s but had not yet arrived in Britain. Victoria's new professor, E.A.B. (Sam) Phillips, was a Welshman, a BA and a passionate joke-teller who had recently been working in personnel training in Rhodesia. He was well acquainted with the current trends in university business education in America, however, and these informed his approach to the task at Victoria: they should offer not a comprehensive professional course, nor specialised training for particular business careers, but a broad, liberal degree to prepare graduates for any business field.

Already, a change to the BCom regulations in 1960 allowing students to take more arts and social science courses had been prompted by their growing interest in executive rather than accountancy careers. Bill Rodger analysed the career objectives of commerce students enrolling in the Accountancy Department in 1961, and observed that ‘the idea which was generally accepted some years ago – that practically every Commerce student aimed at public accounting – is no longer valid for it is clear that the majority of students are more interested in management’. Of the 400 students, 111 were intending to go into management, 94 into public accounting and 87 into commercial accounting (the rest included seven aspiring economists, four planning to become sharebrokers, three clergymen and a would-be author).23 At a conference in Dunedin two years earlier, when the idea of a national school of business administration had been raised, Rodger had ‘agreed with the eminently sensible view’ that the logical place for one was Wellington.24 The decision to establish a department was made, however, against the feeling of the faculty, which harboured doubts about the validity of business administration as an academic discipline. The preferred plan was the ‘upward growth’ of business studies within the established disciplines.25 What eventuated, as Sidebotham observed with characteristic frankness in the wake of Phillips' resignation in 1969, was ‘a department not originally wanted by Faculty … doing work it was never intended to do anyway’.26 The plan had been to focus the infant department's energies on a two-year postgraduate Diploma of Business Administration, which was modelled on the Diploma of Public Administration. This was a disaster. Only seven students graduated in seven years. In hindsight it was generally agreed that it had been an idea before its time: the New Zealand business community was not yet ready for the concept of managers with postgraduate university training. Instead the department, such that it was, had turned its attention to undergraduate courses after all: a unit in administration was introduced in the new BCA, followed by business administration at stages two and three. These failed to gain the confidence of the faculty (and possibly students).27 Finally, there was the inevitable difficulty in getting staff. The department was founded with a nominal establishment of a professor and three lecturers. The third lectureship was only filled in 1968.

The introduction of business studies in the 1960s had failed through error of judgement. In the 1970s they were back with a vengeance, while the relationship between the university and the business community in some more tangible forms was also growing. This was not to everyone's taste. In Salient in 1970 a student representative on the Professorial Board, Rob Campbell (a future trade union activist, and a future director of the Bank of New Zealand), attacked the university's growing links with the agencies of capitalism, accusing Victoria of ‘selling out to the almighty dollar’ by accepting business support for developments like marketing, finance, business studies and industrial relations, its academic staff of ‘sitting silently by as academic standards, integrity and university independence go flying out the window’.28 It was a view held not only by left-wing student politicians. The Salient broadside coincided with the establishment of a business studies advisory committee of the Council, originally a Sidebotham initiative to help kick-start business administration. One faculty member, senior lecturer in economics John Zanetti, dissented ‘because he did not believe that it was the Faculty's role to orientate its courses to the needs of businessmen’ – but this was an attitude that was rapidly becoming old-fashioned.29 The business studies advisory committee, consisting of Council, academic and business members, and a student representative,

Economics students in class, 8 May 1970, while several hundred others boycott lectures in protest at the shooting at Kent State. Evening Post was meant to ‘counsel, advise and warn the Faculty and the Council in the development of business studies’, and to actively seek business support for postgraduate and post-experience programmes, research and the endowment of academic positions.30

Already, through the quiet persuasiveness of Barbu Niculescu, $10,000 had been solicited from the Reserve Bank and several other financial institutions to endow a chair of money and finance in the Department of Economics. Niculescu had this campaign well advanced before the Council was asked to approve the chair in principle in December 1968. This was a new venture for the university (the only real implication of the Macarthy chair being an endowed chair was its title), and there was some sensitivity over the issue of academic freedom and control. The vice-chancellor told a meeting of potential sponsors: ‘Not for a minute am I suggesting that should you decide to endow this chair you would wish to have a finger in the pie’ by either participating in the appointment of the professor or influencing his work.31 The professor would devote himself primarily to postgraduate work, external teaching and research (although some undergraduate teaching would be expected), in a field that was not yet developed in New Zealand universities and for which Victoria was, of course, ideally situated. Moreover, Niculescu observed (one detects an element of flattery), ‘there is also a flexibility and a willingness to experiment and innovate in our monetary and financial institutions in this country which is almost unique in the world’.32 Enough money was in hand for the chair to be advertised in July 1969.

As an additional carrot, Niculescu had let it be informally known that Frank Holmes was a likely contender. After two years at the coal face as economic manager for Tasman Pulp and Paper, a job that had developed not quite as he expected, Holmes had decided that his ‘heart is in the university’ after all. He had applied for his old job, the Macarthy chair, lest the money and finance scheme not come off.33 In the new chair, he was able to devote less time to administration and more to writing and research, and continued to be actively engaged in the public policy field, especially in education (more than he intended, in fact); he left the university for the second time in 1977 to head the New Zealand Planning Council.34 His main internal teaching responsibilities were an honours course and contributing to a new undergraduate course. He also helped teach the Diploma of Public Administration, and played a significant role in the replacement of the 30-year-old diploma in 1975 by the Master of Public Policy, a two-year postgraduate and more broadly interdisciplinary programme unique to Victoria.

The chief architect of the MPP on the public administration side was political science reader Alan Robinson. After his premature death in 1976 recently retired Treasury secretary Henry Lang, now a half-time visiting professor, co-ordinated the programme. In the 1940s Lang, an Austrian refugee, had done his BA and BCom at Victoria while working in a prune-canning factory, and had started at Treasury as one of its first graduate recruits; he left at the end of 1976 after (but not, he insisted, because of) a highly publicised difference of opinion with the prime minister, Robert Muldoon. The Dominion, reporting his move ‘From Treasury to Victoria’, discerned a pattern, noting the previous appointments of retired secretary for justice John Robson in criminology and former labour secretary Noel Woods in industrial relations.35

There had been, however, a ‘disappointingly small’ number of postgraduate students, Holmes found.36 This was true of economics as a whole, and more so of accountancy and business administration. An honours or masters degree added little market value to a BCA: staying on for postgraduate work carried a high opportunity cost when jobs and salaries for mere graduates were abundant. At the beginning of the 1970s, the rapidly increasing enrolments in economics were causing some stress. ‘I am frightened out of my wits about the possible enrolments in Economics I,’ the vice-chancellor informed Niculescu, who was on leave in Ghana for an indefinite period and requested to return, ‘– such is the price of success (yours I mean)’.37 It was not just the success of economics' ‘excellent team’, in Taylor's words, but the growing popularity of the new commerce degree that was putting on the pressure. The anticipated chaos in Econ I that year did not eventuate, but the department endured the third-lowest staff:student ratio in the university (surpassed in this dubious distinction by Accountancy and Law), and continued to teach very large stage-one classes of, increasingly, accountancy majors. Such was the price of success.

Niculescu had wanted the chair of money and finance established as a financially independent unit within the department, but the deans committee would not agree. His decentralist attitude was somewhat unusual for a university head of department, certainly in the 1970s, and it contributed to Economics' reputation as one of Victoria's most happily democratic departments. In 1970 economic history had been given its head in this way: handed responsibility for its own recurring grant and staff, who (except for the professor) were formally excused from teaching in regular economics classes. Gould had seen an opportunity to create at Victoria a ‘National School of Economic History’; Niculescu's motivation was also to unburden himself of responsibility for a part of his department whose interests were, more and more, distinct from the rest (nearer in spirit to art than commerce). By the mid–1970s economic history had two chairs in a staff of three, the second a personal chair created in 1974 for one of the department's own graduates, Gary Hawke, who had been appointed as a lecturer only in 1968. Economic history at Victoria came to be held in high regard; its honours programme, introduced in 1972, unique. In terms of student numbers, however, it did not fulfil the early promise: enrolments peaked in 1970 before settling to ‘a modest but reliable level’.38 The BCA students who had made up a third of economic history enrolments in the 1960s went off to business administration and accountancy in the 1970s, as these increased in range and quality. Economic history was not a requirement for an economics major, and the department resisted the temptation to market its courses as trendy options (‘“The Economy of Women in the Classical Environment” was always my favourite suggestion,’ joked Professor Hawke).39 When the department was reviewed in 1980 it successfully defended its undeniably privileged situation (three staff teaching four undergraduate courses and a small honours class). It readily acquiesced, though, to the downgrading of one of the chairs on Gould's retirement in 1983, as the university embarked on its chair-culling exercise.

The Macarthy chair had been vacated by Les Castle at the end of 1969 after a short incumbency: a specialist in the economics of social welfare, and like Holmes widely involved in public policy work, he returned to the department as a reader in the 1970s. The flagship chair was now occupied by Bryan Philpott, a graduate of this university and Leeds, who had been inspired by Belshaw in his interest in agricultural economics and held a chair at Lincoln; getting him here was a coup. The Belshaw theme of applying the academic mind to a pragmatic investigation of the problems of the New Zealand economy was also continued in the long-term Economic Planning Project which Philpott directed and the Treasury funded. Launched in 1971 with $10,000 a year, initially for three (it was subsequently augmented with grants from other organisations, including Holmes' Planning Council and James Duncan's Commission for the Future), it employed graduate students as well as contract researchers in the game of hypothesising the future of the national economy with the aid of a series of computer econometric models (known as Victoria, Joanna and Julianne), and made a handsome contribution to the Economics Department's quite large published output.

Elsewhere in the department research interests included taxation and wage inflation, labour mobility, housing conditions, consumer demand, and the nursing labour market. The latter was the work of Prue Hyman, one of the handful of women in Economics and a notable teacher in a department which has had perhaps, in later decades, a stronger commitment to its research than to undergraduate students (and has not been notably sympathetic to the cause of encouraging women in the university). Holmes' successor in the money and finance chair (D.K. Sheppard) helped to keep Victoria's economists in the public eye, having a penchant for engaging in debate with prime ministers and advising journalists. In the early 1980s the department successfully argued, more than once, to retain its full hand of professors after Barbu Niculescu's retirement in 1983 from the chair that was now specifically designated its economic theory chair.

This department has also made a notable contribution to the campus's canine population: Hawke's Scottish terriers (Barney Murphy also had a Scottie, although it is not known to have spent its days at the college), and Prue Hyman's rather larger animal, which caused consternation and a complaint to the head of department when it caught a janitor unawares late one night (‘I would just give [room] 516 a wide berth while the dog is there,’ he was advised).40

Business administration got its second wind in the 1970s from the growth of management and marketing, and a new professor, erroneously reported to be the university's youngest yet, at 29: Graeme Fogelberg. He moved across from Accountancy in 1970 with an MCom from Victoria, and an MBA and PhD in business administration from the University of Western Ontario. His interests lay in the direction of corporate policy formulation and financial management, and he thought New Zealand needed just one good postgraduate school of business

The dean's nominee. Jim Urry administration. By mid–1971 he was warning of a staffing crisis brought on by a ‘phenomenal’ growth in student numbers, enrolments in the stage-three course having doubled that year. Victoria was participating in a larger phenomenon: the burgeoning demand for university management, business administration and commerce courses generally. Accordingly, the department of five staff in 1969 had a full-time establishment of 12 by 1974. It also had charge of a $25,000, five-year research grant from oil company BP, which caused a territorial dispute between Business Administration and the Industrial Relations Centre: BP advised that it was not concerned which department of the university took charge of the grant, and Fogelberg made sure that it was his.

In arguing this case, Fogelberg reported that the department was devoting about a third of its attention to organisation behaviour (where lay the potential for rivalry with Industrial Relations), a third to marketing, and a sixth to business policy and planning. A chair of marketing was created in 1973, partly funded by the business community. A newish senior lecturer, David Cullwick, was promoted. He had earlier worked in export sales for the Hawke's Bay Farmers' Meat Company, and now followed an academic interest in international lamb marketing. He also directed a $23,000 research contract, awarded by the DSIR in 1976, to investigate the application of technology to manufacturing and processing systems. However, it was international marketing, service marketing and consumer behaviour that developed as this department's recognised research fields. Fogelberg co-authored the first published case studies in New Zealand marketing (three volumes); and the department launched the New Zealand Journal of Business in 1979.

The unfortunate Diploma of Business Administration, made into a full-time, one-year course in 1970, was restructured again in 1976 into a part-time, modular, post-experience undergraduate programme, comprising two-year certificates in marketing, operations management and personnel administration, and after a third year the diploma. This complemented the department's contribution to a burgeoning field of university extension. It was not until 1984 that Victoria moved ‘into the international mainstream in graduate level management education’ and introduced the prestige, American-style MBA: not your regular masters degree but a specialist programme designed for top graduates from any discipline. Its prospectus was ‘the most up-market publication yet produced at Victoria’, News VUW announced.41 This was the future both Phillips and Sidebotham had seen for business administration back in 1969. Otago, however, had been quicker off the mark, introducing its MBA in the 1970s; after a brief policy of ‘rationalisation’ on the part of the University Grants Committee, Auckland and Canterbury along with Victoria caught up in the mid–1980s. Teaching in the interdisciplinary programme involved some 20 university staff, and a few chief executives imported each year under the Cable Price Downer Management Fellows Award inaugurated in 1985.

Numerically, however, it was accountancy that was the growth area in commerce in the 1970s and 1980s. Between 1973 and 1979 the percentage of BCA graduates with majors in accountancy rose from 45% to 73%. In 1979, 159 accountancy

Moving house – making way for the new commerce building majors graduated, compared with 32 in business administration, 21 in economics and five in political science. Accountancy was by now the university's largest department, with 12% of the student roll: there were more accountancy students than law. There were qualitative as well as quantitative changes too. There was a noticeable improvement in the academic calibre of commerce students (appreciably more top Bursary and Scholarship holders, the dean was pleased to observe), while the numbers of women choosing both commerce and law, historically almost entirely male departments, were rising fast. Women were 5.6% of commerce students in 1972, and 12% in 1978. (Science suffered to an extent from the rise of commerce as a prestige degree.) The growing attractiveness of accountancy as a career path, and an acute shortage of qualified accountants, were also recognised by the department with the successful (but initially controversial) innovation of a Diploma in Accountancy in 1976, a one-year graduate course for non-accountancy majors, which attracted 22 applications in its first year (and accepted 15). The improvement in the quality of its students – since the billiard-playing days – is the most dramatic development of the commerce faculty story.

The Accountancy Department had gone some way towards realising its founding professor's ambition to create the second top-ranking accountancy school in Australasia. Canterbury could claim to be academically the strongest in New Zealand in the 1960s, under the charge of a top Victoria graduate and senior lecturer, Athol Carrington, but in the 1970s Victoria caught up. It had more staff with doctorates than any other accountancy department in New Zealand or Australia, the chairman counted in 1975. An international league table, based on contributions to the scholarly journals over four years (1978–81), ranked Victoria 20th out of 25, the only New Zealand department to rate, and one of only three in Australasia.42 But staffing continued to be a struggle, and Accountancy sometimes started the academic year with up to half its positions vacant. This was not just Victoria's problem: 30% of accountancy positions in the four main New Zealand universities were vacant in 1973. There were plenty of jobs for accountancy academics in America, and the widening Tasman gap in academic salaries made it increasingly difficult to recruit in Australia. When fresh BCA graduates were appointed to temporary lectureships in accountancy, the business administration professors complained that this was lowering standards, morale and their own ability to recruit high-quality staff. Competitive recruitment strategies – appointing bright young candidates to senior lectureships ‘before their time’, for example – brought resentful looks from other departments, although it was done with the full support of the vice-chancellor and chancellor.

There was a high turnover of accountancy professors for a time, partly as a generation of senior staff, appointed from the city during the Sidebotham era, reached retirement (and one was lost to the chair of management at Waikato). But things settled down in the early 1970s. Whatarangi Winiata, of Ngati Raukawa of Otaki and ‘well-known University front row forward and Wellington representative of the 1950s’, was appointed in 1974 to the chair that had been Stamp's.43 Winiata had gone to America to do a PhD in finance at Michigan and become an associate professor at British Columbia. His interest now was in the financial management of Maori incorporations. The North American and especially Canadian connection

Chancellor Duncan Stout with the senior football team and the Jubilee Cup, 1958 (Don Trow, future professor of accountancy, back right) has been noticeable in accountancy at Victoria. The Maori presence was rarer (as the Evening Post was at some pains to point out: Winiata was ‘probably the first Maori to be appointed to such a high university position in a New Zealand Faculty of Commerce or Business Administration’).44 Meanwhile, another prominent university footballer (they had been on the same team) had been appointed to Sidebotham's chair in 1971: Don Trow. He had joined the department in 1965 after some time working in New York, where accountancy, he had discovered, was much more than just bookkeeping. Trow became chairman of the department in 1973, when a professorial resignation meant that Accountancy became the first to implement the new administrative system (unhappily, as it turned out). A fourth accountancy professor, requested since 1974, was finally appointed, after several failed attempts, in 1979. A fifth chair, in public sector accounting, was established in 1983. Some looked askance.

On top of the generic difficulties of staffing accountancy departments, Victoria's suffered some more particular staff problems in the mid–1970s. There was tension in the professoriate. When the chairman was elected, the other professor, who had been on the staff since 1962, resentfully refused to do any administration. A senior lecturer whose teaching was lambasted in Salient in 1974, and whose personality created conflict with both his students and colleagues, was encouraged to leave;45 while next door in Business Administration a part-time lecturer (incidentally the professor's brother-in-law) had to be informed by the Council, after students complained, that using a company in which he was a major shareholder for a case study in marketing was ‘unwise’. Then there was the accountancy lecturer who discoursed to his class on numerology and distributed religious tracts. Meanwhile, the very good staff, of whom Trow counted half a dozen in 1976, showed a tendency to leave. Among them, for example, was David Shand, appointed senior lecturer in public sector finance in 1969 (he was only 23), and well known in the city in the 1970s as a Labour councillor and unsuccessful candidate for Wellington Central in the general elections of 1972 (by a famously narrow margin) and 1975. Trow was expecting him to abandon the university for his political career; he went to Australia following a falling-out with the Labour Party in 1977.

The distinctive character of Victoria's BCA was enhanced by a general overhaul of the faculty's degrees in the second half of the 1970s. Along with the introduction of the new postgraduate and post-experience programmes – the diplomas of accountancy, business administration and industrial relations, and the MPP – the BCA majors were also restructured, in the interests of greater diversity and flexibility. In accountancy, students now had to take a third-year course from another faculty (mathematics, chemistry and languages proved the most popular choices), and a stage-three accountancy course which was not part of the professional requirement. The aim was only partly to broaden the disciplinary basis of the degree. It was also to discourage the less determined student, and it had some effect. But as class sizes in all core commerce subjects, not just accountancy, continued to climb in the late 1970s – with third-year accountancy classes reaching 200 when most had about 10, a staff:student ratio in that department half the university average, and commerce as a whole teaching half of all courses in the university with an enrolment above 150 – the faculty discussed more direct tactics. A proposal to move the first-year accountancy course to stage two was narrowly lost, and the possibility of a geographical enrolment restriction was also dismissed. From 1979 numerical limits were imposed in all core courses in the faculty. Other universities were also feeling the pressure: Auckland was the first to restrict entry to accountancy (to students with a B Bursary or better). Victoria, the dean urged, could not afford to take the others' leftovers. A wider-ranging scheme of restrictions enforced from 1981 brought student protest and city attention. ‘Commerce gets it in the jugular’, Salient cried, and the accountancy profession complained that the universities were not meeting its needs.46 Phone calls flooded in from angry parents; the faculty secretary was offered bribes.

The demand for accountants and for commerce degrees continued to rise in the 1980s, with economic restructuring (under a monetarist-inclined Labour government) and a sharemarket boom: the growth of corporate activity and the finance sector increased the need for good-quality auditing, and for tax experts in particular. Universities were now turning away a third of those applying for accountancy courses.47 Already under pressure, the Accountancy Department was not pleased when the University Grants Committee's Overseas Students Admission Committee increased the faculty's annual quota of overseas students – already far the highest in the university – by 60 (from 25 to 85) from 1985: at least half of these students would major in accountancy. Arguments over who was going to fare the worst and the allocation of the OSAC funding exacerbated existing tensions within the faculty.

It was perhaps the overseas student issue that was the last straw. In 1984 the Accountancy Department revolted. They would leave the faculty and become an independent School of Accountancy and Finance with faculty status, and offer a separate, four-year accountancy degree. Although tension over resources and status was the main cause of this bid to defect, an additional factor in the equation was head of department Whatarangi Winiata's long-term endeavour to, as he himself put it, ‘Maorify’ Victoria.48 The school was to be called the Aotearoa School of Money and Finance. (Winiata's larger programme for the department was based on the twin themes of ‘indigenisation and internationalisation’, the latter meaning keeping up with the globalisation of the economy.)49 The faculty resoundingly rejected the plan. In response Accountancy passed a motion of no confidence in the faculty.50 They would withdraw from faculty meetings and committees, and deal directly with the vice-chancellor and the Professorial Board instead. They threatened to ‘go public’. The (new) vice-chancellor, needless to say, was not impressed.

The review which was instigated (in October 1985) to sort out commerce's warring parties went further than confirming that accountancy would remain part of the faculty and the BCA programme.51 It recommended a wholesale restructuring of the faculty, with the dismantling of the departments and the formation of 13 ‘interest groups’. Computer science should be removed to the science faculty, where the interests of most of its staff lay; political science should keep to the arts. The BCA courses were to be rationalised, to minimise the core requirements and maximise the disciplinary strength of the majors. Business administration was considered not a discipline at all, and so should concentrate on postgraduate work, principally within the MBA programme. The review recognised that accommodation problems had contributed significantly to the commerce faculty's difficulties in getting along: it had been scattered across the campus in at least four locations since its expulsion from Rankine Brown in the 1970s (to make way for Law). The new Murphy building, it was hoped, would assist the process of reconciliation. So would the appointment from outside the university of a full-time dean.

The recommendations were accepted, and the faculty had been reformed into a configuration of interest groups by 1986. Athol Mann, the new dean, a New Zealander recruited from Peat Marwick in New York, succeeded admirably in his unenviable task. Accountancy lamented, perhaps, its lost opportunity; and, most of all, a consequent narrowing of Victoria's traditionally ‘different’ accountancy degree which brought it more into line with the rest. There were some in Economics who regretted the loss of identity of the largest and, they believed, the best university economics department in New Zealand. A more substantial issue was a feared dilution of economics' social science style in a commerce-driven environment. But restructuring, schools and groups were the way of the future.

Law, on the other hand, has always called itself a school. Law at Victoria shares a number of themes with commerce, including its closeness to the profession (and the attendant stresses), an American connection and recognition as one of Victoria's special fields. From as early as 1886 it was assumed that this college would excel in law. The law faculty was officially recognised as a ‘special school’ by the Academic Board of the University of New Zealand in 1949, although not given a separate grant like the other colleges' older and larger professional schools, or even this college's much smaller ones of Public Administration and Social Science. Although not, therefore, a proper special school, law at Victoria has been in some way a separate school: it has had a ‘sense of community’,52 or culture, that set law apart from the rest of the university long before it moved physically apart (off the Kelburn campus and downtown) in 1996.

It had its own private domain in the university library. The large compulsory component and structured format of the law course has meant that law students are likely to identify more strongly with their ‘class’ than those in arts, science or commerce. Law students have had their own brand of organised fun. The annual law ball and law dinner date back to the 1930s. Only the venues changed. The law ball, ‘patronised … by many eminent members of the profession’ (and their wives), was traditionally held at the Majestic Cabaret.53 The law dinner (shortly after

Robert Orr McGechan finals) was at the Empire Hotel in the 1930s; the Grand after the war; at the Pines in the 1950s; in the new student union building in the 1960s (the graduands had theirs at the James Cook or the Royal Oak); at Wilton House in the 1970s. (The character of the event may or may not have changed: ‘a semi-sophisticated nosh ‘n’ grog at least in the early stages of the proceedings … notorious for deteriorating to a series of ribald toasts interspersed with exciting displays of formation flying by chicken (wings)’. That was the 1970s.)54 ‘Stein evenings’ were an established feature of the Law Faculty Club social calendar from the 1950s, and ‘the odd cocktail party’ and luncheons with invited speakers for the more seriously minded. There were inter-university moots, and an annual rugby match against the Auckland students for the Cleary Cup; a magazine of their own, Caveat, started in 1973. The Law Faculty Club was more active than many, and was involved more formally in faculty business before such things became fashionable, then mandatory at the end of the 1960s. It may be dangerous to generalise and just as easy to exaggerate on the theme of student culture, but the view of the law faculty as different is one it has held of itself.

