COMMUNITY - AN OVERSEAS INTERLUDE
Nineteen sixty nine was an exciting year. My study-leave plans, as initially formed in 1965 and 1966, changed dramatically through my two-year official association with Currie Hall. I had my academic interests but, even more, I now had an intense concern for Halls of Residence and the broader aspects of education. It seemed likely that Currie Hall would become co-educational, but there was, as yet, little experience of this in Australia. I planned to spend much time visiting student residences in Britain, in the United States of America and Canada. I wanted to learn from them. There was also a general mood of student unrest throughout the world, triggered partly by the war in Vietnam. This unrest had occurred in some parts of the Eastern States of Australia but demonstrations had not yet reached Perth. It was, however, particularly evident in France, Britain and in the United States. I wanted to understand this mood.
Two years of growing association with Asian students convinced me that I needed to know more of their background if I were to be of full value to them in Australia. I determined to travel back to Perth via Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore.
Finally, I wanted to give my family breathing-space from living amongst so many people, and wanted to spend time living in the countryside. Judith would soon be fourteen and Peter, twelve. We wanted to broaden their horizons and planned to take them to Europe. I looked forward to a year of engaging in those things that attracted me, without having the constant imposition of external restraints. It became a year of luxurious self-indulg-ence.
I
It was on Friday, 31 January 1969 that we drove to Fremantle to join the S.S. Ellinis of the Greek Chandris Line. This was to be my fifth sea voyage and we chose this rather than a plane flight to London because I had worked so hard during the past two years. I needed a period of relaxation before throwing myself vigorously into my planned activities in Britain. The Ellinis was scheduled to call at New York, and we looked forward to meeting my sister briefly. I had not seen her for twenty
1
three years . Kay had never met her. By now, being seasoned sea travellers, there was neither the excitement nor the apprehension of former years. We waved goodbye to the twenty-two people who had come to see us on our way. Half were family members - the other half were Currie Hall students with whom I had a close relationship.
Both Judith and Peter were excited, because they had but dim memories of their last sea voyage. However, it was only a few hours after leaving Fremantle that Judith felt seasick when the ship began to roll as we rounded Cape Llewellyn. She demanded that her dreadful parents, who were subjecting her to this torment, put her ashore immediately. She could not contemplate a voyage of over five weeks' duration.
1 See page 96. Joan left Perth at the end of 1966 to marry Joseph Dougan in USA.
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MY PLANS FOR A YEAR OF STUDY LEAVE IN BRITAIN, USA AND ASIA
This was my last sea voyage as I planned to fly home, but Kay, Judith and Peter were scheduled to return to Australia on the Ellinis at the end of the year. I planned my homeward journey via America and Asia as a business trip with little time for sightseeing.
1969 SEA VOYAGE TO BRITAIN VIA THE PANAMA CANAL & NEW YORK AND RETURN FLIGHT THROUGH USA, HONG KONG, THAILAND, MALAYSIA, SINGAPORE
From Fremantle we sailed to Melbourne and then to Sydney. Crossing the Tasman Sea, we were to spend one day at Wellington New Zealand before stopping at Tahiti for a day. Then we were to head for the Panama canal, and travel up the east coast of America to New York. The Ship had a full day there before setting across the Atlantic for Southampton.
Nine months later I planned to fly from London to New York where I would spend a few days with my sister before flying to Toronto, Chicago and San Francisco. Finally, a plane would take me to Hong Kong via Anchorage in Alaska, and Tokyo, Japan. From there I was to fly to Bangkok, and then take a train to Penang, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore before flying to Perth.
Kay and the Children would make their homeward trip by sea, down the west coast of Africa to Capetown - because the Suez canal was closed - and then across the Indian ocean to Fremantle. They were scheduled to arrive home shortly before my return.
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We had a smooth trip around the Great Australian Bight and across the Pacific Ocean, but the Ellinis did not keep to its scheduled time table: it often ran late into ports, or cut down sightseeing time for passengers. And so it was with the Panama canal. We were scheduled to go through it during the day, but we did not approach Balboa, near the city of Panama and the entrance to the canal, until after midnight. No one went to bed that night. We crowded on to a deck above the bridge as we slowly inched forward into the canal. Bright searchlights from the ship floodlit the way ahead. Soon we were passing jungle on either side; The air was heavy, warm and humid, filled with tropical fragrances. The cries of birds and the shrieks of wildlife in the jungle added to the excitement. It was utterly different from the Suez canal.
By morning we were still passing through the canal, entering one lock after another to negotiate the changes in level. Before entering a lock, the Ellinis halted while tow ropes were connected to locomotives, known as mules, on either side. They pulled us into the lock. The lock gates closed behind us and water was pumped in to raise the level to that on the other side. Slowly the ship rose. Finally the front lock gates opened, and we were pulled out of the lock. This procedure was of great interest to us all.
The Panama canal opened in 1914 after a long history of political conflict and engineering strife. In the mid-nineteenth century two canal routes were suggested: one at Panama, the other in Nicaragua. The building of the Panama railroad from 1849 to 1855, under enormous difficulties, gave that site a definite advantage over Nicaragua. De Lesseps of Suez canal fame2 became the leader of a French attempt to build the canal. After ten years of construction, the company collapsed due to bankruptcy, lack of planning, and disease. There had also been much discussion whether to build a sea-level canal, cutting deep ravines, or to use locks with a high-level design. After much negotiation between USA and France, and argument within the American Congress, the canal was built eventually by the United States of America. When completed, it was recognised as one of the greatest engineering achievements in the world.
In January 1958 we had passed through the Suez canal and from the hot, sunny conditions of the Red
3
Sea to cold, wintry conditions of the Mediterranean and the English Channel . Now, ten years later, as we left Christobal at 9E north of the Equator and headed for New York at 41E north, we experienced the same change. We left the warm tropics behind and entered what seemed like the depth of winter. The day before we reached New York, the decks were covered in snow; Fog descended as we entered the Hudson river. The ship's foghorn sounded mournfully and, unable to see anything of New York, we travelled very slowly, running further and further behind our schedule. It was Monday 3 March, four and a half weeks after we had set sail from Fremantle. I had written to Joan from Balboa telling of the ship's progressive delay. Now, the weather conditions delayed us even more, so that we would have but restricted time in New York.
The Ellinis had already taken immigration and customs officials on board. Passengers wanting to go ashore had been told the previous night that they must first check with them. We were up before six in the morning and soon found ourselves in a long queue, waiting to be processed. Judith felt ill and further delayed us. We did not disembark until 12.30 pm, feeling tired and very frustrated. We presumed that the shipping line paid for the immigration officials to process the passengers, and that they hired an insufficient number for the job. The queue had moved very slowly. We knew that Joan, and possibly her husband, Joe, would be waiting for us, but we worried about the long delay. I
2 see page 154 3 see page 155
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THE PANAMA CANAL BRIEF VISIT WITH MY SISTER JOAN AND HER FAMILY
was impatient and anxious to get ashore as I had not seen Joan since 1946, and now she had five
4
daughters .
I will let Joan take up the account as outlined in a letter she wrote to our mother on 5 March. She had rung the Chandris line and was told that the ship would berth at 6.00 am, but that passengers would not disembark until 8.00 am:
Joan wrote:
Unfortunately Joe had to be at work at 5.30 am that morning for a special job and could not take time off, so I knew that I would have to drive to meet them. Jennifer took time off work to give me some adult company, as I had never before driven into New York. Betty, Jane and Mary took the day off from school. All day Sunday it had rained and snowed, and a terrible snow storm was predicted to start Sunday night. I could not sleep from the worry. How was I going to get to the boat as, in the last snow storm, it had taken five or six hours to get to the tunnel under the Hudson river?
I was up at 4.30 am and got Joe off to work. By 6.00 am the snow was really coming down, but it was not too cold, so the roads were passable. We left home at 6.30 am and found the traffic moving. We reached the dock at 7.10 am. Longshoremen said that the boat was delayed. The snow and fog were so bad that we could only see a little way on to the Hudson river.
We had not eaten, so drove two piers down to get breakfast - only to see the Ellinis slowly approaching. Forgetting our breakfast, we rushed back and found ourselves in a shed without windows so we could not see the ship. An official barricade prevented us waiting near the place where the passengers were to disembark. The shed was freezing, and only a waiting room at the back was heated, but from there we could not see the passengers. So I stood with a few other people behind the barricade.
No passengers appeared until 10.30 am, and then they came in dribs and drabs. By midday, Jennifer was blue in the face from the cold, and Jane was weepy. Finally at
12.30 pm I saw them approaching. I recognised them immediately, and we all began shouting and waving.
Soon we were in Joan's car, heading for Lyndhurst and for her home. Judith and Peter got on very well with Joan's girls and we all expressed regret that we did not live near each other. One day was by no means long enough. We all wished that the Ellinis had two days in New York, because we could then have spent the night with Joan.
