The Fellowship of Friends: Sir James Darling and the College Ideal
by Donald Markwell
Trinity Papers Number 4
Trinity College
The University Of Melbourne
Professor Donald Markwell is Warden of Trinity College, The University of Melbourne. He presented ‘The Fellowship of Friends’ at the Australian Club on Thursday 17 September 1998, on the occasion of the second James Darling Memorial Oration, held in honour of Sir James Darling (1899–1995), pioneering Australian educator and long-time Principal of Geelong Grammar School. Professor Markwell’s Darling Oration makes a strong case, through an examination of Darling’s own vision of collegiate education, for the important role of university colleges in the broader historical schema of higher education in Australia.
This paper represents the fourth in a series prepared by Trinity College which focus upon broad issues facing the community in such areas as education, ethics, history, politics, and science.
The Fellowship of Friends: Sir James Darling and the College Ideal The Second James Darling Memorial Oration Lady Darling and other members of the Darling family, Mr Chairman, Principal and Mrs Hannah, Sir Zelman and Lady Cowen, other distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen: It is a great privilege to be asked to give a Memorial Oration in honour of Sir James Darling1, one of Australia’s greatest educators; and I am extremely grateful to Sir Zelman Cowen, another of Australia’s greatest educators, for his kind words of introduction. I hope that Sir Zelman, for whom my own admiration and affection is very deep, will not mind my revealing that the letter of warm congratulations on his appointment as Governor-General that he received from Sir James Darling in 1977 began like this: ‘I seem to have been pursuing you all my life and yours with letters of congratulations as you have progressed from strength to strength’. And it concluded: ‘What a long way we have come from the little boy who won so many scholarships!’ Sir Zelman has spoken of the origins and evolution of his relationship with Sir James, including of how the young boy who did not go to Geelong Grammar became the Provost of Oriel College, Oxford, who presided at Sir James’s election as an Honorary Fellow. That this election was, as Sir James put it, the ‘greatest day’ of his life is testimony to the debt he felt to Oriel, and his respect for it. These feelings and thoughts are at the heart of my topic tonight – Sir James Darling’s experience and understanding of what I call ‘the college ideal in university education’, the idea – which he explicitly affirmed – that there are great benefits, profound educational benefits, from university study being undertaken in a college, a necessarily small residential academic community offering academic and pastoral support to its students, great opportunities for intellectual, cultural, sporting and other activities, and rich possibilities for friendship. This College ideal has been at the heart of British higher education for many centuries, most importantly – but not only – at Oxford and Cambridge. It has also had considerable influence around the world, especially in countries which grew out of British colonies of settlement, such as the United States, Canada, and Australia. In Australia, university colleges were created in the early stages of university development: there have been colleges in the University of Melbourne, for example, since Trinity was founded in 1872 by the same Bishop Perry who founded Geelong and Melbourne Grammar Schools. In the United States, the various manifestations of the college ideal include the great universities such as Princeton, Yale, and Harvard. The Harvard undergraduate prospectus says, and I quote, that ‘by design, residential living among students and faculty is an essential part of the Harvard experience’. It is my own belief that, if Australian universities are to offer students an education equal to the best in the world, equal to Harvard or Princeton or Oxford or Cambridge, then this will only be possible by combining what is offered in the best departmental universities, such as the University of Melbourne, with what is offered in the best colleges. The University of Melbourne rightly aspires to be ‘one of the finest universities in the world’, both in research and in teaching. Colleges such as my own can contribute much to this, and aim to be very much at the forefront of this endeavour. James Darling entered into this centuries-old tradition of collegiate education as an undergraduate at Oriel. Later, as a Headmaster, he had much contact with collegiate education in Australia, not least – but not only – through the close links between Geelong Grammar and Trinity. In paying tribute to this remarkable man, I would like tonight to discuss the college ideal in university education through an examination of his experiences and thoughts. We will see both the benefits he saw in collegiate education, and some of the issues of difficulty and controversy he encountered. I propose to say something, first, of Sir James’s Oxford experience; secondly, of his extensive experience with Australian colleges, especially Trinity, during his three decades as Headmaster of Geelong Grammar; thirdly, of the way he spoke of colleges in, for example, a speech at Trinity in 1981; and finally, some thoughts of mine on the relevance and current importance of this college ideal and related classical ideas for university education in the years ahead.
