Despite the concerns of student activists, university administrators were similarly keen to preserve a traditional understanding of their institutions as being ‘primarily devoted to extending and deepening human understanding’, in the words of Stefan Collini in his What Are Universities For? (2012). David Derham, vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne from 1968 to 1982, although influenced by Wilhelm von Humboldt’s relatively utilitarian vision of the modern university as a training ground for good citizenship, wasn’t much concerned with making a case for how the university could contribute to economic growth or other ‘practical’ applications of knowledge. For Derham, intrinsic dividends flowed to the community from having the university in its midst, but its primary commitment was to a higher purpose.

In the twenty-first-century Australian university, that sentiment has been significantly revised. The University of Melbourne’s strategic plan, Growing Esteem 2015–2020, reflects its vision of being ‘deeply connected’ with business, government, and community. ‘Engagement’ is prioritised as ‘the lens through which we view all of our activities’ and ‘an integral part of the university mission’. Carolyn Rasmussen’s earlier history of the university from 1935 to 1975, co-authored with John Poynter, was titled – slightly inconveniently for the university – A Place Apart (1996). (The current strategic plan declares that ‘We are no longer a place apart’.) Happily, Rasmussen was invited back regardless, her new work updating the story, giving prominence to the concept of engagement as it emerged, though slowly, from the 1960s. Shifting the Boundaries traces the ways in which change, both within and outside the university, was reflected in the evolution of what ‘engagement’ meant, from a narrow focus on alumni to today’s vociferous outwards-facing activity in the realms of culture, online learning, and commercial partnerships.

Aerial view of the University of Melbourne campus (photograph via Arcadia)

This history takes the story to 2015, covering: the end of the golden age of public funding; the introduction of the Unified National System of Higher Education by the Hawke government in the late 1980s and the managerialism (and doubling of enrolments at Melbourne) that came with it; the ill-fated Melbourne Private venture and related commercialisation in the lean Howard years; and the implementation of the ‘Melbourne Model’ curriculum that has reshaped the university since 2008.

Rasmussen structures her narrative by ‘pausing’ at decade-long intervals (the first in 1975) to reflect on the foregoing decade under four headings: campus, students and staff, governance, and engagement. This structure allows a self-contained consideration of each period within its various contexts (political, pedagogical, technological). It also decentres the role of vice-chancellors. As Rasmussen notes, universities are much more than their leaders, even if, over this period, their influence became more pronounced. The first section of each chapter attends to the changing physical infrastructure of the campus. Space has important stories to tell, about pedagogical change, for instance, as demonstrated in the new Teaching and Learning building at my own institution, designed to discourage teacher-focused lectures and facilitate student-centred, collaborative, ‘active’ learning.

In the academic mindset of the 1960s, a high failure rate for students was an indicator of high standards. (There was some public disquiet when rabble-rousing student journalist Pete Steedman gained entry to the university in 1967 in order to edit Farrago, despite having failed at Monash – Monash!). The new view, evolving over the following decades, was that teaching quality was an important determinant of student success. In the first few decades of Rasmussen’s story, complaints about lecturers (some merely dull and a few ‘barely sober’) are omnipresent. Efforts to improve teaching, including curriculum reform and student evaluation of courses, resulted in generally high levels of student satisfaction by the 1990s, in line with national trends.

While Rasmussen pays close attention to changes in the secondary school environment, critical to a full understanding of how students encountered university over time, many characteristics of the student experience emerge as perennial, despite the university’s pivot to increased student-centredness (partly a product of their repositioning as consumers in the emergent neoliberal climate). The impersonality of the university, large class sizes, and limited access to academic staff (even in the imagined golden age of the 1960s and 1970s) echo across the decades covered in this book. More specific to the University of Melbourne is the alienation experienced by students who are not products of Victoria’s more prestigious private schools. (My mother, arriving straight from Sunshine West High in 1968, was so cowed by the self-confidence of her privileged peers at Melbourne that she claims to have not uttered a word in tutorials during her entire degree.)

All Melbourne’s vice-chancellors since 1975 have subscribed to some version of the old idea of the university, viewing their task as being to secure its economic independence so that it may pursue its own destiny; but achieving this in a period of massive growth in size and complexity required new governance models at odds with the idea of the university as a collegial community. As former Provost Peter McPhee reflects in his afterword, devolved management can bring a loss of coherence, but strong central leadership comes at the cost of staff disempowerment. Many academics are wearied by the bureaucratic weight of mass institutions trying to impose a ‘university mind’. Rasmussen offers a perceptive account of the development, with a University of Melbourne-specific flavour, of a range of challenges familiar to those working in universities today: the need to balance public accountability with perceptions of greater surveillance; misunderstanding between staff and increasingly distant administrations; the tension between the research imperative and undergraduate teaching responsibilities; under-resourcing of teaching; and the pressure for one’s research to be externally funded.

Carolyn Rasmussen (photograph by Tobias Titz)University histories have been abundant in recent years, especially from the older sandstones, several of which (including Melbourne) have established academic units dedicated to the history of their institutions. This is to be welcomed, especially when the resultant histories, like this one, both avoid congratulatory narratives and invite self-reflection. This book will be of interest to Melbourne graduates and other members of the university community, as well as to those generally interested in Australia’s second-oldest university and how it weathered, with considerable agility, the higher education storms that blew in from the mid-1970s.