Victoria's law staff was very impressive at the end of the 1940s: with McGechan in the chair of jurisprudence; E.K. (Kingston) Braybrooke (who went to Western Australian and later La Trobe); Williams the professor of English and New Zealand law, though shortly to go off to the principal's office; and Ian Campbell who followed him in the chair (and later into administration). G.P. Barton came a few years later, from the United Nations with a Cambridge PhD. They taught about a tenth of Victoria's students, and by far the largest number of the four colleges. Auckland, the nearest rival, appointed a second professor only in 1954. But it was one thing being the biggest. They had plans. ‘At the present time the Law School at Victoria just fails of being notable,’ a faculty memo observed in 1948.55 One key to making it so was to overcome the part-time habit, whereby ‘the learning of law is relegated to such spare time as a man has before an early breakfast and after a late dinner’.56 Three-quarters of the law students were part-timers in the early 1950s: the faculty handbook advised them to take their first two years full time.

Another was to reform the method of teaching itself. Of the four staff, three – McGechan, Campbell and Braybrooke – visited the United States between 1949 and 1951, and returned inspired by the American case method of teaching which impelled the student to acquire not only the knowledge but also the technique of a lawyer. In fact they had already begun experimenting along these lines in the mid–1940s. McGechan described the growth of case-method teaching at Victoria as ‘a healthy indigenous development’ – but acknowledged the large influence of American teachers.57 Some of the most distinguished of these began coming here in the early 1950s, in the early years of the Fulbright scheme (Allison Dunham from Chicago, for example, and Dean Griswold from Harvard). Extensive (although never exclusive) teaching by the feared case or Socratic method has remained a characteristic of Victoria among New Zealand law schools since.

The American influence showed in all aspects of the faculty's postwar plan. It wanted to introduce an honours course that would be taught only at Victoria for ‘the best law students in the country’; to develop the study of new areas of law, such as administrative law and industrial law; to write New Zealand textbooks; do research; and contribute to ‘the solution of current legal and socio-legal problems’ like the laws schools of Harvard and Yale.58 Campbell had a suggestion for a Law Amendment Group: half a dozen students investigating and making submissions to the government for minor reforms in the law (‘I was tempted to suggest calling the group the Salmond Club,’ he commented, ‘but fear that its modest activities

I.D. Campbell, law professor, 1955. Dominion collection, ATL F145663 1/2 would not warrant so resplendent a title.’)59 He had his own research plans in the area of common law and the welfare state (on the example of W. Friedmann's recently published Law and Social Change in Contemporary Britain); Braybrooke planned to continue the work on international law that he had begun at Columbia. McGechan had a major project under way in his own field of administrative law, in which he was preparing casebooks for the introduction of the new teaching method, before he was killed in an air crash in Singapore, with history lecturer Winston Monk, on the way to a Commonwealth Relations Conference in March 1954.60 The postwar makeover of law at Victoria can rightly be referred to as the McGechan reforms. His was the main though not sole impetus. Compulsory Latin was removed from the syllabus (in 1953) and the conjoint BA/LLB introduced. The importance of the arts component of the law degree, which had been increased from two units to five in 1938, was vigorously defended against the Law Society's complaints that the course was too long and the arts units too hard. (The faculty looked at the records. ‘There seems to be no substance,’ it concluded, ‘in the notion that there is a species of law student who fails in Arts but romps through law.’)61 It identified, further, a special link at Victoria between law and the social sciences. The establishment of the Victoria University College Law Review and of the law library and reading room were also McGechan's achievements. The Review was planned (since 1948) as a forum for student writing, and the top students were selected to form an editorial committee: the first, cyclostyled issue appeared in October 1953 (contributions were to be unsigned). It has kept its place as one of the country's leading legal reviews. An occasional News Bulletin was also launched to keep practitioners in the city law offices informed of the activities of their old school, which they might hardly have recognised. The transformation of B3 into ‘a comfortable – almost one might say a luxurious – Law Reading Room and lecture room combined’ (a place for law students to ‘be free to develop early that corporate spirit which is so marked a characteristic of our profession’) was completed during 1953.62 It was also designed to serve as a moot room, and compulsory mooting began this year (with a prize donated by Whitcombe & Tombs). A Law Faculty Club request that it be named the Robert Orr McGechan Memorial Law Library failed to gain the approval of Council, but the prize for the best piece of writing published in the Review each year carries his name.

The Victoria law library contained four times as many volumes in 1953 as Auckland's and Canterbury's, and the faculty enrolled more new students that year than the other three combined.63 ‘We are training,’ McGechan observed, ‘more than 1/3 of the lawyers of the Dominion.’64 They were not all men. ‘We always have a number of girls taking the law course,’ the faculty handbook noted; ‘They enjoy it, get through and have no difficulty in securing and keeping a job afterwards … the practice of the law takes a variety of forms and there is a place in it for the woman lawyer.’65 But 96% of them were men.

Autonomy, of which McGechan was a keen advocate, was slow to come in law. While the colleges gradually gained some control over degree prescriptions in other areas, the legal profession (in the shape of the Law Society) remained wedded to the external examination system (and the convenience of part-time study). The university law course remained, apart from the arts units, ‘in the main a fearsome array of narrowly technical learning’, to which changes were made rarely.66 When Roman Law was withdrawn in 1959 the Victoria students celebrated at a toga party hosted by their lecturer, Shirley Smith (who as a student five years earlier had successfully challenged a ruling barring women from attending the law dinner).67 Only with full devolution did the universities gain control over their law degrees and examining for them, although still within the oversight of the Council for Legal Education – the body representing both the universities and the profession which had governed legal education since the 1930s.68 They were still required to teach for the professional exams.

They exercised their new freedom with caution. In the interests of stability, each university substantially adopted the structure of the old LLB. A degree of diversity came with a major overhaul of the degree, initiated by the Council for Legal Education, in 1967. At Victoria it followed three or four years of discussion about extending the full-time component of the course, and its range and academic substance – beyond the largely procedural, professional subjects to include emerging areas of the law such as criminology, family law, administrative law, taxation and commercial law. An early proposal was for a parallel full-time, three-year degree alongside the existing four- or five-year one. Under the new regulations students took three arts or science units in their first year, with more choice allowed than before, and the compulsory introductory paper Legal System which had replaced Roman Law, followed by one year of compulsory law and two of mostly optional courses. (The professional course, comprising six subjects, was not part of the LLB.) Honours was also introduced (at last) in 1967, and an extended compulsory mooting programme.

Another product of the 1960s revision of the law course was the combined BCA/LLB. Meanwhile, the commerce and law faculties had also been discussing their relationship in more intimate terms. This concerned the status and location of commercial law, which was taught in the commerce faculty for accountancy students and in law for the LLB. The commercial law lecturers in accountancy were already visiting members of the law faculty, and law's recently appointed professor of commercial law was a visiting member of commerce. It was an administratively and academically messy arrangement, some thought. (Moreover, the difference in both the coverage and approach of commercial law in the two faculties was compounded by a degree of snobbery on the part of law.) A proposal emanating from the Accountancy Department was to create a separate Department of Legal Studies within commerce, but headed by the professor of commercial law. Accountancy was divided on the plan, however, and by 1970 the two faculties had agreed only to convene a standing committee.69 Meanwhile, law and accountancy students and graduates maintained their own, less formal relationship through annual rugby and cricket matches and occasional luncheons.

The Law Faculty Club observed the changing character of the law student body as the numbers of full-timers rose: from 40% in 1962 to 60% in 1964, to 74% in 1970. The Club was undergoing a metamorphosis: ‘Historically the Club has been supported almost solely by those students who have commenced their office training. The office grapevine ensured that these members knew what was happening and the full time was scarcely thought of … Now, with the new course extant, our Club will soon have a large full time contingent.’ Its 1969 annual report was pleased to report ‘not only more social and sporting functions but also more activities by the Club in its role as a “union” representing law students’.70 (This was a larger trend in Students' Association affairs, not only the law students', as the proportion of full-time students rose across the university.) The Law Review was also smartened up in 1967: commercially printed rather than multilithed, and in content as well as presentation oriented to the practitioner as well as the student. It was now one of two annual reviews produced by the Victoria law faculty, which had been responsible for the New Zealand Universities Law Review since 1963.71

Full-time teachers as well as students were also a growing breed. There had been two full-time staff in each of the law departments in the 1950s. In Jurisprudence and Constitutional Law there were six full-time positions in 1964, nine (including a second professor) in 1969. The Department of English and New Zealand Law had six full-time members by 1964 and 15 (and three and a half chairs) by 1969. The large complement of part-time lecturers – law practitioners taking classes after hours, mostly in English and New Zealand law – now belonged to a bygone era. More staff was a prerequisite for the expansion of courses in the new degree and the development of specialisations. The second professor in English and New Zealand law, appointed in 1963 (D.E. Allan, from Cambridge via the University of Western Australia), was a specialist in commercial law and property and established successful LLM courses in this field, attracting commerce students as well as law. He was succeeded after just two years by I.L.M. Richardson, a later privy councillor, knight and chancellor of the university, who came from the Crown Law Office (with degrees from Canterbury and Michigan) for the opportunity to develop taxation teaching and research. Commercial law was strengthened with the appointment at the same time (in 1967) of a third professor, E.P. Ellinger from the University of Singapore (an Austrian–Israeli with degrees from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Oxford). A specialist in criminology would also have been considered, but applicants in this field were disappointing (criminology, as we have seen, was to develop within the disciplinary frame of arts). In jurisprudence, local graduates were recruited to build fields such as international law (Ken Keith) and comparative law (Tony Angelo, a graduate in languages and law, and a member of the National Ballet). Industrial law was developed by D.L. Mathieson, a Victoria Rhodes scholar who had been one of the first of the new generation of sub-professorial staff, appointed in jurisprudence in 1961.

Building up a full-time, qualified, quality staff in the 1960s was sometimes difficult, as it was everywhere in the university – although law's situation was not as acute as accountancy's. In law, though, the competing demands of the profession presented a different situation. Members of the law faculty were permitted by their conditions of appointment to engage in private practice. Law lecturers who practised appreciated the use of academic gowns in keeping the chalk dust off their suits so that they could make a quick dash to court after class – a sartorial practice that was also followed in other faculties but may have lingered longer in law. In 1961 the two professors (Campbell and McGechan's successor, Colin Aikman) had told the vice-chancellor that they had been concerned for some time about the extent to which law staff should be given an unqualified right to practise. It was not until 1967, however, that formal guidelines were drawn up.72 It became an issue in the 1970s, when tension rose within the faculty over the extent of some members' relative commitments to their practice and teaching. This may have contributed to a noticeable exodus of senior staff into private practice in the middle years of this decade. (Students, on the other hand, appreciated being taught by lecturers who were also lawyers – that, after all, was for most the object of the degree.)

A slightly different matter, but also a problematic one in the 1970s, was the work of staff outside the university for the government. The case at issue was the contribution in the international legal field of Quentin Quentin-Baxter, who took the second chair in the Department of Jurisprudence and Constitutional Law in 1968 after a diplomatic and legal career in Foreign Affairs. His membership of the International Law Commission, to which he was elected in 1971, required him to be in Geneva for most of the second term each year, and he was away for the whole of 1974 as one of the legal team taking New Zealand's challenge against

Professor Quentin Quentin-Baxter, one of New Zealand's most eminent international lawyers French nuclear testing in the Pacific in the International Court of Justice. This created administrative problems for the dean (and occasional murmurings of disapproval from the university Council) rather than friction within the faculty.73 On the other hand, as the Council was pointedly reminded, it reflected well on the reputation of Victoria's law school, and enhanced it in turn – Quentin-Baxter was a towering figure on the international legal stage. The prime minister's formal request for his services in 1974 came with $5000 for the law library's international collection: the case, the prime minister commented, had ‘demonstrated that this collection is a resource which the Ministry of Foreign Affairs could neither duplicate nor do without’.74 The vice-chancellor for his part thanked the law dean, professor in jurisprudence George Barton, when he resigned from the position in September 1973, for his tactful management of the faculty during ‘a very difficult time’.75 But then, the tenure of his successor, J.C. Thomas – a senior lecturer with a reputation as being ‘colourful’ and ‘abrasive’, and with a ‘novel’ approach to Socratic teaching, and ‘outwardly one of the more progressive members of the Faculty’ – was hardly an easy time either.76

When Quentin-Baxter died suddenly in 1984, shortly after his return from Geneva, he was described by the deputy prime minister and his former law colleague, Geoffrey Palmer, as ‘one of New Zealand's most distinguished public lawyers’.77 Victoria's law faculty generally has made a special thing of public law, and in particular constitutional, administrative and international law, by virtue of its location and the reputations of its members. Calculating the university's influence is a difficult business, but in this field Victoria's law faculty has a proud story to tell: in the past 50 years its staff and graduates have provided half of New Zealand's Court of Appeal judges and chief justices, two out of three lawyer prime ministers and governors-general, and all but one solicitor-general. It has played a prominent role in the parliamentary legal process. Palmer himself, an expert in constitutional law – and a notoriously aggressive practitioner of the Socratic method – was appointed a professor in 1973, when a second chair was also created (by amalgamating two non-professorial positions, for this was a financially difficult time) for Ken Keith. Both candidates being considered ‘quite outstanding’78 (although Keith was the more popular teacher). Advising the government on constitutional issues in the Pacific is one field in which Victoria law staff have been conspicuous: Quentin-Baxter on Niue; earlier, Aikman on the Cooks and Samoa; Alison Quentin-Baxter was also active in this field; Richardson too in preparing and advising on tax codes. But perhaps the most notable contribution in this area has been that of Tony Angelo, who succeeded to Quentin-Baxter's chair, and who, as consultant law draughtsman to Mauritius since 1968, completely revised the legal code of the newly independent nation; he has also played an important role in the constitutional evolution of the Tokelaus. (It is interesting, if by the way, that J.W. Salmond, who first brought an American influence to law at Victoria in 1909, gave his inaugural address on international law.) While admitting that ‘none of his successors has achieved Salmond's international eminence as a legal scholar’, in the words of one of its deans, Victoria's law faculty has claimed a pre-eminence in the local field largely on the basis of its contributions in public law.79

Another notable contribution in legal research in the 1960s and 1970s was Don Inglis' on family law – a field, like commercial, industrial and later environmental law in which developments came from America. It is possible to exaggerate the American influence on Victoria's law school. Not all members of the faculty did their graduate work in North America and took their sabbaticals there, although a good many did. And, of course, other students besides law increasingly were taking the postgraduate road to America rather than the traditional one to Britain in the 1960s. And there were things they did not bring back: Victoria's law faculty has not fully engaged with critical legal studies, and did not develop clinical teaching, or law and economics. Still, the American effect on law at Victoria in the 1940s and 1950s was a distinctive and lasting one.

A distinguishing feature of the teaching of law at Victoria, in addition to its pioneering use of the Socratic method, has been its emphasis on research and writing – an emphasis which also goes back to the McGechan era. Law students at Victoria write a lot of opinions. Its honours degree has also been well regarded, and masters enrolments comparatively high. The honours programme, taken concurrently with the LLB, was extended in 1972 with the addition of a seminar programme to the existing writing requirement and LLM paper (four seminar subjects were offered each year), while the assessment value of the writing requirement was increased. Honours enrolments had risen from eight in 1968 to 47 in 1972, and more LLM students were now choosing research projects instead of papers. (It was in part the distinguished involvement of a number of the Victoria staff in the public legal arena during this period that attracted high graduate student enrolments.) With this growing student interest in advanced work, the new staff-intensive honours seminars and an increase in tutorial teaching generally, the staff were feeling under pressure. So were the students. In 1972 they formally complained. A hundred students attended a special meeting of the Law Faculty Club to protest at the combined burden of the amount of legal writing required of them – far more, it had been ascertained, than at most American let alone other New Zealand law schools – and the new internal assessment. Law students were not the only ones to discover that there was a downside to internal assessment, but they found a sympathetic response. Discussions were held with the faculty, which was itself finding internal assessment administratively challenging – with the result that the university-wide reform of assessment methods was curtailed in law.

There was, nevertheless, a major reform of the law course in the later 1970s: the introduction of ‘small group’ instruction in the second year, and of a new first-year subject, Law in Society. The first was designed to improve students' research, writing and advocacy skills.80 The latter had a more innovative purpose – or rather two purposes. One was to address the ‘Enchantment Factor’, or dis-enchantment factor: the progressive feeling of frustration and disappointment that afflicted law students, reaching a nadir in the third year and in some instances developing into ‘outright cynicism about the viability of legal ideals’. The other was to redress a ‘radical separation of text and context’ in the law curriculum which, it was argued, concentrated on teaching the technique of law and devalued its significance.81 The new course would draw on other disciplines, such as history, philosophy, sociology, linguistics and anthropology, to give the students an awareness of the role of law and lawyers in society, and (if they came) interpret the law to non-law students.82 Small-group teaching was a great success. Law in Society was not. It was introduced, in 1977, only after intensive debate, with the faculty narrowly divided. The lecturer appointed to develop the course left, disillusioned, after a few years, and it was carried on by a succession of staff, sometimes reluctantly. The ideal of integrating in the first-year programme text and context Legal System and Law in Society, was not realised. Law in Society eventually disappeared from the curriculum in 1993.83

Standards in another sense had been worrying the law faculty in the second half of the 1970s too. Pass:fail ratios were introduced in 1979, following concerns about the substantial variation in the results of individual courses from year to year, and at least two years of debate, but with the perhaps constructive result of precipitating a lengthy process of course-by-course review. It was also in 1979 that the faculty starting limiting enrolments, the last of the country's four law schools to do so. They had been talking about it for eight years. In 1971, in response to George Culliford's report on the accommodation implications of the university's rapidly rising roll, the law faculty appointed a committee to investigate ‘the future of the Law School’, including its optimum size and admission and exclusion policies. The committee reported, and the faculty unanimously agreed, that some limitation on student numbers would be desirable before the university reached its overall ‘optimum size’ of 10,000, and that the right way to impose this was by controlling entry into the second-year courses. Throughout this debate the faculty stayed committed to the principle of open entry into the first year of law (to Legal System). The magic number was 475 equivalent full-time students, excluding Legal System, or 560 in total (being the anticipated 1973 roll).84

The matter rested during 1973, when enrolments levelled off, but was raised again with a little more urgency in 1974 as the number of law students passed the agreed-upon figure by 150. In 1971 law had enjoyed a comfortable staff:student ratio, ‘below the average prevailing in most University Departments’; it now had the second worst (behind accountancy). Still, pressure on staff and resources was not the point. Rather, the limitation argument was about protecting the special character of the law school: the ‘sense of belonging’ felt by the students, the common intellectual and professional interests shared by the students and staff. ‘No increases in staff, library and other facilities can recapture that sense of community which is essential to a professional school but which can be destroyed by too large an enrolment,’ the university Council was told when asked to approve in principle a plan for limiting enrolments in law using Legal System as a prerequisite.85 Victoria's law school was one of the largest in the Commonwealth: bigger than any English

Model of the proposed Hunter redevelopment, which included a new multi-storey building for the law faculty (and Queen Victoria's statue on the lawn) law school, and any in Australia except Sydney and Melbourne; comparable in size to the largest Canadian ones; and just smaller, now, than Auckland, which had been limiting its enrolments since 1969. The proposal was referred to the university's Academic Development Committee which, however, was presently taking stock of the ‘10,000 plan’ in the light of more modest growth.

During 1974 the law faculty also felt a more immediate threat to its identity. ‘Gloom … descended upon the students and staff of the Law School with the announcement of the proposed evacuation of the Hunter Building.’86 That they must move out of the earthquake-weakened building was sad but true. They did so reluctantly, over the summer of 1974–75, to the sixth floor of the Rankine Brown building and two houses towards the bottom of Kelburn Parade, having argued strenuously but without avail that the move posed a grave danger to the existence of the law library as a separate entity and the heart of the school, to morale, to standards and to ‘the University's historical commitment to legal education’.87 Professors discoursed eloquently on the unique character of the law library: ‘a place where students may browse. It is a repository of writings about the law. But it is more, much more than that. It is what a library is to the historian: it is what a laboratory is to the physicist: it is what a hospital is to a medical school: it is what a telescope is to a School of Astronomy.’88 They offered to take the prefabs on the southern carpark rather than have two-thirds of their staff marooned in Kelburn Parade and having to make a 15-minute round trip to the library ‘as opposed to the present 5 minutes’.89 The move was accepted on the conditions that it was to be short term, and that there was a definite long-term plan for a separate new law building and a separate entrance to the law library.

Whether the move out of the Hunter building compromised the character of the faculty, and whether law suffered more than some other departments from the accommodation crisis precipitated by the Hunter problem, may remain a moot point. When the issue of limitation was revisited in 1977 it was in response to immediate and particular pressures rather than abstract debates about size and character. In the early 1970s law had refrained from asking for increased staff and departmental grants in the annual budget round, in view of the university's overall financial circumstances. It had abandoned this hold-back policy in 1974 in the face of a sudden depletion of staff, particularly in jurisprudence, and by 1975 was pleading urgency. The mooting and writing programmes were suffering; new developments, like the proposed small groups, depended on more staff. When the Academic Development Committee reported on the question in 1977 it observed that only one new course had been introduced since the mid–1960s (Law in Society). And although the staff:student ratio had not deteriorated markedly since 1974, there was an additional consideration: Victoria was now the only New Zealand university that did not restrict entry into second-year law (Canterbury and Otago having begun to just recently). This raised the spectre of its being flooded with ‘inadequate students’ rejected everywhere else (as the commerce faculty would soon worry too): ‘From a position of pre-eminence, Victoria will deteriorate until it has a higher proportion of poor students than any other law school in the country.’ This was, it was argued, an especially alarming prospect for law because the success of Socratic teaching in the early years depended on the contribution of the students.90 A plan was agreed, to take effect from 1979, limiting the size of the second-year classes to 170.

In the event it was not necessary to impose this limit until 1987 (the pass rate in Legal System being sufficiently low to keep entry into stage two within it). In 1988, when the establishment of a fifth law school, at Waikato, was being discussed, Victoria was still the only one not to restrict entry into first-year law. The notion of 560 as an optimum size had been forgotten now. When the university began planning a new law tower on the Hunter site in the late 1980s, the faculty advised that it should be designed to accommodate 1000 students and 67 staff.

For all the pressures and debate of the 1970s, at the end of the decade law appeared to be in good form. The Law Faculty Club was at least. Victoria won both junior and senior national moots in 1978, and the club purchased a cup for its own mooting competition (with a bequest left by past graduate and chief justice Sir Richard Wild). Two Victoria students made up the first New Zealand team to attend an international moot court competition in Washington in 1979. The Review marked its 25th anniversary with a jubilee issue. The law dinner was revived after a lapse of some years, and the ball turned a profit after a financial disaster in 1977. In terms of sheer numbers, there was never a return to the heyday before the 1920s when law students had been a third of the college's roll. But they had recovered from a nadir of about 3% during the war to make up 12% of the student body by the 1960s, and remained at around this level since.

More curriculum change was afoot in the 1980s, largely driven by the Council for Legal Education. Part-units – optional, half-year courses in the third year, to give students more choice in a degree programme 80% of which was still compulsory – were introduced in 1982 (having first been discussed in 1972). Here, in fact, the faculty showed a conservative side: it was considerably slower than Auckland's to introduce options into its degree. Administrative process, welfare law, Pacific legal studies and competition law were the first topics offered; the next year welfare law, energy law, Maori land law and intellectual property law. Enrolments were not high, but the part-units were considered valuable enough to those interested to be continued. (Developing new courses in emerging areas of the law like this had been one of the plans of the curriculum sub-committee which had instigated the Law in Society reform in 1975, staffing permitting.) In the honours programme a number of new seminar topics in the 1980s showed the rise of the ‘information industry’, broadly defined, as a field of legal interest: the television and film industry, media law, entertainment law, copyright, official information, and ‘computers, communication and information’. Victoria was the first in New Zealand to develop a computerised Legal Information Retrieval System.

The next major review of the curriculum, however, was precipitated by changes made to the professional examinations by the Council for Legal Education in 1987 – essentially removing these from the universities' responsibility. It would take the Victoria faculty several years to successfully respond to the opportunity to redesign its LLB degree; others were faster. But in the spirit of the 1980s it did effect an administrative reform, following a review of the responsibilities of the dean. The decision was made in October 1988 to amalgamate the two law departments. They had not functioned autonomously in any real sense (including financially) since the mid–1970s, and an accidental imbalance of chairs in the faculty had highlighted the arbitrariness of that traditional division. In 1987 English and New Zealand Law had one chair and a total staff of 20, while Jurisprudence and Constitutional Law had four chairs and a staff of 14. They became one big family in 1989.

[ten] Soft science and hard art

IN 1954 JOHN McCreary, lecturer in the School of Social Science, previously a junior lecturer in psychology, later professor of social administration (and then of social work), surveyed the state of ‘social science’ at the college. He included in his field the departments of Education, Economics and Political Science. He might have added Geography and Law. It was a scene of promise. The School of Social Science was newly founded. Psychology had just gained its independence from Philosophy. Funds for research (courtesy of the Carnegie Corporation) were looked forward to. ‘The social sciences in New Zealand are on the move’, and this college leading them. But he regretted the loss, symbolised by the death of Tommy Hunter the year before, of their ‘common bond’ in philosophy.1 Just as some in the natural and physical sciences worried about the fragmentation of their field, McCreary looked unsurely at the unwieldiness of social science. Indeed, ‘the social sciences’ arguably describes less a field of academic activity than a style.