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Sir James Darling (1899-1995): Headmaster, Geelong Grammar School, 1930-1961. Member of the Council of the University of Melbourne, 1933-1971. 2
Having been disappointed in his hope for an Oxford scholarship in 1917, Darling went up to Oxford in January 1920 after being demobilized after two years in the British Army. He went to his father’s College, Oriel, which was later to be his son’s also. As an ex-serviceman, and one without a scholarship or government financial support, he undertook a shortened course in Modern History, completed in five terms as against the usual nine; and graduated with a Distinction, the highest grade available to those taking the shortened course. In his memoirs, Richly Rewarding, Darling wrote of this Oxford of war veterans:
Instead of a community of boys desperately pretending to be men, it was one of men reclaiming their lost boyhood: some of them the survivors of four years of war, men who had borne ultimate responsibility for others and faced death daily for years… In spite of occasional outbursts this was for the most part a serious generation, but it was also one which could perhaps value more intensely the joys of Oxford which it had been so long denied. For my part I was intensely grateful that the short interlude of the army enabled me to be a part of this fellowship and to make my friends for the most part with men a little older in years but in experience much more so.
It was this passage that inspired the title for this Oration: ‘the fellowship of friends’. And it is clear from this, and other things he wrote, that Darling regarded friendship as one of the great joys of life, the capacity for friendship as one of the great skills or lessons to learn in life, and opportunities for friendship amongst the greatest benefits that schools and colleges provide. At the end of his chapter on his Oriel days, Darling listed various of the special attributes of Oxford; and concluded: And finally there are the friends one made, who are unlike the friends one makes at any other time. At school, at least in my time, the absurd conventions limited one to a tiny circle; at Oxford there was a freer choice and friends came together from a real community of intellectual and spiritual interests, not as in after life because they are thrown together by their jobs, but because they find that they stimulate and do not bore each other. …All told it is a time of infinite joy, free from worry and full of hopes.
One of Darling’s closest friends in Oxford, Louis Wharton, was for him ‘the outstanding example, in his experience, of the all-rounder who was yet first-class’: and this notion, of the first-class all-rounder, was to be central to his educational philosophy thereafter. At Oriel, Darling lived in a small community in close proximity to resident tutors and to the Provost, L.R. Phelps, with his admirable advice ‘Never worry after 5 o’clock’. Phelps was to encourage Darling’s going to teach at Charterhouse, and later to write in support of his application for the Headmastership of Geelong Grammar. Darling’s memoirs record of his Oriel undergraduate days, Chapel, and walks with the Provost, and sport, and reading parties, lectures, concerts, and occasional plays. The real education [he wrote] came from the necessity of writing a weekly essay to be read to one’s tutor, and the reading which this entails.
One of Darling’s tutors was ‘the great seventeenth century historian’ G. N. Clark, who in 1947 became Provost of Oriel on the same day that the then Mr Zelman Cowen became a Fellow of it. Darling described the Oxford tutorial as ‘Nobby’ Clark employed it: I read to him my ten-page essay on something and he smoked and, I think, listened. I finished. ‘Thank you very much, Mr Darling’, he said. ‘That is very good’. The decency of gentlemanly politeness having been satisfied he would go on. ‘But why have you omitted to mention this and this and that?’, thereby, if one had sufficient sense to see it, completely destroying the validity of one’s argument. This concluded, he set the subject for the next essay and discussed what books should be read before writing it.
