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Reflecting on the end of the First World War in 1920, the University of Melbourne vice-chancellor, John Grice, hoped that the “memory of those who offered up their lives may quicken the conscience of men” to do likewise to defend “justice, liberty, brotherhood, and the restoration of peace”. University men and women had a special role now that peace was restored to “help forward the settlement of the social problems which are pressing upon us” (Grice, 1920, p. 763).
On university campuses across Australia, similar statements concerning the significance of the skills and responsibilities that tertiary education imparted for the rebuilding of Australian society became a common refrain. In a 1919 edition of the Melbourne University Magazine (MUM), where students and graduates published journalistic analyses, book reviews and creative writing, the editor W. Keith Hancock – later the noted historian of the British Commonwealth – observed that the university had become “more self-conscious” during the war about its future (Hancock, 1919, p. 76).
The war made the connections between Australian universities and government priorities explicit, as academic expertise was called upon to further the national interest in a variety of ways. The war work undertaken by staff and graduates demonstrated that universities could be enlisted in the development of industrial, military and medical innovations, while the “extension” programmes of lectures and adult education gave universities a distinct role in informing public discussion about war-related issues such as conscription, and about wider questions of international and domestic politics and ethics. This expanding role in the public sphere continued after the Armistice; at the University of Melbourne, for instance, a Public Questions Society debated political affairs, generating unprecedented community debate into the 1920s (Selleck, 2003, pp. 569-570; Davidson, 2010, pp. 32-36).
By the end of the First World War, almost 380,000 men had enlisted in the armed forces from an Australian population of almost five million people. Of those who served, 62,300 were killed, with 208,600 men hospitalised, including 63,400 for shell shock (Noonan, 2014, pp. 116, 120, 127). In the immediate post-war years, hundreds of war memorials were erected in Australia, instigated by municipal councils, clubs and sporting bodies, businesses, schools and universities. This extraordinary response was elicited by the Allied military decision not...