Faculty History
Student Movements
Any attempt to characterise the student body of the Faculty must necessarily be highly impressionistic. How far did they resemble, and how far did they differ from, students elsewhere, either in Victoria or in other states? Certainly for the first year or two Monash provided opportunities for students who had been unable to gain entry to the quotas of the University of Melbourne, but very quickly, whether because of its location, or its atmosphere or its academic reputation it was attracting some of the best matriculants in its own right. Many of them were first generation students whose parents and grandparents had either not wanted a university education of had not been able to carry through the full course of secondary education required for entry. This perhaps led to differences of motive or outlook. Certainly those members of staff who were here at the beginning, in the words of one of them, found the Monash student to be "a lively, irreverent and stimulating being to teach". Whether there were any Monash characteristics to explain the extraordinary activities which disturbed the University over a decade, from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s, however, it is impossible to say.
Certainly no account of the growth of the Faculty would be complete without reference to this prolonged period of student unrest. It was a complex movement whose motives, causes, structure and general character it is not easy to describe. An overt aspect of the student movement, of course, was the Australian involvement in the Vietnam conflict, and an early trigger to student demonstration occurred over a collection of funds for the Vietnam Red Cross. Much of the rhetoric of mass demonstrations was directed at the evils of American imperialism. But the Vietnam issue, while important, was, perhaps, an occasion rather than a cause. For some the ideological elements went deeper. For them the mass meetings and the demonstrations represented an attack on capitalist society and on the University as a vulnerable part of that society. For some the real goal was the politicisation of the student body. The desire to force the University to invoke the support of the police (unfulfilled for ten years) was specifically intended to radicalise student opinion. For others the movement had an experiential character. It was something without definable goals whose meaning lay in the experience itself.
These developments were, of course, part of a much wider pattern of student activity, to be found in the universities of Europe and America as well as in other Australian campuses. Broadly speaking there were two waves of student activism. The first phase, beginning in about 1967 and fading out at the end of 1971, was deliberately political in character, and was concerned to channel student indignation at the defects of the society about them. The second phase, in the mid-1970s, was concerned more with genuine university maters - to methods of assessment and to aspects of university government. Student views on these question led to some compromises - to modification of assessments systems and to the provision of greater student participation in the deliberative bodies of the university.
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