Victoria never had (until 1998) a faculty called social science, but rather a jigsaw identified as arts – and most easily discussed as such, in pieces. They tell a coherent story, however, or at least illuminate common themes: in their tendency to become part of other disciplines, departments or faculties; the growth of applied social sciences (in the 1970s and 1980s); the place of professional training in the university; and the nature of the liberal arts degree. There is the glaring disjunction too between the promising development of social science in the university at a time when its vice-chancellor was pursuing its future in big science and technology.

To a real extent, in fact, the ‘synthesising’ influence attributed to Hunter was continued in the 1950s and 1960s by Ernest Beaglehole, who had succeeded him in the chair of psychology in 1948 and headed this department until 1965. (The psychology course was separated out from philosophy in 1949 and the department's name changed from Mental and Moral Philosophy to Psychology and Philosophy; they became separate, and philosophy gained its own chair, in 1951.) Beaglehole's work lay at the border of psychology and anthropology; he himself called it the study of ‘culture-in-personality’.2 He was in America in the 1930s studying with the likes of Peter Buck, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict and Edward Sapir, doing his PhD at Yale in cultural anthropology on the Hopi Indians of Arizona. He conducted fieldwork in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru; made studies of five Polynesian cultures; and published pioneering, sometimes controversial research on the Maori. He is said to have disliked the term ‘inter-disciplinary study’, but this may be to quibble over terminology.3 In a five-year plan for psychology prepared in 1950 he described developments at Harvard, Cornell and Chicago (and to a lesser extent in England, at Tavistock and Liverpool) which he hoped Victoria, however modestly, might follow: ‘over the next five years we at Victoria should not establish more chairs of this and that, but … we should promote by every possible means cross-disciplinary teaching and research’. More simply, he wanted more staff, teaching and laboratory space, and the latest in equipment: ‘a good wire recorder’ and a one-way mirror. And he hoped to make research ‘a living thing in the work of the Department’. He had turned down approaches from British and American universities, he informed the principal, but would not regret his decision to stay in New Zealand if adequate resources were provided for research.4

The inadequacy of funding for social science research has been a perennial complaint in New Zealand universities. While University Grants Committee research funding explicitly favoured the physical sciences and their expensive pieces of apparatus, the social science (and other) departments were in the main left to rely on the more meagre resources of internal research committees.5 Perhaps the bias went further than that. The Americans, they had told Beaglehole, were keen

Ernest Beaglehole, professor of psychology. ATL F19983 1/1 to send social scientists to New Zealand under the recently established Fulbright programme, but the local Fulbright committee had ‘indicated a strong policy preference for scientists in agriculture and related subjects’.6 An overture to the Carnegie Corporation was already being planned down in University House in 1949, and came to fruition in 1953: $60,000 over five years for social science research (to be distributed among the four colleges by the University of New Zealand). In the meantime Victoria's Professorial Board convened its own social science research committee. Plans were made for a series of collaborative ‘Studies in Contemporary New Zealand Society’ in the fields of economics, psychology, law, education, political science and public administration.7 This did not proceed; and McCreary's suggestion that they all take a year off to think about the future of social science research was also a little optimistic. However, the Carnegie Social Science Research Fund was to make an appreciable contribution for a time to the college's work in this direction (as, in fact, did the flow of Fulbright visitors).

Notable in psychology were the Rakau studies, a series of investigations into ‘the effects of technological change on four New Zealand Maori communities – an area study of folk culture under stress’,8 which were conducted (around Murupara) by several staff and graduate students under Beaglehole's direction. For James and Jane Ritchie (Beaglehole's daughter), lecturer and PhD student respectively, this began an important and prolific career in the study of modern Maori society and family structure: in the 1960s they carried the Beaglehole influence to Waikato.9 The Rakau studies were five of the Psychology Department's occasional publications series: 29 were published between 1952 and 1983, but 24 of them before 1960. Over half before 1966 – during the ‘Beaglehole years’ – were on Maori topics, including controversial Fulbright visitor David Ausubel's Maori Youth (1961). The professor of educational psychology at the University of Illinois had made headlines while here in 1957–58 with his comments on the bodgie phenomenon (and drawn a peeved response from ‘D.A.P.’ in Salient, who told the ‘American so-called Educator’ that he should take his ‘psychiatric methods’ back to the country which enjoyed the highest juvenile delinquency rate in the world: Ausubel was offended, Beaglehole aghast).10 There were also several opinion surveys, conducted mostly by undergraduate students as part of their course requirements, with a conspicuous interest in New Zealanders' attitudes to the rest of the world.11 The Beaglehole imprint on the department's work in this period – situating psychology at the interface of sociology and anthropology – was not exclusive. C.J. Adcock, appointed to the staff back in 1947, worked on psychological testing and factor-analytic research. But it was clearly predominant.

Not that Beaglehole himself was concerned to develop only social psychology. He was anxious to introduce clinical psychology – the study of what a later professor described as the ‘troubled and troublesome’12 – which was then a fast-developing field overseas, especially in America, and unrepresented in New Zealand; and he wanted to re-establish the children's psychological clinic that Hunter had run on Saturday mornings between 1926 and 1942. In 1953, with support from the professors of education and social science, he proposed that the college purchase the late principal's house in Clermont Terrace to be the Hunter Memorial Children's Centre. This did not happen (although the Hunter home was acquired by the university, and housed the School of Social Science for many years). When the establishment of a psychological clinic, or child guidance centre, was raised again in the 1960s it was rejected as an activity more appropriate for a hospital than a university. An appointment in this field was first made in 1958. But it was not until the 1970s and 1980s that clinical psychology developed as the Victoria Psychology Department's particular strength.

The newly autonomous subject had proved popular: enrolments in psychology doubled between 1949 and 1953, while the college roll overall fell slightly. Despite Hunter's pioneering intentions, comparatively few students took psychology for a BSc (although more did so after the introduction of the ‘type B’ BSc in 1960).13 Its affiliation with the science faculty as well as the arts from the late 1960s, though, had all to do with funding. The staff grew more steadily than the students (doubling between 1950 and 1973, when there were 10).

A second chair had been advertised twice, but not filled, before Ernest Beaglehole died in October 1965. Adcock, now associate professor, was appointed acting professor for a year, but not to the chair when it was filled in 1967.14 It went to L.B. Brown, a local and London graduate who had been Beaglehole's first full-time demonstrator in 1949, a specialist in the psychology of religion. In his inaugural lecture Brown commented on changing fashions in a discipline exceptionally subject to fashion, on the behavioural revolution and the application of experimental and laboratory methods (‘Rats were definitely in for the Behaviourists’), and on a concomitant shift of psychologists' attention from personal to public problems – its shift as a discipline from a branch of philosophy (‘mental philosophy’) to a kind of science.15

The inaugural theme of his successor in 1975, A.R. Forbes, was that psychology must above all be rigorously scientific (not all of his colleagues, in Forbes' opinion, were). Forbes conducted his research on driver perception and the effectiveness of road markings and road signs with the sponsorship of the National Roads Board (a collaboration which brought a research fellowship and $80,000 worth of equipment for measuring eye movements). Meanwhile, the second chair had finally been offered, in 1970, to clinical psychologist and student counsellor Tony Taylor. Twenty years after Ernest Beaglehole had recommended the establishment of clinical psychology in the university as a matter of urgency, it was still in its infancy, commanding the attention of only 9% of New Zealand psychology academics, by Taylor's calculation – with the result that his own work was (and continued to be) better known overseas than at home. His professional background included probation work in Britain, and 10 years with the Department of Justice combined with part-time teaching at Victoria, before he took up a lectureship in 1961. He had continued to teach when appointed in 1964 as the university's first student counsellor, a job he had been doing voluntarily since 1961. (Beaglehole had seen this as a proper function of a psychology department.) Taylor's research interests then included psychotherapy, transsexualism and transvestism. Later he would

Freud and friends: the Psychology Department rats. M.D. King photo transfer his study of social isolates from the confinement of prison to the lonely expanse of Antarctica; an investigation of the effects of stress on the Mt Erebus air-crash recovery workers in 1980 stimulated in turn an ongoing interest in the psychological aftermath of disaster.16 On the teaching side, a two-year MA (Applied) in clinical psychology was launched in 1976 (one subject option in a new degree introduced that year, designed to develop applied graduate studies in ‘non-science’ subjects). This became the department's prestige graduate programme; it was highly regarded outside the university and highly competitive. Six students were accepted into the programme each year (from up to three times as many applicants); 59 had graduated by 1991. But it succeeded, perhaps, at the expense of a broader ‘research culture’ in the department, measured by low numbers of MAs and PhDs.17

The vacillation over filling the second chair in the 1960s had been due in part to a desire to make an appointment in experimental psychology, recognised then as the department's weakest field. Experiments in animal learning had begun in 1952 with a colony of white rats (‘affectionately named after famous psychologists and one can imagine the confusion when Freud gave birth to a litter’).18 Over time the rats contributed their share to the personal tensions which, from the mid–1960s, plagued an under-resourced, badly accommodated department – for it was arguably more so than most – especially after a breeding programme was started in 1968 and ‘nauseating, foetid’ odours permeated the eighth-floor studies of the Rankine Brown building.19 Productive research was done in cognitive psychology and animal learning in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But eventually animal work was abandoned, and with it physiological psychology from the department's undergraduate teaching programme – a conspicuous gap, along with psychometrics which had been C.J. Adcock's field. But experimental and laboratory psychology was not all about rats. A computer-controlled psycho-physics laboratory was installed in a Clermont Terrace house in 1978 (and became the envy of the rest of the department): there two staff conducted research on visual function, auditory psychology, decision theory and artificial intelligence. Other staff specialisms in the department included blood pressure and stress, and social conformity. Ngaire Adcock carried on work in personality-factor testing and Reciprocal Inhibition Therapy. She had joined the department in 1964 when Taylor was appointed student counsellor (the job she had wanted), became a senior lecturer in 1972, and for the length of her 24-year career in the department was its only full-time woman member. It had been, she reflected when she retired in 1988, a lonely and frustrating experience.

A review of the Psychology Department carried out in 1991, on the eve of the retirement of its two professors, pulled no punches in describing the ‘cumulative effects of almost a quarter century of internal disputes among its senior staff, of relative neglect, and of relegation to low status by successive university administrations’: Victoria's was the smallest, most poorly resourced, and ‘widely regarded by its peers as the least effective’ of the country's four university psychology departments.20 It was a sad contrast to the promise of the Hunter/Beaglehole years. Equally frank was the dean of arts who a few years earlier described the depth of antagonism among the staff as ‘frightening even by the standards which, unfortunately, too often apply in academic life’.21 Perhaps, as some would argue, entrenched academic divisions are endemic to departments of psychology (a science in which there is no general paradigm, no agreed taxonomy of behaviour). Likewise, personal feuds in other departments have hardly been unknown. But this appears to have been an extreme example. A related, unhappy theme of this department's story is the struggle for recognition as a laboratory science and for the resources that a laboratory science requires.22 Yet psychology as a profession now was thriving. The demand for clinical psychology graduates was booming at a time when the number of health professionals generally was falling. Industrial psychology, which Leslie Hearnshaw had pioneered at Victoria in the 1940s, founding the DSIR's psychology division before going to the chair at Liverpool after the war, had been allowed to lapse in the 1980s but was reintroduced in response to strong student demand. The business sector was a growing field of employment for psychologists as well as commerce graduates. Undergraduate enrolments overall were rising. The ‘New Age’ culture of the 1980s and '90s had given psychology a new cachet.

‘Sociology,’ Victoria's first professor in the subject, giving his inaugural lecture in 1966 and quoting from the Chambers Encyclopaedia of 1882, ‘is a somewhat barbarous name that has of late been used to denote the study of the origin, organisation and development of human society’; but, he was pleased to say, it appeared to have come to stay.23 Nevertheless, uncertainty about what to call itself continued to afflict this department, which had already been known as social studies, sociology and social work, before it was established as the School of Social Science in 1949.

Sociology for the BA had been part of the original plan – and was still but a plan when the first professor, David Marsh, left for the University of Nottingham in 1953, having successfully launched the Diploma of Social Science, aka social work. Casework was the core of the two-year course. Marsh employed ‘good humour, a little bullying, a lot of energy, and an extensive knowledge of rugby football’ to secure the co-operation of government departments and community welfare agencies in arranging practical placements. Eighteen subjects were covered in the classroom with assistance from other departments, while the Psychology Department for a time also assisted with the selection of candidates for the course, applying ‘a formidable test battery’.24 Victoria would continue to enjoy a monopoly over the training of professional social workers until 1975, when the recently established New Zealand Social Work Training Council invited other universities into the field.

The school was staffed mainly from Britain and its curriculum based on current British practice. But in the 1950s it was at the forefront of developments in social work education on both sides of the Atlantic, in its principle of generic training, and in combining the academic approach of the British with the more practical orientation of the Americans. After Marsh came W.G. (Bill) Minn, with a degree from Cambridge and a practitioner background in probation, including 11 years in London's East End: a reserved Englishman to Marsh's ebullient Yorkshireman, and with an individual approach which contrasted with Marsh's orientation to social planning and legislation. John McCreary, joining the school from psychology in 1953, and later following Minn in the chair, contributed social psychology and statistics to the school's teaching strengths, research in the sociology of alcohol, gerontology and criminology (and to the university at large a long-term interest in the Pacific).

From the beginning research was an integral part of the diploma programme, not only to give the students interviewing and survey skills but also to establish the academic credibility of the school. A small thesis was required, and from 1957 participation in a group project – an American adoption, facilitated by the creation of a full-time research assistant position (usually filled by recent graduates from other social science departments). Many of the projects were commissioned, usually by government departments. (Being alone in the field, there was pressure to do more than the school was able at first, and ‘some ill-informed criticism’ as a result.)25 Prominent among the school's early research ventures were its ‘old people's surveys’ (in Marsh's phrase), six surveys of accommodation conditions of the aged undertaken for the departments of Health and Social Security; and three pioneering community surveys, initiated by local organisations and funded by Carnegie grants. The first, Hawera survey (1954) was a joint adventure of the school and the Psychology and Education departments, and directed by psychology lecturer Athol Congalton. The published survey was prefaced by essays on ‘The role of the sociologist’ – H.C.D. Somerset in imagined conversation with a Hawera resident explaining why sociology was a science; the value of social surveys explained by Fulbright scholar R.J. Havinghurst (professor of education at the University of Chicago); a description of the school; and a foreword by Ernest Beaglehole.26 The interdisciplinary theme is only one to observe here. Sociological research was new and strange – not only in Hawera. The surveys of the aged, for example, were attacked in Parliament as an invasion of privacy.27 A few years earlier an investigation into class consciousness among adolescents by Congalton had brought a shocked reaction from the eminently shockable New Zealand Truth.28

How far such incidents expressed a deep-seated hostility in the New Zealand character to the sociologist's project – the asking of uncomfortable questions, the questioning of comfortable beliefs – and the extent to which this, along with the opposition of Oxbridge traditionalists, contributed to the rather late development of sociology in New Zealand has been a subject of debate within the academy. The alternative view is that the chief obstacle was the difficulty in finding staff in a ‘world-wide sellers’ market'.29 Victoria was the first to try. Sociology I started in 1957, developed from the Contemporary Social Problems paper in the diploma course and taught by J.H. Robb, who became the university's first professor of sociology in 1966.30 (For many years he would also play a valued role in the delicate job of convenor of the Professorial Board's Accommodation Advisory Committee.) He was a Beaglehole graduate, studying undergraduate history and psychology, doing an MA in psychology after the war and then a PhD in sociology at the London School of Economics with a thesis on working-class anti-Semitism. In London he also worked for an experimental Family Discussion Bureau (practical experience that qualified him for the Victoria job) and as a researcher at the cutting-edge Tavistock Institute.

The romantic story of sociology ‘battling desperately for survival against the hostility of the academic establishment’ hardly applies to Victoria.31 Robb found only support, particularly from Education, Geography and Political Science, and a supply of basic sociological and anthropology texts in the college library acquired in the 1930s and 1940s by Hunter, Beaglehole, Lipson et al. McCreary contributed methodology to the new course, while Robb's wife Margaret, herself a sociology graduate, marked the essays (the wife as essay marker and tutorial taker was an important adjunct to the college staff in these years). Second- and third-year papers were approved for 1962, but not introduced until 1964 and 1965 (honours in 1967) while the search went on for suitable staff. The Bay of Pigs crisis produced a flash flood of applicants from the East Coast of the United States whose suddenly changed circumstances had allowed them to pursue a long-held ambition to come to New Zealand. (‘It became the joke around the department that we should ask the university to award Fidel Castro an honorary doctorate for services to NZ sociology.’)32 In due course an American was appointed, but stayed only three years; after him Miriam Gilson, a young New Zealander then doing demographic research in Canberra.

Sociology was, unsurprisingly, a hit. But it peaked quickly in the early 1970s – when sociology and social work were ‘now “with it”, “on the beam”, “groovey”, “turned on”’ – falling back to about 1960s numbers in the 1980s.33 Its initial popularity, though, prompted the introduction of the transitional certificate, which was subsequently adopted by other departments, allowing students who had taken an undergraduate course in another subject to move into sociology (say) without having to start again. In contrast to the British-based social work course, sociology in the 1950s and into the '60s was predominantly American: all the textbooks came from there (and Robb, although schooled in London, had had an American supervisor). Later the development of the discipline in Britain would trickle down to this way.

Having pioneered the field, it must be admitted that in sociology Victoria did not maintain an edge. The mainstream British–American tradition has been supplemented at times by ‘various types of Marxism, symbolic interactionism, phenomenology and labelling theory’.34 There was a strong component of demography from the outset, contributed by both Robb and McCreary, and reinforced by Gilson, who also developed the teaching of urban sociology and the family (her PhD thesis on the New Zealand family and social change launched the department's occasional papers series in 1978). Robb had had an idea of focusing the department's research effort on the welfare state. In applied research, he believed, New Zealand sociology could make a contribution of international theoretical importance – another take on the familiar ‘New Zealand as a social laboratory’ theme – and Victoria's location made the state its obvious subject. But the reality of building up a department hardly permitted such a considered approach and its research output has been more diverse, with few very obvious highlights. David Pearson's Johnsonville (1980) was a successor not to the department's early community surveys but to Somerset's 1938 Littledene, and equally a seminal work. In the field of family and gender its published work has included sometime lecturer and research assistant Alison Gray's several ‘popular titles’, including The Smith Women (1981) and The Jones Men (1983). The department's second professor of sociology (appointed in 1976), Michael Hill, brought a quite different interest, from London, in the sociology of monasticism, and pursued research on religion and deviance.

The semantic history of this department is a complicated tale. In 1969 the School of Social Science became the Department of Social Administration and Sociology. This was in part to recognise the growth of sociology, and in part to avoid the confusion caused by the appearance of ‘schools of social science’ elsewhere, not to mention Waikato University's Bachelor of Social Sciences, which was not, as some assumed, another professional social work qualification, just as schools of social science were not normally sociology or social work departments. The choice of the term social administration followed British usage (there recognising the discipline pioneered by Richard Titmuss at the LSE). An MA in social administration was introduced, with options in social administration or social work, and a lecturer (Avery Jack) appointed to develop undergraduate courses. These especially attracted part-time and older students. Lack of staff, however, frustrated the plan to develop a major. Meanwhile, in 1972 the department had been renamed the Department of Sociology and Social Work – thus reinstating the term that had offended Peter Fraser 25 years earlier. Now, ‘social administration’, it seemed, was disliked or misunderstood by students, employers, government departments, the New Zealand Association of Social Workers and the academic community alike. (‘Graduates who have sought employment overseas have reported difficulty in having a diploma in Social Science taught by a Department of Social Administration accepted as a professional qualification in social work.’)35 So the Diploma in Social Science became a Diploma in Social Work, and two separately named MAs were identified: social administration and social work. This, it was pleasingly noted, was in line with current London practice. The range of qualifications in the field once known inclusively as ‘social science’ was now expanding beyond Victoria too, as other universities established theirs.36

In due course, in 1990, social administration would give way to social policy, and a major was finally fashioned to complement the growth of policy studies elsewhere in the university and of the ‘policy analyst’ as a breed of public servant. By now the department's panoply of qualifications also included an MA (Applied) in social work, and an MA (Applied) in recreation administration, which was created at the request of the Council for Recreation and Sport in 1977 and transferred from the Recreation Centre to this department's responsibility in 1989. It did not administer the short-lived Diploma in Social Science Research, which was introduced in 1987 in response to a report from the National Research Advisory Council bemoaning the paucity of graduate social research skills, but made a major contribution to it.

At least, though, the physical progress of sociology at Victoria is a simple story: from Clermont Terrace at the northern edge of the campus, via the Von Zedlitz building, to Fairlie Terrace at the south.

Academic expediency gave sociology a decade and a half's head start over anthropology at this university. Anthropology has, however, a prehistory going back almost as far as the college itself, if we note a clutch of early students who followed distinguished careers in anthropology elsewhere: H.D. Skinner (the college's first custodian of library books) at Otago; Diamond Jenness in Canada; Harry Hawthorn and Cyril Belshaw at British Columbia; Reo Fortune (husband of Margaret Mead) at Cambridge; Derek Freeman (Mead's nemesis). And Ernest Beaglehole, who brought American cultural anthropology back here. But in the first few decades of the college's life New Zealand anthropology existed outside the university, with the ‘amateur’ ethnographers of the Polynesian Society, the Turnbull Library and the Dominion Museum. Up on the hill, Beaglehole taught a course on ‘Man and Culture: an introduction to social anthropology’ in 1939, and offered a postgraduate paper on ‘Ethnopsychology’ in 1951. That a department was not established until the 1960s was decided by the deal just then brokered by Hunter, which secured social science for Victoria while anthropology (and with it the Polynesian Society) went to Auckland.

It was not long before this arrangement was under siege. A conference of Maori students in August 1955 – ‘a weekend of competitive sports and discussion’ at the Ngati Poneke marae to which Victoria's Maori students invited their Auckland counterparts – asked the college Council to appoint lecturers in Maori studies and anthropology, ‘in the interests of scholarship and mutual citizenship’.37 A handful of Victoria students each year were taking Maori at Auckland extramurally. Beaglehole convened a committee which recommended the introduction of both subjects. The college had just begun an adult education class in Maori language, they noted; and as well as complementing Victoria's existing social science field, anthropology would ‘dovetail very nicely’ with the plans just then being laid for the development of Asian studies. The trusty Carnegie Corporation might be approached for funding (it had recently made such a grant to the University of Western Australia), along with the Department of Maori Affairs. The latter, however, turned down the Council's application, because the subjects were already taught elsewhere.

Surprisingly perhaps, neither anthropology nor Maori studies was included in the college's submission to the grants committee in 1958, despite the visit that year of Raymond Firth, expatriate New Zealand professor of anthropology at LSE, and some evident Council interest. It waited until a quinquennial round later, when Maori students and the Students' Association renewed their request. An ad hoc committee of the arts faculty which reported in 1963 on the performance of Maori students – who were then between 1% and 2% of Victoria's roll – while not going so far as to recommend the establishment of anthropology and Maori studies suggested that such a department might provide a ‘point of identification’ for the students, as it did in Auckland (‘as “natural” a beginning for them at the University as English is for non-Maori students in the Arts degree’).38 The arts faculty in its quinquennial submission now bid for a full department of anthropology; and the establishment of a chair was approved for 1964, for appointment to which ‘some specialisation in the Polynesian field’ would be preferred.39

Filling this chair, as with many appointments in these years, was more easily decided than done. It was twice offered and twice turned down.40 In the meantime, in response to continued student pressure, it was agreed (with reluctance) to go ahead with Maori. Ernest Beaglehole was designated temporary head of a department of anthropology which did not quite exist, and Joan Metge was appointed senior lecturer ‘with special reference to Maori Studies’ at the end of 1964. She was an associate professor in just a few years, and 20 years later would be made a dame for services to anthropology which had included two standard works (The Maoris of New Zealand (1967) and its revised edition in 1976) and extended research on cross-cultural communication.

Metge had done her postgraduate work in the 1950s under Raymond Firth. To this British social anthropology tradition was added the European, structuralist influence and frisson of intellectual excitement brought to Victoria by its first professor of anthropology, Jan Pouwer. Firth recommended the appointment of Pouwer, a Dutchman strongly influenced by Lévi-Strauss and French structural linguistics. He arrived in 1966, and Anthropology I started in 1967. Thus for two years the department had taught only Maori studies, which was both more and

Anthropology lecturer Bernie Kernot (front) and Maori studies professor Hirini Mead at a Tohu Maoritanga hui on the university marae, 1987 less than anthropology. Joan Metge and Bill Parker – well known as the country's first Maori broadcaster and an adult education tutor, from which department he was seconded – taught one course along with Maori reading knowledge in 1965.41 Te Kapunga (Koro) Dewes, a noted exponent of Maori poetry and oratory (like Parker, of Ngati Porou, and Te Aute educated) was appointed lecturer the following year, from adult education in Auckland; Bernie Kernot, whose interest would be in Maori material arts, was appointed in 1967. By 1971 Maori language and literature had been extended to stage three, again following student representations,42 and anthropology (which included Maori society and culture) to honours level. Both met a keen demand. Initial enrolments in anthropology were ‘unexpectedly high’.43 Maori language enrolments, in the elementary classes especially, rose rapidly, aside from a sudden, temporary fall when the foreign language requirement was removed from the BA regulations in 1970. From this point, the institutional stories of anthropology and Maori begin to take separate paths.

