This is a draft of the written version of my paper "Knowledge and intelligence: why ASIO thought university knowledge would kill democracy, 1968-1973"

1. Knowledge and intelligence: why ASIO thought university knowledge
would kill democracy, 1968-1973
Hannah Forsyth Draft 22 June 2009
In 1969 the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation claimed four stages to the total collapse of
parliamentary democracy in Australia. The first stage was disaffection of intellectuals – especially
students and academics – and the fourth was guerrilla war. At the time of the report, its ASIO authors
implied that Australia was already at stage two – the alienation of intellectuals and the transfer of their
allegiance away from government. With sociological inevitability, ASIO warned that this left only two
stages until the collapse of government, which inevitably would lead to unconstrained violence. This
theory appeared repeatedly in ASIO reports on student protests 1968 – 1973, suggesting that ASIO
considered university-based knowledge to be central to the success of parliamentary democracy. This
paper considers student protest and perceptions of the power of university-based knowledge in
democracy and capitalism during the period of student unrest. It considers why, for both students and
ASIO, knowledge was worth fighting to control.
Introduction: universities, knowledge and democracy
In 1969 the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation claimed that there were four
stages to the total collapse of parliamentary democracy in Australia. The first stage
was disaffection of intellectuals – especially students and academics – and the fourth
was guerrilla war. For ASIO, that this process had commenced was unquestionable:
1
The process of ‘alienation of the intellectuals’ is well under way…
Central to the imminent collapse of parliamentary democracy according to ASIO,
were university-based intellectuals, including students, who ASIO thought were
responsible for the popularisation of new ideas that would undermine the existing
democratic system.
ASIO’s assumptions about intellectuals and student protest movements in the late
1960s and early 1970s, enables us to see some of the existent consequences of the
various positions that university-based intellectuals are held to have in relation to
democracy, ideology and the state. In the 1970s, Noam Chomsky, for example,
claimed that university-based academics, alongside the mass media, provided the
illusion of critical engagement with the state while functioning to limit the scope of the
debate to boundaries within which the state could implement repressive policies
unimpeded. 2 Affirming, from a different direction, the complicity of universities,
Edward Shills suggested that the expansion of universities over the past 100 years
1
ASIO, "Trends and Developments in Australia of Counter-Subversion: Security Interest and Significance," in
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (Canberra: National Archives of Australia, 1968), 8.
2
Noam Chomsky, Intellectuals and the State (Baarn: Wereldvenster, 1978), 29, 31.
1

2. has been a part of the application of liberalism, replicating rationalism in the
educated elite, as the basis for good society.3 This expansion of higher education, as
Brian Head noted in 1988, has been linked in academic literature to the emergence
of a new intellectual class, distinct from working and ruling classes.4 Alan McKee,
considering public intellectuals especially, claims that the concept of “intellectual” has
been consistently linked to left wing political goals, as if by definition.5 Head suggests
the opposite, saying that the label of intellectual obscures the “distance between
Meanjin and Quadrant”.6 Head also highlight’s Gramsci’s suggestion that everyone
deploys intellectual labour, describing “organic” intellectualism that operates beyond
the narrow type relentlessly reproduced by educational systems.7Gramsci also
reminds us that ASIO (and this paper) consider a very particular kind of knowledge
and intellectualism – the kind of knowledge that is intertwined with traditional ideas of
the university form.
ASIO’s four-stage theory considered the universities and the intellectuals within them
to represent the source of ideas the population held regarding good government. In
stage One, their “transfer of allegiance” away from the establishment would result in
them leading a propaganda campaign in support of people they considered to be
“repressed” by the social system.8 Stage two would be a popularisation of of this
campaign, and protest movements would position parliamentary leaders as “bad”.9
This would facilitate stage three, takeover from the parliamentary system and the
installation of small self-governed communities.10 The fall of parliament would
inevitably result in stage four, guerrilla war, leaving their politicians with a
responsibility to act. ASIO’s descriptions of the “classic” tactics of revolution included
demonstrations (or “demos”), teach-ins, protests, sit-ins, occupations of offices and
strikes used by students on every university campus around Australia at the time.
Through these, according to ASIO, the “revolutionary process”, was leading
Australia in a singular and inevitable line towards the end of parliamentary
democracy. 11
3
Edward Shills, "The Modern University and Liberal Democracy," in The Academic Ethic and Other Essays on
Higher Education, ed. Steven Grosby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 259.
4
Head ref
5
McKee ref
6
Head p27
7
Head, Gramsci refs
8
ASIO, "Student Revolutionary Activism: Its Implications for the Promotion of Insurrectionary Warfare in Australia," in
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation A12389 A30 PART 7 (Canberra: National Archives of Australia, 1969),
9.
9
ASIO, "Student Revolutionary Activism: An Appreciation of Significant Strategical and Tactical Concepts," in
Australian Security INtelligence Organisation (Canberra: National Archives of Australia, 1969), 57.
10
ASIO, "Student Revolutionary Activism: Its Implications for the Promotion of Insurrectionary Warfare in Australia,"
15.
11
ASIO, "Student Revolutionary Activism: Its Implications for the Promotion of Insurrectionary Warfare in Australia,"
3.
2

