Humanities Research Centre : A history of the first 30 years of the HRC at The Australian National University (original) (raw)

Two further science Research Schools were founded in 1967-Chemistry and Biological Sciences. That began to suggest that a Research School of Humanities was overdue. Yet there were two problems. A push had already begun for a Research School of Earth Sciences. The Universities Commission opposed this on fi nancial grounds and declined to make further provision for it. The Vice-Chancellor, Sir John Crawford, nevertheless pressed ahead and RSES was founded. That, however, made the chance of creating yet one more Research School all the more diffi cult. There was a further issue too. As constructed by that boundarytraverser, Keith Hancock, his Research School of Social Sciences not only already had departments/units of History and Law but of the History of Ideas and Philosophy as well. Hancock indeed had even proposed to add 'Humanities' to its title. The principal lacunae here were studies in the arts, languages, literatures, and their cultural contexts, of ancient and modern Britain and Europe. There was no push, however, for these to be added to RSSS; let alone any suggestion to excise its humanities departments to join them in a separate school. So the only hope was a trimmed down version: a Humanities Research Centre, to which in 1973 the Universities Commission was ready to give its blessing. Its founding in the following year proved, however, to be at a most unpropitious time. For it occurred just as government funding for universities fi rst levelled off and then started on its unending decline. That meant the HRC never secured the funding which it warranted, as this book so o# en details. My own experience suggests, however, that this needs to be put in context. Upon becoming Director of RSPacS in 1973 I was expecting to have two more departments (Sociology and Politics). There were, however, funds for only one (Political and Social Change as we called it). I had an understanding, moreover, that I would not only have a junior but a senior colleague in my fi eld of Indian history to revive its study at ANU. I never had the senior one, and despite a later occupant of the other appointment becoming in the 1980s the most notable world fi gure in the subject, it disappeared as well. The times were out of joint for so many new academic enterprises however great their signifi cance might be. The HRC faced another problem. Because of the diff erences between ANU's Research Schools and its Faculties, a Centre which was most closely associated with the Faculty of Arts but like the Research Schools was wholly commi! ed to research frequently found itself in danger of falling between their two stools. Long awkwardly xiv Humanities Research Centre