Fortunately, during the morning it had stopped snowing, and New York had a bright sunny day of 45EF. For lunch we had ham sandwiches, a pot of tea -unusual for America, but especially provided by Joan as an old Australian custom - and assorted "cookies". Naturally we talked without stop. We picked up Joe's mother and, on returning to the house, found that Suzanne and her husband Paul had arrived. Joe left work an hour early and was home by 4.00 pm. We had quite a gathering for supper with an ample spread: Judith and Peter particularly enjoyed the strawberry shortcake and ice-cream sundaes with strawberry sauce. We followed this with a brew of delicious coffee.
Our ship was due to sail at 9.00 pm, so we all left home at 6.30 pm and Joe gave us a rapid tour of central New York by car. We watched the ice-skating at the Rockefeller Centre and were impressed by the Empire State building, and with all the lights around Times Square. Back on board we gave them a tour of the ship and then sat talking in our cabin until it was time for them to go ashore.
4 Suzanne (21), Jennifer (17), Mary (14), Betty (11) and Jane (9)
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Our brief visit was far too short. No sooner had we arrived than we were gone. Fortunately, I was to fly back to New York on 21 October to spend ten days with Joan. Kay and the children had to wait several years before Joan and her family visited us in Australia, and it was not until 1993, when I had retired, that Kay and I made a two-month trip to America to see the entire family - but, by that time, Joe had died.
One day after we left New York I felt very sorry for the many passengers who had just boarded the ship. The weather was foul and we headed into an Atlantic storm. Increasingly, the ship rolled and pitched. Each time it went over a crest of a wave it plunged into the following trough with a great shudder. The screw came out of the water, and the engines raced. On the second night, the dining room had noticeably fewer people. Fortunately, all members of our family had their lea-legs, so we did not feel seasick. Water constantly sprayed the decks, but this did not stop Judith and Peter from rushing on to them to watch with excitement as the wind lashed the fiery sea, and plumes of wind-driven spray formed at the crest of each gigantic swell.
That evening we were to have dancing in the lounge. Earlier in the day the staff had cleared and polished the centre of the floor and rearranged the heavy chairs in rows on either side of the dance floor. During the afternoon, when the seas mounted, these chairs started to slide about as the ship heaved and wallowed. The crew placed heavy ropes between the pillars to prevent them sliding on to the dance floor.
We went to the first sitting of dinner and then joined others in the lounge, where we sat on the starboard, or right-hand side. Our regular compere attempted to play the organ on the stage. By eight in the evening the room was full; everyone felt slightly nervous, as our chairs slithered about. A small coffee table in front of the stage kept sliding back and forth, but our compere kept us happy by telling humorous stories.
‘It's a rough night, all right’ he said, ‘but you are really enjoying it, aren't you?’
Half-heartedly, but in good humour, we all agreed; Then, the ship heeled to the left, righted itself and then started heeling to the right. The coffee table slid to the right, but this time it kept sliding. Further and further the ship heeled over. All the chairs on our side slid across to the wall. The rope on the other side of the dance floor gave way, and the chairs on that side hurtled across to collided with us. Those who were standing lost their feet and were thrown across the room. I tried to prevent a row of side-ways-facing chairs in front of me from squashing the legs of the ladies sitting in them. My thighs became trapped.
Slowly the ship righted itself. Our compere had put his arms around a pillar and held on to it. Judith, who had been on her way from the cabin to find us, after being tossed about, lurched in to the room at this moment. Later, she said that it looked like a battle scene, with furniture, bodies, arms and legs all jumbled together. Everyone felt shocked by the experience and some people appeared injured. Slowly, the ship returned to its rough, but tolerable motion.
‘I see that some of you may be injured,’ announced the compere over the public address system. ‘Would all who are uninjured please return slowly to your cabins and remain there until further notice. Do not tend the injured. The crew will look after them.’
Kay and I counted ourselves among the uninjured, so rose to join the throng of those returning to their cabins. As we passed through the library, I suddenly fainted. I had not realised that when my thighs were squashed between the chairs, my right thigh muscle had been compressed and torn. Although the skin was unbroken, there was an indentation in the thigh -which was still slightly evident thirty years later. I recovered, and we groped our way to the cabin. Judith caught up with us
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WE ENCOUNTER AN ATLANTIC STORM AND REACH OUR DESTINATION
on the way and, fortunately, Peter was in the cabin, which was in a great mess. Everything on the dressing table had been thrown to the floor and the suitcases under our beds slid about constantly.
Soon, the captain made an announcement. He said that, as the seas were so high, we had been zigzagging our way through them. Our direct route would have placed us broadside to the waves. At the time of the incident, the ship was changing direction and an outsized seventy-five-foot wave had caught us broadside; we had heeled right over. Everyone, he said, was to remain in their cabins. The crew would visit all passengers to see if they needed attention. Ropes were being placed in all open spaces and, when we were allowed to move around, we should cling to these. We went to bed but could not sleep well as we were tossed from side to side in the bunks. Throughout the night there was the constant sound of breaking crockery. Every small group of cabins had a steward's pantry and it was this crockery that kept smashing.
Next morning, it was still very rough, but none of us felt ill, so we gingerly made our way to the dining room, clutching the ropes, and making our way down the stairs. The sensation on the stairs was peculiar: one moment we were running down the steps, the next moment, we could not move. Eventually we reached the almost-empty dining room. Our table was covered with a wet table cloth. This increased the friction so that plates would be more stable, but there was nothing on the table. Our steward lurched towards us and apologised that they could only cook hard-boiled eggs. He brought these to us in an aluminium bowl. Someone at our table held on to this, so that it would not fall off. Everyone held the table with one hand to prevent falling out of the chair, and, somehow, we ate our hard-boiled-egg breakfast. By that night, the storm had subsided but, when we reached Southampton, we noted that several people left the ship on stretchers. They had suffered spinal injury.
We had reached our destination and soon found ourselves on the boat train, headed for London.
II
Before leaving Perth, our Nedlands newsagent in Broadway had recommended Vandon House, off Buckingham Gate, near Buckingham Palace, as suitable London accommodation while house-hunting. When we arrived by taxi from the boat-train, we found that it was a small bed-and-breakfast guest house run by the Salvation Army, centrally located and ideal for our purpose. After a few days we rented a house about twenty-five miles northwest of London in an area of Buckinghamshire known as “The Chalfonts”.
Two small villages lie in the Chalfonts: The beautiful village of Chalfont St. Giles lies in the valley of the Misbourne river and consists of one long street and a green with a picturesque group of houses around a pond. Just behind is the church of St. Giles, the patron saint of cripples. It was to this village that poet John Milton retired at the age of fifty-seven with his third wife during the Great Plague in 1665. There, he finished Paradise Lost. His house, a plain, half-timbered cottage with his name inscribed over the door, is now a museum. Our own cottage, known as Leighton Cottage, was in the other village, Chalfont St. Peter, but three miles distant.
Fortunately, Leighton Cottage was not of the antiquity of Milton's cottage, but was a modern, although compact two-storey house, set in a street called Sandy Rise, on the edge of the village. We had a large garden in which the children played, and over which I laboured with the lawnmower while Kay tended the garden. On one side we looked out over farmers fields and could see cows grazing. It was a ten-minute bus ride to Gerrards Cross where we sometimes caught the train to London.
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Later, when we mentioned to our friends that we lived at Chalfont St. Peter, they responded: ‘Oh, so you live in the stockbroker-belt, do you?’ We had not realised that we were in an up-market area. We paid a rent that, by Australian standards, seemed reasonable, but which horrified our cousins in Hinckley. Admittedly, most houses in the area were much more grand than Leighton Cottage. Whenever Kay caught the train at Gerrards Cross to London after ten in the morning, well-dressed, bowler-hatted gentlemen with neat, furled umbrellas either disdainfully perused The Times, or engaged in office work while resting polished briefcases on their laps. They obviously disapproved of the constant chatter of Judith and Peter.
The weather was still cold when we arrived in London. Our blankets and other household goods were in Leps Store just off the Covent Garden market in Central London. We could not move into Leighton Cottage until we had our belongings. I discovered that it was very difficult to have them transported to Chalfont St. Peter. A clerk told me that first they must be moved to another store, then to yet another one in our area before being delivered to the house. He could not say on what day they might arrive.
I rang Leps store: ‘Can I hire a van, drive to your store and collect my belongings personally?’ This took them aback. No-one did this sort of thing - but, yes, I could collect them, but should come at lunch time. Otherwise, they said, I would never negotiate the congestion of all the vehicles arriving and leaving the markets.
I discovered a place to hire a van near St. Pancras station but, by the time I arrived there, all the small vehicles were gone. I found myself driving around central London in a van that had a large cavernous space with ribbed-metal flooring behind the front seats. Covent Garden market was in an area sandwiched between Kings Cross Road, Shaftesbury Avenue, Aldwich and the Strand. Somehow I found Leps store and loaded my goods. I then drove down the Strand, into the Mall, around Queen Victoria Memorial outside Buckingham Palace and so to Buckingham Gate and to Vandon House, where I picked up Kay, the children and our suitcases. The office staff of the small guest house came out to wave us goodbye, incredulous that we mad Australians should move our goods ourselves in such a large van. Soon we were driving up Park Lane, around the Marble Arch at Oxford Street and out along Edgeware road, heading towards Oxford and our new home. Judith and Peter found the journey very exciting as there were only two seats in front and they had to sit on the metal floor of the van amongst our goods. As we turned corners, they slithered about over the shiny metal surface.