3. Many students would have been delighted to hear this. A Serious attempt to Change
Society, is the title of one of a handful of Australian histories written retrospectively
by student participants, recounting student radicalism in the late 1960s and early
1970s. 12 This is a highly mythologised, but nevertheless crucial period of university
and political history, in which many students and junior academic staff actively
sought to use universities and intellectual inquiry to question established economic,
political, academic and social norms. Mick Armstrong’s 1,2,3 what are we Fighting
For? was published by the Socialist Alternative, promoting its ongoing interests13 and
Barry York’s Student Revolt! about similar events at La Trobe University, draws on
memory as its key primary source. 14 These and similar works frequently recall ASIO
operatives on the edges of events.15 Making ASIO more central to his narrative, the
sense of having a political self (re)constructed via an ASIO file has been explored by
ex-Sydney University radical, Rohan Cahill, as a type of “incriminating biography”.16
Histories of ASIO by David McKnight and Frank Cain point to the change that student
protest brought to ASIO’s activities and resources.17 The emergence of the New Left,
documented in 1970 by in situ academics in The Australian New Left, created
enhanced links between intellectuals, intellectualism, social and economic theory and
the projects of the Left.18 Similarly, John Docker describes the “moment” of the New
Left as a realisation of intellectual endeavour and everyday life as instruments of
power. 19
The claims of ASIO and students regarding the proper role of the university form
were totally incompatible, as we will see. Did this moment of fighting to control
university-based knowledge change it? Focusing on ASIO’s four-stage theory,
traditional perceptions about the role of university knowledge to keep society on its
chosen path are compared here to then emerging ideas about disruptive and
revolutionary knowledge. Authors like Goldfarb have claimed that university
intellectuals hold this dual role, to “civilise” and “subvert”, thus forming the dialectic
12
Don (ed.) Beer, A Serious Attempt to Change Society: The Socialist Action Movement and Student Radicalism at
the University of New England, 1969-75. Transcripts of Interviews. (Armidale: Kardoorair Press, 1998). see also Don
Beer, "Doing a Van Winkle? Student Activism and Attitudes at the University of New England, 1964-69," History of
Education Review 25, no. 2 (1996).
13
Mick Armstrong, 1,2,3 What Are We Fighting For? The Australian Student Movement from Its Origins to the 1970s
(Melbourne: Socialist Alternative, 2001).
14
Barry York, Student Revolt! La Trobe University 1967-1973 (Canberra: Nicholas Press, 1989).
15
see for example Don Beer, "Interview with Rod Noble," in A Serious Attempt to Change Society, ed. Don Beer
(Armidale: Kardoorair Press, 1998).
16
Rowan Cahill, "C/58/63: An ‘Incriminating Biography’," in Power to the People: The Legacies of 1968 Workshop
(University of Wollongong: 2008).
17
David McKnight, Australia's Spies and Their Secrets (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994).
18
Richard Gordon, ed., The Australian New Left: Critical Essays and Strategy (Melbourne: William Heinemann
Australia, 1970).
19
John Docker, "'Those Halcyon Days': The Moment of the New Left," in Intellectual Movements and Australian
Society, ed. Brian Head and James Walter (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1988).
3

4. that pushes society onwards.20 The conflicting roles assigned to intellectuals by ASIO
and students tests this idea. Could traditional ideas about the liberal university co-
exist with new ideas and new knowledge? If they could, why did both ASIO and
students fight so hard to control knowledge?
Four stages to revolution
An ASIO report to government quoted student radicals from four Australian states,
demonstrating widespread feeling, using the quotes to claim:
In a country like Australia, an insurrection…would be a strategic alternative to guerrilla warfare
as practised in regions like Latin America and South-East Asia…It might be the culminating
event in the revolutionary process, or alternatively one phase on the process aimed at the
overthrow of the government. In its classic form, insurrection is promoted by three interlocking
21
tactics…
These three tactics, which each headed a brief and alarmingly familiar description
were (1) Provocation via demonstrations, (2) Barricade Uprising (Paris’ May ’68
student uprising was the example) and (3) Revolutionary Strike. With the certainty
attached to an archetypical process, ASIO claimed that the conditions leading to
insurrectionary warfare “will proceed, in Australia as elsewhere, over a period of time
through a series of stages”.22 The report repeats the words “classic form” to convey
the inevitability of the process, creating an imperative to Commonwealth action.
The four-stages to revolution theory outlined a process from disaffection with
government to the end of parliamentary democracy and the outbreak of geurilla war.
Stage One was where individuals in a “society under stress” grow “restless and
dissatisfied with the status quo” and disaffection grows amongst “students,
academics, teachers, the press, etc.” who are in a position to spread discontent.23 A
few demagogic type leaders might emerge, probably out of “elite aspirant groups like
the CPA”. 24 This all seems totally benign. Stage One suggests that Government is a
little inefficient and can’t satisfy the demands of every individual.25 Some haphazard
protesting goes on every now and then.26 A few academics and journalists speak out
20
Goldfarb 1998 ch 1 ref
21
ASIO, "Student Revolutionary Activism: Its Implications for the Promotion of Insurrectionary Warfare in
Australia."A12389 A30 Part 7 pp.2-3
22
ASIO, "Student Revolutionary Activism: Its Implications for the Promotion of Insurrectionary Warfare in Australia,"
7.
23
ASIO, "Student Revolutionary Activism: Its Implications for the Promotion of Insurrectionary Warfare in Australia,"
7.
24
ASIO, "Student Revolutionary Activism: Its Implications for the Promotion of Insurrectionary Warfare in Australia,"
9.
25
ASIO, "Student Revolutionary Activism: Its Implications for the Promotion of Insurrectionary Warfare in Australia,"
7-8.
26
ASIO, "Student Revolutionary Activism: Its Implications for the Promotion of Insurrectionary Warfare in Australia,"
8.
4