I have to confess that I believe that, combined with good lecturing and in the hands of a challenging tutor and a conscientious student, there is no better system of undergraduate education than the Oxford tutorial system, combined with all the benefits of living and studying in a college community. The degree of personal attention offers benefits not to be found in any system of mass education. It is a great shame that the Oxford tutorial system is now threatened, both by governmental reluctance to continuing meeting its financial cost – it’s worth every penny, in my view – and because of the growing pressure on academics to research and publish at the expense of teaching. Throughout his time as Headmaster, Darling took great pride in the young men for whom he helped to secure places in Oxford and Cambridge, and especially those who, after undergraduate years in Australia, went to Oxford as Rhodes Scholars.
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Shortly after he arrived in Australia in 1930, Darling ‘received a formal visit of welcome’ from two fellow old Oxonians – Mr L. A. Adamson, headmaster of Wesley College, and Dr J. C. V. Behan, Warden of Trinity. He came to know Dr Behan very well, inviting him to the School, seeking his help in identifying Trinity graduates who might go to teach at Geelong Grammar, and himself going to Trinity to speak. For example, in 1931, Darling led a Trinity Dialectic Society symposium on ‘Socialism’ – after Behan had said that Darling’s proposed topic, ‘Public School Religion’, was ruled out by the Dialectic Society Constitution which banned discussion of religion. It may be obvious from this that Trinity is an Anglican College! Darling devoted considerable effort to recommending Geelong boys to Melbourne University colleges, especially Trinity, for undergraduates places, including putting boys forward for College entrance scholarship examinations and awarding scholarships from the School itself to help them attend college. There was, for example, the F. L. Armytage scholarship awarded by Trinity to former students of Geelong Grammar; it was endowed through a benefaction in 1883, and is awarded still – though inflation has greatly diminished its value. The School had since 1912 offered the Cuthbertson Scholarship for members of Geelong Grammar ‘at any College connected with the Melbourne University’. In 1933, when an unusually large number of Geelong Grammar boys, including Michael Thwaites, won scholarships to Trinity, Darling told the School that he was ‘glad that our connection with Trinity College should be strengthened in such a way’. Much correspondence exists in which Darling recommended boys, with often-detailed letters on their ability and intellectual distinction, character, and activities, to the two Wardens of Trinity with whom he dealt – Wardens Behan and Cowan. They in turn reported on the boys’ performance in entrance examinations. In 1931, to take but one example, he recommended a boy – and I quote – ‘out of whom you will, I am sure, get good work’. For some years after World War II, there was such pressure for College places for ex-servicemen, such as Darling had been at Oxford after World War I, that there was an acute shortage of places available for young men fresh from school. Darling had to inform boys that the only assurance of a college place would come from their academic work being of scholarship standard; but he warned Warden Cowan that, I quote, ‘many of them are not of that type’. Cowan was clearly also very conscientious in reporting back on how well the former Geelong Grammar men in his charge performed in their University exams; and Darling expressed gratitude for this ‘most useful’ information, though often he, and Cowan even more so, thought their performance not satisfactory. Warden Cowan did not readmit students who failed subjects, and this, alas, was the fate of rather a number of young men who had come from Geelong Grammar. One year Darling wrote to him: Thank you very much for all the trouble you have taken in sending the results to me. It only goes to prove that one’s School opinion of boys is not always the best one. There is not very much distinction about our Old Boys but I am pleased that there are comparatively few who failed badly. I am surprised that [X] has done so well.
But on other occasions the Headmaster was less concerned about academic performance than the Warden. Character had much to do with whether a student succeeded or failed academically. Darling wrote to Cowan one year: ‘The failures are as usual failures of character.’ In Darling’s day, at least at times, The Corian published the names of boys who had won scholarships to Trinity College, and the university examination results of Geelong Grammar boys who were in College. The Corian also published a regular ‘Trinity letter’, a letter from a Geelong old boy at Trinity, and sometimes at least, a comparable ‘Oxford letter’. The ‘Trinity letter’ published in December 1946 is especially interesting, written perhaps under the sobering influence of examinations. I quote: The carefree college life is now a myth… No one is ashamed to work. We know that the standard at Melbourne [University] is uniformly high, and to reach it an achievement.