Having unloaded our belongings at Leighton Cottage, Kay and the children stayed home to settle in, while I drove the van back to the depot by St. Pancras station, and then caught several connecting trains to return to Gerrards Cross, and finally a bus to Chalfont St. Peter. I felt very tired after the exercise but, at least, we had all our belongings delivered in the one day.
Two days later, leaving my family behind, I took the train to Bangor in North Wales. There, I attended a ten-day live-in course related to my academic interests. This was the first of several visits that I made to universities and to conferences on academic matters. At Bangor the fifty delegates lived in a university residential college and each evening gathered around the bar. At the end of the first week, on Friday night, I overheard one delegate, Don Watson, bemoaning the fact that he had to absent himself from lunchtime Saturday until Monday morning as he had advertised his Hillman Estate car for sale and had to return home. He had bought a larger car to suit his growing family. He
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CHALFONT ST. PETER WE BUY A CAR ALISTAIR MACFARLANE
extolled the virtues of the old car. ‘I will be very sorry to lose it,’ he said, ‘it is such a reliable vehicle.’ Someone asked what he wanted for it, and he said £150.
That night in bed, I started thinking. I had not intended buying a car but, living in Chalfont St. Peter, it would be most convenient to have one. Don had no idea that anyone present might be a potential buyer, so his comments about its reliability were probably genuine. At the Saturday morning-tea break, I spoke to him, and he took me for a test drive. Immediately, I bought the car. Don lived in Sutton Coldfield near Birmingham and said that when the conference ended I could drive home with him and stay the night at his house before continuing next day to Chalfont St. Peter. His next door neighbour was an insurance man, and he could arrange insurance for me - as in England, insurance followed the driver, not the vehicle. I rang Kay from his home and told her what I had done. It was an excellent decision to purchase the car as later I took it on to the Continent on a camping tour and it served us well. In Britain it gave us much more flexibility of movement.
III
Activities such as the conference at Bangor were but one part of my academic interests. Soon after my arrival in Britain I visited Queen Mary College, where Professor Humphrey Davies placed a room at my disposal. However, there was still no one in the College working in my academic area, so my visits were rare and mainly social. Arthur Ellison was still there but was soon to take up a chair at Northampton Polytechnic, which had become City University. I visited the Electrical Engineering Departments at Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, and Loughborough and attended several other conferences including one on computer-aided design at Southampton. My general pattern was to visit a university for a few days, talk to people, collect ideas and then return to work quietly in the comfort of my home.
The conference at Southampton started on Monday 14 April and did not prove very satisfactory. There were 750 delegates and hundreds of papers, presented at ten-minute intervals. No one could present a technical paper and hold a worthwhile discussion in ten minutes. The only purpose was to provide opportunity for people, already working in the field, to meet and talk with colleagues outside the formal sessions, and to have their papers printed in the proceedings of the conference.
5
For me, the highlight was to meet my old friend Alistair Macfarlane , who arrived midday Thursday to chair a session on Friday morning. He was now at UMIST - the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. We talked all afternoon and until ten in the evening. He was a man with a thousand bright ideas, and had become a single-minded specialist. When I had known him at Queen Mary College, ten years earlier, he was already a very intense young man. Speaking of this, he said: ‘Over the years, by concentrating on my work, I have made myself a craftsman, like a concert pianist, in the area of theoretical dynamics. Just as the concert pianist achieves his mastery by hours of patient practice, day in and day out, slowly honing and perfecting his skills, so, too, have I worked at my craft.’
Alistair was by now a world authority in his field and was later appointed Professor of Control Engineering at Cambridge. I could not help but compare him with the outlook of Arthur Ellison, with whom I had also had a long talk. Alistair was the myopic expert, Arthur, the generalist educator. The world needed both.
5 See page 180
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Arthur Ellison6 saw the burgeoning number of students entering tertiary education in Britain as a mixed blessing. ‘The problem for many,’ he said, ‘is motivation. We find it increasingly difficult to get students to undertake real thinking. An ever greater proportion are not sufficiently motivated. In the past it was often necessary to work hard - and under some hardship - to obtain a degree, but today this is not so. Many students coming to us have always had things handed to them on a plate. They were the bright boys in their school, but once they come to university, they discover that they are no longer the bright boys. For some, there is a rude awakening when they take their first exams, and this may provide motivation. But surely, this is the wrong kind of motivation.’
‘There are always a few who are well motivated,’ Arthur continued, ‘and the really bright ones such as those who go to Oxford or Cambridge - will always succeed in spite of their courses, good, bad or indifferent, because they are strongly motivated. Unfortunately, we only have a few of these at QMC.’
Arthur and I agreed that it was a facet of human nature that people ranged from a small number who were self-motivated and self-activating to the majority who were driven by externals, such as fear, hunger, greed, or the desire to feel important.
‘The trouble,’ mused Arthur, ‘is that, as we draw more and more of the population into the university, the proportion of self-motivated people drops. And the university is not blameless when it fails to tackle the real problems.
‘If, at the university, you can make a man self-running, then you have achieved something enormous. How much of this endeavour should be part of a university education? I think it should be a basic objective. The whole point of an undergraduate course is to turn out people who are both workers and thinkers, who go ahead under their own steam. But only a few experienced and concerned university lecturers realise this. The university does not emphasise it.
‘A really good teacher can stimulate and inspire his students, setting them on the path of self-motivation. Many of our teachers, however, do no more than read a few text books, write and then deliver notes in a monotone -and that's that! They have little personal concern for the student or for true education. Conscientious teachers know this, and try to improve. The students see the attitude of many lecturers for what it is, and become disillusioned.’
I discovered that Arthur's thinking was along my own lines. He thought that, during his university years, the student should have time to talk about religion, philosophy, politics, sex and all the broader issues of life.
‘In the University of London,’ he said, ‘it is sad that most students have little opportunity for this. Many live far away and spend much time commuting. Fewer than 10 percent live in Halls, where this wider education would be possible. The University, for most, is a nine-to-five affair.’
I intervened, ‘But what about the student unrest that is spreading around the world? Surely this is a measure of the wider concern of many?’
‘It is not that simple,’ Arthur replied, ‘There are many motivations for the unrest. A few of the stupid ones want to destroy society; others are doing it because they feel inadequate: their actions make them feel important, and provide them with a good excuse for failing their exams. But there are also some quite genuine local concerns. Look at the current trouble at the London School of Economics. Some of the trouble is that many students never see their professors. They neglect them and are too busy doing things elsewhere. The students have a genuine gripe, but many problems
6 See page 183
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could be overcome without the extent of the unrest that has occurred. Some universities have overreacted. There is a gulf between students and academic authorities and these authorities should realise that the students of today are much more mature than they once were. They should draw the students into participation and consultation. Good, genuine communication should be the start.
‘There is also a more general problem. I find that among young students in this country today there is a sense of futility. No longer are young people being brought up with a religious background - with a belief that all life is a preparation for heaven. They regard this as old-fashioned, superstitious nonsense -but they have nothing to replace it. The young person has nothing to live for, no star to hitch his wagon to - and so they thrive on new experiences. Whenever I give a lecture on psychical research, students are very enthusiastic and want to go on talking all night about it.
‘We need to break down materialism. Of course, we cannot be dogmatic about uncertainties, but we can be dogmatic in asserting that narrow materialism is inadequate for the human spirit.’
This discussion with Arthur was the first of many I had with other people about education and about the student unrest that seemed to be gaining strength in the world, and which I did not fully understand. I decided not to make final judgment until I had spoken with educators both in Britain and in the United State of America.
IV
Kay and I were concerned with another aspect of education - that of our two children, Judith and Peter. If we were to spend a year outside Australia, we wanted our children to gain as much from the experience as possible. There was much more to education than just a knowledge of the three R's. I was conscious that I had entered the university at too young an age. Being only sixteen, although intellectually able, I was too immature socially at the time to gain much from the experience. I felt that the children would benefit from having a year without school - a year of experiencing other things, a year of growing, so that they would gain more from their education when they returned home. We discussed this openly with them.
7
Many years later, Peter wrote :
My parents gave my sister and me the choice of either going to school in England, or having a year without school. We jumped at the chance of a year off! When I returned to Australia I was a year behind my former classmates but soon made a new set of friends. I believe that taking a year off school was beneficial to my education: I found that many subjects now seemed much easier.
Our daughter had similar feelings and added8
7
The Rumble Family Register, John Fall, 1994, page 598 8 Op Cit. page 596
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Spending a year in England instead of going to school, in the year that I turned fourteen, was like a wild dream come true.
We discussed the idea with both the Headmaster of Wesley College and with the Headmistress of Penrhos College. While the Headmaster approved, the Headmistress shook her head and said to Judith, “Your brain will atrophy during the year.” How wrong she was!