5. about a few social issues and several people will agree with them.27 The Communist
Party will talk about revolution.28 It sounds normal. Except that, unless something is
done, according to ASIO reports, it will slip into Stage Two.
Stage Two also must have sounded familiar. Here, this disorganised mass of
individuals becomes collectively restless, the reports claimed. The warnings to
government about this stage were explicit:
People only enter this stage if the establishment has failed to deal with the causes of unrest
29
and discontent.
If government fails to deal with the causes, the unrest will be “popularised” –
probably the report is obliquely referring to the development of a counter-culture.
Especially dangerous for government in this stage, was the loss of support from
“university-based intellectuals”:
There is a transfer of allegiance of the intellectuals (or part thereof). This occurs when the
intellectuals in question consider the social system to be repressive and its leaders bad. These
leaders are seen also to represent certain social groups or classes the activities of which are
said to be detrimental to the welfare of the people at large. A propaganda campaign is built and
directed against these groups or classes, in the process of which the ‘repressed’ groups are
afflicted with an “oppression psychosis”, while the leaders of establishment tend to lose faith in
30
themselves and the ‘status quo’.
The language of contagion is telling. The ASIO analysts were keen for their readers
to see the spread of this “affliction” as inevitable. Sufficient role for government was
thrown in to demonstrate the only way to prevent the epidemic. Politicians must not
listen to students, they must not “lose faith in themselves” or the status quo. They
must intervene before popularisation of protest is unstoppable. The apparent
wrongness of the New Left’s position was crudely emphasised by the words
“propaganda”, “myth”, “Illusion”, stopping barely short, one feels, of words like “lies”
and “heresy”. Intellectuals spreading propaganda would result in the widespread
adoption of new (heretical) ideas:
The disaffected intellectuals then help to create and disseminate a new social myth containing
new collective illusions, new doctrines, new objects of loyalty, economic incentives to
31
revolutionary action, and new values.
But the danger of university-based intellectuals was in their control over knowledge
and thus, the report assumed, their control over ideology:
27
ASIO, "Student Revolutionary Activism: Its Implications for the Promotion of Insurrectionary Warfare in Australia,"
8.
28
ASIO, "Student Revolutionary Activism: Its Implications for the Promotion of Insurrectionary Warfare in Australia,"
9.
29
ASIO, "Student Revolutionary Activism: Its Implications for the Promotion of Insurrectionary Warfare in Australia,"
9.
30
ASIO, "Student Revolutionary Activism: An Appreciation of Significant Strategical and Tactical Concepts," 57.
31
ASIO, "Student Revolutionary Activism: Its Implications for the Promotion of Insurrectionary Warfare in Australia,"
9.
5

6. The purpose is to provide ideological grounds for a new consensus in support of revolutionary
32
action through the replacement of existing patterns of cultural and social cohesion.
The problem was not war, governments, violence, oppression, inequality, poverty or
racism, according to ASIO. The problem was not even students, the New Left, the
Old Left or the Communist Party. The problem was knowledge. It was knowledge
that formed ideology and knowledge that could re-form it. It would be this that would
underpin revolution:
In fact, the new social myth provides the dynamic for the entire revolutionary process and
33
movement. Hence the importance of the intellectuals in that process and movement.
The role of intellectuals in society – as educators, protectors of knowledge and, with
the emergence of the New Left’s political consciousness on everyday life, as
ideology-creators – positioned them as holders of power.
Stage Two must have sounded alarmingly familiar, reflecting the current state of
student unrest and the academic staff who were also aligned to the movements for
change:
This second stage is particularly noted for the ‘alienation of the intellectuals’ and the transfer of
their allegiance from the accepted values of society to other values, eg. Marxism, non-
parliamentary methods of government, anti-capitalism, anti-individualism etc. This transfer of
allegiance is necessary since the intellectuals, eg. Academics, teachers, students, writers,
journalists etc., are the means whereby the new values and philosophy are propagandised and
34
spread throughout the community.
With student activism and the emergence of academic staff who supported it starting
to influence a widespread counter-culture, the fact that Stage Three was “the actual
period of revolutionary action and takeover”, should have been cause for panic. That
the period would be violent, characterised by a type of internal or guerrilla war was
certain.35 Revolution and the collapse of parliamentary democracy would result in the
instatement of small, community-based participatory democracies.36 Just in case the
reader did not immediately recognise that this was a bad thing, the ASIO authors
point out that these small communities would be likely to start competing for
resources and guerrilla war would be inevitable.37
Stage Two was clearly seen as the tipping point and, despite ASIO assurances that
Australia was in fact in Stage One, Stage Two contained sufficiently familiar
32
ASIO, "Student Revolutionary Activism: Its Implications for the Promotion of Insurrectionary Warfare in Australia,"
10.
33
ASIO, "Student Revolutionary Activism: Its Implications for the Promotion of Insurrectionary Warfare in Australia,"
10.
34
ASIO, "Student Revolutionary Activism: An Appreciation of Significant Strategical and Tactical Concepts," 6-7.
35
ASIO, "Politically Motivated Incidents of Violence 1961-71 A12389/A30/Part 12," in Australian Security Intelligence
Organisation (Canberra: National Archives of Australia, 1971), 10.
36
ASIO, "Trends and Developments in Australia of Counter-Subversion: Security Interest and Significance," 8.
37
ASIO, "Trends and Developments in Australia of Counter-Subversion: Security Interest and Significance," 8.
6