The university's recently convened Academic Development Committee took stock of Maori studies in 1973. They consulted the universities of Massey, which had just introduced an extramural Maori language course in 1972, and Waikato which had just established its Centre for Maori Studies (after a long battle, spearheaded by Jim Ritchie, with the University Grants Committee and defensive opposition from Auckland). They concluded that Victoria had a distinctive contribution to make if it concentrated on language and literature.44 The reasons for affirming the place of Maori in the university now were more than compelling. A rapid expansion of Maori language teaching in schools was under way, and courses began in the teachers' colleges in 1974. Victoria's Te Reo Maori Society, formed in 1970 by the stage-two class, itself played an instrumental role in the movement to revive a dying language, instigating a Maori Language Day (later Week) in 1972, and continuing to advocate its official recognition and use.45 A sub-committee of the faculties of arts and languages and literature advanced both political and academic reasons when it proposed in April 1973 the creation of a separate department of Maori language and literature, an oral research unit and a marae: it observed the growth of the academic study of ‘oral literature’ and the place of Maori within this context of international scholarship, as well as ‘obvious’ student interest, the rising theme of multiculturalism and the ‘rights and needs of the Maori people’.46 The Academic Development Committee did not go quite so far, recommending the ‘substantial expansion and development’ of Maori studies within a renamed Department of Anthropology and Maori, and the establishment of a chair. A campus marae was ‘desirable but not essential’.47

Language remained the core of the Maori studies teaching programme, but increasingly within the framework of a broader study of Maori written and oral literature and material arts. In this it was seen to differ from the Auckland department's more strongly linguistic focus. In 1975 Hirini Mead, of Ngati Awa, and then at the anthropology department of McMaster University, Ontario, was appointed to New Zealand's first chair of Maori studies. McMaster had hosted the first international symposium on the visual art of Oceania in 1974, the proceedings of which Mead subsequently edited. He also edited (with Bernie Kernot) those of the second symposium held at Victoria in 1978, and the catalogue of the landmark Te Maori exhibition which Mead accompanied on its four-city American tour in 1984 – and which, in his own words, ‘put us on the art map of the world’.48

Te Herenga Waka, 36 Kelburn Parade

Following the professor's arrival in 1977 the Maori studies courses were restructured, graduate ones introduced, and a new and unique undergraduate course established on culture and technology (which included a practical requirement, the replication of an object being studied). The department began building its own artefacts collection, with a grant from the Todd Foundation and recognition as a collector of antiquities under the 1975 Antiquities Act. The establishment of a scholarship for honours study promised to encourage the development of graduate work (but postgraduate enrolments remained low). The formal separation of Anthropology and Maori seemed inevitable now. Maori Studies gained its independence in 1981.49 Already they effectively operated autonomously, in different buildings (since 1979) and teaching distinct programmes, although separately they were small: four staff in Maori Studies, seven in Anthropology, with one appointment (Kernot) shared.

The establishment of a marae further enhanced (but also complicated) Maori Studies' distinct identity, and enlarged its role. The marae was opened in 1980 at 36 Kelburn Parade – since 1969 the university chaplaincy, Ramsay House, and formerly the home of Archdeacon Kingi Ihaka, the Maori pastor of Wellington. It was named Te Herenga Waka, the anchorage of canoes, after some debate over whether the name should claim a local – geographical or tribal – association. From the outset it was intended to be inclusively a university marae, although the extent to which it was would later become a point of debate. In 1984 it moved to temporary premises further up the road to make way for the new commerce building, and a fundraising campaign was launched for a purpose-designed Maori Studies Centre there, forming part of the Kelburn Parade ‘precinct’ in the campus beautification project, its centrepiece to be a new carved meeting house. Te Tumu Herenga Waka was formally opened at a dawn ceremony in December 1986.50 Among its several roles the marae was a teaching tool, ‘as laboratories are to chemistry and physics’,51 particularly for the newly developed Tohu Maoritanga, a two-year diploma combining existing undergraduate courses in language, culture and society and two new tikanga courses, marae practice and waiata. Twenty-four students enrolled for the diploma in its first year, 1986.

Although it aimed to draw a new constituency of Maori students into the university community, the Tohu Maoritanga conformed to the traditional focus of Maori studies at Victoria and elsewhere: language and culture. But there were signs this was changing. A recently developed course on Maori and science, and the Accountancy Department's stage-two paper on Maori resource management developed by Whatarangi Winiata, suggested a larger conception of Maori studies in the university as ‘an area of academic endeavour encompassing a number of disciplines while retaining a distinct Maori orientation with relevance to contemporary Maori development’.52 From the 1980s, other parts of the university (with varying degrees of commitment and success) responded to the newly recognised obligations of the government under the Treaty of Waitangi. These developments would have implications for the position and responsibility of Maori Studies. To some extent it was the old question of the place and scope of ‘area studies’; and there remained those who disputed that there was a discipline of Maori studies at all. There was a political aspect, too, that is made explicit by the work of the department's research unit, Te Tira Whakaemi Korero, established in 1988. Very soon it was engaged exclusively in tribal development and Treaty settlement research. (But it was not only in Maori Studies that the Treaty of Waitangi settlement process challenged academics' traditional views of their profession.)

Anthropology at Victoria exclusive of Maori studies has been conspicuously

Opening of Te Tumu Te Herenga Waka, December 1986 international. There are exceptions to this statement: Joan Metge's work; Peter Webster's Rua and the Maori Millennium (1979); and studies of the social background of Stewart Island fishermen, Jewish ethnicity in New Zealand, the food habits of Pacific Islanders living here, and a contribution to a feasibility study for Wellington's Manners Mall. But the large majority of Anthropology's staff have come from outside New Zealand, and their research interests have remained there – principally in Oceania, Europe and Asia. Not that this department has been in all senses unconscious of indigenous connections. In 1984 its new premises in Wai-te-ata Road were named Jenness House, and it received that year Reo Fortune's collection of New Guinean artefacts; when it moved again it named a Reo Fortune room.

Pouwer bequeathed strong and continuing theoretical emphases on structuralism and semiotics, in contrast to the Auckland department's founding professor (Ralph Piddington) who had studied under social anthropologists Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown. The department at Victoria maintained an exclusive focus on cultural and social anthropology, different again from Auckland where social anthropology was later complemented by archaeology, and from Otago which kept to its founding father H.D. Skinner's interest in archaeology and prehistory. Victoria has never taught archaeology or prehistory. Pouwer returned to the Netherlands in 1976, by which time the department's permanent staff on the anthropology side included two Americans and a Briton, while Webster had crossed over from the Geography Department to pursue interests in Maori millennialism and Nepal. Pouwer's successor, Ann Chowning, was also an American (a native of Little Rock, Arkansas, like a more famous one): a graduate of Bryn Mawr and the University of Pennsylvania, she came to Victoria from Papua New Guinea (via Columbia and ANU) and continued to research in that field.

Appointments in the next decade contributed interests in the Russian Mennonites and Greece. Such a diversity of personal as well as theoretical backgrounds in the department did not make for an especially cohesive one. Yet its cosmopolitanism was not by accident. It is in obvious contrast to the necessarily local focus of its cousin Maori Studies; and was by now out of step with the prevailing national climate for scholarship and research. It was a brave Anthropology Department that asserted, in 1991, that its ‘primary focus is international’ and deplored ‘recent attempts to reallocate research funding to a narrow set of parochial topics of supposedly practical scientific value to New Zealand’.53

Political science professor R.S. Parker, taking in British and American institutions on his refresher leave in 1951–52, like many of his colleagues also saw the American sociological approach as the way Victoria should go. We ‘shall be merely ostriches,’ he wrote to the principal, ‘if we go on without raising our heads from Plato or Austin or even Lord Lindsay, and pretending to teach students about the political process. Anyhow I hope at the end of this trip I'll have a more solid foundation of know-how in social science, on which to stand together with people like Ernest Beaglehole or Somerset or David Marsh and their students, and get some inter-disciplinary work done in seeing how the New Zealand polity operates and the whys and wherefores of the civic acts and attitudes of its citizens.’54 This was a definition of political science not only as a social science, but as one with a specifically local brief.

The Diploma of Public Administration had dominated the work of the School of Political Science and Public Administration in its tender years, and was now just getting into its stride after the intervention of the war. It was a unique, small but prestigious programme, ‘recognised abroad’, the School boasted in 1959, ‘as being of outstanding interest and significance’, despite its explicitly parochial application: to educate New Zealand's public service.55 It firmly established its credibility despite some continuing scepticism both inside and outside the university about the status of public administration as an academic subject. A significant group of the diploma graduates would find their way back to the university as ‘academics’. Among them were Ken Scott, the head of the school (just) when he died suddenly in July 1961, and another member of the founding class of '39, T.R. Smith; Ray Polaschek, seconded back from Transport in 1955–57 when he wrote (with a Carnegie grant) Government Administration in New Zealand, for a long time the only general study of the subject other than L.C. Webb's brief centennial survey; and John Roberts, the first professor. Treasury secretary Henry Lang also made his way back, rather later (when public administration had become public policy).

Public administration made the crossover from the diploma to the BA more successfully than social administration: it was introduced at stage one in 1959, and eventually offered as both a BA and BCA major and (with some resistance) as a postgraduate stream.56 The creation of the chair in 1966 accompanied the school's inclusion in the enlarged faculty of commerce and administration and its courses in the new BCA degree. The partnering of government and business administration that this rearrangement effected was not a total innovation, mind you. Among the external activities of the school in the 1950s – mostly seminars and short courses for the New Zealand Institute of Public Administration and the Public Service Commission – was its contribution to an executive management course jointly run by the Institutes of Public Administration and Management. Parker had had this in mind when he investigated business schools, including Harvard's and Henley, as well as public administration and political science programmes in 1952.

In contrast to the gradual emergence of sociology out of social science, political science was there at the beginning, initially as just two introductory papers (‘CPI’, comparative political institutions, and ‘HPT’, the history of political thought), but a major and postgraduate option from 1950. Victoria led the way in building a specialist political science department in this decade. At other New Zealand universities the subject remained in its traditional association with history, and separate departments of political science were not established until the 1960s. Victoria also remained the biggest: with 16 full-time staff by the end of the 1970s to the others' 10 or fewer. At the beginning of the 1950s, though, they were few. Joachim Kahn from Munich, who had penned that eloquent memo to the principal in 1953 about the school's army-surplus accommodation, left presently after seven years at the college, as they had been expecting (but not wanted) him to. His first ambition had been the stage, which his father forbade: he ‘could hold a party in fits by mimicking someone reciting Shakespeare in a Hungarian accent’, but his heart was not in political science teaching.57 His colleague Ralph Brookes was a

Four political science professors: Leslie Lipson, Margaret Clark, Robert Parker and Stephen Milne at the 50th anniversary of the School of Political Science and Public Administration, May 1989

man of another character: ‘careful, unflamboyant, precise, scrupulous’, an Englishman (it was Ralph pronounced the English way) with a London degree and a lasting commitment to the job.58 He was appointed to a lectureship in 1950 and stayed to become professor in 1962. In 1953 he went to Stanford and Columbia on a Rockefeller fellowship to study Russian history and Soviet politics, which he taught from Russian literature as well as politics texts. Local government was his other field.59

Between Parker and Brookes the chair was held for five years by Stephen Milne, who had been at Bristol and The Hague (the Netherlands, one of the most regulated countries in the western world, has been a popular destination for scholars of public administration and political science) and, briefly, Ohio. Parker had returned to Australia in 1954, to the Research School of Social Sciences at ANU. Milne left accidentally, thanks to some confusion over the taking of unpaid leave.60 His field was political parties, and the book which came from his briefer-than-intended New Zealand stay, Political Parties in New Zealand (1966), was a major work in what has also been a dominant interest of New Zealand political scientists. Ken Scott became acting head after Milne's departure in 1959 and professor at the end of the following year. With his death six months later the department lost one of its best teachers, a ‘natural academic’ and original wit. His New Zealand Constitution was published posthumously in 1962.

Once the department (still formally a ‘school’) grew in the 1960s, so could its teaching range. In 1972 Political Science took full advantage of the new credit system to offer a total of 36, mostly four-credit, undergraduate courses. Indeed, the very large number especially of stage-three political science courses was a matter of continuing concern to the vice-chancellor and deans.61 Among this array some focuses emerge. There was once a passing thought that New Zealand's several political science departments would specialise, but the extent to which they did has been a result of local conditions and personal inclinations rather than a rational plan. Victoria's things have been public administration and international politics, offering the only postgraduate programmes in both these fields.62 The international side was stimulated in the 1960s by the Asian studies development, and the department absorbed one and a half staff from the disbanded Asian Studies Centre in the 1970s. After Brookes, in 1978 an Asian specialist (in Malaya and Borneo, to be precise) was appointed to the chair: a Victoria graduate, Margaret Clark. In the 1980s, other staff research interests outside the local included Pacific politics (taught since the 1950s), disarmament, foreign policy and international disaster relief; and international relations was the most conspicuous area of growing student interest.

The department discharged a particular local responsibility with the production of Political Science. Although this was never intended to be solely inward in its interest, New Zealand content always dominated, and increasingly so. After the formation of a New Zealand Political Studies Association in 1974 (over 20 years after the first attempt) the journal's editorial board was extended to include the heads of all five university departments, but the editorial responsibility remained with Victoria.63 The Victoria students who launched Political Science in 1947 also pioneered election studies in this country (and it was partly this development which spurred, then rendered redundant, the Survey Research Centre proposal). Later others, notably Auckland, got into this field. Back in 1949, an analysis of the election had been the main project of the students who had formed the Political Science Society, conducted by a specially convened Election Research Group (advised by John McCreary on the use of statistics), and published in the third number of Political Science. They were on the ball: the first Nuffield study in Britain had only just been published in 1947, and these, rather than American versions, remained the New Zealand psephologist's model.

Among this department's claims to uniqueness there was also its curricular association with commerce, valued on both sides even if it had occasional unwelcome side-effects – like the famous year (1978) when attempts to control numbers in accountancy resulted in a POLS 111 enrolment of 915. There were predictable complaints from ‘a disaffected minority’ but most put up with it ‘in a good-humoured and highly co-operative way’, the course co-ordinator and chief lecturer Les Cleveland reported. Cleveland, who was also a photographer, poet, social and cultural historian, author of the course textbook The Politics of Utopia (1979), and sometime journalist, bush contractor and welder, always endeavoured to make the subject attractive to ‘the BCA “captives”’ – as perhaps only ‘a good keen man’ with a PhD could convincingly do.64 The drafting of commerce students into political science also had the effect of exaggerating the contrast between the political science class and the Diploma of Public Administration, which was ‘a small, intense, elderly affair’.65

A high profile in political punditry naturally accrued from Victoria's location: its political scientists are conveniently called upon as expert witnesses. It was on this account that the department found itself briefly the focus of parliamentary attention in 1978 (but only in jest, in the form of a light-hearted motion put in a dull moment in the session, ‘That this House notes with interest and amusement the fact that … staff members of the School of Political Science and Public Administration including many who frequently comment on New Zealand politicians, obtained their qualifications and degrees in such places and countries as Malaya, Prague, Delhi, Florida, London, Columbia, Denver, Madras, Chicago, Mysore, Nottingham, Syracuse, and Loyola and questions whether such qualifications adequately equip these academics to comment on New Zealand politics’).66 John Roberts, for example, as a scholar wrote little but was well known as a commentator particularly for Lookout, his 10-minute, weekly political round-up on National Radio (his verbal facility and careful even-handedness overcoming any problem that might have been caused by his labour background and left-of-centre views: it was never, he claims, an issue). As a professor, he regarded academic administration with an insouciance (ironically) that exasperated deans and vice-chancellors. He stood for a seat on the regional council once but failed to get elected, unlike Ralph Brookes, who served a term on the Wellington City Council, giving a practical grounding to his academic interest in local government. In this

Professor Gary Hawke, director of the Institute of Policy Studies (right), discusses economic restructuring with visiting Iranian officials respect, though, politics met political science more prominently in the careers of the politicians who spent time up here – like Labour prime minister Geoffrey Palmer, who taught in both political science and law, or National's Jack Marshall, a visiting professor in public policy and years before a lecturer briefly in law. Personal contact, and personal confidence, were ultimately the foundation on which a creative town–gown relationship rested.

With the reshaping of the commerce faculty in the 1980s the School of Political Science and Public Administration became in name, as well, a Department of Politics. Its courses had been removed from the BCA core, its staff from the commerce faculty, with the exception of a few who retained membership of commerce's ‘government studies’ group. It was not wholly happy with this turn of events, fearing for the intellectual breadth of the commerce degree on the one hand, and for the coherence of political science and public administration. In fact, ‘public administration’ as such was already on the way out. On the eve of his retirement in 1988, Roberts suggested that his chair be disestablished and replaced by one of policy studies, a more up-to-date term and an expanding field elsewhere.

Since the replacement of the diploma in 1976 by the Master of Public Policy, the university had also acquired an Institute of Policy Studies in 1983, a very successful ‘town–gown’ initiative intended to carry out research for, and funded by, both public and private institutions. It was born out of discussions between Roberts, Henry Lang and Frank Holmes, partly from concern about the imminent disestablishment of the New Zealand Planning Council and the vacuum this would leave in the field of independent, policy-oriented thinking. A former deputy secretary of External Affairs, Malcolm Templeton, was appointed its first director; he was succeeded in a few years by professor of economic history Gary Hawke. By contrast, the MPP had had a more uncertain start, failing to gain the confidence of the State Services Commission, but it was to be revived in 1990s by Claudia Scott, reader in economics, who was appointed to the new public policy chair. It was co-ordinated now by the Graduate School of Business and Government Management, which had formed out of the reconstitution of the commerce faculty, cementing Victoria's historical strength in graduate programmes in this field, and their orientation further from art towards commerce.

While political science has affiliations with arts and commerce, geography crosses the disciplinary border of art and science. Although its origins, both as a discipline and a department, lie in science, like psychology geography has aligned itself with the science faculty primarily to have access to resources. It has identified its distinctive style and its strength on the other side. This has not been uncontested. In terms of quantity, however, it is the case that geography at Victoria has been more a social than a physical science.

The distinctive, indeed ‘maverick’ style which constitutes the Victoria school of geography in this account has been seen as its interdisciplinary or ‘holistic’ approach within regional and national contexts, when other geography departments have rather adopted the ‘paradigm of the decade’.67 It was founded by the first professor, Keith Buchanan, and continued explicitly by the second, Harvey Franklin, and associate professor Ray Watters. Buchanan, taking over in 1953 from senior lecturer D.W. McKenzie, a physical geographer in the Cotton school, swung the new department in the first instance to human geography, and established a department that would find its ‘major strengths in those aspects of the subject concerned with geographical implications of social and economic change’.68 He had told his interviewers when applying for the job that his special interest was in agricultural geography because his father had been a small-holder. Before, his

Geography professor Keith Buchanan on the last day in the Salamanca Road huts. M.D. King photo field of work had been Africa (he taught at Natal and Ibadan as well as Birmingham and the LSE); from now it was to be Asia, specifically China and mainland South East Asia. His ideological approach was left wing (and a little utopian). The Chinese People and the Chinese Earth (London, 1966) was the first of several major publications which cemented his international standing in this field. Buchanan's reputation in Victoria's story also lies in his teaching: as ‘one of the most talented lecturers of his day’, he spoke with the moral fire ‘of a Welsh preacher’, and ‘did more than perhaps anyone else of his generation to question the insularity, the provincial assumptions, smug ethnocentrism and ignorance of New Zealanders’.69 In fact the decision to include Asia in the geography programme was made before the professor was appointed. They were pioneering not only Asian geography in a New Zealand university, but Asian studies. China, Indo-China, Indonesia, Japan and India have been covered in this department's teaching about Asia – or as Buchanan once wrote, ‘what New Zealanders term their “Near North” (however remote it may be from their thinking or their concern)’.70 Europe, the Pacific, New Zealand and Latin America have made up the range of its regional interests. This is a department that has always seen the study of elsewhere as one of its main concerns.

The journal Pacific Viewpoint also carried the department's style, and reputation. It was founded in 1960 as an interdisciplinary, social science journal, and an international one, with its regional eye on (obviously) the Pacific rim, its thematic focus on economic and development issues; and it made Victoria an international name in the field of Third World and development studies. Asia figured largely in its pages in the first half of the 1960s, less so from the 1970s when the emphasis moved down to the Pacific. There was more competition in the publishing field now; and student interest in Asia had drifted off. Buchanan's own retirement (in 1975) contributed to some diminution of the department's Asian strength, but it was to remain an important part of its teaching programme.

Harvey Franklin, who succeeded Buchanan in the chair (and had also come from Birmingham), studied Europe, particularly its peasantry, and the New Zealand economy, on which he made provocative statements in Trade, Growth and Anxiety: New Zealand beyond the welfare state in 1978 (when this was not widely believed to be an imminent prospect) and Cul de Sac: the question of New Zealand's future (1985). Ray Watters contributed the small (academically speaking) but unique area of Latin America, whose geography Victoria has been the only New Zealand university to teach, until the 1990s when it was dropped (with regret) after Watters' retirement. The course he started in 1966 came out of two years of fieldwork in the Peruvian Amazon in 1963–64 for the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations. But he had contributed especially at first to the department's Pacific field. In the context of decolonisation the Pacific was a productive area of student as well as staff research in the 1960s – and not just among geographers. In the early 1970s Watters led a team of geographers and anthropologists to the Gilbert and Ellice Islands to undertake socio-economic studies of five of the atoll islands for the British Ministry of Overseas Development, a three-year project that took six.71

Finding the wherewithal for fieldwork in other countries has been a constant, and growing, constraint on geography's research and teaching range – a particular problem to a department with a longstanding commitment to development studies. All of its Latin American fieldwork, for example, was funded from overseas sources. Thus it is not surprising that New Zealand geography has generated the large majority of student theses. It took an original, political economy approach to the local field, and contributed in turn to the round of national development conferences and debate in the 1960s. (A policy component in its courses is seen to have assisted its graduates into a wide range of employment, a record of which the department is proud.) In the field of human and especially urban geography on the other hand, attention to the local in the 1970s displaced (it has been argued) ‘the distinctive Victoria University developmental approach to contemporary geography’.72

Others might see a stronger claim to a Victoria ‘school’ of geography on the physical geography side, in the continuation of the Cotton school of geomorphology. McKenzie maintained this line, but with a flair for teaching that Cotton lacked, and a greater concern with the interaction of people and land. (Passed over for the chair, he remained in the department to become an associate professor and be given a personal chair.) The second physical geography appointment (Ralph Wheeler) was also a geomorphologist, to which he added the plate-tectonics revolution in geology. By the end of the 1960s the department could offer a full physical geography programme, with honours from the early 1970s. Geomorphology remained the focus of research, but was updated in the 1970s by the addition of subjects like climatology and hydrology, and by the quantitative revolution, which produced ‘morphometry’. These developments applied particularly to the study of slope stability and soil erosion founded a major area of the department's work now: Mike Crozier (appointed in 1974) would establish an international reputation for his work on landslides. (The Wellington–Wairarapa region is well suited to this field.)

Ecology, or environmental studies, also made its appearance in the 1970s. While efforts to create an interdisciplinary centre of environmental studies failed, it was in geography that this nevertheless fashionable interest took strongest hold, moving in the 1980s from regional studies to focus on resource management issues. Always the smaller side of the department, physical geography was at its strongest in establishment terms in the late 1970s, but suffered in the 1980s from an exodus of staff (across the department, in fact) and was maintained only with difficulty. Its graduate and research work became the responsibility of the new Research School of Earth Sciences in 1985; in time, the department as a whole would find its institutional home in science.

In cartography, though, Victoria geography makes its claim as art. Buchanan was an innovator here (as had been Cotton); but it was McKenzie's imaginative use of aerial photography that really established cartography as one of this department's points of distinction. The first separate undergraduate course in Australasia, it is claimed – in cartography and aerial photographic interpretation – was established in 1965, taught by McKenzie and David Winchester, a cartographer with the New Zealand Geological Survey (appointed at first as a technician, later to a lectureship). The introduction in the 1970s to writings by Gombrich, Arnheim and Berger underlay the development of the ‘sketch-pad approach’. French cartography and a visiting American architectural psychologist interested in mental mapping were other influences. The aim of cartography at Victoria was to produce ‘a conceptual logic’ rather than proficiency in technical method. Its style was the ‘apparent casualness of the crayon and the marker pen sketch’ rather than the precision of technology. They like to call it the Picasso approach.73

Faculty politics, how the social sciences position themselves – art or science or commerce – is not the important story of education, but rather the purpose of education as a subject in the university in the first place. Education had nurtured the college's emergent social science theme since the 1930s, under W.H. Gould and A.E. Campbell, before Crawford Somerset, ‘the greatest of the “founding fathers” of sociology in New Zealand’, joined the department in 1948.74 Crippled by osteoarthritis while at training college and unable, therefore, to obtain a teacher's certificate, Somerset had embarked instead on a career in adult education, in rural Canterbury, where the district of Oxford became ‘Littledene’, and then in Feilding, where he and his wife Gwen founded the country's first rural community centre. (Here, in fact, was the genesis of the School of Social Science's community surveys.)75 Somerset taught widely in the department until his retirement in 1962 (he referred to himself as one of the last of ‘the general practitioners’) but with a continuing interest in educational sociology, and in Littledene.76

The professor who had succeeded Gould in 1946, C.L. Bailey, gave his attention to educational history, philosophy, and education in developing countries, a significant interest of this department into the 1960s; the study of Maori and education was a later development. History is a longer-running theme, and not only the history of education. Rollo Arnold, appointed in 1966 and to a chair in 1976, would publish three important works of New Zealand social history.77 Jack Shallcrass, another member of the Education Department well known outside as well as inside the university – as a prominent public commentator on social and educational issues – brought the ideas of Paulo Freire to his classes in the 1970s ‘with the fervour of the convert’.78 More quietly, Arthur Fieldhouse, on the educational psychology side and the first incumbent of the second chair, had been known back in the 1930s through his radio broadcasts to schools on musical appreciation, but in educational circles was recognised as a pioneer in the development of standardised achievement tests.