Once we had settled down in Britain, we went about introducing our children to aspects of history. Typical was our visit to the Grand Union Canal, which passed not far from Chalfont St. Peter. We drove over to it and walked along the tow path and examined the locks. Through this, we could make history interesting in a casual way. This old canal, we said, had been built in 1805 and was part of a great network for transporting goods before the railways took over. When did the railways appear on the scene? Well, that was after 1830. The great Stockton to Darlington railway opened in 1825, although James Watt's steam engine was in use by 1776.
And what has happened to the canals today? They are now used by pleasure boats. This century, even the railways have to some extent been displaced by road haulage, but you can still see barges carrying goods plying the Thames in London. All these developments were part of the industrial revolution, which started in England. . .
One day we took a twenty-minute drive to Windsor castle; there, history surrounded us. Another day we went to nearby St. Albans and searched out the Roman remains. This introduced us to the Roman Empire and its extension into Britain. It was Kay who took over much of the children's active education while I was away visiting universities. She took them to the Tate and National Galleries and to Trafalgar Square. Peter wanted to return several times to the Kensington Science museum, where he could both see and operate working models. He so enjoyed the Planetarium that he borrowed a book on the subject from the local library.
Judith was fascinated by the Victoria and Albert museum, while everyone remembered their visit to Madame Tussaud's waxworks, founded in 1854. Judith had always had a fascination for dolls, owning thirty-three at one stage. Soon after making these visits she started writing a book on how to make a doll's house. Perhaps the doll's house at Windsor Castle inspired her. In her adult years, this interest developed to the subject of making miniatures and, at one time, she formed and then edited the first miniatures magazine in Australia. Looking back at her time in Chalfont St. Peter she recalled that this was also the period when her interests widened and she was forever borrowing books from the local library on all manner of subjects. It may also have been a time when my children sometimes perceived me as too much of a schoolmaster. Judith developed two cryptic sayings: one was "DLA" - Daddy Lectures Again; the other was "DMA" - Daddy Moralises Again.
Not only were the children stimulated by their year in Britain but I, too, learnt much by listening to many excellent programs on BBC radio. I had a small reel-to-reel magnetic tape recorder and
9
recorded many of these programs . A highlight of the year was to watch television on 21 July when Neil Armstrong, commander of Apollo 11, was the first man to land on the moon. We heard him pronounce the famous words: “That's one small step for man, one giant step for mankind.” There was an air of great excitement. The Daily Telegraph reproduced large pictures of the event, and of the earth rising above the moon. I cut these out and pasted them into a scrapbook, otherwise filled with political comments and stories of student protest.
9 These programs covered such topics as: The rich and poor in India, Vietnam, the value of constitutions, The great powers and the Middle East, Studies in leadership, Computers and Society, Drugs, The work of Sigmund Freud; Civilization and the Student Revolt, Crime and punishment: Are we too humane?, Reincarnation, Adolescence: learning to live and Falling in love, Do "pop prohets" have a message?, The generation gap, Morals and Medicine. . .
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Two doors from us in Chalfont St. Peter lived the Bence family. Our children made friends with theirs. Peter had already developed an interest in electronics and had discovered that people often threw out old television sets and radios on local dumps. He and Graeme Bence regularly cycled to explore these and usually returned home to implore me to drive them to a particular dump where they had made a magnificent find. We allowed Peter to use a downstairs conservatory as a place for electronic experiments. Following his birthday in July he had a soldering iron, pliers, screwdrivers, a multimeter and a small amplifier with which he experimented.
Perhaps it was a case of “like father, like son” because I had developed an interest in electronics at an early age and followed this into a career, and Peter did the same.
Sometimes the Bence children had school outings and our children were invited along as Mrs Bence was a teacher at the school. Thus, they went to the Royal Tournament at Wembley. But perhaps the greatest educational value for them came from our six-week tour of Europe.
V
It was our cousins, Cynthia and Alan Ward, who implanted in our minds the idea of buying a tent and of camping in Europe. They were dedicated members of the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides movement10 and called on us on their way home from a camping holiday in the New Forest. They set up their tent in our back garden and soon inspired us to go searching for a tent of our own. We realised that we could load this on top of a roof-rack on our car and have a carefree holiday in France, Germany, Austria, Italy and Switzerland. We visited a camping exhibition in Richmond Park in London and found erected over one hundred tents. We wandered from tent to tent, finally choosing a large framed model made in Leipzig, East Germany.
The salesman warned us: ‘Whatever you do, make certain you try out the tent in your garden before starting on your holiday. And don't come back tomorrow and say that you can't follow the instructions! Take your time over it.’ His warning was justified as the frame comprised many interlocking metal tubes, all supposedly colour-coded to help in fitting them together. The English translation of the German instructions left much to be desired but, at length, our new tent stood in our garden. It took over an hour to erect. We described it as our “three-bedroom tent with lounge-dining room and kitchen.”
Window
)))))))))))))0)))Y44444444Z)))))))))))))))), Kitchen [ +)))))))))))))),* LOUNGE * Bedroom 1 ** 4.25 m wide Entrance \ /))))))))))))))1*
| +)) | )))) | * Bedroom 2 | * * | 5.8 m long | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| [ | /))))))))))))))1 * | ||||
| Window 5 | Dining Room | * Bedroom 3 | * * | ||
| \ | .))))))))))))))* | ||||
.)))Y44444Z))))))))Y444444Z)))))))))))))))))-
Window Window Tent Plan
5
10 see page 168
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OUR EUROPEAN CAMPING HOLIDAY
THE ROUTE FOR OUR EUROPEAN CAMPING HOLIDAY
Our route took us to Koblenz and then down to Kirchzarten in the Black Forest. There we dallied for a few day, walking in the forest and soaking up the atmosphere. We did what most tourists do: we bought a cuckoo clock, which we gave to Judith for her birthday. Then we moved on to Innsbruck and to Dobbiaco in Northern Italy. We enjoyed beautiful weather and camped beneath the pine trees beside a fast flowing mountain stream. Next, we headed for a German caravan park on the Adriatic sea, near Venice. This was our half-way point, and we spent one week there.
The Bence's had impressed on us that we must visit this campsite as it was, they said, like no other. The German NSU motor company had set up the camp initially as a holiday resort for its employees. Now it was open to anyone - and it catered for 10,000 campers. It had 4 km of private beach, several restaurants, a supermarket and three churches. There was a section for campers, a section for caravans and an area with on-site chalets. It even had a high-rise hotel where aged parents could stay while their children and grandchildren “roughed” it in the camping area. It was highly organised in efficient, German fashion. Our passports were taken from us until we departed. The camp was surrounded by floodlit, barbed-wire-topped perimeter fencing. No cars were allowed inside during the two-hour siesta each afternoon. Each campsite had its own raised and grassed plot with a tree on each of the four corners. At five in the afternoon, a truck came around spraying insecticide to control mosquitos.
At first sight, it seemed like a concentration camp, but it was very well run and was ideal for a restful week. Each day we sat at our camp table under the blue, mid-day sky consuming a beautiful loaf of Italian bread with cheese, washed down with a two-litre flagon of red wine while we reminisced about our experiences: our bivouac in the Ardennes; driving along the banks of the Rhine; travelling south on the autobahn to escape the rain and reach sunnier conditions; watching wood-carvers at work in the villages of the Black Forest; skirting around the Bodensee; coaxing our old car over the Arlberg and then the Gross Glockner passes to reach the Italian Alps. We talked about the beautiful carved chess set we had seen in Dobbiaco. Should we have bought it even though we could not afford it?
During the week we motored to a ferry and crossed to Venice. We had seen photographs of St. Mark's Square but, to be standing in it, watching the hundreds of pigeons that had made the square their home, and gazing at the famous old church magically transported us to another world. We lent over bridges that crossed the canals and watched the gondolas lazily ply their way back and forth. All too soon our week was over and we broke camp to head back towards home. Six weeks did not allow us to drive down into Italy to see Rome. We skirted Florence and Milan, but had discovered that Judith, and particularly Peter, were not really interested in looking at sculptures and art treasures, so we concenrated on seeing the natural countryside.
Soon we were climbing into the snow-clad Swiss Alps and were delighted that our car managed to chug its way slowly over all the passes. We camped at Interlaken and took a train to the top of the Jung Frau, which the children greatly enjoyed: changing to a rack and pinion railway; stopping at an ice-station at the top; finding it hard to breath due to the lack of oxygen. We trudged around the snow at the peak and took photos of us standing beside the Swiss Flag pole.
Next, we were on our way to Berne, where we saw the famous bear pit - and then to Dijon, finally camping on the banks of the Seine outside Paris. We visited the Palace of Versailles, walked around the Arc-de-Triumph, sauntered past famous street cafes and admired the Eiffel tower. Finally, we
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travelled to Le Touquet on the coast just south of Calais. We camped there for two nights and completed a major cleaning of all our gear before crossing the Channel to Dover.
Our time in England was almost over. Soon I was to fly to New York, while Kay and the children were to catch the Ellinis at Southampton for a trip back to Fremantle via Capetown. However, one other item requires recounting: My visits to many university residences.
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VI
In Britain I spoke to almost seventy people - ranging from university registrars to wardens of halls, student union representatives and ordinary students themselves at various universities in my quest to understand British student residences - particularly the relatively new phenonemon of “mixed” or “coeducational” student housing. It was a quest that I continued in the United States of America and Canada.