7. elements to signal a need for action. The real risk of Stage Two, claimed ASIO, was
that the disparate groups would be coordinated by the Communist Party of Australia.
ASIO communicated that they had evidence of a conspiracy that the Communist
Party and other revolutionary groups were deliberately infiltrating Australian
universities with “large-scale, organised violence” as their goal:
It is now certain that such a policy and such groups are building a hard core of activists within
the universities…The process of ‘alienation of the intellectuals’ is well under way and the
38
established revolutionary bodies are now competing for their allegiance.
ASIO’s belief in the fragility of parliamentary democracy seems astounding, even
given the dramatic character of student polemic and the genuineness of feeling for
change at the time. David McKnight described ASIO as having “swallowed overseas
models of revolution just as slavishly as the numerous left-wing groups”, suspecting
the four-stage model was based on Uruguay, Brazil or Chile as seen by the CIA.39
McKnight points out that the conditions of economic exploitation and politics in those
countries bore no resemblance to Australia, where “capitalism and parliamentary
democracy were resilient and deeply rooted”.40 Furthermore, McKnight says, ASIO
took the “wilder fantasies” of the Left at face value, leading them to mistakenly advise
the government that Australia was headed towards guerrilla war. 41
The ASIO reports contain many pages of quotes and copies of student-written
material, sourced from hundreds of roneoed pamphlets, student newspapers and
other types of publication, always with an emphasis on the more extreme comments,
often pulling them out of context for maximum impact. Despite McKnight’s claim to
their error, it seems hard to believe that ASIO analysts would have interpreted all of
these youthful “wilder fantasies” as intention. The tone and examples used in the
reports also suggest that the ASIO analysts, just as well as the students they
observed, were prone to a bit of melodrama and exaggeration. For example, the
report “Student Revolutionary Activism: its implications for the Promotion of
Insurrectionary Warfare in Australia” gives a long preamble, in which quotes from
student activists are placed alongside definitions of revolution, escalating the sense
of confrontation students verbalised. The report achieved this through a smooth
progression from the words students used themselves – revolution and insurrection –
38
ASIO, "Trends and Developments in Australia of Counter-Subversion: Security Interest and Significance," 8.
39
McKnight, Australia's Spies and Their Secrets, 217-18. McKnight is referring to an ASIO report in his possession
entitled “Violence, Political Extremism and the Revolutionary Process – Basic Elements”. I have no doubt it refers to
the same theory.
40
McKnight, Australia's Spies and Their Secrets, 218.
41
McKnight, Australia's Spies and Their Secrets, 232.
7

8. to “equivalents” that included guerrilla warfare, mutiny, coup d’etat and terrorism.42 It
described student tactics in terms that emphasised things that governments fear:
student provocation, barricades and strikes aimed at the “apparatus of the state” and
the “effective functioning of government”.43 One 1969 report gives a table showing
the relationship between four levels of violence in which the second level is the
overthrow of parliament by riot action, making revolution sound imminent, in their
ostensibly expert opinion.44
A clue to this apparent tendency to exaggeration may lie in a report describing the
way the New Left and student protest movements changed the character of ASIO’s
work. In the 1968 report “Trends and Developments in Australia of Counter-
subversion: Security Interest and Significance”, ASIO described their pre-Vietnam
activity as largely following around the Communist Party.45 It was opposition to the
war, they claimed, that complicated their job, meaning they now needed to watch
churches and “academics, students and other intellectuals via the teach-in
movement”. This paper, like all the others, ends in “the disillusionment of Australians
with parliamentary democracy”, inevitably leading to violence.46 In this report, ASIO’s
unlikely belief in the imminent collapse of parliamentary democracy starts to look like
an application for substantial funding increases to the organization. A vastly
increased workload associated with the government’s foreign policy and revolution
just around the corner would certainly have been compelling reasons to allocate
more resources. Frank Cain says that the period resulted in an increase in staff, a
move to bigger and better premises and the attachment of special branches of State
police to ASIO to assist with surveillance.47
Hierarchical Knowledge
But perhaps ASIO is too easy a target. Laughing at ASIO is a tradition we inherit
from the students of the period, though there is no doubt it is amusing to consider the
collapse of parliamentary democracy to be just a step or two away from students’
questioning of capitalism as the best organiser of wealth. And yet, other characters,
who we can perhaps view with less ridicule, also saw knowledge as foundational to
42
ASIO, "Student Revolutionary Activism: Its Implications for the Promotion of Insurrectionary Warfare in Australia,"
3.
43
ASIO, "Student Revolutionary Activism: Its Implications for the Promotion of Insurrectionary Warfare in Australia,"
4.
44
ASIO, "Student Revolutionary Activism: Its Implications for the Promotion of Insurrectionary Warfare in Australia,"
5.
45
ASIO, "Trends and Developments in Australia of Counter-Subversion: Security Interest and Significance."
46
ASIO, "Trends and Developments in Australia of Counter-Subversion: Security Interest and Significance."
47
Frank Cain, The Australian Security Intelligence Organization: An Unofficial History (Essex: Frank Cass & Co.,
1994), 200.
8