While sociology was a notable early influence here, educational psychology remained, naturally, a large part of the education curriculum. (Its disciplinary status, on the other hand, was a subject of some discord.) Training school psychologists was a more specialised, and in this university's experience not a successful, undertaking – although this was not (entirely) its own fault. A Diploma of Educational Psychology was introduced in 1976 at the request of the Department of Education, after a government decision to increase the number of school psychologists it was training from nine to 27 a year. Auckland had had a course going for some 15 years, and Otago joined in later. These as well as Victoria's catered almost entirely to the government programme; there were few private students. In 1980 the government decided to cut the number of placements back to 11, clearly too few to warrant three university programmes; and, disregarding cogent arguments from the Victoria department in favour of its own (including a not insubstantial investment in staff), chose the other two. The Committee of the Vice-chancellor and Deans took the lesson that ‘this University [must be] very wary of initiating academic developments that are vulnerable to changes in policy developments outside of the University itself’.79

The larger theme to follow is that of professional training and the arts degree. The BA is the least professional, in this sense, of the undergraduate degrees – compared, for example, with medicine or law – and education, along with the public service, the profession with which it has been most closely matched. Victoria's education professors have regarded their subject as part of the liberal arts programme of the university rather than as a training course for teachers. (Education courses, that is, ‘constitute a continuous, comprehensive, and independent study of education as a major institution in society’.80 Notwithstanding, education's legitimate place in the academy once attracted its share of suspicion.) Still, traditionally the teaching profession has been the destination of a considerable percentage of the university's BA students, and there was a longstanding co-operative relationship with the teachers' college, even if Hunter's plan for the two institutions to share the same site did not proceed. Primary teacher trainees were encouraged to do university study concurrently with their teaching diploma, still more so with the establishment of cross-crediting arrangements in the 1970s.81 Victoria also had a smaller number of ‘Division U’ students doing their undergraduate degree on a government studentship before taking the one-year, postgraduate secondary teacher training course at Auckland or Canterbury.

The question of teaching becoming wholly a graduate profession – of making a degree an entry requirement for both primary and secondary teaching – had been raised as early as 1928, but neither university teachers of education nor the minister then were keen. Three decades later, the suggestion of the Hughes Parry committee in 1959 that an experimental development of university-based, post-primary training be tried at Victoria went unheeded (or rather was superseded). The establishment of distinctly profession-oriented faculties at Waikato and Massey in the 1960s brought these issues back into focus in the 1970s.82 Both the government and teacher organisations now wanted degree programmes for primary training. In this context Victoria and Wellington Teachers' College convened a working party in 1977. Although hesitant to make firm recommendations, it thought the two institutions should discuss the development of a Bachelor of Education: a four-year professional degree for both primary and, in a more specialised version, secondary teaching. This was not new ground: Waikato, Massey

Dr and Professor Adcock (left), Professor and Mrs Bailey, and director-general of education, C.E. Beeby (right), are amused by an exhibit in the Mathematics Department. New Zealand Free Lance collection, ATL F47280 1/2

and Otago universities already had a BEd, and Canterbury would soon. But Victoria's Academic Development Committee urged caution: the BEd proposal had attracted criticism on a number of grounds. It might be seen as a slight on the teachers' college course, and some perceived an attempt by the university to encroach on the autonomy of the college. This was a sensitive point at a time when Victoria was working out its relationship with the rapidly expanding non-university tertiary sector (through a recently formed Wellington Tertiary Education Consultative Committee). On the other hand, Victoria's Education Department declined to accept special responsibility for the university's relationship with the teachers' college, and did ‘not aspire to have its present principal areas of academic work extended by the addition of pre-service teacher training’.83 It did not, in other words, have ambitions to be a special school. When a jointly taught BEd was eventually introduced in the early 1990s, it met problems that were not only to do with the geographical distance between the two institutions.84

A professor of economics once identified philosophy as one of the university's ‘useless’ subjects. On another scale, it was ‘indispensable in any University’, wrote Hunter in 1949, and especially so in this one, as philosophy ‘provides fundamental criticism to many Arts subjects but in particular to the Social Sciences in which this College needs to be strong’.85 In fact, it was where philosophy meets mathematics that an especially creative cross-disciplinary relationship was to be formed here, in logic.

The most widely used textbook in the world on modal logic is Cresswell and Hughes' Introduction to Modal Logic (1968, 1984 and 1996), co-authored by Victoria's two professors.86 Logic was a comparatively late development for George Hughes, who arrived to take up the new chair in philosophy in 1951. His early interests were ethics and the philosophy of religion; he had been ordained an Anglican priest in 1950 in Bangor, where he was teaching at the University College of North Wales. He was tempted away to Australia in 1960 (to the chair at the University of Western Australia) but for family reasons was back in a few months, and retired from Victoria in 1984.87 In the 1950s he transformed philosophy with remarkable speed from one of the university's weaker subjects, overshadowed by psychology, into a department of strength, able to attract some outstanding students to graduate in its field. In the university at large he wielded a quietly persuasive, liberal influence in such forums as the Academic Development Committee. In philosophical circles his major work – if not his most widely read – has been judged to be his 1982 study of John Buridan on Self-reference: a critical translation with philosophical commentary of chapter eight of the fourteenth-century philosopher's Sophismata.

One of Hughes' students, Max Cresswell graduated from Victoria in 1961, studied with (expatriate New Zealander) A.N. Prior at Manchester, returned to join the staff here in 1963 and was given a personal chair in 1974. His work on logic and linguistics as well as in modal logic is of international standing. The

Philosophy lecturer J.M. Hinton and Professor George Hughes (right), 1955. NPS collection, ATL F34564 1/2 teaching of logic as a distinct area was developed in the 1960s (not without debate about whether logic properly belonged in philosophy or mathematics): a separate stage-two unit was introduced to cater to maths as well as logically inclined philosophy students, leaving a logic-free Philosophy II for those who were not. The department's logic branch has developed a special relationship, and held seminars and summer schools, with the Mathematics and, more recently, Computer Science departments.

Hunter's observation of philosophy's usefulness to a range of disciplines can nevertheless be demonstrated. A sudden fall in stage-one enrolments when Law in Society was introduced, for example, indicates that many law students found philosophy a useful arts choice. A feature of this department has been its large first-year classes in proportion to its advanced ones. Its course offering, arranged in the three standard branches of general philosophy, history of philosophy, and logic, changed little from the 1950s to the 1970s. New interests and new applications came in the 1980s, with courses like feminist philosophy and philosophy of art. Philosophy also expanded its formal departmental liaisons in this decade with a shared teaching programme with Political Science in moral, social and political philosophy. But it remains in logic that Victoria's reputation in philosophy lies.

George Hughes was also one of the prime movers behind the introduction of religious studies, where this university made a mark by appointing the first professor in Australasia in 1970, and a controversial one too. However, religious studies is only tangentially related to philosophy in the story of the university's intellectual development: it was not an offshoot of philosophy, as one might expect (not because of the philosophy professor's personal interest, but because this is a familiar pattern elsewhere). It was more or less by ‘an accident of the prevailing circumstances’, even though a perfectly amiable one, that Philosophy hosted religious studies for 10 years.88 When the development was first mooted, it was assumed that there would be a new department because there was no obvious place to put it.

It was the students who first asked for religious studies, in 1961. A recommendation from the Professorial Board two years later that a chair, and in due course department, be established followed a report from a committee of the arts faculty, convened by Hughes, who explained how religious studies could be included within the arts syllabus ‘with complete propriety’.89 Religious studies, that is, was expressly not vocational. It was to be clearly distinguished from theology. (Otago, the most religious-minded branch of New Zealand's secular university system, had offered degrees in divinity since 1946: the Rationalist Hunter, as vice-chancellor, had vigorously opposed this in the Senate.) The committee would not approve of any course consisting ‘either wholly or partly of Biblical exegesis’, nor one ‘on the History of Israel or Christian Origins’, nor any ‘concerned exclusively or almost exclusively with the Christian or any other single religion’. Nor was it to be solely concerned with religious thought. Rather, the programme they had in mind might include the study of important world religions, and the sociology, anthropology, psychology (social and individual) as well as philosophy of religion.90

This report, recommending the establishment of a department and rapid development of a full undergraduate course, was approved by both the Professorial Board and the Council, but the vice-chancellor and deans did not rate religious studies as the highest of priorities. There was a complaint from the Student Christian Movement (in 1967) and two submissions from the arts professors (in 1968 and 1969) before a professor was sought. The specifications for the chair made plain its secular nature, stating that applicants' religious beliefs or affiliations would be irrelevant. The Council's choice was a bold one, and unanimous. Lloyd Geering, principal of Knox Theological Hall and professor of Old Testament studies at the University of Otago, had a few years before been tried for heresy in the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, and the media, for questioning popular belief about the Resurrection and the immortality of the soul. (He made these ‘heretical’ statements in the church newspaper Outlook and in a sermon at the opening of Victoria's 1967 academic year.)91 This controversy ‘saw the awakening of a New Zealand theological consciousness’ at a time of ferment in western theology that had barely touched this country;92 and made Lloyd Geering a figure of exceptional notoriety, for an academic or clergyman, when he came to Victoria in 1971.

Geering was allowed to choose, and nominated Philosophy as his temporary departmental home. He taught a stage-one course on world religions in 1972 to 80 students; a major in religious studies was offered from 1974, and honours in 1978. The addition of two lecturers enabled the programme to expand to include Indian religious thought, primal religions, and religion in the Pacific and New Zealand. Geering himself continued to examine the role and challenge for Christianity in a secular and technological world, and remained a prominent public figure for doing so. The department developed good relationships with local ethnic and religious communities. Within the university, however, religious studies attracted some criticism for becoming a ‘soft option’, precisely as the 1963 report had warned that it must not.93 (It also attracted some concern about the funding and status of a lecturer's study tours of India.)

The creation of a separate Department of Religious Studies in 1982, although what Hughes' committee had intended, was preceded by some argument among the vice-chancellor and deans. The current trend in academic organisation, it was observed, was amalgamation not fragmentation, and three staff could not a department make. For Religious Studies and Philosophy, the issue was academic identity rather than administrative convenience. The university had started with the establishment of a chair precisely to define religious studies as a disciplinary field, rather than letting it grow organically within others, and to define it more widely than religious philosophy. And anyway, Geering commented, while relations had been cordial, ‘there is such a thing as outstaying one's welcome’.94 The philosophers too found the deans' proposal for a combined Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies ‘wholly unacceptable’.95

The academic visibility that departmental status gave was threatened in a few years, however, by the disestablishment of the chair after Geering's retirement in 1984.96 It was further undermined by the department's novel decision, in 1988, to rename itself the Department of World Religions. The point of this was to make plainer the difference between the study of religions and training for the church, and that the academic study of it did not denote a personal commitment to a religion; it was also to emphasise the diversity of religious traditions that were taught.97 It was all very well being innovative. The fact that the term was nowhere else in the world in use arguably diminished rather than enhanced the department's identity. Moreover, the new name promised a universality in its teaching programme that the department did not in fact offer.98 The name Religious Studies was reinstated in 1994, and so was its chair.

On the continuum from science to art, history moves this chapter further toward art – although within history it could be said that the progression has been from art to social science. It was typically provocative of Peter Munz to give his inaugural lecture, when he was appointed to a chair in history after J.C. Beaglehole's retirement, on ‘the concept of the Middle Ages as a sociological category’. He had no mind to ‘share in the modish popularity’ of sociology and the social sciences (it was 1969), which he believed would be a temporary phenomenon. He was interested in explaining what history could teach sociology (how to account for change), and in considering how a sociological perspective might even revise history. But he concluded by defining history emphatically as an art, not science. In the modern university which was ‘built around the sciences, natural, social, mathematical and commercial’ and believed in scientific certainty, the historian played a ‘salutary’ role by exercising imaginative judgement. An historian, said Munz, was ‘a poet of events’.99

J.C. Beaglehole was a poet–historian in a more literal sense: an historian who also wrote poetry. This may be a local phenomenon: Keith Sinclair was too, as was Munz and Beaglehole's sometime colleague W.H. Oliver (or perhaps it was simply the times). Beaglehole, once appointed to his research fellowship and immersed in the labours of Cook and Banks, largely withdrew from classroom teaching, although he continued to take American and Commonwealth history for small groups of honours students. But lecturing to undergraduates had never been his forte; nor administration. Fred Wood shone especially in the former, ‘sharply perceptive, yet unfailingly benign’.100 Munz felt closer to Wood. In his inaugural address he thanked Wood's ‘sympathetic moral support’ for the opportunity to pursue medieval history here: ‘a particularly unsuitable subject for a modern university and, especially unsuitable for a modern university in a country of the new world’, he confessed, although ‘relevance’ is this sense is not a theme one would normally expect Munz to be concerned by.101

With these three, Victoria's History Department was recognised as the best in the country in the 1940s and 1950s.102 They had Winston Monk too, for four years: an Otago graduate and Rhodes scholar, author of a volume in the Hutchinson series on Britain in the western Mediterranean, and an energetic and individual

J.C. Beaglehole addresses the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs at the college, August 1954. NPS collection, ATL F33982 1/2 teacher of the history of the United States and post-colonial Africa and South East Asia, it was a devastating loss to the department when he was killed in the plane crash that also claimed McGechan. New Zealand in the world – to quote the title of Wood's centennial survey – was a major interest of Victoria's historians in these postwar years. Wood, Beaglehole and Monk, Mary Boyd (a junior lecturer then, and one of the first Victoria women to be made a reader, 20 years later), and others who spent shorter times in the department in the 1950s, were all closely involved in the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs, which had been founded in 1934. So were other Victoria staff, notably the economists (like Belshaw and Holmes), international lawyers (McGechan and Aikman, later Quentin-Baxter and Keith) and political scientists, to the extent that the institute was for 30 or so years effectively an adjunct of this university.103 History's farther-reaching ties then were particularly with London and Australian Keith Hancock's Institute of Commonwealth Studies, and Canberra, where local boy J.W. Davidson was professor of Pacific history at ANU. It was later, in the 1960s, that New Zealand graduates returned from American universities to the staffs of departments here.

A strong presence of women was a notable feature of Victoria's History Department in the later 1950s and the 1960s: nearly half of its staff were women one year. It was in this time that the department was described (after John Knox) as a ‘monstrous regiment of women’, facetiously, of course. It is fitting, although quite unrelated, that it was in part the History Department that later spawned women's studies. The first women's studies programme in a New Zealand university was pioneered at Victoria in 1975 by Phillida Bunkle, who was ‘job-sharing’ (itself an innovation) with her husband Jock Phillips teaching American history, and who had not long since been at Smith College, Massachusetts, where feminist studies was taught.104 Women's studies was an interdisciplinary affair (which was in vogue then) that would develop its stronger links with languages and literature. Overseen by a board of studies convened initially by another member of History's ‘monstrous regiment’, Beryl Hughes, it was carried on, against odds (but by the commitment of its students and staff), with the smallest of ‘fractional’ establishments. The first Women in Society course was co-ordinated by Bunkle from History until her formal appointment to a less than half-time faculty position in 1978. Jacquie Matthews from the French Department joined her, part time at first, to co-ordinate the second paper, Images of Women, in 1979. They were managing five undergraduate courses (including Feminism and Social Theory, Biography and Autobiography, and Feminist Writing) and an honours research paper by the late 1980s, when a women's studies major was introduced (by the expedient of double-labelling). Theory was to remain the weak link. Other universities had not been too slow to catch on to the feminist studies wave, and by the time the question of departmental status was being considered in the mid–1990s Victoria had fallen a little behind in both its establishment and academic strength.105

Back in the History Department, and the 1960s, the matter of status – that the

Beryl Hughes (left), Phillida Bunkle (centre) and the first women's studies graduates, May 1990 women mostly held junior positions – perhaps contributed to a deterioration of staff relationships in the later 1960s. So did personalities, intellectual differences, and simply size, which was a general experience. Inevitably it was all less cosy when staff meetings were no longer held over lunch at Peter Munz's flat – or as another professor in the university has put it, once a department became too big for one cocktail party. History's move into the penthouse suite of the new Rankine Brown building may not have helped either (not that it had been luxuriously accommodated previously). Wood, it is said, chose the ninth floor because that would mean that when the library, as it was meant to, expanded, History would be the last to have to leave. This measure of security brought with it a low ceiling and nine floors' worth of rising hot air. Munz led a successful campaign for improvements – sending long memos to the vice-chancellor and assistant principal describing the physiological effects of having seminars in an internal room with no fresh air, and of staff studies in which ‘even short sojourn of one single person … causes fatigue and a slight numbness’ – although the difference was relative.106

The Rankine Brown stairs: nine flights down from the History Department (or up when the lifts weren't working). M.D. King photo

History professor Peter Munz. Carlotta Munz photo History resided in its ‘precarious position’107 at the top of the Rankine Brown building (the lifts, reputedly a job-lot from Bombay, were notoriously unreliable) until 1996. (A bonus of being the last academic department in residence in the library building, on the other hand, was being able to ‘borrow’ books via the internal stairs – until the librarian began making sweeps of the historians' rooms.)

For whatever reasons, the department made the transition to the post-Wood– Beaglehole era with difficulty. Beaglehole's research fellowship had become a chair in British Commonwealth history in 1963, a label more ‘consistent with the dignity of the University’ and fitting for ‘an historian of world eminence’ who had just declined an Oxford chair,108 and a regular chair when Munz was appointed to it in 1967. This was an obvious succession, and Munz was already being courted by other universities.109 It took a little more time to replace Wood, who retired in 1969. W.H. Oliver, who had left after four years here to head a new department at Massey in 1964, accepted the chair but then changed his mind. David Hamer, a young Auckland graduate not long back from Britain, was appointed in 1970. Sadly, this was one two-chair department where the democratic revolution in academic government was not an easy one. But Munz eventually relinquished his right, under the old rules as the senior professor, to the headship. Disinclined to participate in the mundane business of university government, he has been a conspicuous exception to this department's significant contribution to academic administration (it has contributed a deputy and acting vice-chancellor and two long-serving deans). Increasingly he was to be outside the mainstream not only of his department (while remaining its most prestigious and internationally recognised scholar) but also of academic history in New Zealand generally: objecting to fads like social history and women's history, and to the encouragement of students to do research essays in New Zealand history topics rather than to take the ‘long view’. Munz was a philosopher as much as an historian, and more and more the philosopher as his interests moved from medieval history to the nature of myth, the philosophy of history and of science, and in the 1990s to evolutionary epistemology. He remained a universalist in an age of specialisms (in Bill Oliver's words, ‘New Zealand's intellectual Man Alone’).110

In the 1960s, the Auckland History Department grew to become the country's biggest, and strongest especially in New Zealand history; and it was there that a New Zealand Journal of History was founded in 1967. Thirty years earlier, the locus of an emerging academic history community had been Beaglehole and Wood, the Victoria department and the Department of Internal Affairs. New Zealand history at Victoria looked precarious for a moment, when the delay in filling Wood's place and some other sudden departures put pressure on the teaching programme. A crisis was averted by the appointment (controversially) of W.B. Sutch as a visiting fellow for 1970. The previous year, in fact, Munz had suggested disestablishing the second chair and appointing two senior lecturers in early modern history instead (he had two willing candidates in mind), so strengthening ‘the European and English side … It seems that it may be advisable for us to become stronger in this field and to leave Auckland to build up their NZ history – a field in which we are weak.’111 Obviously this advice was not taken (although one of those likely candidates, Colin Davis, did join the staff a few years later – but eventually would follow a distinguished career elsewhere).112

A ‘floating’ stage-one unit in New Zealand history (meaning there was no stage two or three) had been introduced in 1960 – interestingly, on Munz's initiative (and taught by Bill Oliver and Mary Boyd). They had been teaching New Zealand history, however, in the two diploma courses – social science and public administration – for some years already.113 The mid–1970s saw a rapid increase in enrolments in New Zealand history courses. The rise of New Zealand as a large and distinct part of the history curriculum is a major theme of the department's post–1960s development. And if one makes indigenisation, ‘the ways in which the people in a new university progressively adapted their institution to a new environment’, the organising idea of the history of universities in New Zealand (as Keith Sinclair did of his), it is a central one114 – but not the only one. In the 1950s and '60s the Victoria department taught the middle ages and early modern Europe, British and Commonwealth history (including New Zealand here), America, Asia, the Pacific and, briefly, Africa. The new staff recruited in the 1970s contributed both new subjects and new versions of the old: in urban history, American intellectual history, French peasants and revolutions, Australian history, and race relations. Moreover, teaching history in a New Zealand context does not only mean teaching New Zealand's history (as Beaglehole had once observed). Relevance is not just a question of dirtying one's hands in the dusty archives of the local past. But the growing class of undergraduate students, as well as postgraduate ones, were encouraged to do so now (to Munz's disdain): to produce research essays, taking advantage of this university's privileged access to the resources of the National Archives and the Alexander Turnbull Library, adding to the undergrowth of a burgeoning New Zealand historical literature.115 The Victoria department produced too in the 1980s some major and iconoclastic statements in New Zealand historiography: Jock Phillips' A Man's Country, James Belich's New Zealand Wars and Miles Fairburn's The Ideal Society and its Enemies.

Medieval history was dropped from the stage-one programme after Munz's retirement in 1987, and the department's third period followed a clutch of retirements and resignations in the mid–1980s. American history, in fact, was the single most popular subject above stage one at this time, even though the lecturer responsible for this field, Jock Phillips, had already shifted his attention to the local scene – from the intellectual history of one frontier society to another. Part of this transition, and his out of the academy, was the creation in 1984 of the Stout Research Centre ‘for the study of New Zealand society, history and culture’. Phillips found some external funding (although this was more difficult for history than for commerce), and some stained-glass windows rescued from the former home of Robert Stout on The Terrace when the house was razed by the serial arsonist who destroyed or damaged some 20 university properties over the summer of 1984–85. An annual research fellowship was funded by the J.D. Stout Trust. Housed in Wai-te-ata Road two doors up from the Institute of Policy Studies, the Stout Centre was also part of vice-chancellor Axford's plan for a street of research institutes with spectacular views. If it did not always develop in ways that its founder and first director had intended, it established a niche in the infrastructure of New Zealand historical scholarship, with its popular series of annual conferences, and rooms for visiting scholars of diverse kinds. It was founded at a time, in the 1980s, when for various reasons the meaning of ‘national identity’ was a growing subject of academic, political and popular discourse. Its interdisciplinary intention was at the forefront of a coming trend, the latest brand of ‘area studies’ (although this was contentious here too: early plans for a teaching as well as research programme in ‘New Zealand studies’ foundered, while the very concept of ‘New Zealand studies’ was opposed by the Department of Maori Studies). The very impressive number of publications in the 1980s and 1990s that have acknowledged Stout Centre support include history, biography and natural science, children's literature and novels.

[eleven] The creative edge

I HAVE STILL to be convinced that anyone can teach anyone else to be a poet or a novelist,' Ian Gordon wrote in 1949. ‘The way to write a poem is to write a poem and not to take a class on The Writing of Poetry.’1 But 50 years on, creative writing has become one of the English Department's and Victoria's most visible areas of distinction. That story is part of a larger one, of the growth of the creative arts as not only a legitimate activity of the university but also an outstanding one.