At Loughborough University I discussed mixed residences with Rev. Perkins, the Anglican chaplain and sub-warden of Telford Hall.
‘The real problem is the fear of public opinion regarding sex,’ he said. ‘Of course, mostly, that word is not mentioned, but we continue to debate whether women should be housed in blocks separate from men. It is the same thing when we discuss “the twelve o'clock” rule - which says that our students in residence must not have visitors in their rooms after midnight. Our Vice-Chancellor does not wish to be drawn into making a public statement on these matters because there is a section of the public concerned with “the laxity of sexual behaviour among the young”. He feels it better to leave the matter in a state of ambiguity. It is the same with the wardens in our halls of residence. They will not make moral judgments. They will not publicly say whether it is right or wrong to have sexual relations in the Hall: so they fall back on the twelve o'clock rule, or the separation of the sexes in different blocks.
‘Of course, since the Second World War the sexual mores of society, and the basis of morals have changed so greatly that wardens are often confused personally as to what is right and wrong. We are also in an increasingly permissive society: our students react very strongly to anything that smacks of paternalism. Moralising to them would certainly be seen as paternalistic.’
The Sub-Warden was warming to his pet subject. ‘Formal dining in Hall when there is no real sense of occasion fails - and its imposition is again seen as paternalistic. However, it is easy to get students involved in informal discussion, particularly when it's over a beer or two. I sometimes throw in three words: illegal, immoral and sinful and ask the students to separate them in meaning. This always leads to a lively and useful discussion.. . . but to return to the permissive society . . . The parents of our students would often wish to be more strict than the permissive society suggests and we who are in charge of the halls are in some respects in loco parentis. We are caught by this. Parents expect us to be conventional and morally strict on their behalf but, if we are, our students see us as paternalistic, and genuine communication breaks down. To be useful guides to our students as they establish themselves in life, we must be in genuine and realistic contact with them.
‘The age of majority in this country is still twenty-one, but it is very likely that soon it will drop to eighteen. Then we will be in locus parentis no longer. Even now, most of the wardens feel that the private behaviour of students is not their concern. Nonetheless pregnancies still occur.’
I agreed with Perkins that there was confusion between individual and social morality. He continued:
‘Without knowing all the facts it is just not possible to judge right and wrong for an individual. It is not easy to condemn pre-marital intercourse in every case because it depends both on the circumstances and on the motives involved. It is even difficult to separate on moral grounds pre-marital intercourse between two lovers intending to marry, and promiscuous behaviour between two persons neither of whom is deeply involved. Also, there is a noticeable change in sexual impulse in many students as they become older. A first-year student may experience very strong physical, sexual impulses, not related in any way to emotional needs. This may express itself by a call for “free love”
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- often in the most outragious terms. That same student, two years later, may have made a dramatic change in outlook. He may now have strong emotional needs, and his physical impulses may have become linked to these. Now he may claim that intercourse is wrong unless it is an expression of emotional love. Individual sexual morality is based on the principle of protecting other people's interests; of not exploiting one's partner. No one can judge this, although experience of the world shows that often people do get hurt even though there is no intention of it. Experience tells us that some caution is required.
‘The young are idealists; they often discount the possibility of pregnancy and the effect it will have on their academic work and psychological state. They ignore the stress caused to parents and the problem of the unborn child. They don't think of the morals of abortion, the desirability of adoption, or the rights of an illegitimate child. They don't think of the possibility of being forced into an unsuitable marriage solely because of the pregnancy.
‘They argue that all this won't happen and say that with modern contraceptives the chance of pregnancy is slight. But really effective contraceptives are not that available, and even if available, are not often used. Emotion being what it is, one does not often plan for intercourse, and many young people risk it without contraceptives. These are facts, often overlooked by the young, but they are sufficient to form a social attitude that recognises that sexual intercourse, although not necessarily right or wrong for individuals, has sufficient potential social harm to suggest caution. I think that this justifies some official restraint: but wardens do not wish to make such statements publicly.’
The Sub-warden of Telford Hall had obviously presented his argument for caution on previous occasions, but he did articulate what lay behind the attitude of most of those concerned with the welfare of young students.
This concern for the relationship between the student and university authorities and the upholding of social standards in an increasingly permissive society was something I was to hear discussed at almost all universities I visited. In early July I attended a national conference of wardens of residences held at the University of Newcastle and a major session focussed on sexual behaviour and hall rules, and on the debate between single-sex and mixed residences. Increasingly, students were objecting to restraints on their private behaviour and wanted the right to entertain members of either sex at any time in their rooms. More and more students wanted mixed residences.
Society was in a state of flux, and I found that the attitude of college heads ranged from the strictly authoritarian to the widely permissive. When I met six wardens of male residences at Manchester, they grudgingly conceded that mixed residences might have some advantages, but there was much to be said against them. Much male conversation, they said, was of no interest to women. If groups were mixed, the quality of discussion would decrease. One warden said, ‘Look, if a girl has been out with her boyfriend the night before, she does not necessarily want to see him at the breakfast table. What if there has been a breakup in the relationship and they can't get away from one another because they live in the same place?’ Another warden expanded: ‘Girls don't always want boys around when their hair is in curlers.’ None of these men had ever experienced a mixed residence.
Those with wide experience of both types of residence suggested that a mixed residence was more relaxed and natural. ‘A women's residence is much more difficult and is often more tense than a men's residence,’ suggested one woman warden. ‘Well, my college’ proffered one man, ‘moved from an all-male to a mixed residence and I would never go back to the old style. In the old days I often had outbursts of hooliganism: playing with fire hoses and hydrants - this just does not happen now that we have men and women.’ I could sympathise with this.
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VISITS TO UNIVERSITY RESIDENCES MIXED RESIDENCES: CONDONING SEX?
All seemed to agree that social intercourse was simpler in a mixed residence. In single-sex residences social relations with the opposite sex were centred on dating. Men often saw women as sex objects. In the mixed residence, men and women saw each other in a more natural setting, and this was good. It was common for mixed groups to go out together, not exclusively on a one-to-one basis. This rarely occurred in single-sex residences.
‘Those in authority, without experience, fear the outcome of sexual behaviour in a mixed residence. They are afraid for the reputation of their hall or institution. But you don't need to keep a close guard on your community or try to impose unworkable rules,’ said one experienced college head. ‘These communities are reasonably self regulating. In any community there are always some who will be promiscuous; mixed living does not change that. Those that want to fornicate will do so whether they live in a mixed residence, a single-sex residence or in the larger community. But there are very few that play the field. In my experience it is much more likely that a steady relationship will develop an emotional bond that often leads to marriage. I do not believe that I should ever stand in moral judgment if a sexual relation develops.
‘But there is such a thing as public opinion -and it is the ratepayers that support the University. If they feel that young people should not sleep together, then their opinion must be considered. That is why we have a twelve o'clock rule. Officially we say that our students must not cohabit. This satisfies the general public. The fact that we do not pry into people's behaviour and do not strictly enforce the rule is simply our way of dealing with reality. It may seem hypocritical - and the young would tell us that it is - but we have to satisfy the general hypocritical community, while being realistic about the needs of our young people.’
Across the Atlantic, I later heard the same story, of which the following two examples were typical. The first was a conversation I had with two College Wardens at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. The second took place on the campus of Stanford University in California.
My visits to Trent University and to the Santa Cruz Campus of the University of California were unique experiences, since both were based on the collegiate principle: teaching and residence were combined around sets of colleges, each housing both academic and residential facilities. Both were new, and both retained the enthusiasm of their youth. At Trent I discussed mixed residences with Professor Ian Chapman, Master of Peter Robinson College, and with Paul Wilson, a don at Lady Eaton Hall.
‘We started as an all-male residence but then changed to a mixed one,’ said Chapman, ‘I have also experienced a women's college, so have gained much experience. Women's residences are prone to neurotic outbreaks; I found them very often fragile with strong undercurrents and cliques. The all-male residence is prone to raucous tom-foolery but, as one man once said to me: “I am a farmer, and cows are much quieter when they have a bull amongst them.” The same applies for human beings.
‘All my colleagues relate a similar experience: when young men and women live in relationship with one another it settles the women down, and the boys are less raucous. The groups are good for one another. On the practical side, women often feel the need for some protection at night. They feel safer if men of the college are on the ground floor. Some authorities want to impose rigid rules since they fear sexual involvement among the students. But rigid rules cause tension and are not worth having because they are unworkable. In my experience men, by and large, are scared of girls; most girls have been brought up in homes with reasonably puritanical parents and they do not lightly lose their virginity. In practice, the pregnancy rate does not go up in a mixed residence without rules, and boys generally react strongly against a promiscuous girl.’
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Paul Wilson was the Athletics Director at Trent, and backed Chapman's views. ‘There is much unnecessary publicity given to, and fear about sex in college,’ he said, ‘but attitudes are changing. It is now generally accepted that if there is a close relationship between two young people, then a sexual relationship between them may be the logical expression of it; if the young people take proper precautions, then it is at least more honest than what went on in the past. Most people in the colleges here accept this and most times the University Health Service, or some local doctor, will prescribe the pill. Many of our students sleep together.