9. the establishment, as civil democracy. Indeed, this was the tradition on which the
idea of the university was based. Knowledge, according to the university tradition, is
what underpins an idea of civilisation. Perceived as a type of “truth” knowledge, in
this paradigm, enables and protects a society and its political and social systems.
That relentlessly influential definer of the idea of the university, Cardinal Newman,
said:
But a University training is the great ordinary means to a great but ordinary end; it aims at
raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national
taste, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aims to popular aspiration,
at giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at facilitating the exercise of political
48
power, and refining the intercourse of private life.
For knowledge to fulfil this duty to society, according to tradition, it requires a group
of people to protect, extend and promote it49, for new knowledge also underlies
“progress”. 50 The 1957 Murray Report on Australian Universities – arguably the
biggest influence, next to the 1987 Dawkins reforms, on the character of universities
in Australia in the latter half of the 20th Century – said of academics:
Such men [sic] … are necessary to keep the march of human knowledge on the move …
without them human discovery would grind to a standstill and the teaching of the able young
51
would become stale and unprofitable.
The protection of democracy and progress, according to the tradition of the liberal
university, requires a community devoted to what is known as “academic freedom” –
the autonomy and security to pursue knowledge for its own sake, uninfluenced by the
state, church or financial gain.52 Sir Keith Murray, who chaired this first review of
universities in Australia, asserted academic freedom as central to the good of any
nation:
The public, and even statesmen, are human enough to be restive or angry from time to time,
when perhaps at inconvenient moments the scientist or scholar uses the licence which the
academic freedom of universities allows him, and brings us all back to a consideration of the
true evidence … No nation in its senses wishes to make itself prone to self-delusion … and a
good university is the best guarantee that mankind [sic] can have, that somebody, whatever
53
the circumstances, will continue to seek the truth and to make it known.
The “purity” of this knowledge and the liberal education that arose from it was
constructed as the safeguard to civil society.
48
John Henry Cardinal Newman, The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated in Nine Discourses Delivered to the
Catholics of Dublin in Occassional :Lectures and Essays Addressed to the Members of the Catholic University, ed.
Martin J Svaglic (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1852 (1966 Edition)), 134.I, vii, 10
49
Jaroslav Pelikan, The Idea of the University: A Reexamination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 76.
50
Abraham Flexner, Universities: American English German (London: Oxford University Press, 1930), 18-20.
51
Keith A.H. Murray et al., "Report of the Committee on Australian Universities," (1957), 10.
52
Conrad Russell, Academic Freedom (London: Routledge, 1993), 15-24.
53
Murray et al., "Report of the Committee on Australian Universities," 11.
9

10. It is likely that this is how ASIO saw it too – though undoubtedly less eloquently than
Murray. The problem, as we will see, is that the traditional construction of knowledge
necessitated an elite. Among students in the late 1960s, this elite came to be known
as “god-professors”. While this title was intended to bring their role into the open and
thus undermine it, elite scholars were indeed traditionally seen to be different from
ordinary people. These academic “masters” were tasked with the responsibility and
privilege of protecting knowledge – so that University Professors in Australia long felt
that their highest responsibility was the maintenance of “standards”.54 Ian Clunies
Ross, highly respected head of the CSIRO and member of the Murray review
committee, saw the importance of intellectual leaders (including scientists like
himself) as “contemplating…the problems of national or international society”.55 He
was not alone in his concern for a significant role of Australian intellectuals, an idea
that was especially prevalent after the Second World War – a war that had been
fought and won with knowledge, and in which Nazi atrocities were known to have
been committed in the name of science.56 The Murray report said:
Finally, in addition to the two aims of education and research, universities have a third function.
They are, or they should be, the guardians of intellectual standards, and intellectual integrity in
the community. Scholars and scientists who spend their lives in the search for knowledge
should, at least in their on spheres of inquiry, be proof against the waves of emotion and
prejudice which makes the ordinary man, and public opinion, subject from time to time to
57
illusion and self-deceit.
The distinction between the scholar and the “ordinary man” [sic] is important, since
scholars were entrusted with the responsibility of knowledge with integrity. Such
anxieties around intellectual inquiry further embedded the idea of knowledge as a
type of truth, the truthfulness of which would be a sound foundation to society:
The preservation of human integrity in facing truth and the demands of justice is the most
58
exacting task which a nation can impose upon itself.
On this basis, the Commonwealth invested heavily in universities after the
acceptance into parliament of the Murray review of universities in 1957. It was
expected that intellectual leaders would start to consider some of the ethical,
economic and social problems the Second World War had presented. Around ten
years later the students and academics who were the objects of ASIO surveillance
were questioning the values of society, though almost certainly in unanticipated
54
James B Conant, "Confidential Report to the Carnegie Corporation on the University Situation in Australia in the
Year 1951," in CCNY Records (New York: Butler Library, Columbia University, 1951).
55
I Clunies Ross, "Letter to Eric Ashby (4 May 1956)," in Ian Clunies Ross Collection: Eric Ashby (Personal
Correspondence) (Canberra: National Archives of Australia, 1956).
56
Kim Beazley (Senior) in House of Representatives Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, "Universities
Committee Report 28 November 1957," (1957).
57
Murray et al., "Report of the Committee on Australian Universities," 11.
58
Murray et al., "Report of the Committee on Australian Universities," 11.
10