I wonder if this is how members of the College of that generation remember it: but it is certainly a salutary statement. When Darling came to the School in 1930, there were already at Corio three boys who were to become Rhodes Scholars – three in four years, from 1935 to 1938: J.G. Mann, Michael Thwaites, and Alan Hamer. All three had gone from Geelong Grammar to Trinity, and then on from there to brilliant success at Oxford. J.G. Mann was killed in action in Crete in 1941. I am delighted that Michael Thwaites and Alan Hamer are here this evening. In his School Report for 1937, defending changes he had made in the School, the Headmaster said: 4
The justification of school policy rests with the boys of this generation, and with those now at the University; and they are clearly beginning to justify it. I should like you to look at the results in the University Examinations, which will be in the ‘Corian’. I have before me a list, not yet complete, which includes ten boys, who have won between them eleven first classes and twelve first places in the class lists. Then there is the Rhodes Scholarship won by A.W. Hamer – a distinction in which we can take our share of pride; J.G. Mann’s good first class in Law at Oxford; and the Fellowship of Worcester College to which A.B. Brown has been elected.
It is no wonder that Darling had a keen interest in the Rhodes Scholarship. The Rhodes ideal was closely related to his ideal. Darling was an educator with an ideal – an ideal of the sort of person he wanted to emerge from his school. Such an ideal could, in insensitive hands, encourage conformity and discourage diversity and individuality: and this was not Darling’s wish. In good hands such as his, an ideal gives a noble aspiration and a valuable sense of purpose, and so I am sure it was with Darling. I hope I embarrass neither by saying that Michael Collins Persse has written that Lister Hannah – and I quote – ‘is an example of the sort of Renaissance man and Christian humanist that Darling had as his ideal’. Weston Bate wrote of Darling’s ideal ‘of the civilized man, who played games for the love of them, who studied without cramming, who valued music, literature, religion, politics and history above material success’. Darling himself said in his Headmaster’s Report in 1941 (in days long before co-education, of course): Our ambition should be to produce the Elizabethan type, full of manly vigour, courage, confidence and initiative, and yet capable of scholarship and taste at the same time…
This may not be exactly the Rhodes ideal, but it is very close; and that Rhodes ideal is one that – for Trinity men and women also – successive Wardens of Trinity have sought to promote. As Darling well knew, Behan had been the first Rhodes Scholar for Victoria, and for many years administered the Rhodes Scholarships in Australia; and his successor at Trinity, Ron Cowan, had been Rhodes Scholar for South Australia. Many people here will know Michael Thwaites’s beautiful and moving poem ‘J.R.D.: 1930-1961’, written to honour Sir James Darling at the end of his Headmastership. ‘J.R.D.’ superbly evokes the excitement Michael Thwaites felt at the transformation the new, young Headmaster had wrought at the School in his first several years: In that keen morning it was good to wake… …In that heady spring Music and drama, art and poetry Flowered from the ground, with handicrafts and skills Buried till then. A pulse and pain of growth Set the blood coursing, and the earth was young. Yet was the new engrafted on the old With a wise husbandry: the rule of law, The athlete’s and the soldier’s discipline Not scorned in that renaissance of the mind, But guarded in a general scheme of good, The intended growth of body, mind and soul For all the freemen of our commonwealth. “Lovers of wisdom, but with manliness” – The Periclean trumpet-call you blew Stirred us who knew your coming, stirs us yet With gratitude and pride that we were there.
Michael Thwaites’s poem expresses a philosophy of balanced, liberal education as well as admiration for the determined leadership Darling showed in seeking to get the balance right. Warden Behan was one of those in whom Darling confided his scarcely-disguised frustrations with the absurd criticisms and rumours his transformative leadership provoked in his early, sometimes lonely, years at Corio. Darling’s correspondence with Wardens Behan and Cowan reflects his educational and personal philosophies: for example, his insistence on writing honest testimonials, even if they raised difficult issues (though it seems that experience led him somewhat to soften his written assessments); and his deep regret that so strong a vocational emphasis in education in Australia works against good education: Those people who merely want to be educated in the best possible way according to their talents seem to be reasonably rare, if they exist at all, and there is therefore this almost universal desire to be either a doctor or an engineer. I quite agree with you that many boys try to undertake these professions without being properly equipped.