‘But the genuine relationship between two young people is the simple case, and it's not always that simple. The two basic rules in a relationship are: don't act to cause damage to another; and don't act to cause damage to oneself. There may be no damage done by two loving couples, just as there may be no damage when one promiscuous person has sex with another promiscuous person - although we may argue that such people are lacking in personal development.
‘There are, however, two cases where we must be concerned. There is the case of the serious girl, grown up in a puritanical family, who loves a boy and wants to have sexual intercourse with him, but her upbringing says she shouldn't. It is here that the gulf between the generations is revealed, and which quickly grows wider and wider. One girl came to me and said that she saw nothing wrong with it, except the parental injunction. I said, “Why don't you discuss it with your parents?” She told me that she had tried but that, when she raised the matter, they replied: “Yes, some sleep with their boyfriends, but this can't possibly be a problem here, because our daughter would never sleep with a boy before marriage.” In this one step, the gulf with parents increased enormously. The other problem occurs when one partner - usually the girl, in my experience -is serious with a boy, while the boy is promiscuous and only wants sex. He deceives the girl and, eventually, she is damaged. This is a serious problem, and is one that worries me constantly because I have no solution. The only protection we can provide is to encourage our tutors and mature members to get to know the girls well, so that they have their ear to the ground and become aware when something is up. Then they can talk to the people involved, or get some senior girls to lend a hand. I find that groups will often work together to protect a girl from a promiscuous male.’
Stanford University in California was a very different place to Trent. When I first saw the campus it reminded me of my own University in Perth. It had the same sandstone buildings, the same Mediterranean roof tiles, and was set in a place with familiar vegetation and climate. However, it was altogether larger than the University of Western Australia. When I arrived, coeducational residences were in their third year. Sally Mahoney, who had much experience, discussed the changes that had taken place at the University:
‘Our coed experience started from our overseas campuses which, because they were small, were forced to be coed. These were eminently successful and there were pressures from staff returning from overseas to establish coed on the main campus.’
‘When I look back, say, to 1963, I realise just how segregated was our community. Men were housed on one side of the campus, the women on the other. All freshmen were housed separately by themselves. This had terrible consequences: Our freshmen were in limbo, out of contact with the University; men and women tended to behave in stereotype roles. There were annual raids and water-fights. There were "panty raids" in which the men's halls raided the women's halls, pulled the women out of their rooms and put them under the showers. All this had sexual undertones and showed that the men were immature and just did not know how to relate to women. Most of the relationships were dating relationships...’
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MIXED RESIDENCES IN BRITAIN, CANADA AND IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Sally outlined the story of lack of genuine relationship and its consequences in terms that I had heard many times before. In men's dorms, the talk was of how many girls you had slept with, and there were pressures to conform. Sally continued:
‘Women's dormitories had many security problems in those days. We had peeping toms, while exhibitionists lurked in the trees and bushes on campus. Now, with coeducation, for the first time we have the opportunity for the boy and girl to see each other as people with common interests. The girl as a dating object is much more rare. When we established five coed houses, the Stanford Observer came round looking for stories of licence and sex. Our students gave them short shrift.
‘Along with the move to coed on campus, there has been a change in young people's mores. Relationships are more honest and lack the hypocracy of the older generation who preached one thing and practised another. However, here at Stanford there is tremendous student group pressure against promiscuity in all its forms, and also against casual sexual relations.
‘Of course there are sometimes sex problems in coed halls, but so there were before in segregated halls. If anything, the sex problem in a coed hall is easier to deal with. Five years ago, there was so much pressure on a girl that she could not refuse a date. Now she can. Mixed groups often have a simple night out together without sexual undertones. The raids have stopped. Now the boys and girls will turn up to a social function independently without the need to match up. I think it important for a coed hall to have a kitchenette and a stove. Even some men cook, and it is common to bake birthday cakes. We still have a few immature freshmen who arrive expecting a party atmosphere and don't find it. Sometimes they indulge in pranks “because there's nothing exciting here.” It takes a while for them to adjust, but today we have fourteen coed houses and most Stanford students are too able, too earnest, and too busy to be frivolous.’
By the time I left America I felt well qualified to meet the challenge to coeducation that we might experience in Perth, and I had much material to digest about the general running of a college in both financial, organisational and social terms. Just as I had explored coeducation in considerable depth, so, too, had I explored all other aspects of running a college in the same depth.
One conclusion I had reached was that we should never allow Currie Hall to expand to the original projected student population of four-hundred. Five identical four-storey blocks each housing eighty students, all dining communally in the one dining hall, would be disastrous. Again and again it had been stressed that quality of communal life depended on it being a community - a community where everyone could recognise everyone else. A community where it was possible to know everyone. Rules and formulas did not work. Only by establishing strong, informal, personal relations between the younger and older members of the community could a positive atmosphere with positive outcomes be produced. I had been to Owens Park, a residential complex at Manchester University in England that housed over one thousand students of whom 25% were women. There were three cafetaria-style refectories where everyone had meals.
I spoke to Professor Welland, the chairman of tutors at the park. He said: ‘The place is too big and too diffuse to provide any measure of community. People just do not know each other. We have a house structure, but it to too weak to be effective. Because people can be anonymous there is a great lack of consideration for others. The whole place is very noisy, and this is made worse by a quadrangle construction. Some people just cannot make friends. There is a Saturday night dance, commonly referred to as “the cattle market”. Maybe the life-style suits very gregarious people who can make friends easily, but it is very bad for introverts or lonely people. Never do the residents have a proper meal. They always stand in queues. Now that we have a thousand residents, many say that it would be no worse if we had fifteen-hundred or two-thousand.’
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VII
It was a foggy day in London on 21st October and, as we drove to Heathrow airport for my flight to New York, I felt unhappy to be leaving Kay and the children behind. It was to be eleven weeks and two days before I would see them again but my intended itinerary was too packed with business activities for it to be a holiday, so it was sensible to make the trip alone.
My plan was to visit almost twenty universities and to spend time looking at both their student residences and electrical engineering departments. Sandwiched between these visits I wanted to renew my acquaintance with a few old friends.
The plane arrived at Kennedy airport at 3.10 pm after a seven-and-a-half hour flight. Joan and her second daughter Jennifer met me and then struggled through one-and-a-half hours of heavy traffic to reach 404 Page Avenue in Lyndhurst - a suburb about eight miles from Central New York. Although I had met Joan for half a day in March11 there had been little opportunity to talk in depth. Essentially, I had not seen her for twenty-three years and, before that, we had never been close. It was to take until the end of 1988, when Mother died, before I really grew to know her through the exchange of monthly letters.
Next day, when her husband Joe went to work at 7.00 am, Joan and I were already sitting on the couch, talking. When he returned at the end of the day we were still sitting on the couch, and still talking. We had much of the past to rediscover. Joan had had a difficult life. Leaving a sheltered and conservative background at the age of twenty12 she had travelled to America to marry Joe, who had a very different background to her own. Joe's parents accepted his Australian bride very reluctantly and yet, until they established themselves, the young married couple had to live with them. Fitting into this situation and raising five daughters could not have been easy13.
I stayed with Joan and Joe until the end of the month, enjoying visits to her earlier homes, going ten-pin bowling with Joe, marvelling at the size of Macey's store, and ascending to the top of the 108 storey Empire State building. I met her friends, and came to know something of her way of life. I watched a local Halloween Parade with the school band leading the way, and on 31 October, with the two youngest girls, Betty and Jane, went on a "trick or treat" venture.
11 See page 348-9
12 See page 96
13
See The Rumble Family Register, John Fall, 1994 pages 486 - 497
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I VISIT MY SISTER AND START MY TOUR OF AMERICA, CANADA & SOUTH-EAST ASIA
Halloween was not a tradition in Australia and I enjoyed seeing the lit-up, hollowed out pumpkins sitting in the front windows of all the houses. It confirmed for me that the Americans enjoy celebrations and pageantry in a way not found in Australia.
VIII
While staying with Joan, I twice visited New York University at University Heights in the Bronx, which catered predominantly for the Jewish community. I enjoyed finding my way around the New York subway that eventually emerged as an overhead railway where I could look down on the streets and congested housing below. Engineering deans, Emanuel Salma and Irwin Wladaver, met me and discussed the direction that engineering was taking in the States.
‘Once, an engineer was a man with his head in the air and his feet on the ground,’ said Salma. ‘Now he is a man with his head in the air, his feet in the air, and his arse on the ground.’ He was complaining about engineering education becoming ever more abstract with a strong scientific base. He felt there was a need to move back so faculty at least had their feet on the ground. ‘We insist that most of our staff engage in consulting work. This helps them remain in contact with practical reality,’ he continued.
‘Few of our engineering faculty members favour the enforced inclusion of humanities in our course,’ added Wladaver. ‘But, then, most of them are narrow specialists. The accrediting authorities demand it and it is obviously intended to broaden the students' outlook. Almost any course will do provided it captures their interest. We offer courses in the history of Western Civilisation, in Western Literature and in Psychology. ’
Later in the day I met Hans Hopf, the Director of Student Activities, and with others connected with student halls of residence. They talked about the social pressures impinging on American Education.