11. ways. The idea that traditional university-based knowledge underpinned the nature of
society was something student radicals would have agreed with – only they were of
the opinion that universities’ tacit support for capitalist systems promoted inequalities
they opposed.59
ASIO’s priority was the protection of their parliamentary benefactors causing them to
interpret students’ preoccupation with ‘god-professors’ as a veiled threat to
parliamentary democracy. They did not understand that the professorial authority to
decide what knowledge is (and who may have it) was what students found to be
inherently unacceptable. Just as the student movements critiqued wealth controlled
by a few, so did they consider knowledge in universities to be controlled by
professors, who hoarded it for the benefit of an elite. God-professors and the
governing bodies they controlled, thus prevented the emergence of new knowledge
through more democratic means, which students believed might lead to social
change. 60 ASIO was notoriously opposed to social change and certainly suspicious
of any questioning of capitalism, governance structures and government policy.61
Also, their lack of cultural affinity with long-haired student “ratbags” made ASIO less
inclined to view students sympathetically.62
Eric Ashby – popular British educational leader who wrote sympathetically of
studentsʼ roles in universities 63 – shows the centrality of a sound concept of expertise
to the idea of liberal universities:
[According to students]…universities have to be ‘restructured’ through non-stop
seminars…about what the university is for, run by students on the unexamined assumption that
the participants will always remain students. The one positive article of faith which students in
this group seem to share is that now, in an age of plenty, utopias need to longer be dreams in
books: they can become realities; though how this will be done if expertise in the universities is
64
liquidated, they do not presume to know.
Utopias may be achieved, said Ashby, but not without the “expertise in the
university”, understood as mastery in a hierarchical, but (in his case) generous,
framework. 65
59
Docker, "'Those Halcyon Days': The Moment of the New Left," 295.
60
Rowan Cahill et al., "The Lost Ideal: Position Paper of the Committee for a Free University," Honi Soit 3 Oct 1967
40, no. 22 (1967).
61
Cain, The Australian Security Intelligence Organization: An Unofficial History, 201.
62
McKnight, Australia's Spies and Their Secrets, 228.
63
In 1970 Ashby wrote two books on students in universities: Eric Ashby, Masters and Scholars: Reflections of the
Rights and Responsibilities of Students, The Whidden Lectures for 1970 (London: Oxford University Press, 1970).
Eric Ashby and Mary Anderson, The Rise of the Student Estate in Britain (London: Macmillan, 1970).
64
Ashby and Anderson, The Rise of the Student Estate in Britain, 124.
65
Ashby, Masters and Scholars: Reflections of the Rights and Responsibilities of Students, 13-18.
11

12. ASIO was in general more outlandish in their theories and less gentle and generous
than Eric Ashby. But they too held that the “expertise” in the university underpinned
society’s ideals, which they felt were firmly directed to parliamentary democracy.
Positioned as foundational to civil democratic society, intellectuals and the
knowledge they held were now, from an ASIO perspective, not to be trusted – a risk
to national security. To ASIO, as to students, knowledge was power. But ASIO could
not understand the student preoccupation with university governance as anything
other than a political concern (and it was that, too). This was because they saw
knowledge as inherently hierarchical – there could be no expertise without an elite,
and no safeguard for knowledge as truth. For student movements, the elite were
preventing the emergence of knowledge by containing legitimacy to the ranks of the
professoriate. Knowledge was power and its hierarchical structure was unacceptable.
This led to demands for changes to university governance, towards increased
student participation in identifying and creating knowledge.
Students and knowledge in democracy
ASIO file A12389/A30/Part 7 contains a press clipping from The Australian
newspaper entitled “Reform in the Ivory Towers”. ASIO staff have marked parts of
the clipping, with especial emphasis on the following passage:
Self-management of universities goes hand in hand with a general movement to extend the
66
principle of self-management throughout society.
ASIO analysts reported that reform of universities was intended to precipitate reform
of society.67 ASIO too felt that reform of universities towards participatory democracy
could spread. Another marked section of the article read:
The special problems of universities in achieving re-orientation towards a fully human
education cannot be solved by the governing bodies of the universities. The people most
qualified to tackle these questions, as well as to make everyday decisions, are the staff and
68
students themselves.
As unlikely as it seems that ASIO would care about the internal organisation of
universities, it turns out they did. The fact that a shift towards participatory
democracy was observable within universities suggested, according to ASIO reports,
that such a shift was possible on a much wider scale. 69 ASIO analysts oddly asserted
that a student takeover of university governance would be one easy step away from
66
Reform in the Ivory Towers, clipping in ASIO file A12389/A30/Part 7 marked by hand as originating in The
Australian 23/7/69
67
ASIO, "Recent Trends in the Radical Student Protest Movement in Australia," in Australian Security Intelligence
Organisation A12389 A30 PART 7 (Canberra: National Archives of Australia, 1969), 7.
68
Reform in the Ivory Towers, clipping in ASIO file A30 Part 7 marked by hand as originating in The Australian
23/7/69
69
ASIO, "Student Revolutionary Activism: Its Implications for the Promotion of Insurrectionary Warfare in Australia,"
15.
12