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Darling wrote of boys obtaining what he variously called ‘the benefit of Trinity’, ‘the discipline and influence of the College’, ‘the control and influence of the College’, and ‘the control and stimulus of College life’. He wrote of boys who would clearly do better at College than if they were at home; but his approach was not identical to that of either Warden Behan or Cowan, and this difference of perspective was clearly expressed in correspondence with Cowan. In 1948, Darling suggested that ‘the best boys are not necessarily those who need the discipline and influence of the College most’; in 1952, that ‘there are some boys who just because they are weak in character need to go to a College more than others’; and in 1956: Good boys can look after themselves and will do well wherever they may be. It is the weaker vessels that seem to me to need help.
This 1956 comment was written in an uncompromising exchange with Warden Cowan: the blunt confronting the blunt. The Warden wrote frankly of the poor academic performances at Trinity of Geelong Grammar boys, and the Headmaster expressed the resentment of some at the School at what they thought was the Warden’s disregarding of their assessments of boys. Cowan’s reply to Darling was clear: It seems to me that there is a critical difference between us on the question of the duty of the College to ‘good boys’ on the one hand and ‘weaker vessels’ on the other. No doubt the true end of primary and secondary education is to make the best of each individual by developing to the full his talents and his sense of service. This does not seem to me to imply that either the good or the weak boy should be given attention at the expense of the other – though they will require different kinds and degrees of attention – nor that all are equally grist to the University mill. By the time a boy has completed his secondary schooling it ought to be true that his ability to ‘take’ further formal education can be pretty accurately assessed. Beyond this stage, therefore, the encouragement of excellence ought to be the chief aim.
Warden Cowan continued:
I certainly do not think that it is any part of the function of a University or of a University college to concentrate on the needs of the academically weak at the expense of the academically strong, much less to leave the latter to look after themselves. There are, of course, men who develop late as well as people of great ability who need special attention if they are to amount to anything. But I hope the College will continue to give, as its first duty, the greatest possible help to those really able youngsters upon whom the future of this country depends. It should be our aim to humanise the brilliant rather than to make the way easy for the plodder. I have always wanted the college to be a frame upon which the good man can stretch himself to the utmost, not a trellis for the clinging vine.
This seems to me well stated; and to some extent, at least, Darling agreed. He had already written:
It is… probably true that a number of boys here who are not really fit for university life manage by staying on a long time to get themselves up to Matriculation level and because their parents have money with which to back their fancy try to go on to university courses. It is not very easy to knock them back, though perhaps it would be kinder in the long run to do so.