‘In this country there is tremendous prestige in gaining a college degree; for many jobs, a degree is mandatory. Often employers don't care what kind of degree you've got, provided it is a college degree. The problem with this,’ said Hans, ‘is that if everyone must have a degree, then we degenerate the meaning of the word. It is just not possible for everyone to gain an intellectually demanding degree, so many colleges make very small demands. This does not mean that there are not colleges with good degrees, but it does mean that they run the full gamut from the good colleges to those that guarantee a degree provided you can pay their fees. We all accept this as inevitable. However, within the middle-class area, “Liberal Arts” is now a dirty word because who wants an education that does not have a job payoff at the end?’
Joseph Marvel, the Assistance Director of Student Activities took over: ‘This pressure to gain degrees is felt in our high-schools. It is taken for granted that everyone must graduate from high-school. So, everyone must pass his grade and not flunk out on a year. Children are pushed up through grades, regardless of their ability. Students are often kept at school, not because they want to be there, but because of the social pressure. Often, without purpose, they react against the system. Without your college degree - without that piece of paper - you cannot get a job. But once you have a job, the degree counts for nothing: it's how you perform in the first year that finally matters.’
Hans expanded on the problem of high-schools: ‘Teaching as a profession has no social rating in this country, so it is difficult to attract first-rate teachers into our schools. We cannot attract enough teachers, so classes are large. Social status is largely determined by income, and we do not pay our teachers enough. With low teaching standards many come up to college ill prepared for what lies before them.’
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I realised that Arthur Ellison was not alone when speaking about the problems of education in British universities14.
I was made so welcome at the University that they invited me to return another day to meet many people at the student residences and discuss their organisation and problems. I discovered that most students were housed, two to a room. I also discovered that the University catered for the fairly affluent and fairly bright students who did not quite make the grade into the Princeton-Harvard group. I was invited to stay for dinner and then to attend a student council meeting in the evening. By this time it was so late that they gave me a room for the night, saying that I could return home after breakfast. This was typical of the hospitality I received throughout Amercia.
On Saturday 1 November, Joan and Joe drove me forty miles southwest of their home to Princeton, where I stayed a week with George and Cynthia Taylor15. We had been close friends when we were both in London working for our doctorates ten years earlier. George had subsequently settled in America, and was working for RCA16 at Princeton. I spent one day visiting his laboratories but for the rest of the week I concentrated on visiting staff at Princeton University, one of the private and highly prestigious Ivy-league universities in the States.
Founded as the College of New Jersey in 1746 and the sixth oldest college in the Americas, it was originally located in Elizabeth and then Newark. The founders wanted to create an institution for training enlightened men for the Presbyterian clergy and other worthy endeavours. In 1756, the college moved to the rural village of Princeton to escape the temptations of the city deemed detrimental to the students. From 1756, the entire college was contained within one building Nassau Hall - for nearly half a century. In 1896 it was renamed Princeton University and in 1901 it opened its graduate school. In 1746 there was a single class of eight undergraduates. Now it had 4,500 undergraduates and 1,900 graduate students. It occupied 600 acres of land on which there were 160 buildings. Its undergraduate numbers were not large, even in comparison with the University of Western Australia, but its buildings were richly endowed by many prestigious benefactors. There was one faculty member for every eight students, who gained admission not only by being very able but also by coming from rich families who could afford the very high fees.
At the Electrical Engineering Department, I spoke with Professor Peter Mark, a solid-state physicist. What I had heard at New York University about high-school and undergraduate courses was now reiterated for graduate school.
‘Many years ago,’ explained Marks, ‘most students completed only an undergraduate degree. These students were trained as implementors and met the needs of industry. The innovators were supplied by our small graduate schools. But now society says that everyone must have a first-degree, so there is increased demand for the PhD. For the middle-class, this has both a prestige value and a financial incentive, since a man with a PhD has a starting salary about $5,000 more than a man with just a first degree. There is also increasing sophistication of industry and this has increased the demand for graduate training.
14 See pages 353-355 15 See page 177 16 Radio Corporation of America
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‘Here at Princeton, almost 90 percent of our first-degree men will go on to a PhD - but not at Princeton. We discourage that. Unfortunately, our graduate students in this country are still trained as narrow specialist innovators. They have poor facilities but much freedom within the universities. When they graduate and join industry, they find excellent facilities but lead closely directed lives, with little choice in what they do; they must buckle down and conform. Most will not work as innovators, but as implementors, and their graduate training is often inappropriate. Some graduates become resentful and are often reluctant to be pushed outside their narrow field of expertise.
‘What we need now for engineers in this country is a broad, professional, postgraduate training that introduces them generally to the whole field of electronics and which acquaints them with techniques and ideas, but with no attempt to make them innovators. On top of this we need postdoctoral training for the few who will become innovators.’
The Engineering Dean at New York University had been very critical of the requirement to include humanities. Peter Marks at Princeton said that his faculty had a very different view. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘once a man enters industry or commerce, there is every conceivable pressure to narrow him through political and human pressures. It is a university responsibility to produce cultured, creative men and women who will find ways to live satisfying and fulfilling lives. For many, the university is the last opportunity they will have for this. Unfortunately, when our students come under the influence of the liberal arts faculty, the men and women in that faculty try to create in our students the image of themselves. For our students the purpose in studying history is not to become historians but simply to discover what the story of civilisation is about: that it is the story of human weakness. So, many of our young people today - and particularly the rebellious students that abound - live in a cultural vacuum. They express the sentiments of idealists: Their talk is of the perfectibility of man. They are not the realists that knowledge of the past should make them.’
Talking with several deans of students, I quickly discovered that residential arrangements had little relevance to Currie Hall. Social and academic life were completely separate. Students resented any academic infringement on their lifestyle, and were housed in dormitories that did not have dining facilities. Many students were very wealthy and wished to associate with others with similar standing and connections. Many sought nomination as members of an independent dining club, but could join only by invitation. There was much social stratification and snobbishness among the clubs. Although theoretically controlled by a board of alumni, they were usually a law unto themselves.
One dining club invited me to inspect their premises. I saw elaborate dining facilities, relaxing common rooms with pool tables, and bar for use during parties. I was also shown one room containing a group of bunk beds. This, I was told, was for girls who visited on the weekends, and it was too late at night for them to go home. Princeton had not yet ventured into mixed residences, and it was intimated that I should not enquire too closely into the lifestyle in some male dining clubs.
When we left, one dean said that the clubs were anachronisms today. They encouraged snobbery, and many students were beginning to disapprove of them. The next residential development would include a dining hall, and would be coeducational. Women now lived in "staircases" and kept their front doors locked as protection against marauders. Anyone wanting to visit a girl must ring from a telephone just outside the front door, so that she could come down and admit the visitor if she wished.
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IX
On Saturday 8 November I flew to Toronto in Canada. Cynthia and George drove me to Newark airport where I found Joan and her family waiting to say goodbye. I was not to see her again until she and Joe, with two of her daughters, visited us in Perth some years later. A light plane shuttled me past the Statue of Liberty to Kennedy airport. At 1.20 pm I arrived at Toronto and was soon on a bus taking me on a 90-mile journey to Peterborough, the home of Trent University.
In 1968, Professor Robin Harris from Toronto University had stayed in Currie Hall. He paved the way for my visit to Universities in Ontario. I found myself warmly welcomed wherever I went because of this personal connection. Robin had said that I must visit his close friend Professor Symons at Trent, which was the most exciting development in Canada. I spent a week there as a guest of the University and learnt much about collegiate life17.
Symons became president-designate in 1961. He conceived the idea of a very small university with close interaction between students and staff. It first opened its doors in 1964 and, when I arrived, the student population had grown slowly to fourteen hundred. Thirty years later it still had fewer than four thousand full-time undergraduates. Symons wanted to create a community of scholars: an Oxford on the Otonabee River. Peterborough was a very small “hick”18 town, and the University buildings rose out of the fields like abstract pieces of modern sculpture. On the day I left, snow had fallen lightly and, to this day, I retain vivid memories of its unique setting.
In the early years the students became extremely enthusiastic and found ways of talking to professors after hours. The college setting was vital: to collect one's mail or to go to dinner, one had to walk past the professors' doors. There were many opportunities for informal contact. From the very beginning, Trent emphasised the importance of the individual, and attracted staff with these sympathies. Tutorial methods, rather than lectures, were adopted with tremendous zeal. Symons insisted on small initial size and slow growth. He wanted to select only the most able students who would thrive in this environment. He did not want Trent to repeat the experience of Simon Fraser University which, by expanding rapidly, had been forced to accept low quality students, from which it never recovered. All staff - both administrative and academic from the president down - had a teaching or supervising role and maintained close contact with small student groups.
Max Young, the professor of Classics pointed out to me the distinction between the ideal and the reality. ‘In Trent,’ he said, ‘we have asked our young people to form a community of scholars. We have tried to establish the Oxford on the Otonabee. But we are not Oxford; We staff are not inward-looking celibates leading a monastic, scholastic life. We are men and women with interests in the home, and want our privacy even though we may be willing to associate to a limited extent with young people.’