13. a similar takeover of the Australian democratic system.70 In a 1968 precursor to the
four-stages theory, an ASIO report on the nature of student protest in Australia
suggested that if government allowed universities to become too large (like the
American universities) large-scale protest and violence might result:
Still, if the Australian universities develop into impersonal, mass, authoritarian-type institutions
on the American and Western European models, then student-staff administration relations
could become so strained as the result of student and staff frustrations, that aggressive
71
'student power' action might result.
The author connected “attacks” on the university with attacks on government as
inevitable:
The resulting attacks on university administrations would lead automatically to political
campaigns directed at government … The campus would become a forcing-house for every
brand of ‘protest politics … the entire student protest and power movements, operating on
common ground, and using student frustrations, resentments and fears to generate radical
action of a destructive nature, would take its part in a general revolutionary political
72
campaign.
The four-stage theory saw universities as future ‘counter-states’:
The universities, run by students with outside support via ‘student-worker co-operation’, would
form the base for the ‘counter-state’, and a model for the establishment of guerrilla bases
73
elsewhere in the community.
So it was that whenever students spoke of violence on campus, ASIO took careful
note. 74 The problem was, some of students’ discussion of violence was metaphoric.
Much of the student protest movement understood the control of knowledge to
represent a type of power, even a type of violence by an intellectual elite over the
population. In Mark Gibson’s recent analysis of power, he suggests that for Foucault,
the1950s and 1960s had shown that oppression was not just state power, but a “sort
of abiding oppression in everyday life”.75 Inspired by the student protest movement in
Paris, Michel Foucault considered there to be no relationship between knowledge
and what is known. Therefore, knowledge asserts domination, power, force and is an
act of violation. 76 Few students would have developed theories as sophisticated as
Foucault’s – and indeed Foucault’s ideas were barely introduced into Australian
intellectual life until the late 1970s – but the sense of the (sometimes violent) power
70
ASIO, "Recent Trends in the Radical Student Protest Movement in Australia," 7-8.
71
ASIO, "Student Protest in Australia: Its Nature and Significance," in Australian Security Intelligence Organisation
A12389 A30 PART 7 (Canberra: National Archives of Australia, 1968), 3.
72
ASIO, "Student Protest in Australia: Its Nature and Significance," 3.
73
ASIO, "Student Revolutionary Activism: Its Implications for the Promotion of Insurrectionary Warfare in Australia,"
15.
74
“Whenever students spoke” is no exaggeration. ASIO appears to have literally taken note of every mention of
violence.
75
Michel Foucault, from Interview in JD Faubion (ed) Power: Essential Works of Foucault. Cited in Mark Gibson,
Culture and Power: A History of Cultural Studies (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2007), 22.
76
Gibson, Culture and Power, 27.
13

14. of knowledge was a characteristic of the period.77 As John Docker put it, “the makers
of mainstream knowledge had allowed themselves to become contemptible clients of
State power”. 78 Of course, for some this quite readily slipped into a justification for
physical violence, especially when it attracted media coverage.79 More commonly,
students saw the imposition of knowledge by the professorial experts as a type of
repression of the “socially relevant” knowledge that could come about by more active
participation by students in the “community of scholars”. And when professors
actively denied the validity of, for example, feminist inquiry as a valid intellectual
pursuit we can see the ways that the elite professoriate did use knowledge as power
in the autocratic fashion that earned student ire.
In 1973, PhD students Jean Curthoys and Liz Jacka proposed to teach
“Philosophical aspects of Feminist thought”. The proposal was hotly debated in the
then deeply divided Philosophy Department at the University of Sydney. Despite
some fierce opposition, both Department and Faculty approved it – all the
authorisation officially needed for an optional unit offered to senior undergraduates.
But one professor in the department made a phone call to another professor: the
Deputy Vice Chancellor, who held the purse strings. The Deputy Vice Chancellor
declared there to be no funding for the course. Outraged members of the Philosophy
department descended on his office in protest, leading the Deputy Vice Chancellor to
refer the issue to more professors – the University Professorial Board. This was
exactly the type of behaviour that was making students suspicious of professorial
power and hierarchical knowledge. Professors were using whatever power was at
their fingertips – in this case funding-power – to control knowledge.
The Professorial Board voted against the course, leading to the highly publicised
Philosophy Strike. In this, many staff and students from several departments went on
strike. The Builders Labourers Federation weighed in with their support and media
contacts and a Women’s Tent Embassy was constructed in the Main Quad.80 A
University Senate Inquiry resulted in approval for the course.81 Leonie Kramer, then
Professor of Australian Literature, felt the published Inquiry report failed to give an
77
Tania Lewis, "International Exchange and Located Transnationalism: Meaghan Morris and the Formation of
Australian Cultural Studies," Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 17, no. 2 (2003).
78
Docker, "'Those Halcyon Days': The Moment of the New Left," 295.
79
Albert Langer, The Socialist Imperative - a May Day Manifesto. Cited in ASIO, "Student Revolutionary Activism: Its
Implications for the Promotion of Insurrectionary Warfare in Australia," 2. See also ASIO, "Politically Motivated
Incidents of Violence 1961-71 A12389/A30/Part 12," 10.
80
Alison Bashford, "The Return of the Repressed: Feminism in the Quad," Australian Feminist Studies 13, no. 27
(1998).
81
University of Sydney, "Minutes of the Special Meeting of Senate 20 July 1973," in Senate (Sydney: University of
Sydney Archives, 1973).
14