It seems to me, as a general proposition, that individuals of the greatest ability, who have the greatest capacity to lead our society and change it for the better, will only reach their full potential if they are really stretched, with high standards expected of them. To place the ablest in an environment where their best is not expected of them, and mediocrity is accepted complacently, is greatly to reduce their chances of achieving and contributing all they have the capacity to do. It seems to me also that, in general, weaker students who are nonetheless of university standard will be helped to achieve their best in an environment which celebrates and encourages excellence. We should celebrate and encourage excellence in academic study, but also participation, leadership, and achievement in other fields – sport and the arts and other extra-curricular activities – and excellence of individual character and communal life. And we should provide moral support and pastoral care to all students, weak or strong, especially in the crises which, for weak and strong alike, are almost inevitable through these exciting but often-difficult years of maturation and development. This support should be, not least, during the transition from school to university. Darling also recognised the danger of the ‘very good all round boy’ being kept from ‘being academically first class’ by having too many extra-curricular activities. He wrote to Cowan of one such boy and his extra-curricular commitments that ‘he has so much to do that he cannot go deeply enough into anything. This incidentally’, the frank Headmaster wrote, ‘is one of the more obvious weaknesses of the school.’ Although this boy might ‘withdraw into himself again’ if he lived at home rather than in college – in another case he said that a boy’s ‘only hope’ was ‘to be at college rather than living at home’ – Darling said that ‘at this stage I am rather inclined to think that he would be better not to go into residence where the temptation to continue the same sort of dissipation of his energies as exists at school would continue.’ 6
A college such as Trinity needs always to seek a balance in its life which helps and encourages students themselves to maintain a balance so that they achieve to their fullest potential. For all his disagreement with Warden Cowan, I am sure that Darling would have agreed with this. ‘Trinity Notes’ in The Corian in Darling’s first year, 1930, declared: ‘The school should send many more men up to Trinity than it does now.’ But, in 1956, both Darling and Cowan agreed that too high a proportion of Trinity students were from Geelong Grammar – Darling thought it must be nearly 50%, but Cowan put it at 31%. Today, of course, the percentage is very much lower, though of the roughly 80 schools around Australia and overseas from which students have come to us this year, more have come from Geelong Grammar than from any other. The relationship between School and College is close and friendly and much-valued. We are keen to welcome able students from Geelong Grammar to the College; and we are keen to have students from a diversity of social backgrounds, a diversity which is and should be beneficial for all concerned. If College offers an educational experience that is truly special, as I believe it can be, then this should ideally be available to the best students regardless of their backgrounds or means. It is for this reason that we continue to work hard to build up the endowments for our scholarships, just as I know that Geelong Grammar places considerable emphasis on financial help and scholarships to enable students whose families could not otherwise afford it to gain its special benefits. It is truly fitting that, inspired by Sir James’s own vision, the James Darling Memorial Fund seeks to build a handsome endowment for such financial assistance. One of the occupational hazards, and occasionally benefits, of working with students, especially undergraduates, is the student prank. At their best, pranks are clever and amusing, and cause no harm. Some, unamusing at the time, gain retrospective charm with passing years. Others are best forgotten. In 1938, Darling presented on behalf of Sir Christopher Furness, an old boy of Charterhouse, a wrought-iron gate to Janet Clarke Hall, then a part of Trinity College. The dedication ceremony was to be conducted by Archbishop Head, in the presence of Vice-Chancellor Medley and other dignitaries, with Headmaster Darling speaking. Unfortunately the gate went missing between 2am and breakfast-time of the day it was to be officially, as it were, opened. As one newspaper succinctly put it: ‘Consternation reigned’, but a carefully-contrived ‘treasure hunt’ for clues as to its whereabouts, guided by mysterious telephone calls, finally resulted in its being found in Archbishop Head’s front garden at Bishopscourt. The press reported that ‘the gate was rehung in time for the ceremony, which was enlivened by students in gala dress. They cheered the arrival of three fire engines just as the ceremony began… There was no fire, but a rocket ascended the evening sky, and the fire engines departed’. A newspaper story quoting university authorities unhappy at what was seen as an insult to the Archbishop, and fire authorities unhappy at the false alarm, quoted a Trinity student saying the prank was not wholly ‘a Trinity show’: ‘Ridley pinched the gate; Ormond rang the fire brigade; and we turned up in fancy dress,’ he said.
When Warden Behan wrote to him to apologise for this ‘unfortunate episode’, Darling replied:
I confess that I didn’t find it amusing, having come up all the way for it and nothing else. However, I suppose it isn’t serious and wouldn’t really have justified the exceptionally fine and scathing speech which I made up about it on the way home. I am glad that Trinity was not greatly involved and am sorry that I was rude to the one or two old boys whom I happened to see there.
Forty-three years later, in 1981, when Sir James spoke at a Friends of Trinity dinner, he recalled this prank, and another prank involving the diversion of Royal Parade traffic into the College grounds during a fog. He said: The deplorable fact is that, as the outcome of research, I have found a positive pride in those who participated in these shocking incidents. The incidents are the more shocking because of the positions of dignity their perpetrators have since occupied. I regret that I must inform you that they have involved a distinguished pubic servant a politician of great significance in our own State a Justice of the Supreme Court a noted Oxford Don a much honoured physician and, most sad of all, there is one who became, admittedly by a rather circuitous route an Archdeacon in the Anglican church.