He paused, drew on his pipe, and then continued.
‘Further, our young students coming from school are not scholars, and many of them never will be. Many don't even know why they are here. In their first year they are not meeting what is demanded
17 See page 362
18 In 1996, while I was researching this topic, I came across an "unofficial handbook" of Trent University on the Internet - or global information computer network. This was written by a current undergraduate who said "Trent is the best kept secret in Canada, being an inspiring collegiate university set on the edge of the hick (or provincial country) town of Peterborough. Few people know of its existence but it is a gem."
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from them because they have come from the thirteenth grade in school where it was all rah! rah! rah!
- and rote. They have never known study as something serious; they have never met the critical demand for excellence.
‘So, naturally, Trent falls short of its ideals. Not until third-year will some of our students really develop what is required, although many will catch on more quickly than in the conventional university.’
Nonetheless, I was mightily impressed by both the staff and the students with whom I talked.
While I was at Trent, the students staged a moratorium for one day, boycotting all classes while holding mass meetings to show their solidarity with students throughout the world who were disaffected with bureaucracy in all its forms, with the military machine whose governments sent young men to be killed in the Vietnam war, the legitimacy of which was doubted, and with the cold war and its constant threat of the use of nuclear weapons.
Following a breakdown in the authority of the Church and family, and an increasing sense of purposelessness among the young, there had been a breakdown of conventional values, with nothing to replace them except the blatant pursuit of money or profit, with an emphasis on material individualism and self-interest. There was a general feeling among the young that the older generation had let them down.
I had discussed student unrest while in Britain19, but heard much more of it while in America. The moratorium at Trent was my first on-the-spot experience of it. On 7 May 1968 there had been an outburst of street-fighting in Paris when up to 30,000 students, locked out of their own campus at the Sorbonne, had fought the tear-gas of the baton-wielding riot police with barricades, bricks and Molotov cocktails20. The trouble had been fermenting for some time. On 20 March, six students were arrested after an anti-American demonstration; the next day, a mass sit-in21 at the Nanterre campus began. The police, using excessive brutality, evicted the students.
It was not long before the spirit of rebellion spread to other universities around the world. In April 1969, 150 students seized the office of the Dean of Student Affairs at Boston University, just two miles from Harvard. They demanded the end of on-campus military recruitment for the Vietnam war. Then, 10,000 students at Harvard held a strike against police behaviour in breaking up a sit-in. Unrest spread across America and across Europe. More than 1,500 police and militia raided the Middle East Technical University campus at Ankara in Turkey and arrested 113 students who had occupied the university buildings. There were sit-ins at Prague, and complete disruption at the London School of Economics by students protesting against the lack of contact between themselves and the academic staff who seemed concerned only for their own research pursuits. Even in Australia in May 1969 students at Monash University in Melbourne invaded the administration building. They demanded the right of veto on proposed new disciplinary regulations.
19 See page 354
20 A Molotov cocktail was a crude incendiary device ususally consisting of a bottle filled with imflamable liquid.
21
Occupation of a place of authority, such as the University Vice-Chancellor or President's office, as a means of protest.
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In Britain, the daily newspapers carried banners following the progress of the disruption. The students proclaimed that their institutions were too authoritarian and impersonal, and cared nothing for them. They demanded a say in running university affairs.
The authorities reacted with severity making the problem more intractable. The leading article in the British Sunday Times on 27 April 1969, proclaimed:
The issue is now unmistakably clear. Shall the universities continue to be centres of learning within the democratic social system? Or shall they forsake their central educational function and become the catalysts of social revolution?
In America, many blamed the demand for mass higher education when many were unsuited for it. As one published analysis put it:
There have always been activists, but activist and educational roles were previously balanced. Many of the young today are activists with little concern for education. Not all our young people can be both serious and intelligent enough to be dedicated political idealists, so we must look elsewhere for an explanation of their behaviour. In addition to the need to oppose and to be opposed by adult authority in order to define their personal identity, many of the present college population have become activists because they are suited to no other role.
For the first time, higher education is the right of all, and a necessity for the success of the middle-class. The universities have had to accept large masses of students who possess neither the cultural interest nor the intellectual incentive to benefit from higher education. Schools have lowered their standards to accommodate the mediocre majority. Many students do not want to come to the university; they have no sense of purpose and, when confronted with complex issues and academic requirements, become lethargic or resentful, or they compensate by becoming political activists.
However, when I spoke with Trent students on their Moratorium Day, I found most of them thoughtful and serious, and they voiced legitimate concerns. There was no strong activism on their campus and they knew that they were fortunate in that they had excellent relations with staff, and a large democratic voice in the government of their university. However, they recognised that this was not commonly the case, and understood how students within authoritarian institutions were beginning to rebel.
The real concerns of the Trent students centred on the lack of social justice, the problems of race relations and prejudice in America, the growing powerlessness of the individual in an increasingly impersonal culture, the Vietnam War, and a sense of insecurity from the constant threat of Nuclear weapons. During the afternoon I attended a screening of a documentary film produced by the BBC. This depicted graphically, in all its horror, the outcomes of a nuclear bomb being dropped unexpectedly on London. So graphic was the film that the British Government banned its release for television. After showing the devastation and mutilation following the explosion, the film depicted the complete disintegration of society among survivors, as they scavenged and fought for food, water and shelter.
The theatre was full, and everyone left in a thoughtful mood. If ever a film depicted the madness that men can inflict on one another, this was it. It made an impression on me that is vivid to this day.
X
On Saturday 15 November, I returned to Toronto where I was booked into a guest room at Hart House in the University of Toronto. Professor Robin Harris had arranged to entertain me over the weekend, but the porter handed me a note from Robin saying that he had been called out of town
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unexpectedly and would see me on Monday when he returned. I felt at a loose end, particularly when I discovered that Hart House did not provide meals on Sundays. For the first time since leaving London I had time on my hands and felt very homesick.
As I set out to find somewhere where I could take breakfast, I realised how much I missed Kay, Judith and Peter.
As I returned from a downtown cafe and approached the Gothic structure of Hart House22, I saw someone waving to me from the front steps. As I came nearer, I realised that it was Moorthi Krishnasamy23, who had been a mathematics tutor in Currie Hall in 1967. He had left at the end of that year to take up higher studies at McMaster University at Hamilton, Ontario. Someone in Currie Hall, who knew my movements, had written to him. That morning, Moorthi travelled sixty miles by bus hoping to find me, and guessed that I might be in a Hart House guest room. The porter, who had told me where to go for breakfast, confirmed this and so Moorthi waited on the doorstep for me to return.
My depressed feeling lifted immediately at the sight of such a good and unexpected friend. We spent all day together talking about our experiences. When he caught the 5.00 pm bus to return to Hamilton, I felt elated. Never again did I feel homesick. Indeed, during the following week, Robin Harris kept me too busy to feel homesick. I spent hours inspecting the University and talking to people. Senior academics took me to see Waterloo, Guelph and York Universities where I continued my discussions at all levels. By midweek I felt quite tired but enjoyed being invited to dinner by the warden of the graduate residence and his young French wife. There I relaxed, sitting in a soft and voluminous leather chair, before a roaring wood fire, coat off, and feet up on a footstool, having risen from a delightful candlelit dinner.
At the end of the week, I said goodbye to my friends, took a plane to Chicago and then a Greyhound bus eighty-five miles south to Lafayette in Indiana. This was the home of Purdue University and also the home of Ray Jarvis, one of my former Electrical Engineering students who now lectured at Purdue. I stayed with Ray and his wife Irene and their two children for a few days, but found little at Purdue to interest me from the residential point of view. Purdue was huge: over 9,600 students were in residence, usually housed in buildings accommodating over eight hundred. The residential administration was centralised and bureaucratic. My visit simply confirmed what I already knew: that large halls of residence are anonymous and lack any real sense of community. Their centralised administration with its attendant impersonality might be an efficient way to run the residences, but they did not make for a sense of belonging and could easily produce an antagonistic attitude between students and administrators. The greatest outbursts of the student unrest had often occurred in large impersonal institutions, although Purdue had not yet experienced this.
22 Hart House was unique in its structure and purpose. It opened in 1919 as a men's centre at the University of Toronto and was one of the earliest and most imaginatively conceived student centres in North America. Its influence was international. More than just an undergraduate centre, it provided for the body, spirit and mind - for everything outside the lecture hall that touched the life of the male undergraduate, except residence. It was like an exclusive male club. It stood in great contrast to the stormy campus activism of which I was hearing so much. For half a century it had operated successfully under a system of cooperative democracy strikingly similar to that now demanded by militant students throughout the world. Undergraduates, graduates, faculty and administrators were all members of its committees, but the undergraduates always had the majority and the initiative. Hart house showed that shared responsibility, based on mutual respect and fundamental agreement, can and does work. The House provided its members with dining facilities, gymnasiums, swimming pool, library, study areas, common rooms and meeting rooms, and a rich structure of societies through which men of all ages could interact.
23 See page 301
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