15. adequate picture of the Philosophy Strike and insisted that her own analysis be
published alongside it.82 She insisted on this because there was something new
about the Philosophy Department that she thought should be highlighted: they were
experimenting with participatory democracy.83
Universities were changing and, at all levels, moves to include student opinion in
curriculum design and student representation in university governance were
progressing. Experiments were underway, exploring the best ways of including
students and junior staff in decisions. Sydney’s Philosophy Department was, at that
point, allowing all students to vote at Departmental meetings. This certainly seems
radical, but the staff vote was recorded separately and could be used as a veto. A
majority of staff had supported the Feminist course. For Leonie Kramer, the majority
of staff were not to be trusted either, however. She wanted it known that the majority
of professors in the department had opposed the course – she did not mention that
there were only two or three. It is clear that she thought the public would support
professors over anyone else, in their assessment of the intellectual validity of
feminism in Philosophy.
Conclusions
Jean Curthoys, approximately 25 years after the Philosophy Strike, made the
following intriguing comment:
I have no time here to defend this liberal conception [of the university] and so I shall simply say
that my deep regrets about the strike concern the extent to which it opened the floodgates for
84
its rejection.
The extent to which it opened the floodgates is difficult to determine, but what is
certain is that the way student protest movements conceived of knowledge was
incompatible with the way knowledge was structured in a traditional sense. The
student movement sought a redistribution of the control of knowledge from the
professoriate to a more participatory model. It is tempting, looking at our consumer-
focused universities and student-centred pedagogies to say they succeeded, and
possibly they did. But in confining ourselves to the late 1960s and early 1970s we
can conclude that the tension between liberal traditions of the university and
emerging models of knowledge were possibly at their most taut.
82
Sydney, "Minutes of the Special Meeting of Senate 20 July 1973."
83
David Malet Armstrong, "To All Philosophy Students at Sydney University," in David Armstrong Papers: Philosophy
Strike (Canberra: National Archive of Australia, 1973).
84
Jean Curthoys, "Memoirs of a Feminist Dinosaur," Australian Feminist Studies 13, no. 27 (1998): 57.
15

16. It is possible that ASIO analysts deliberately exaggerated the imminence of their
assessment of the risk of revolution in order to ensure adequate resources to fund
their vastly expanded surveillance responsibilities. It may be that they did not
actually believe Australia was a couple of short steps away from guerrilla war. Or it
could be that they thought worst-case scenarios were warranted, given events in
Paris and elsewhere, where perhaps other governments had underestimated the
power of the student population. 85 Regardless, the ASIO reports were able to give
such an elevated status to the level of risk presented by student protest movements
because of the way they saw the relationship between knowledge and democracy.
ASIO constructed knowledge as foundational to a civil, democratic society, which
was consistent with traditions of liberal universities. The task of the traditional
university to promote progress, uphold intellectual integrity and, where needed, point
out falsehood and wrongdoing implied that it would always function in support of the
establishment, keeping society on its chosen path. To students this was
unacceptable. Knowledge, they thought, should show ways that the establishment
was repressive, undermine it, promote revolution and change. If ASIO genuinely
thought that knowledge underpinned democracy, it is less surprising that they were
so alarmed. If professors thought it, perhaps it is less ridiculous than it might appear,
that they too sought to protect their position as a part of their perceived responsibility
to maintain intellectual standards. But the professoriate, in abusing the power they
had, sometimes behaved badly and, like ASIO, earned their downfall.
However, the liberal conception of the university is not an uncomplicated idea, nor
was it the sole possession of professors, ASIO operatives and other agents of state
power. While students opposed ways that university-based knowledge was being
deployed and the types of power it granted, they did not necessarily wish to disrupt
the knowledge traditions universities upheld. In fact, quite the opposite. Mostly,
students just wanted to be considered to be a valid contributing part of the
university’s knowledge and governance systems, often invoking a monastic tradition
of “community of scholars” to claim it.86 The problem was that despite the tradition
that included students as members of the university87, the same tradition was
inherently hierarchical – based on mastery and expertise. The community of scholars
was not, in this tradition, the same thing as participatory democracy and it could not
easily be made so simply through conceptual slippage. By challenging the existing
85
See for example ASIO, "Politically Motivated Incidents of Violence 1961-71 A12389/A30/Part 12," 10.
86
Bob Connell, "Inside the Free U," Honi Soit 19 April 1968 41, no. 7 (1968).
87
Ashby and Anderson, The Rise of the Student Estate in Britain, x.
16

17. order, students did not add themselves to the professoriate as a new community.
Instead, they tore the professoriate down. While it may not seem like a great loss, the
legitimacy of the university’s claim over truth in civil society rested in this hierarchical
order.
This battle over the control of knowledge was not a productive dialectic between
conservativism and change via the power of knowledge. These two positions could
not coexist. With the decline in the hierarchical elitism of the professoriate went the
truth-claims of the university and much of its power. The continuing tension, perhaps,
is that this largely un-mourned loss is also connected to a loss of the perceived social
value of university-based knowledge itself, leading Jean Curthoys to say in the
1990s:
88
This liberal conception of the university no longer has currency.
88
Curthoys, "Memoirs of a Feminist Dinosaur," 57.
17

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20