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I would like to dwell on Sir James’s 1981 speech, not only because it showed him tolerant of ‘the brisk intemperance of youth’, but because he went on to make a strong case for ‘communal living at one time or another in one’s development’, and specifically for university colleges. First, Sir James said:
… a College provides a place of laughter and fun a womb of friendships a chance for endless discussions about the realities of life a stimulating community to which to belong.
Secondly, Sir James said, a college offers tutors who give personal academic attention to students. ‘At Oxford,’ he said, I was fortunate to enjoy the sole attention of a tutor for one or two hours each week. Here I learned that there is nothing more important in education than intimate contact with first-class minds. The contact with University lecturers, however brilliant, is inadequate.
These were the words of a man who had served on the University of Melbourne Council from 1933 to 1971. It appears that, in the early 1950s, when Ron Cowan was also on the University Council, Darling and he both argued there that ‘a good university experience was not possible in a large institution’. If the rapid and unprecedented expansion of universities has seemed at times to obscure the role of colleges, it is precisely because of the growth of the mass university that the personal benefits of collegiate education are becoming all the more important, and will, I think, be recognized as such if we in the colleges can truly show that we do enhance the all-round education of our students. There are those who think that new information and communication technologies will make the campus university redundant, and presumably residential colleges also. While we aim to use such new technologies in helping our students, and to help enable them to use the technologies as well as possible, it seems clear to me that the high degree of personal interaction – student with tutor, and student with student – that a college involves will always be an immense benefit to students. Thirdly, in his 1981 speech Sir James said that, in a College, ‘there is tradition’:
This is an old fashioned and almost anachronistic value, and it can become a restriction of proper development. On the other hand, there is much to be said for belonging to a body which has a history and which is bigger than oneself – a body which places demands of high standards and service on its members. Curiously, the College means more to me than the University and much more than the school – perhaps because it is more personal and intimate. Only the regiment for soldiers can compete with this kind of loyalty.
As he so often did, Sir James also discussed religious aspects of education. Elsewhere, he spoke of himself as a Headmaster as dealing ‘with the training of minds and the saving of souls’. In his Friends of Trinity speech, he contrasted schools and colleges, and students at each stage: Our schools may, and sometimes do, have a vague and generalised influence on their members to the extent of recognising religion as, on the whole, a good thing. In a college there is less chance of that, but more chance of the real conversion of an occasional individual, and this is nearer to the real thing.
At Trinity we recently had a special service at which seven students and tutors were confirmed, and two Roman Catholics received into the Anglican Church. These numbers would be unremarkable, even very low, in an Anglican school; but in a university college, they are remarkably high. There is a direct and continuing link between Sir James and the Trinity College Chapel, which is that he inspired the creation in 1937 of what is now the Canterbury Fellowship, which has been worshipping weekly in the Trinity Chapel since 1956, and which supports the work of the Trinity College Theological School. Whether a College is a religious foundation or not, or has any religious purpose or effect, it will, as a residential community, be well placed to encourage, perhaps even instill, values in its students. If in state and secular institutions there is a shying away from the discussion and deliberate transmission of values, then perhaps one of the benefits of autonomous colleges affiliated with public universities is that they can unashamedly proclaim certain values. For my own College, I am happy to declare that it is not, and never has been, a value-free zone; and nor, of course, is Geelong 8
Grammar. In a passage I have just quoted, Sir James Darling implied that a college should place ‘demands of high standards and service on its members’. From his earliest days at Geelong Grammar, and only partly because of the appalling depression then gripping this country and others, Darling encouraged amongst his charges a sense that they should contribute handsomely to the community from which so many gained so much, and that it was noble to serve the common good and not merely the private. It is no wonder that so many, including many who went on to Trinity, rose to positions of leadership in service to the community. The classical educational philosophy which underlies collegiate education, and which Sir James Darling articulated and implemented, contrasts strongly with certain trends in higher education in recent years. As we have seen, the nurturing of individuals, and the most effective development of their