On March 11, 2024, the University of Sydney announced that Belinda Hutchinson would be stepping down from her role as Chancellor after reaching the University Senate’s 12-year limit. The Senate elected David Thodey in her stead, adding to his current positions as the Chair of Ramsay Health Care, Xero, Tech Central and the CSIRO. At the time of her replacement, Hutchinson was also the Chair of military arms manufacturer Thales Australia.
But if we travel 100 years into the University’s past, we would see the same connections to arms dealers and multinational corporations. To only peer into the Chancellor’s Office over the past decade provides a myopic and warped perception of its history. Once we have scaled the high sandstone walls, shattered the stained glass and pulled back the overgrown ivy, Hutchinson and Thodey’s backgrounds remain frightening — but they are unsurprising. Colonialism, corporatism and militarism — alongside all the racism, elitism and misogyny they bring — are etched into the Quadrangle’s original mahogany desks. And as the Senate’s most recent decision shows, they are unlikely to be removed any time soon.
What Is The Chancellor’s Office?
Although the role of the Chancellor has changed drastically since the University’s founding in 1850, many of its duties and powers have stayed the same. Articulated by the Media Office, the Chancellor’s function is to “facilitate work carried out by the Senate” in pursuit of two goals: securing the wellbeing of the University and its maintaining reputation in the wider community through mostly bureaucratic and ceremonial duties.
Interestingly, the University Governance Council stipulates that the Chancellor’s role “may be seen broadly as that between a Chair and a CEO”. It stresses that these individuals “will have held senior positions in business, government, the armed forces, the public service and/or the not-for-profit sector.” While this is certainly true of the University of Sydney, it is also a widely accepted facet of tertiary education management teams across Australia.
The Early Years: the University’s First Colonisers
The University remembers its first Chancellor Edward William Terrick Hamilton as a “businessman” and “pastoralist”. Educated at Eton and Cambridge, Hamilton became Chancellor in 1850. Thanks to his ownership and management of properties on stolen land in the colony, Hamilton was known as a ‘squatter’; that is, a man with enough socio-political power to extrajudicially occupy tracts of Crown land for livestock grazing. Although he held no legal right to the land, he was recognised as the legitimate owner by successive colonial governments. One of his most notable acts was his public denunciation of other squatters who resisted the implementation of stricter squatter regulations throughout the 1840s.
Hamilton represents an important precedent for the University’s next 17 Chancellors: he was Oxbridge-educated, had a legal background, benefited politically and financially from colonial structures, and had a vested interest in strengthening them. British Baronet Charles Christian Nicholson, Colonial Treasurer Francis Merewether, Colonial Secretary Edward Deas Thomson and Attorney-General William Montagu Manning would continue these trends in the New South Wales Legislative Council and Supreme Court until the turn of the century.
Perhaps the most notorious of the lot was Charles Nicholson, serving between 1854 and 1862, and for whom the Quadrangle’s Nicholson Museum is named. Nicholson funded the University’s endeavours by importing indentured labourers from Asia to Sydney. His early involvement in Australia’s first gas company Australian Gaslight Co. set a precedent for the University’s current administration, with at least $1.83 million of portfolio funds indirectly invested in BHP alone. William Charles Wentworth, the University’s founder who famously argued that Indigenous people were a “savage race” in an 1842 NSW Legislative Assembly, also opposed First Nations land rights on his properties in the Blue Mountains.
Veterans, Barristers, and More Veterans
Appointed in 1886, Henry Normand MacLaurin was the first Chancellor to hail from a military career. So began the University’s obsession with war, manifested through a slew of naval commanders, lieutenant-colonels and air marshals who believed they knew something about how to run a University. Many were physicians who cut their teeth in the Australian Army’s Medical Corps during World War I, including Charles Bickerton Blackburn and Charles George McDonald.
Perhaps the most notable of these figures was James Anthony Rowland, a senior commander in the Royal Australian Air Force and Chief of Air Staff. Prior to his appointment as Chancellor in 1991, Rowland had served as a bomber pilot for the British Air Force during World War II. In the 1980s, he worked as a part-time consultant for French arms manufacturer Ofema. Following his time at the University, Rowland was a board member of the NSW Police Board and aerospace/defence electronics producer Thomson-CSF Pacific Holdings. Does any of this sound familiar?
Our First Woman! And the Beginning of the End
The University has always been an inherently colonial, militaristic and corporate institution, where men from elitist and often violent backgrounds can come together and profit from what should otherwise be free public education. For many white liberal feminists, the appointment of Leonie Judith Kramer as the first female Chancellor in 1991 appeared to welcome an era of gender equity and progressive governance; the University held a State Memorial for Kramer in 2016, citing her “invaluable contribution to education” as a “remarkable woman.”
But Kramer was not a feminist; she was a renowned conservative. As well as holding numerous board positions at the Western Mining Corporation and ANZ Banking Group, Kramer was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1976. However, she is mostly remembered today for making a range of offensive and prejudice statements throughout her career — including that women hold fewer higher positions in universities than men because they “go a bit limp when the going gets tough”, and that Australia would be a better place “when we are better educated, when we work harder.”
The backdrop was then set for Kim Santow, who would become Chancellor after Kramer’s resignation in 2001 hours before her colleagues were to pass a ‘no-confidence’ vote. Another lawyer who was educated at Sydney Grammar School and served as a Judge of the Supreme Court of NSW, Santow was succeeded by the University’s first and only non-European Chancellor Marie Bashir until 2012.
Honourable Mentions: Vice-Chancellor Edition
Any incursion into the Chancellor’s Office would not be complete without a brief stop in the Office of the Vice-Chancellor and President. If you thought Hamilton and Hutchinson were bad, you’ll be shocked to see how their right-hand-men could get worse:
- Robert Allwood (1869 – 1883): son of Chief Justice Allwood of Jamaica, who owned over 500 slaves during his lifetime.
- Frank Leverrier (1914 – 1917 and 1921 – 1923): an original shareholder and director of Austral Malay Tin Ltd, which introduced bucket dredging in South-East Asia.
- Robert Strachan Wallace (1928 – 1947): Australia’s Chief Film Censor during the 1920s.
- Stephen Henry Roberts (1947 – 1967): frequently liaised with Nazi leaders and attended their rallies before publishing a book on Hitler in 1937.
- Michael Spence (2008 – 2020): expended $133,525.46 over two years at the University, including on a personal membership to the exclusive Oxford and Cambridge club.
- Mark Scott (2021 – Present): used the term “picket, smicket” to refer to a staff strike while Group Editorial Director at Fairfax Media, and authorised over 400 job cuts during his time as Managing Director of the ABC.
Conclusion
These facts, however outrageous, are easily accessible and have been widely reported upon. Often, the biographies of figures like Spence, Hutchinson and Thodey are taken as evidence of a wider turn towards what scholars Christopher Prince and Jim Stewart first identified two decades ago as the “corporate university”; a co-optation of public universities not only towards internal business-style management, but also the guarantee they will deliver research and development capabilities to partner corporations. Indeed, it is no coincidence that the University adopted a memorandum of understanding with Thales to “work closely together over the next five years to develop new technologies and capabilities” following Hutchinson’s appointment as Chair of the company.
Yet as we have seen, they are indicative of a far more entrenched, structurally deficient culture that is unlikely to shift any time soon. What the University desperately needs is not a woman or a person of colour at its head, but a complete reassessment of its hierarchical structure and elitist connections. Only by reckoning with this history can we hope to change it.