This is not to imply that Gordon's contribution to this history was wholly conservative or insignificant: on the contrary. It was with Gordon that Victoria's strength in English language and lexicography began. A remarkable clutch of dictionary-makers graduated from his department: Robert Burchfield, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary; Graham Johnston, editor of the Australian Pocket Oxford; W.S. Ransom, who compiled the Australian National Dictionary; and Harry Orsman, who stayed here, a medievalist and collector of local vernacular, whose crowning achievement is the Oxford Dictionary of New Zealand English (1997), a solo effort for most of its 40-year gestation.2 Gordon also nurtured the development of medieval language studies, which benefited as well from the presence in the department of veteran philologist Pip Ardern, just retired from Auckland, for a few years after the war: here, as well as the Renaissance, Victoria's English Department has at different times made its reputation. He lifted a department which he would later describe as a ‘depressed area’ when he came to it in 1937 – it had not produced one senior scholar in 30 years, and boasted a higher than 50% fail rate in English III – to become in the 1950s one of the university's best. It was turning out ‘a pretty high quality graduate’, he wrote, with characteristic pride, in the early 1960s.3 It would establish an impressive record of filling Oxbridge chairs, and personal ones here.4

Straight after the war Gordon made two notable acquisitions to his department: Joan Stevens and James Bertram. Bertram, an Auckland student and Phoenix associate of the early 1930s, had returned to New Zealand after a degree at Oxford, and several years as an international correspondent in Chiang Kai-shek's China and prisoner of war in Hong Kong and Japan, uncertain if he would stay or what he would do. As a teacher he was thoughtful and indirect (which was not to every student's taste). He found a literary research subject in the poetry of A.H. Clough and his milieu – although his more determined contribution within the university may have been his advocacy of Asian studies. Stevens had returned with her Oxford first to go teaching, and was a dynamic, enthusiastic lecturer especially to first-year students: a populariser both in the classroom and in print, she published several books on both New Zealand and nineteenth-century English literature. Capturing the imagination of first-year students was a skill rated highly by Gordon, who came from the Scottish lecturing rather than the English tutorial tradition of university teaching. (Having said this, he also effectively developed the tutorial as part of the department's teaching strength.) He took seriously too his responsibility to the many non-majoring students who chose or were compelled to take English I, in a course centred on teaching the right use of language (his own English Prose Technique was the course textbook) and training the critical mind. Stage-one English could develop a more literary emphasis when it was no longer compulsory for the law degree.

Packed classroom: English I, 1957. Evening Post collection, ATL F1957–919

Don McKenzie, a Gordon graduate who became a junior lecturer in 1956, was also an exceptional lecture-theatre performer. Appointed to the second chair of English literature in 1969, and elected chairman of the department in 1974, he assumed Gordon's mantle in shaping the department with a definite plan. He came back from his postgraduate tour in 1961, having turned down English job offers but accepting an extended fellowship at Corpus Christi, Cambridge. This enabled him to establish a life-long habit of commuting, until he left Victoria finally in the late 1980s to become a full-time Oxford professor of bibliography and textual criticism. McKenzie has identified the formative influence on the direction of his academic career – and the distinctive edge of Victoria among New Zealand's English departments in that period – in Ian Gordon's honours paper on scholarship. The example of Bertram, combined with his own reading of writers of the left, stimulated his interest in printing and publishing as an economic activity; George Culliford gave him his thesis topic and specialist field, in textual criticism of Shakespeare. McKenzie conceived of an English Department whose academic character was scholarly and contextual, and of the department as a mini-faculty, which would nurture new academic areas, such as drama, art history, musicology and library studies, that might later become independent. Some got away that weren't supposed to.

The faculty of languages and literature, combining English, classics and modern languages, was created in 1966, not on the basis of a considered academic plan but for practical reasons. The lesser one was size. The existing faculty of arts contained 16 of the university's 25 departments and over half of the full-time academic staff, held together only by a common framework of degree regulations. The critical reason for languages and literature seceding was the refusal of the English Department to follow the rest of the faculty in replacing the MA with honours degree with the BA honours (a single honours year assessed by examination) and an MA by thesis. This reform was adopted by most of the arts departments in 1964 after several years of discussion about structure and nomenclature, prompted in the first instance by the problem of students who were passing their MA papers but could not finish a thesis (or vice versa). Not all students, as Gordon observed, were ‘research men’ – and not all disciplines were equally research-oriented.5 English was eventually to go this way in 1976; the language departments not until 1983.

Faculties, in the first analysis, are only administrative constructs. Arts and languages and literature continued to meet (and usually vote) together. Perhaps the main advantage of being two was the political one: it gave the university's arts departments two deans. The integrity of ‘languages and literature’ was never secure. In the early 1970s the faculty underwent an anxious self-appraisal, kicked off by a stern memo from McKenzie on the need for it to preserve itself against the threat of disestablishment. A number of things fuelled this fear, including the possible adoption of the BA (Hons) and a wider examination of the faculty structure. But the real threat lay in the fragility of its small classics and languages departments, exacerbated by the imminent retirement of two professors, and straitened economic times. The language departments were hard hit by the removal of the foreign language requirement for the BA from 1970 – a decade after the Students' Association had first requested its abolition. (The English Department held out again here.)6 Their rolls were predicted, correctly, to continue to fall, as the numbers of senior school students taking traditional languages did.7 A number of other factors made the moment opportune for taking stock, including the anticipated move into contiguous accommodation in the new Von Zedlitz building; but insecurity was the main one. ‘The recent and determined rise of Commerce is salutary,’ McKenzie wrote. ‘We are living on borrowed time.’8

Out of this exercise emerged a definition of the faculty in academic terms. It discovered its unifying theme in literature, complemented by the comprehensive development of language teaching. It would further develop interdepartmental activities, exploiting what it saw as its inherently interdisciplinary character and the flexibility offered by the new credit degree.9 It also identified a new responsibility in the creative arts, ‘to claim a role as an active, creative centre of University life, and more firmly to establish its right also to offer hospitality and work to writers, composers and artists as well as fulfil its more traditional functions as a centre of literary scholarship and criticism’.10 A radical structural proposal was the division of language and literature teaching by creating a language centre or institute and department(s) of literature, although the traditional ‘national’ majors (English, French, German) would be retained.

The language centre idea was never realised, but the progressive separation of language and literature studies is a central theme of the postwar history of the university's language departments. This followed international trends. The Department of Modern Languages marked the end of an era at the end of 1954 with the retirement of Boyd-Wilson, and the end of the French-teaching partnership of ‘Prof. Boyd’ and Frankie (Frances) Huntington: she had been appointed as his assistant in 1939 and a senior lecturer in 1947. She did not retire until 1973, one of the first and longest-serving women on the college's permanent academic staff. This was a good department, with an impressive record of senior scholarships. It was claimed then to be the only language department in Australasia teaching five languages – French, German, Russian, Italian and Spanish – although French was the core.11 During 1955, before a new professor was appointed, it enjoyed a brief, stimulating visit from Fraser Mackenzie, son of the foundation English professor, the department's most outstanding graduate and now professor at the University of Birmingham: he left behind a favourable report of the abilities of Victoria's students in comparison with Auckland's.12

Fraser Mackenzie recommended one of his Birmingham colleagues for the chair: Pierre Conlon, a Victoria and Auckland graduate, shy and scholarly with interests in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature; but he stayed only five years. Peter Norrish who succeeded him – as Victoria's first professor ‘of French’, in line with overseas practice – came from North Staffordshire; he was a Cambridge

Modern languages visiting professor Fraser Mackenzie (left), retiring professor Edwin Boyd-Wilson and his portrait, November 1955. Dominion collection, ATL F145665 1/2

graduate and more modern in his tastes. His speciality was twentieth-century French drama. He set immediately to modernising the department's teaching, giving more emphasis to modern language and literature in the revamped undergraduate course, setting literary texts in full rather than in parts, and introducing oral examinations at finals. Norrish's reputation – and at least equally his wife's – lies especially in leading the development of the ‘communicative method’ in language teaching not only at Victoria but also in French departments New Zealand-wide. A language laboratory was established in 1967 under the direction of Norma Norrish, and Victoria's department became highly regarded for the standard of her teaching. A decade earlier the German lecturer, David Carrad, had politely but unsuccessfully requested some permanent accommodation for Modern Languages' gramophone, records, tape-recorder and visual aids, which would provide both an audio facility and a social space, an ‘activities room’ such as he had observed in universities overseas: ‘Moving the material from my study and attempting to set it up in a strange room usually means a nerve-straining flap before the lecture and … the alternation of electronic squawks and smothered lectorial exclamations for some time after it should have begun … As it is I hesitate, for instance, to plaster German posters over the walls of a botany classroom.’13 Voluntary at first, language laboratory sessions were formally integrated into the first-year French programme in 1974. The language was taught with an emphasis on its social and cultural contexts: French songs, for example, and news taped from shortwave radio broadcasts became teaching texts.

German peeled off to become its own small department on the establishment of a chair in 1964. Norrish had also had in mind a separate department of Russian, which had no more linguistic or cultural connection with French than it did with German, but this did not come about until 1968 – and with it the renaming of what remained of Modern Languages the Department of Romance Languages. For now this meant French and Italian. Spanish classes, started in 1945, were discontinued when Boyd-Wilson retired. He had also been offering Italian since 1923, but its continuing provision was made possible by financial support from the Italian government. An offer from the Italian consul had not been welcome in 1940, but between 1954 and 1965 the Italian government provided Victoria with a visiting lecturer to teach Italian units to stage three. Then the university created a permanent senior lectureship (appointing a New Zealander teaching in Australia).

An Austrian émigré, Paul Hoffmann, was Victoria's first professor of German. He had fled Vienna with his family in 1938, having completed but not yet submitted a doctoral thesis on the Austrian playwright Franz Grillparzer. In New Zealand he turned dairy farmer, married, studied extramurally at Auckland University College, and met the German exile poet Karl Wolfskehl, on whom he wrote his second thesis to complete his Vienna degree (the manuscript of the first having been lost when the boat carrying his family's possessions to New Zealand was sunk). He became a senior lecturer at Victoria in 1959: Norrish in supporting his appointment to the chair described him as an outstanding scholar and ‘one of the kindest, most gentle and most generous men I have ever met’.14 (His dog, however, was at times less welcome on campus, drawing complaints one year for lingering with intent in the student union cafeteria at mealtimes.)15 Hoffmann developed

The German ambassador (centre) presents German books to the university library: Professor Paul Hoffmann, left; lecturer David Carrad, right. M.D. King photo

German literary studies at Victoria and founded the Wellington Goethe Society, which became a Goethe Institut in 1980.

Supporting cultural organisations of this kind, and a mutually beneficial relationship with the international diplomatic community in Wellington, has been an important role of the university's language departments. Boyd-Wilson was a founding figure in the Cercle littéraire français de Wellington in the 1920s, and Norrish was responsible for its transformation into the Alliance Française in the 1980s. Personal connections (of the department's language teachers) facilitated relations with the embassy. The Wellington Tolstoy Society was founded by the Russian Department in 1975. Politics, though, could complicate these relationships. The French Department's annual French Week was suspended at the height of the controversy over French nuclear testing in the Pacific in the 1970s, and efforts begun in the 1960s to establish an official exchange agreement with the Soviet Union were periodically thwarted (especially by the Sutch affair and its aftermath in the 1970s); despite rapprochement during the Gorbachev era in the 1980s, they still failed.

Victoria's first teacher of Russian, Nicolas Danilow, was another exile from war-torn Europe: a Latvian-born Russian, he had done his military service as a secretary–interpreter in the Russian Far East, then gone to Vienna in the 1920s, working in a hat factory and graduating in arts and law; in 1938 he fled to England and thence to New Zealand. He became a teacher at Scots College and enrolled in MA French and Latin at Victoria. An ‘exquisitely courteous and amiable polyglot’,16 Danilow was appointed to the university staff in the first instance to teach German, when the lecturer, A.C. Keys, took the chair of modern languages at Auckland. ‘I understand,’ Fred Wood later commented, ‘that he was not wholly successful in the teaching of German because he persisted in pronouncing German with a distinct German accent … My friend, Professor Boyd-Wilson, taught French with gusto and enthusiasm, but without, according to the experts, a very intimate knowledge of how to pronounce the French language.’17

If the college was to teach the language of its enemies, Danilow put to the principal when he arrived, it should also teach the language of its allies, of which the Soviet Union then was one. He began teaching Russian reading knowledge in 1942, a stage-one BA unit in 1945, and after a brief postwar hiatus had by 1951 established the subject to stage three, along with science Russian, and honours in 1962. He also taught extramurally, examined candidates from the other colleges, and wrote his own elementary grammar, Russian with a Smile. The beginning of a substantial library collection was assisted by a donation of some 400 volumes from the Soviet government in the 1940s and by Danilow's contact with the School of Slavonic Studies in London, and supplemented by his own 1500 volumes. He was proud to claim the teaching of Russian in New Zealand as ‘my child’.18 Victoria was the first in the field in Australasia (followed closely by Melbourne in 1945). Demand, though, was not huge.19 By the time he was pressing for the introduction of honours Danilow feared that Victoria was losing its place. (As to the question of staffing, he told the vice-chancellor, his stage-three students could take over the elementary teaching and free him for the honours work: last year they had earned 12/6 an hour as interpreters in the department stores when Russian whaling boats were in port.) The same concern propelled Norrish's argument for a separate department of Russian in 1963. The other universities were moving quickly into the field; Russian was added to the secondary school curriculum in the early 1960s, and was starting to burgeon in universities worldwide, fuelled partly by its growing importance as a scientific language.20

Danilow, having just turned 70, was not a candidate for the chair of Russian when it was advertised in 1966, and again in 1967. There were no applicants suitable, by age or qualifications, for a permanent appointment. Elizabeth Koutaissoff was engaged for two (in the event three) years. She herself was approaching retirement age after a long teaching career (at Birmingham since 1947).21 The foundation of the New Zealand Slavonic Journal in 1968 (taking over the Journal of the New Zealand Slavists' Association) confirmed the Victoria department's national profile. Staffing, however, remained a thorny field. One reason was common to the language departments: it was not possible to ‘grow one's own’ native speakers (unlike accountants).

The ‘fortuitously timed’ vacancies in 1973 of the chairs of Russian and classics, subjects with among the smallest enrolments and most favourable staff:student ratios in the university, threatened them, for a moment, with extinction. The Committee of the Vice-chancellor and Deans decided that both chairs should be filled by visiting professors while the newly established Academic Development Committee interrupted its wider-ranging deliberations on the ‘10,000 plan’ to consider their future. It recommended (McKenzie's advocacy was persuasive) that both be advertised for permanent appointment, emphasising the themes of interdepartmental and literature studies where the faculty had recently found its purpose. The faculty warned against assessing the value of any subject solely in terms of student demand; and about the psychological health of single-chair departments with small enrolments facing ‘constant threat of random disestablishment’.22

Classics, of course, was well used to defending itself against the charge of irrelevancy and the reality of declining interest – the classical languages had long ceased to be the lingua franca of the educated classes, and Latin had also lost its vocational application in medicine and law. This had been pretty much the subject of Rankine Brown's inaugural lecture in 1899, and of his successor, H.A. Murray from Aberdeen, another Latinist (and an exacting head of his department), writing in Spike in 1957 on the place of the classics in ‘the atomic age’. While the university must continue to teach Greek and Latin for the fewer and fewer students who wanted them, he recognised another constituency in the growing interest in the classics in translation, which had recently seen the Penguin edition of the Odyssey become a ‘best-seller’.23 The department pursued this in the 1970s – under its new professor, Chris Dearden, a specialist in Greek comedy. Greek History, Art and Literature, a ‘floating’ stage-one unit on the BA syllabus since the 1920s, was the precedent for the rapid development of ‘civilisation’ courses, starting with Roman History and Literature in 1973 and Etruscan and Roman Art in 1974. (On the advice of the visiting professor, however, they did not develop ancient history, in which a stage-one unit had been introduced only in 1970, although anticipated for several years by Professor Munz in History as well as by Murray; Auckland was well advanced in this field.) A classical studies major was introduced in 1976, and enrolments turned around. Perhaps there remained an amount of academic disapproval of ‘classical studies’, as the young Eric McCormick had found in the 1920s when he enrolled for Greek History, Art and Literature under Rankine Brown – but to him it was a revelation.24 By the end of the 1970s over three-quarters of classics students were taking classical studies courses rather than Latin or Greek.

This has been one of Victoria's quietly impressive departments. It was in the vanguard internationally in the development of classical studies, well ahead of Britain, and of Australia (where classics has developed rather in the ancient history direction). From the earlier era, Victoria can claim an outstanding scholarly achievement in Ronald Syme, a student in the early 1920s who was once rated as the twentieth-century's pre-eminent Roman historian; and then Peter Dronke, who graduated from classics as well as English to a chair in medieval Latin at Cambridge. In more recent decades it has produced very significant work especially in myth, and an impressive number of scholarship-winning students.

Other departments followed the pattern – though did not attain the same scholarly reputation – in the face of the unpalatable but plain truth that they were losing their students. The new professor of Russian, Patrick Waddington, was as required a literary scholar, a specialist on Turgenev. He came here as the visiting professor in the first place, anxious to leave Belfast where he had been teaching for 10 years (and keen to stay despite having inherited a ‘complex and delicate’ staffing situation, to his dismay).25 The department had introduced Russian literature in translation in 1972, followed by Russian civilisation in 1976, and moved its foundation Russian literature course to stage two. The new, non-majoring stage-one courses were popular – Russian civilisation attracted over 150 enrolments in the early 1980s – although failure rates were also high. Koutaissoff, on the other hand, had seen the retirement of the department's teacher of Old Church Slavonic and early Russian literature (an area of minimal student demand) as an opportunity to ‘modernise’ by developing Russian studies or Sovietology, but this was neither practical nor in line with the faculty plan. (Nor was a more ambitious scheme of an interdisciplinary Centre of Russian and East European Studies, another variation on the area studies theme.) Language, nevertheless, could also be modern. Forty years after Danilow had hoped to import Russian printing fonts to produce a Russian newspaper, one research project in the department in the 1980s was the development of Cyrillic fonts for Apple Macintosh computers.

The French Department took this road a little later. It suffered the most of the modern languages from the changing academic interests of teenagers: enrolments in University Entrance French fell nearly 60% between 1970 and 1981, twice as

George Culliford and French lecturer Norma Norrish top off the Von Zedlitz building, March 1977; Professor Norrish looks on far as German. It remained the most studied language in New Zealand universities, but these were stressful times. The department's staff was reduced from 11 to five between 1974 and 1988. By the end of the 1970s it had reduced its literature programme and its major requirements to the minimum it believed academically defensible, and was restructuring its courses to increase their ‘civilisation’ content to meet this demand. There were other contexts, however, for the development of French studies in the 1980s, one of which was the growing discourse of national identity (New Zealand's). An emerging field was research on French explorers and early French writing about New Zealand (following the lead of John Dunmore at Massey), as well as some strength more widely in ‘la francophonie’ (French outside metropolitan France).

German was spared the same trauma: its enrolments remained steady. In fact in 1980 it reported that it was enjoying its largest stage-one classes ever. Hoffmann had accepted the chair of modern German literature at Tübingen in 1970, for a year initially, and then had decided to stay. He was replaced back here by Con Kooznetzoff, an Australian and specialist in medieval German from the University of Melbourne. Kooznetzoff revitalised the department and vigorously promoted German studies at a national level: launching a quarterly newsletter for secondary school teachers; helping to found the New Zealand Association of Language Teachers (Hoffmann and Norrish had started a Wellington one in the 1960s); securing the establishment of the German DAAD scholarship scheme in this country. When he died suddenly in 1980, rumour that the university meant to disestablish the chair drew strong protests from other German departments as well as its own. Either this fear was misplaced or their campaign successful. The next professor, Hansgerd Delbrück, who came in 1982, had been an academic assistant to Hoffmann at Tübingen. While German followed the disciplinary trend – a separation of language and literature study and the introduction of audio-lingual teaching – it also responded to the challenge facing university languages in another way. A course in German business studies was introduced in 1984, designed to attract commerce and law students, and in 1987 became a new major alongside the traditional language and literature streams.

The plight of the Romance languages, meanwhile – in particular, the Italian problem – prompted another soul-searching at the end of the 1970s. The loss of a junior lectureship had reduced the Italian staff to three, one of whom was also teaching Spanish: barely enough to sustain a full degree programme to honours level, for which there was a steady though small demand. An introductory course in Spanish had been reintroduced in 1978, in the context (belatedly) of New Zealand's growing economic, diplomatic and development links with Latin America as much as the study of European cultures.26 It met a good demand. The faculty considered its options, until the Academic Development Committee intervened and directed it to have a harder and wider think about its language policy before making any precipitate decision to abandon either the Italian major or Spanish.27 This lengthy and delicate exercise essentially confirmed the status quo: French, German, Italian and Russian would remain the university's major European languages (although not necessarily to the extent of a major) and Spanish a minor one. It also confirmed the place of Asian languages, the lecturers in Indonesian and Chinese having recently been relocated in this faculty from the ruins of Asian Studies.

Not yet, however, did the faculty really engage with the question of why Victoria taught the languages it did, and on what grounds it might teach more. Aside from the core (the classics, French and German), languages had been introduced because there were staff who were willing and able to teach them: Danilow with Russian; Enrico Chiessi had offered Spanish; Bulgarian was taught from 1982 by a member of the Russian Department, which also had passing ambitions for Polish and Ukrainian. Back in the 1940s the professor of political science had plumped for Hindustani (but the Professorial Board had rated Maori more important). Local ethnic communities and diplomatic representatives also had an interest in seeing their languages taught, and foreign governments might pay. In 1974 the Dutch and Belgian embassies approached the university about the introduction of Dutch. A decade later the Saudi ambassador to Australia offered a professor to teach Arabic language and Islamic studies here, to which the faculty responded with cautious enthusiasm (Arabic language was welcome but ‘Islamic proselytism is not a high priority for us’). Neither proposal progressed.28

Nor, it might be argued, did the language departments really engage with the hard question of the relationship between foreign language and literature teaching in a university. These deliberations also disposed finally of the language institute idea, which had remained in the faculty plan since 1973. Don McKenzie argued strongly for this – a comprehensive restructuring of the faculty which would separate language and literature studies, as a pragmatic as much as an academic solution to the faculty's woes – but others thought it academically unsound.29 A language major was instituted, however, in 1981. A recommendation that the separate departments amalgamate to form (or re-form) a Department of Modern Languages was implacably opposed by their professors, Russian's Waddington especially – and was not to be raised again until the end of the 1980s. With the Italian staffing now down to two, in 1984 this major was dropped, not to be revived until 1996.

It was ironic (perhaps) that as Italian was struggling for its survival as a degree subject, it was thriving in the field of ‘extracurricular’ cultural activity that has always been more than an adjunct to the language and literature departments. There were one or two dramatic performances in Italian each year, and senior lecturer David Groves also produced operas with the Music Department. Annual productions of drama in its original language were a longer tradition of the French and especially German departments, while in the 1980s the German Department also supported a choir and a film society (established by honours students in association with the Goethe Institut). The Russians were less active – although the 1949 performance of Griboedov's Woe from Wit for the college jubilee was (Danilow claimed) the first performance of a play in Russian in New Zealand.

A myriad of connections, formal and informal, among departments and between ‘town and gown’ contributed to the university's growing business of supporting the creative arts. The Théâtre des Iles in the 1970s was a most enterprising one. A semi-professional company formed in 1972 by Jean-Pierre and Claire Jugand of the French Department and drama lecturer Phil Mann, Théâtre des Iles toured bilingual productions of French drama around New Zealand and French Polynesia, often to places where professional theatre had never before been seen – taking Molière, for example, on the 300th anniversary of the playwright's death, to 14 villages in New Caledonia – until 1977 when the Jugands went back to France. Opera was also a fertile area. Staff from the language departments contributed to music courses on opera as drama and European languages for singers; a German Department lecturer who was also a professional baritone co-conducted a music honours course on lieder interpretation (there were two singers in the German Department, in fact); English's Jeremy Commons eventually left the university and Augustan studies to pursue his other passion of rediscovering minor and forgotten Italian operas. A notable operatic collaboration, Waituhi, was written by Ross Harris of the Music Department, the libretto by Witi Ihimaera (the university's 1982 writing fellow) and was produced by Adrian Kiernander of Drama Studies in 1984. In this faculty, ‘interdisciplinary’ denoted something less formal and more fertile than an ‘academic meccano set’ (to quote a somewhat cynical law faculty committee on the subject).30 The creative arts flourished at the interstices of disciplinary structures.

Formal interdisciplinary projects found mixed success. Comparative literature was an unsuccessful plan of Paul Hoffmann in the 1960s, keenly supported by Don McKenzie. Earlier still Bertram had been promoting this in the late 1940s. But it was not until the mid–1970s that two ‘genre’ courses, European tragedy and European romanticism, were established (tragedy was more successful than romanticism). This fell some distance short of a lectureship and a major, let alone the department and chair of comparative literature that had been hoped for.

Lectureships in linguistics and drama were the first faculty positions created. Janet Holmes was appointed in 1969 to develop general linguistics within the English Department programme, an area the faculty had had in mind for some time. The discipline of linguistics had grown rapidly in North America and Europe in the 1960s, having already moved from its origins in philology (the historical and comparative study of languages) into structuralist and descriptive linguistics before the revolutionising influence of Chomsky in the 1960s. The creation of New Zealand's first Department of Linguistics in 1988 gave visible recognition to an area that had been developing in the preceding 20 years as one of Victoria's areas of distinction, but in an untidy way. There had been a chair of English language in the English Department since 1962 (this was also a first in New Zealand), although established more in the philological mode, and an English language major was developed; but a first move to establish a general linguistics course in this decade faltered with the early departure of the English language professor, L.F. Brosnahan. Elsewhere in the department, meanwhile, Harry Orsman was quietly

The state-of-the-art Memorial Theatre in the new student union building. M.D. King photo advancing his lexicographical magnum opus. Applied linguistics – the theory and methodology of second language learning – was advancing over in the English Language Institute.31 In other parts of the university too there were pockets of linguistic interest, from anthropology to information science, but most impressively in Max Cresswell's work on logic and language in Philosophy.