intellectual skills, requires a degree of personal attention to them which Sir James Darling found wanting in our universities. Growing lecture and tutorial sizes, the disappearance of tutorials in some subjects in some universities, and related developments mean that, for all the conscientious efforts of the many good and dedicated teachers in our universities, there is unavoidably less and less of this individual attention. This is one area where Colleges with a good number of resident tutors and mentors, and an extensive provision of tutorials and of academic and pastoral mentoring, can significantly enhance the education of their students, and where the educational role of colleges is likely to become more and more important. Those who are anonymous in the mass university are individuals in the College. The nurturing of individuals requires that educational institutions not become too large. Experience around the world shows that it simply is not true that, in higher education, either world-class research or appropriate variety of subject choice depends on universities having many tens of thousands of students. This is less an issue at the University of Melbourne than at some universities whose leaders have seemed more interested in empire-building than in the quality of education. In an important address reprinted in his anthology, The Education of a Civilised Man, Sir James Darling said that ‘the main objective’ of education is ‘the training of the sensitive and penetrating mind’. This meant, he believed and I believe, the avoidance of premature specialisation, and regarding specifically vocational education as coming after, not replacing, that general preparation for citizenship, and that general training in intellectual skills and awareness, which education should impart. Despite their significant differences, the higher education systems of the United States and Britain both reflect – and highly successfully – the view that, at least for the ablest students, specialised vocational training is best done after more general training and broadening of the mind up to and including undergraduate education. Yet we in Australia have, with no obvious benefits, long had a more narrowly vocational approach to higher education, and it appears to be narrowing yet further. Our national appreciation for the value of studying the humanities and some, at least, of the social sciences has never been high – at least in comparison with the great universities of North America, Britain, and elsewhere – and these subjects seem now to be under greater threat than ever. I have no doubt this would have alarmed Sir James Darling, and it certainly alarms me. I regret the need to add, however, that the case for strengthening, not cutting, Arts faculties would be stronger still if there were not so much teaching of incomprehensible, over-theorized, and unbalanced gobbledygook reflecting transient fashion, and more of the clear thinking and clear expression which such courses should exemplify. One of the benefits of the collegiate experience, though sometimes one of its dangers, is that it is broadening. It exposes students to students in other disciplines – students they would never meet in the departmental university, and so conversations they would never have. It gives students the ready opportunity to participate, in a supportive environment, in a range of extra-curricular activities – sports, music, drama, debating, and much else – and opportunities for leadership. Many colleges have ‘language tables’, opportunities for students and tutors who speak or are learning to speak a language to meet, perhaps weekly, over a meal and practice that language. These are just some of the ways in which our colleges can and do contribute to the all-round education of university students, aiming always to be faithful to that great tradition of collegiate education in which Sir James Darling shared and which he so admired, while adapting it as best we can to the needs of the decades ahead. In 1960, Sir James Darling delivered the George Adlington Syme Oration to the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons on the title ‘The Education of a Civilized Man’. He began by listing several functions of such an oration, saying: Finally, and this is too often forgotten, it must not omit to do honour to the great man in whose name the oration was established, or miss the first point of a memorial oration, which is to commemorate in the most
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fitting way possible the services of one who in his lifetime was a well-known figure in your society, but whom subsequent generations can very easily forget.
In what I have said tonight, I have hoped to say things worth saying, but too little said, about what colleges can contribute to university education, and about the nature of university education itself. I have deliberately done this through the experiences and indeed often the words of Sir James Darling, not least to make my small contribution to commemorating, I hope fittingly, this towering figure in Australian education. It is certainly fitting that he be commemorated through the James Darling Memorial Fund; and your efforts will help ensure that subsequent generations do not forget a man to whom so many owe so much, and from whose words and actions there is still so much to learn.
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