A faculty study group convened in the early 1970s had thought a department of linguistics was premature, but supported the subject's active development, identifying a likely area of specialisation in sociolinguistics, as would indeed be the case. A further investigation of linguistics' institutional status in the early 1980s stumbled on the ‘fearsome’ academic, administrative and personal implications of rearranging the relationship between linguistics, English language and the English Language Institute (particularly because of the unwillingness of the English Department to wholly relinquish its language function and staff). An institute (on the geophysics model) was proposed. Instead a board of studies was constituted, and a recognisable linguistics major established by appropriately labelling all the relevant courses32 – with the exception of one essentially philological course taught by Brosnahan's successor in the chair of English language, John Pride (although he was really a sociolinguist). Linguistics became a quasi-department at this point; but as Janet Holmes remarked in 1988, when it gained its independence proper, ‘there is no department which can testify more eloquently to the symbolic significance of a name’.33

Linguistics' enhanced visibility within the university infrastructure was matched by its growing profile in more public arenas. Holmes was now internationally regarded in sociolinguistics – she would be appointed to a personal chair in 1993 – while at closer quarters Victoria's staff were regularly called upon by government agencies in the 1980s and 1990s to advise on linguistic interpretations of legal texts, or on the influence of broadcasting on Maori language or, most frequently, on non-sexist language. Policy advice to government was not the preserve of the economists. Janet Holmes' research on gender and New Zealand English gained a high profile. The publication of her and colleague Allan Bell's New Zealand Ways of Speaking English (1990), together with Harry Orsman's dictionary, put a Victoria stamp on the study of Kiwi-speak.

Drama took off spectacularly well; and had been a long time in gestation. Back in 1948, on Bertram's suggestion, the college's first quinquennial submission had included a request for an ‘instructor–producer’ in drama, to work in co-operation with the departments of English, Education, Classics and languages, with college clubs and to give lectures. It was another decade before the matter was pursued again, soon after an approach to the university from the New Zealand Drama Council. A faculty committee was convened by Ian Gordon – who had also in the late 1940s entertained the idea of drama (unlike creative writing) as a future development for his department. It proposed that a manager and producer for the Little Theatre be appointed, who would also teach a course in drama in the English Department: a combination of academic and practical training would be ideal, but if this could not be found, practical experience was to be preferred. A new theatre was anticipated in the planned student union building, ‘which can be with proper advice the best small theatre in New Zealand’.34 The position was duly advertised in 1961, then proceedings stalled when it was suggested that it should be a limited-term appointment. Drama, Peter Munz argued, was a dynamic art, which needed the constant stimulus of new ideas and techniques: ‘It would be deplorable if the lectureship in Drama were to become an institution … Drama is not the sort of academic discipline that improves with the advancing age and sedentary experiences of the man that professes it.’35 So the advertisement was withdrawn, another committee appointed, and the position redefined as a five-year one. Then Gordon requested that the advertisement be deferred until his return from a sabbatical winter in Britain. He, in fact, was hoping to appoint Richard Campion of the New Zealand Players. Others had in mind a more scholarly appointment – and the drama lectureship fell into abeyance for several more years.

During these years Victoria played a prominent role in an important moment in professional theatre in Wellington: the foundation in 1964 of Downstage. Five members of the university staff were on Downstage Theatre's inaugural committee, including John Roberts (its president) and Don McKenzie (a vice-president).36 The first production, Ionesco's Exit the King, was staged in the Memorial Theatre. Already, however, Victoria had made a significant contribution to theatre downtown. The capping Extravaganzas in their heyday in the 1930s and 1940s, and the college drama society (along with the teachers' college's), had provided a large number of the membership of Unity Theatre, Downstage's precursor, when it moved away from its wartime, anti-fascist, agitprop beginnings to become a paler-hued but still earnest, socially conscious theatre, and a training ground for the country's nascent theatrical profession. Among these were Richard and Edith Campion, who then founded the New Zealand Players in the 1950s, Bruce Mason, sometime Victoria reference librarian Nola Millar, and John McCreary.37

It was at Downstage in 1969 that McKenzie met Phil Mann, an energetic Yorkshireman recently arrived in the country via California and looking for a job. Victoria was looking (at last) for a lecturer, and Mann was appointed at the end of this year. He was to remain at the helm of Drama Studies until 1994 – apart from a brief sojourn in China in 1979–80, from which he returned with a revitalised interest in oriental drama forms – while pursuing careers as a professional theatre director and an author of science fiction novels on the side. McKenzie had set out in a memo a year or two earlier what was to remain the operating principle of drama studies at the university. It was not the university's function to provide vocational training for the theatre: its role was to provide an audience, to ‘educate audiences to the values expressed in drama’, extending ‘the informed and disciplined intelligence’ that academics practised beyond the academy.38 Mann offered the required mix of academic and professional experience, with degrees in English and drama from the University of Manchester, and an MA and a stint at directing experimental theatre at Humboldt State University, California.39 He also brought the right measure of enthusiasm and ability to communicate it. A key factor in the creative synthesis of the academic and practical, performance and study, was a contract (or at least a verbal agreement) that allowed him to work in the professional theatre while teaching – much as law lecturers were permitted to practise. This he did mostly with Downstage, for a time ‘seconded’ half time as artistic director in the 1980s: his productions of Brecht and of local plays, Greg McGee's Tooth and Claw and Vincent O'Sullivan's Shuriken, mark this time as one of Downstage's finest.

There was, Mann observed, some quiet rumbling in the university at first about the academic rigour of drama courses, ‘regarded as advanced kindergartens where some students could “do their own thing”’, but which soon dissipated in the face of the ‘singular focus and blind enthusiasm’ of the students.40 The courses were restricted and always oversubscribed: 80 applied the first year, 35 were accepted. The first course, Drama II, started in 1970; third-year courses in film analysis and oriental drama began in 1972, and production in 1974. Drama Studies made its physical entrance in a semi-derelict house in the upper reaches of Kelburn Parade, the billiard room converted into a studio; it moved next door to ‘Drama House’ in 1974 – ‘a temporary stopping place on the road towards a Performance Centre’, it was thought, although this would turn out to be a longer and more winding road than imagined.41 Temporary remained the operative word, as it was for many university departments in the 1970s and 1980s, only this was more constraining for Drama Studies (and Music) than for most. Matters were not improved when Drama House was burnt out by the Kelburn arsonist on Christmas Eve 1984.

Public performance was a by-product rather than a primary purpose of the practical part of Drama Studies – which grew – but an obligation was accepted to present obscure, difficult or ‘unpopular’ works which the professional theatre wouldn't or couldn't, and to be a ‘fertilising influence’ on the development of an indigenous drama: at the beginning of the 1970s there was much fervent discussion about what this might be.42 The first Drama Studies class presented Alistair Campbell's When the Bough Breaks, for example; there was Beckett at Unity while Mann directed Büchner's Danton's Death for Downstage in 1971; there was Euripides and Rewi Alley; a medieval mystery play (and non-stop screenings of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton films) for the opening of the Von Zedlitz building in 1979. In the 1980s annual large-scale productions gave way to more flexible ‘workshop’ styles with greater student involvement, and student-generated work increasingly formed the material of the production course. Drama Studies came to define its role more clearly in production and writing. It was providing more than audiences, although still less than a vocational course for theatre practitioners. Graduates made their names as playwrights (often via the English Department's original composition course), and via the New Zealand Drama School as writers and directors.

Wellington has long claimed to be New Zealand's theatre capital, by virtue of the vitality of its professional theatre life and as the home of the national drama school. An important part of the ‘town–gown’ link that made Victoria part of this, in addition to being the first university in the field, was its association with Playmarket, the New Zealand script advisory service and playwrights' agency. Founded in 1973 (by a graduate of the first drama class, playwright Robert Lord, and the drama lecturer's wife, actor Nonita Rees), Playmarket was given a home at Victoria from 1976, at first under the stairs in Drama House. It provided some secretarial services for Drama Studies (which was administratively attached to but geographically remote from the English Department) in turn, but more importantly was a social and focal point ‘where the theatre professional rubbed shoulders with the theatre scholar and both met the writer’, until it was unceremiously evicted by the university in the late 1980s, to make way for the Department of Librarianship.43 (It had not been singled out, as the aggrieved Drama Studies staff may have felt: the mounting accommodation crisis had led to a decision to ask all non-university organisations using university space to leave.)44

It had not been planned for Drama Studies to evolve naturally into an independent department: this was intentionally a faculty affair. An undergraduate major, though, was discussed in the late 1970s, as too was a major in creative arts – at a time when quinquennial planning and the pressure of falling rolls produced some creative thinking about both academic and institutional structures, along with a renewed commitment to developing the creative arts (the language centre, majors in comparative literature and languages, fellowships in creative arts, and a performance centre were also under discussion here). Both developments, a drama major and a department, came about at the beginning of the 1990s, under the new name of Theatre and Film. This was almost a misnomer. Film was a smaller part of the department's work than had been planned. A course in film production had been introduced without fuss in 1974; a second, history and criticism of film, in 1979 when a full-time lecturer joined the staff. They were popular, and the establishment of the quarterly Illusions, ‘a New Zealand magazine of film, theatre and television’, by a group of former students in 1986 gave the department a national profile in this fast-developing field. But a comprehensive development depended on the establishment of two more full-time positions in the new department, and only one – in drama – was granted. Financial assistance from the New Zealand Film Commission enabled a course on New Zealand theatre and film to begin in 1991, the department's first that was wholly New Zealand in content. Elsewhere, at Auckland, film studies made a robust although later start, there in association with television studies, which remained a conspicuous absence at Victoria. Unique to this university has been the combination of drama and film.

Musicology, by contrast, was an unrealised part of McKenzie's vision for the English Department as a mini-faculty of contextual literary scholarship, for the graduate he brought back from Oxford in the 1970s to develop this field – Peter Walls, a Baroque specialist who combined his literary and music interests in the study of the English courtly masque – soon decamped to the Music Department. A similar McKenzie scheme didn't get this far. In 1972 separate requests from English and

Don McKenzie, professor of English Music – for a junior lecturer in drama and music, and a music lecturer in ‘aesthetics, criticism and communication’ – led to a proposal for a joint position, for which he had in mind a former member of his staff, Roger Savage, who had been a prominent figure in university drama and music in the 1960s and was now at Edinburgh. He would have liked to offer the job without advertisement (no other candidate would do), but although the vice-chancellor agreed, the pro-chancellor saw a ‘jack up’ and the Council demurred. In Taylor's view there was nothing irregular about flexibility ‘if men of distinction are on offer’, and ‘To my mind, Music and Drama are flowering areas in Victoria … I am delighted in this flowering too because it so nicely counter-balances the other flowering areas, Business Studies, etc.’45 In the event, however, Savage declined to come.

Library studies was also, in this scheme of things, a disappointment. However, the establishment of a Department of Librarianship (in 1980) has a considerably longer history, which places it in the different context of special schools and professional courses. Since the 1950s the library profession had entertained the idea of the National Library School diploma, inaugurated in 1947, gaining status by association with a university.46 There were informal discussions on this theme between the national librarian and Victoria's Council in the early 1960s, although the vice-chancellor then (Williams) was somewhat less than enthusiastic. So it appears was Taylor, who stated in 1969, ‘without committing the university in any way, that I believe the prospect [of transferring the graduate part of the library course to Victoria] is worth further exploration when the time is ripe’.47

The New Zealand Library Association was behind this plan, as, at Victoria, were the librarian, John Sage, and his deputy, David Wylie (a leading figure in the Association). A ministerial working party, however, recommended the establishment instead of an autonomous college of librarianship, which would co-operate with Victoria at the higher levels of its programme, leading to a masters degree. Victoria considered this, and proposed that the university set up its own department of librarianship, to teach a postgraduate diploma and masters. This plan gained provisional approval from the University Grants Committee, but a quinquennium went by while complex manoeuvrings ensued over the relationship between the proposed university course and non-degree library training: the certificate course taught by the Library Association, in which Victoria had no interest. A new proposal (from the director-general of education) was for all library training to be based at Wellington Teachers' College, with an association with Victoria at degree level: the university, that is, would grant a degree taught by the college. This, unsurprisingly, did not find favour at Victoria.

In the event the Teachers' College did get the certificate course, and Victoria held on to the diploma. A new committee was convened by McKenzie to finalise the plan for a department, and set about looking for a professor. Victoria's Diploma of Librarianship was launched in 1980 with 45 students, and a masters course began in 1981, but the amount of scholarly research in the department continued to disappoint. Victoria had gained another professional school. The professor (Rod Cave) was appointed with a literary, bibliographical context in (at least McKenzie's) mind. He was a specialist in rare books and the history of printing and publishing. But the future of library practice and training, as he observed in 1983, was in management and information science. Librarians became ‘information workers’; the department became Library and Information Studies in 1988. In the 1990s it found its institutional place in the faculty of commerce rather than language, literature or arts.

A professional school of art, such as Canterbury's Ilam and Auckland's Elam, was not what Bertram's sub-committee on academic development had in mind in 1948 when they suggested the development of ‘fine arts’ as well as comparative literature and drama. It was really art history, something like the original conception of drama: ‘an undergraduate course … of an academic and non-vocational nature’, one function of which was to educate an audience, but without the integral practical component of the drama course.48 The faculty's expansive 1978 quinquennial submission did, in fact, raise the question of giving degree credits for practical work in the visual arts, as in creative writing, music, drama and film, but noted that it was more difficult to do in this case (without elaborating why).

The chief protagonist for the introduction of art history was Reg Tye, a senior lecturer in the English Department from 1965 (and before that at the Palmerston North outpost) with a passion for the Victorians. He inaugurated the department's winter-term visual arts programme in 1966, a lunchtime programme of slides and films. He and G.J. Dunn of the Classics Department formed a two-person faculty committee in 1972, and found a good number of reasons to recommend the expansion of the university's art history offerings beyond a few classics courses, a History Department one on Renaissance Italy, and some in anthropology and Maori; and the University Extension art classes begun in 1966 by Paul Olds. Those reasons included the importance of an appreciation of art as ‘a safeguard against cultural alienation’, student interest, and a respectable university tradition ‘dating from Ruskin's lectures in Oxford in the last century’.49 They wanted to start boldly with a fully fledged department and a major. Research should focus on colonial and Polynesian art (there would be little chance of attracting distinguished scholars all the way out here to study European art).

In reality art history made a more modest appearance, with a faculty appointment to the English Department in 1976, Tony Bellette. He began with Renaissance art in 1977 to complement the English Department's (and, it was hoped, faculty's) strength in ‘Renaissance studies’, followed by the origins of modern art in 1979 (assisted by Tye and a lecturer from the French Department), Baroque and neoclassical in 1981, the twentieth century in 1986. A major was instituted in 1990; courses in New Zealand and Australian art, North American, Byzantine and women's art were added. Already a full art history major was offered at Auckland and Canterbury. Here the subject had attracted a steady demand, and was especially popular with mature students.

Victoria's other ‘extracurricular’ contribution to the fine arts is its art collection, consisting by the late 1990s of nearly 250 works by New Zealand artists. The origins of the collection date back to the 1930s and 1940s, and the belief, expressed by J.C. Beaglehole in 1949, that the college had a duty beyond as well as in the classroom to cultivate the arts. A history of art at this university should include also the Carnegie collection of books and prints, and the opening of the art room in the 1930s; Fred Page (he later recorded) hung Matisse's The Dance in the music room ‘but found at the end of the first term vacation that it had disappeared. A prissy librarian had removed it on the grounds that it was “unsuitable”.’50 The purchase of original works of art was initiated by Beaglehole. In 1947 he inaugurated the Staff Common Room collection, which was funded by an annual levy of five shillings on each member of staff. Early purchases were Daffodils by Sam Cairncross, a John Weeks landscape and (to the consternation of some) Frances Hodgkins' Kimmeridge Foreshore, which was bought by Beaglehole and Douglas Lilburn in London for £180, almost twice the limit they had been given, and by far the most expensive acquisition for this collection. By 1970 when it was given to the university on permanent loan, the Staff Club collection numbered 16 works, including a McCahon and a Woollaston, and a van der Velden watercolour, although most were oils (and most purchased before 1963).

Separately, a request from the Students' Association prompted the university Council to appoint a purchase of pictures standing committee in April 1958 and establish a £100 annual grant ‘with a view to establishing over the years, a collection of pictures which should be regarded as meritorious and which would eventually constitute a valuable historical record of the graphic arts in New Zealand’.51 Lilburn was the staff representative on this committee until he resigned in 1963,

Chancellor Ivor Richardson (left), Kevin O'Brien and Colin McCahon's Gate III, 1984 and was replaced by Tim Beaglehole, who formed the collection thereafter (although it was placed in the formal custody of the university librarian, who thus gained the additional title of curator, in 1966). The establishment of an official university collection also stimulated the occasional donation or loan, notably several gifts (etchings and prints mostly) from Jack Ilott, while in 1959 T.D.H. Hall, law graduate (and son-in-law of Professor Mackenzie), sent over his collection of some 30, mostly nineteenth-century watercolours because he had moved house and had nowhere to hang them. It had originally been hoped to build a collection of ‘historical value’ – the first attempted purchase was of a John Gully watercolour at auction, but the college was outbid – but this was not pursued. Tim Beaglehole followed, otherwise, the curatorial policy adopted by the committee at the beginning: to buy works of ‘contemporary artists of note’, keeping ‘an eye open for purchase from young painters of exceptional promise before their prices go too high’, adding his own belief that a university environment called for paintings with people as well as landscapes.52 The collection was meant to be displayed for public view (at first on the second-floor landing of the main Hunter stairway and in the music room). Items were also regularly lent for public exhibitions, and the first university Christmas card with a work from the collection (Charles Tole's Farm buildings, Canterbury, from the Staff Club collection) was produced in 1970. By the late 1970s the combined university and Staff Club collection was worth almost $125,000, and the Council's annual contribution now $1000. By the mid– 1990s its market value was some $2 million.

Aside from portraits of chancellors and foundation professors, the university has not generally been in the business of commissioning art. One exception was a memorial sculpture in honour of Ernest and J.C. Beaglehole, to be placed in the Rankine Brown courtyard. A fundraising effort for this purpose was launched in mid–1967, and in two years had gathered $2700. But the scheme had a complicated progress. Fred Page had already had in his mind, before the Beaglehole project was initiated, ‘a large piece of red rock from Ohiro Bay’ for the courtyard in front of the new library building.53 Tanya Ashken, who was commissioned to sculpt the Beaglehole memorial in 1969, started on a piece of Carrara marble from Dunedin; in 1975 a bronze (entitled Seabird IV) was installed without fanfare in the main floor of the library. The better-known memorial to the historian Beaglehole is the J.C. Beaglehole Room, home to the library's manuscript and rare book collection, which was planned in recognition of his award of an OM in 1970, and also opened in 1975 (having also had its share of controversy).54 The George Kojis obelisks that were unveiled in the Rankine Brown courtyard in 1979, meanwhile, were commissioned to mark the opening of four new buildings. A policy of commissioning or purchasing a suitably large piece of art to adorn each new university building had been established a few years before, but it was not conscientiously followed. A Fred Graham sculpture, Tane and Tupai, in kauri and totara, was commissioned for the first Cotton block but had to be removed several weeks after its unveiling because of vandalism.

The biggest painting in Victoria's collection, physically, financially and in reputation, is Colin McCahon's Gate III – popularly known as ‘I AM’. One of several commissioned by the Auckland City Art Gallery to mark its reopening after the construction of a new wing, it was purchased for Victoria in 1972, where it adorned a brick wall in the Maclaurin lecture block. Half of the $4000 purchase price came from the university's art fund, the other half from the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council in the form of an ‘award for achievement’ to honour the artist. It is this painting that has called attention whenever the university has felt obliged to defend its ownership of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of art. If it were sold, one could argue (not very convincingly), half the income should be returned to the Arts Council. The real point to argue is the place of the art collection in the university's ‘cultural and civilising role’, in Tim Beaglehole's words, and its commitment to the creative as well as the scholarly arts.55

Victoria has supported the literary arts as well, in both curricular and extracurricular ways. A writer's fellowship was established in 1978, funded by the New Zealand Literary Fund and a half-lectureship from the English Department. Although this had been in the faculty plan since 1973 (McKenzie had the first idea), the effective initiative came informally from the Literary Fund and formally from the minister of arts in 1977. This was the second literary fellowship at a New Zealand university. The first, Otago's Burns Fellowship, had been privately endowed; the others that followed were also supported by the Literary Fund. The fellowship was never to be restricted to writers of poetry, prose fiction and drama, and incumbents have included the odd historian; but in practice it mostly has been. The first fellow was a playwright, Joseph Musaphia: appropriately, it was felt, in the context of Victoria's leading edge in drama studies.

Original composition made its way into the English syllabus in 1975, ‘as a sort of undergraduate thesis paper’ whereby third-year English students could submit a folio of work for credit towards their degree.56 Don McKenzie, again, had been the initiator here, but it was Bill Manhire, poet and lecturer (from 1974) in modern poetry and Old Norse, who developed the original composition option into a structured, highly competitive, glamorous six-credit course in the 1980s. It was by then open to students with any 12 stage-one credits and a ‘required standard’ of writing. Twelve were admitted each year; in the mid–1990s over 150 applied. Creative writing courses, in universities as well as outside them, became a flourishing industry in the 1990s. Manhire has himself recognised a ‘style’ of writing produced, unintentionally but inevitably, from Victoria's: in a habit of genre-jumping and a certain linguistic playfulness (the personality of his own poetry). For better or worse, a Victoria ‘school’ had emerged by the 1990s, abetted by a productive relationship between this course and Victoria University Press. There has been debate as to whether there developed, more particularly, a ‘Manhire school’ of poetry. But undeniably Wellington became a productive centre of new New Zealand writing. Sport, the playfully titled literary magazine launched by Victoria University Press editor Fergus Barrowman in 1988 (its title, though, was surely chosen in answer to the earnestness of its predecessors, Landfall and Islands), became the route to published status for many Manhire graduates – and other writers, of course.

In the 1980s and 1990s Victoria University Press built a reputation as a discerning and enterprising publisher of New Zealand fiction. This is not necessarily, not usually, the role of an academic press. Victoria had been slower than others to launch into publishing on its own account after the dissolution, with the University of New Zealand in 1962, of the University of New Zealand Press. This ill-fated operation had been established in 1946 (30 years after James Hight of Canterbury College had first taken up the issue with a reluctant and impecunious Senate). J.C. Beaglehole as chair of its board ran the press from 1947 until its demise. It had never been sufficiently funded to enable it to publish without subsidy from an author, a college or the Literary Fund, or without making a loss. Of its 17 publications, only two (both textbooks) turned a profit without help. Victoria paid for The Old Clay Patch and the jubilee history, and subsidised Cotton's New Zealand Geomorphology and James K. Baxter's Fire and Anvil: notes on modern poetry.57

Beaglehole, who convened Victoria's publications committee, thought the disestablishment of the New Zealand University Press was a mistake, and also thought it would be a mistake immediately to establish a Victoria one. The publications committee dispersed a grant from the Council in subsidies to assist the publication of books by university staff, of articles in academic journals overseas, and the production of the university's own; and sought to bring the accounting procedures of these under centralised control (the Law Review was an ongoing problem). Only in ‘exceptional circumstances’ would the university publish a book itself; although it might, in time, find it convenient to channel all books through a single ‘publisher to the University’.58 Negotiations with Blackwood and Janet Paul in 1967 over The Feel of Truth – a festschrift to professors Wood and Beaglehole, edited by Munz – appears to have given rise to a proposal of this nature, which the publications committee felt financially constrained to pursue, but they were prompted to ask Don McKenzie to investigate and report on future publishing policy and the possible establishment of a Victoria University press.

McKenzie, who now chaired the publications committee from 1968 until 1985, advised on the creation of a university imprint, rather than a press. The time had passed, he observed, for giving cash inducements to publishers to take on academic books: commercial publishers ‘now compete for prestigious titles, and the growth of the academic market and institutional libraries has reduced the commercial risk’.59 But the most important thing to get right, before publishing, was distribution, especially overseas (and he began making inquiries both locally and in Britain).60 A fully fledged university press would come later. His final report to the Professorial Board in 1970 recommended the appointment of a full-time editor to oversee all university printing and publishing: substantial scholarly works published on behalf of the university, and the more routine work of the multilith department (to which he hoped to add a small letter-press printing section for small journals and monographs). What was not included in this scheme, however, was the Wai-te-ata Press, which McKenzie kept as his own. When he came back from Cambridge in 1961 he had brought with him an 1813 Stanhope Press on indefinite loan from the Cambridge University printer, which he installed in a garage below the English Department houses on Wai-te-ata Road (because it was too heavy to carry up the steps), and put to service primarily as an educational tool, to show students how early books were made. But it found too a broader, if still modest cultural role. Under the imprint Wai-te-ata Press, McKenzie published small first editions of New Zealand literature, mostly by local poets (Baxter, Campbell, Manhire); an occasional miscellany, Words (co-edited with Paul Hoffmann); scholarly essays by students and staff; and a significant music series. Launched by McKenzie and Douglas Lilburn in 1967, the Wai-te-ata music editions were the first substantial publication of original New Zealand scores.

In a typical Victoria example of going half way, McKenzie's recommendation for an editor of university publications was enthusiastically received by the Committee of the Vice-chancellor and Deans; then it was decided that the job was too much for one person and only a printing manager was appointed. This left the publications committee to engage a part-time editorial consultant as it pleased, for what it no doubt regarded as the more important part. Hugh Price, who had formed the local publishing house Price Milburn in 1957 and for five years managed Sydney University Press, was appointed consultant editor in August 1971. Thus began a period in which Price Milburn published on behalf of the university – not always distinguishing clearly which were Victoria books. (Already, in fact, Price had casually appropriated the term New Zealand University Press.) The first to appear with the imprint Price Milburn for Victoria University Press, in 1974, was Maori Poetry, a collection of waiata in translation by Barry Mitcalfe; next The Turanga Journals of missionary William Williams, edited by Frances Porter, a quite substantial project initiated and largely financed by the Williams family; and later the same year Beatrice Webb's 1898 diary of The Webbs in New Zealand, edited by David Hamer.61 The Turanga Journals forced the issue of what qualified as a university book. It had bothered the lawyerly mind of deputy vice-chancellor Ian Campbell that Frances Porter was not a member of the university staff. But she was a graduate, the publications committee pointed out, and her work had been overseen by Beaglehole and Wood. In May 1973 the Council approved terms of reference for the committee which defined its field as ‘research done by past and present members of staff, by past and present students of the university and by graduates’.62

The extension of this brief without apparent ado from ‘research’ to creative literature was facilitated by the invention of two series under the general editorship of English Department staff: a New Zealand short story series edited by Bill Manhire, launched with Helen Shaw's The Gypsies (1978), and New Zealand playscripts edited by John Thomson, starting with Roger Hall's Glide Time (1978). (Both were assisted by the Literary Fund.) More or less formally, the university presses now divided up the creative field: Victoria taking short stories and drama, Auckland poetry (the Otago University Press had decided to stop publishing playscripts because they were ‘commercially problematic’) – an arrangement which lasted for more or less a decade. The publications committee relaxed its formal terms of reference again in 1978, to encompass books not only by but ‘relating to the teaching and research interests of members of the University community (staff and students, past and present)’.63

By 1978 a properly constituted university press was on the agenda at last, and the publications committee contemplated the challenge, expressed by McKenzie, ‘to evolve an editorial policy which balanced, in a disciplined way, the sometimes conflicting demands of narrow academic interests and the market’ with the financial means of a New Zealand university.64 In 1979 Pamela Tomlinson was appointed (without advertisement) to the part-time position of editor, bringing several years' experience with John Calder and Penguin in Britain. Without relinquishing the traditional role of an academic press – publishing scholarly works by university staff in small print runs for specialist markets – and with the financial cushion of the university's institutional support, Victoria University Press would grow more and more to resemble a general publisher (with a serious, literary bent) in its list and its operation. In the fiction field, notable successes in the 1980s were Janet Frame's short story collection You Are Now Entering the Human Heart and Booker Prize-winner Keri Hulme's Te Kaihau: the wind-eater. It published its first novel, After Z-hour by Elizabeth Knox (an original composition graduate), in 1987. In the 1990s, when the university presses gained increasing success in New Zealand literary awards, Victoria's was conspicuous, and almost exclusively in poetry and fiction.65

Back in the English Department, New Zealand literature as a traditionally academic affair was a comparatively late development.66 It was taught firstly at honours level (a special option only) by Joan Stevens from 1962. Not that it been totally ignored before then: some New Zealand writing had been set as optional reading or tutorial exercises since the mid–1940s (the obvious choices: Katherine Mansfield's selected stories first of all, Dan Davin's Oxford edition of New Zealand short stories, Mulgan's Man Alone, and Allen Curnow's first Book of New Zealand Verse). Outside the classroom, Gordon was at work on Mansfield, and engaging with New Zealand literature in another way on the advisory committee of the State Literary Fund. But both he and Stevens confined their teaching of it then to adult education classes. And curiously, perhaps, Bertram was not inclined to show any lead. An undergraduate course was not introduced until 1975, taught by John Thomson, who had also taken over Stevens' honours course, and Frank McKay, a Marist priest and later James K. Baxter biographer.

Along with Baxter, Mansfield has been a significant subject of Victoria's New Zealand literary scholarship: from Gordon's pioneering study in the 1950s to the work of Vincent O'Sullivan (appointed a professor after McKenzie's departure) and postgraduate student Gil Boddy in the 1980s. Although English had introduced a separate MA by thesis in 1976, it was not until the mid–1980s that students would regularly choose their subjects from New Zealand writing. Even then, the university press, the writer's fellowship and the creative writing course were probably the greater stimulus to a growing interest in New Zealand literature than the department's formal teaching was.

There were also new options in the mid–1970s in contemporary literature, the American novel and American poetry, as this department took advantage of the new credit degree it had devised – if not readily enough, according to some of its students. There was a protracted debate between the department and disgruntled students, as well as within the department, through 1972–73, for English had by far the largest major requirements of the faculty.67 (Not only the English Department, however, grappled with the task of more carefully defining its essential subject – what would constitute a ‘major’ – with the move to the smorgasbord style of credit degree.) But the larger context of the evolution of English studies in the 1970s and on was the challenge of literary theory, and the expanding boundaries of the subject itself, with the growth of regional and post-colonial literatures, of media studies, cultural studies, gender studies and other such cross-disciplinary fashions. Hugh Mackenzie had observed in his inaugural lecture in 1899 that, ‘In studying English Literature we ordinarily leave contemporary authors severely alone as being too near us to permit of viewing them in proper perspective. We confine ourselves to accredited masterpieces – works that have become English Classics. We can bestow but passing notice on second or third rate work; and on that only in order to preserve the continuity of the literary record.’68 The old philological and canonical basis of English in the university, here concisely expressed, was thoroughly deconstructed in what has been termed the era of ‘exploding English’.69 This happened at Victoria too, although it in some respects showed itself as conservative in the face of change. When an honours paper in literary criticism was established in 1982 (in fact re-established, after an absence of several years), tensions flared. Introducing students to the challenge of post-structuralism for the first time at honours level was bound to be trouble. Over a decade later the department was criticised still for failing to incorporate clearly and comprehensively into its undergraduate teaching programme the ‘plurality’ of modern literary theory.

It had restructured its undergraduate programme again in the late 1970s, with the aim of more choice. More stage-two and -three options were provided, and all literature courses could now count towards a major; enrolment in New Zealand literature was opened to any students (not only English majors); and in 1980 an enlarged modern literature option was introduced at stage one, to provide an alternative basis for an English major programme alongside Renaissance. These changes bore fruit in a dramatic and welcome increase in enrolments. For, although it remained a large department and did not face the threat of extinction that some of the smaller ones in the faculty did, English too experienced falling rolls in the 1970s and a concomitant depletion of its staff. Some of those staff losses were in the Renaissance field, which the department had been actively fostering in the 1970s as one of its long-established strengths, but which was now recognised as a fragile area in need of nurturing to survive. The marked area of student interest observed in 1980 was the modern novel.

There was, sadly, also a deep professorial difference of opinion in the department over how (more than what) it should teach: between, specifically, Don McKenzie and Roger Robinson, Victoria's famous ‘running professor’ (a world-ranking veteran marathoner, and specialist in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century novel). McKenzie still believed, without objecting to the diversification of the English curriculum per se, in a structured teaching programme at least for majoring students. But in 1985 the stage-one Renaissance literature option was dropped, leaving a single first-year course in contemporary literature to serve as an introduction to

Professor James Bertram receives an honorary degree from Kevin O'Brien, 1981 ‘literary studies’. This course was still proving problematic in the 1990s. And this was still a department divided – now particularly over the place and scope of ‘cultural studies’. It was ironic that English should be one of the university's less happy departments at a time when it also had a reputation as one of its most successful – through, for example, the continuing success of original composition, the publication of Harry Orsman's pioneering dictionary, and the not quite so long awaited Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature (1998), edited by Roger Robinson and Nelson Wattie – and, less obviously in the local context, while it maintained the high international reputation in medieval studies it had established in the 1940s.

The Music Department left the faculty of arts to join languages and literature in 1978, a natural addition to this faculty's emerging identity in the creative arts. Music had been a creative department from its inception, with its particular focus on performance and composition, and a professor, in Page, whose devotion to the avant-garde did not diminish with age – nor did the fierceness and honesty of his views: Page ‘would speak his mind with small regard for his listener's self-image, and for this reason had many enemies’ (although perhaps not as many as he liked to think).70 But there was no hesitation in promoting him to the chair when it was created in 1957. He founded a branch of the International Society for Contemporary Music; promoted the new in broadcasts, recitals and articles. A visit in 1958 to Darmstadt and Donaueschingen, stamping grounds of Stockhausen, Cage and Boulez, confirmed and invigorated him in his tastes. With two composers on his staff – Lilburn, and David Farquhar, Victoria's first MusB graduate and in Page's view ‘the best lecturer in counterpoint and anything to do with musical analysis and structure, in the country’71 – the Victoria department developed in the 1950s as an active centre of composition. In an article in Spike in 1957 Page noted seven Victoria composers (graduates and staff), and explained the importance of composition in the department's teaching: ‘It is as though Professor Gordon were to ask, in English III, for poems on a particular rhyming scheme, with opening lines given’ – which is exactly what Bill Manhire began doing in original composition 20 years later. (On having composers on the staff, Page quoted Hindemith: ‘[his] instruction is bound to have a certain creative warmth, because he is passing on directly what he himself has experienced’.)72

A good part of Douglas Lilburn's composing output – in addition to three symphonies, of course – was incidental music for the National Film Unit, the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation and the New Zealand Players, and musical settings of local literature, where he formed a special association with the ‘Caxton’ writers. His music took a major change in direction when he made his first tentative experiments in electronic music in 1961 for a production of Allen Curnow's verse play The Axe. In 1963 he went to North America to investigate electronic music studios (particularly Toronto's) and returned to try to establish one here – with difficulty. To a former student he remarked, ‘Isn't it a little like persuading the

Fred Page and Igor Stravinsky in the Memorial Theatre, 1961. Tom Shanahan photo Govt. to launch into nuclear science [which his colleagues in physics had recently been trying to do], and isn't it possible that this sort of thing can only be done in wealthy countries … we are not Columbia with £75,000 a year to spend on electronic music research. In fact each upright piano has been a battle, and I register stoically when Ashley [Heenan, another graduate] writes out to tell that Indiana has 250 Steinway Grands dotted about the campus.’73 Victoria's ‘fully professional and moderately expensive’ Electronic Music Studio was established in the Hunter basement in 1966 with £4720 from the University Grants Committee, Victoria's research committee, the Arts Council, and the Broadcasting Corporation which gave £1500 worth of surplus equipment.74 It was the first of its kind in the southern hemisphere, and an internationally recognised ‘school’ of electronic composing developed here – although it took time to achieve local recognition (Page was not impressed). In 1970, when he was awarded a personal chair, Lilburn left teaching in the department and became director (half time) of the Electronic Music Studio, which he ran until his retirement from the university in 1980. (It was then taken over by Ross Harris.)

Performance, always encouraged by Page, became a formal part of the BMus curriculum in 1965, when four executant courses were established. Outside tutors were engaged, two from the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. This was an association from which Victoria would continue to profit: two full-time executant teachers were later appointed to the staff, but the continued use of part-time tutors as well, mostly members of the Symphony Orchestra, was both expedient and valuable. Practical training was developed in the 1960s to meet an ‘urgent’ demand for professional performers and teachers from the Broadcasting Corporation, the Department of Education and the newly established Arts Council. The long talked-of national conservatorium had not come to pass (its Bowen Street site where excavations were started before the war had been given to Broadcasting House) and Victoria saw itself stepping into this role, although without necessarily national pretensions. Its performance training was to be at a higher level, though, than the diploma already offered at Auckland, and the course later established (in the mid–1970s) by Wellington Polytechnic. As the other universities followed Victoria in developing practical music training, and adopted essentially the same BMus structure as it did in 1973 – with three degree options in history and literature, performance, and composition – it was agreed that regional development was preferred to the old-fashioned notion of a national school. Victoria, however, maintained its edge.

It certainly showed that it meant to when Jenny McLeod was appointed professor, at the age of 28, to succeed Page in 1971. She was Page's choice, considered by both him and Farquhar the department's most brilliant student to date. After graduating in 1964 she had studied in Europe with Messiaen, Stockhausen, Berio and Boulez; won a prize in Paris; and had a chamber work (For Seven, an ‘avant-garde European piece in the approved manner,’ as she later described it)75 premièred at the Berlin October Festival, an unprecedented achievement for a New Zealander. She returned to establish a local profile as a composer – especially with her music-theatre piece for children, Earth and Sky, commissioned by the Arts Council and first performed in Masterton in 1968, followed by the multi-media Under the Sun for the centenary of Palmerston North in 1971. She joined the department in 1967. When she was appointed to the chair she planned to stay for 15 or 20 years, to strengthen the department's commitment to performance, and introduce courses in electronic, pop and other kinds of modern music. Her ‘conversion’ to rock music was not something Page had foreseen. After turning down a commission to write a rock-opera, she spent her sabbatical leave in 1975 on a beach tour with her band ‘playing mostly devotional soft-rock music’; she had already discovered meditation.76 When she resigned in a blaze of local publicity in 1976 to work full time for the Divine Light Mission, she commented on her estrangement from classical music: ‘This whole art syndrome was really phony. I guess I always knew there was something funny about concerts.’77

The department unanimously petitioned for David Farquhar to be invited now to take the chair, a course which Taylor supported on the grounds of his reputation, as well as the difficulty in filling New Zealand music chairs. Farquhar had founded (in 1974) the Composers Association of New Zealand, and had a wide-ranging record of piano, chamber, opera and orchestral music (his first symphony was completed in 1959), and incidental music – including a Recessional for the university's graduation ceremony (Lilburn composed the Processional Fanfare). Moreover, the department had been through a ‘troubled’ time and was ‘desperately in need of that old-fashioned quality of leadership which Jenny completely failed to give’.78 The chancellor approved, but the academic members of the Council unanimously didn't, on the grounds that it would create a dangerous precedent. The chair was advertised and Farquhar was appointed after all.79 The Dominion's music critic was relieved that Farquhar would ‘bring the department back to a more academically normal course’ after the ‘exciting, highly stimulating interregnum’ under McLeod.80 There was more here, however, than McLeod's disinclination, or unpreparedness, to take the traditional professorial part. This was a department, the dean observed when it was found to be over $9000 in debt in 1987, which had a longstanding record of poor administrative and especially financial control. It was at the same time one whose style and diversity of activity made it especially complex to manage.81

Non-western music and ethnomusicology is another area in which Victoria's Music Department can claim an edge, which was begun under Page and continued by Jenny McLeod. The possibilities here were greatly enhanced by the donation on long-term loan from the Indonesian embassy in 1975 of a 15-piece gamelan orchestra (after the cost had precluded McLeod buying one). In deliberate contrast to the Auckland department's interest in Pacific, Victoria chose to develop Asian music, although not exclusively. (The first ethnomusicologist on the staff, Allan Thomas, has specialised in Pacific music and dance.) When it was planning the development of ethnomusicology as a major option in the 1980s the department defined its approach as anthropological, its themes modernisation and acculturation, in contrast again to Auckland's more traditional, musical approach. Responsibility for the development of the non-western side was shared by Jack Body, another of the department's resident composers, notably of electronic music, who had travelled in Asia after his tour of the avant-garde centres of Europe in 1969 and later spent two years in Jakarta. Body also founded that peculiarly 1970s phenomenon, the Sonic Circus: multi-venue music marathons, the first of which, a six-hour, eight-venue performance of New Zealand music, was commissioned by the Broadcasting Corporation and held at Victoria in 1974.

It was strange, perhaps, that a department of such obvious distinction should be left to languish in the 1970s in the crumbling chemistry wing of the Hunter building, amid peeling plaster and leaking roofs, feeling that it was struggling for its survival. (But at the same time, it should also be acknowledged that for many years the department had done little to advocate its accommodation needs; Page was not bothered about such things.) Its fortunes looked up with the revitalisation of the university building programme in the 1980s and the sympathetic support of the vice-chancellor, Ian Axford, and of a new one (Les Holborow) who had a strong personal interest in music. The new music complex, formally opened with a three-day festival in June 1989, boasted a concert room judged to be the best chamber venue in Wellington, thanks to the generosity of local art patrons Denis and Verna Adam. In all nearly $300,000 from outside the university assisted the rehabilitation of the Music Department. The Turnovsky Endowment Trust gave the money for a long-term residency for the recently formed New Zealand String Quartet, which had been temporarily housed in the department over the summer of 1986–87, an arrangement brokered by Holborow and Turnovsky which satisfied two desires: Fred Turnovsky's to support a string quartet without risk (to his reputation, not his finances), and the department's, the players' and the Music Federation's to continue a happy association.82 (‘Perhaps,’ Fred Page had written

Jenny McLeod, professor of music, 1976. ATL F18217 1/4 40 years earlier, ‘we shall have to learn to be patrons, to be able to call on a string quartet so that our students can hear regularly the quartets of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and the finest chamber music.’)83 In 1988 the department also inaugurated a two-month visiting composers' fellowship for composers normally resident outside New Zealand: the first was from China. This was Body's initiative, and funded at his own request by half of his senior lectureship. It also took over the Wai-te-ata music editions from Wai-te-ata Press – which was languishing in the care of the Department of Library and Information Studies following McKenzie's departure for Oxford – with Body as editor, and financial assistance from the Composers' Federation and the Lilburn Trust. (It is worth noting, however, by way of qualifying this department's historical support for local music and composition, that a separate course in New Zealand music was introduced only in 1989.) To coincide with its new lifestyle the department took a new name: the Victoria University School of Music. And the university, as a sign of good faith, wrote off its debt.84

The new Adam Concert Room also provided a fitting venue for the department's Thursday lunchtime recitals, which had been held in the music room of the old Hunter building since the 1940s until that part of the building was abandoned in 1977: the student union Memorial Theatre was not the same. In that modest but ‘marvellous’ venue Page had given first Wellington performances of the European avant-garde composers; and there were ‘legendary’ premières of Lilburn, of Farquhar and Body. (Organising these recitals for 25 years, Page later said, made him feel like Prince Esterhazy.)85 The future of the lunchtime recitals had already been threatened by financial difficulties a year before the evacuation of Hunter. An appeal to ‘friends’ brought a good response, and led to the establishment of the Music Department Development Fund to foster its performance activity.86 Like Drama Studies, but with a much longer tradition, the Music Department has had a close relationship with its professional and the wider music community, and contributed much to Victoria's public reputation, as well as playing a key part in interdisciplinary and extracurricular ways in the creative life of the campus. In town–gown terms, Music has been one the university's undoubted stars. Its new premises were an overdue recognition and enhancement of this role.

The prospect, by 1985, of a new music building also inspired a more ambitious plan for a university Arts Centre. The faculty had had a performance centre in its sights since the 1970s – in fact some had had it in mind in the 1940s. The idea of a shared music and drama facility was not a practical one, although not everyone understood this. However, new premises for Drama Studies – the need for which was beyond urgent – next door to the music complex could create the nucleus of a complete centre for the creative arts. Television studies could be developed here (a course in television production as well as academically styled media studies was in mind). In any case the university was ‘gravely lacking’ in lecture facilities for high-quality visual projection. Art history and architectural history courses could be taught here. The writing fellow and the original composition programme might also find a congenial home. A small art gallery was also envisaged, as an ‘open and public focus for the whole Arts Centre’ as well as a teaching facility, for which public subscriptions might be sought.87 An arts centre would give ‘physical expression to the Victoria tradition of combining the academic, the public and the creative aspects of the arts’. It was also seen as remedying a certain lack of Victoria's campus – for this was ‘one of the few universities in the world which possesses no Senate House, no Hall, no Centre, no Stadium, nor even a Chapel’.88 Vice-chancellor Ian Axford seemed keen on the idea, and a public announcement was made, but without, it seems, a definite idea of quite what the centre would encompass. Some others were less enthusiastic, and the project was actively discouraged when it came before the Council's site committee. When the dean of languages and literature, Roger Robinson, its chief promoter, raised it again two years later, the University Grants Committee was in financial crisis, and the proposal was deferred again.

The scheme was one of two failed arts centre proposals, in fact. The other, in the early 1970s, had been something a little different, however: a student union facility for recreational ‘creative arts’, such as pottery, weaving and screen printing, photography, modern music and dance.

[twelve] Weirdie beardie layabouts

THE STUDENT UNION building, sometimes known as the university union, was officially opened by the minister of education on 10 June 1961, nearly 30 years after the Students' Association had established a Permanent Building Committee and resolved to put the profits of Extravaganza and Cappicade into a building fund, and three years after the old gymnasium was demolished. ‘This antique building would not be the landmark it is if it were not in its usual parlous state,’ the president had remarked a few years earlier.1 An unofficial wrecking party held before the contractors arrived was a source of some embarrassment: reglazing the windows in the part of the old building that was to be used as the site office cost the Students' Association £20. Otherwise, Victoria has been proud of its students' ‘magnificent record’ of self-reliance, in acquiring for themselves firstly the gymnasium, then the student union.2

1932 had been a singularly inopportune year to launch a fundraising campaign, and the college Council refused the students permission to apply to hold an art union. Momentum began to build after the war when the Council decided that the building should be a war memorial and open in the college's jubilee year, and the government agreed to pay a subsidy of £2 for £1 up to £40,000. Raising the money was one matter. There were also fierce controversies over the choice of an architect and the site. The Council had given its assent to the gymnasium site before the war, but George Dixon now devised an alternative plan that would save both the old building and, more importantly, the tennis courts. It was this site that was proposed when the Students' Association launched a golden jubilee appeal in 1949. In the end, however, both the gym and Dixon's beloved tennis courts had to go.

The students had £15,000 in their building fund when the appeal was launched: the government raised the subsidy limit to £70,000, and £35,000 was in hand by the middle of 1950.3 They also had an architect in mind: the Austrian émigré Ernst Plischke, whom they recommended to the Council in 1946 as ‘the foremost architect in the country’ and for his ‘philosophic and intellectual approach to the problems of architecture and to the problems of community life’.4 The Council for a variety of reasons (not least of which, perhaps, was his nationality) hesitated. The New Zealand Institute of Architects offered its opinion in favour of the current college architects, the firm of Gray Young. J.C. Beaglehole lent his support to the students and ‘the cause of a worthier College architecture’ in a passionate plea to the Council not to appoint Gray Young (‘very mediocre architects indeed’) but to choose one of the younger, modern men: he did not necessarily mean Plischke, but noted Plischke and Firth's Meat Board building on Lambton Quay, then in construction and ‘which looks to me as if it will set a completely new standard for Wellington’ (this was Massey House, and it did).5 Nevertheless, and despite the apparent obstacles to Plischke's engagement having been overcome, the Council's building committee chose the advice generously offered by the recently retired government architect, and gave the contract in 1953 to the Structon Group (with the assent of the Students' Association).6

As the project evolved a separate gymnasium was decided upon: having the gym on the floor above the theatre did not seem a good idea. The principal returned from America in 1954 and, having investigated student facilities there, advised that more generous plans were required. Costs escalated. The Students' Association voted in 1957 to raise its fee from £2 5s to £3 5s and put £1 of it into the building fund, upon which the government increased its contribution to £115,000. A second public appeal was launched in 1960 for furnishings. For a few months in 1958 the Students' Association also changed its name to the Students' Union.

The union building, while not a masterpiece of modernism, at least broke away from the red-brick pattern of the college's academic buildings to date. It was designed to take a third storey, initial plans for which were ready by 1965 (by Ian Athfield for Structon) – giving the whole the appearance, as a Salient writer noticed, of an airport control tower.7 This was not added until 1969–70, by which time the building was becoming desperately overcrowded. Where the gymnasium had stood, the state-of-the-art Memorial Theatre, with ‘a versatile apron stage, built-in cyclorama, electronically-controlled curtain, ample dressing room and storage space, orchestra pit and New Zealand's first front-of-house lighting control’, was inaugurated by the Drama Club in 1961 with Much Ado About Nothing.8 Its southern foyer (‘expected to be frequently hired out for cocktail parties and the like’) was also added in 1970.9

In all, the students directly contributed just over a quarter of the cost of the union building. Having done so, they wanted to keep it as their own. Fears that the university was planning to appoint a warden prompted a successful campaign for control to be vested in a Student Union Management Committee with a majority of student representatives. The university and the association continued to share the operating costs of the building, while the university employed the staff, with a managing secretary rather than a warden.

The new student union building. M.D. King photo

Jim Williams was elected a life member of the Students' Association for his essential support for the student union building, and for the subsequent development of student welfare services – as well, one supposes, as for his patronage of university rugby. He hoped that it would develop as a facility for the whole university: as a universi