ATEM Origins

Colin Plowman's Memories of AITEA

From my earliest days at the University of Western Australia in the 1950s I was bothered by the lack of any formal development of the theory and practice of university administration amongst my colleagues. This discontent with the status quo came to a head in the early 1960s during my time at the ANU. Two steps were taken in those days which were precursors of what was to become AITEA.

Firstly, I used to gather my staff for a meeting every Friday at which we discussed the theory and practice of our work. I encouraged them to read books about administration and about good writing. Examples were the works of Quiller-Couch, Fowler, Gower and Robert Graves. I remember the first sentence in Graves’s Reader over your Shoulder which was “What are the principles of a clear statement?”

Secondly, I visited Maurie Blank, Registrar at the Caulfield Institute of Technology, as I had heard of his ideas for formalising the training of College administrators. He was an extraordinarily modest and unassuming man. I asked him why his ideas for an Institute were confined to the Colleges of Advanced Education. He replied that University Registrars appeared dismissive of his ideas and that the Vice-Chancellors were reluctant to take a different view. The opposition came mainly from Hugh McCredie (Sydney) and Jim Butchardt (Monash) and to some extent Howard Buchan (Flinders).

After a time, however, my colleagues at other institutions sensed that they needed to do something about formal training and initiated a School for University Administrators which was run at the University of Melbourne. This venture had the support of the Vice-Chancellor, Sir George Paton; the Registrar, ‘Ding’ Bell and his Associate Registrar Paul Morgan, together with Ray Marginson. A similar school was run in Canberra by me and Don Patterson at the Canberra College of Advanced Education. It was at this School that I met my wife Anne. The next step was that Warwick Williams of the ANU and Paul Morgan of the University of Melbourne ran a School at the University of Papua New Guinea.

The Registrars remained generally opposed to the idea that the CAEs should be included but the idea for the Australian Institute of Tertiary Education Administrators (AITEA) nonetheless began to emerge. Graham Jackson of the ANU visited the University of Western Australia and convinced the Deputy Registrar, Dan Dunn, that the CAEs and Institutes of Technology in Western Australia (now Edith Cowan and Curtin) should be included in the new organisation. People began to give the idea more consideration, but not necessarily active consideration.

In the mid-1970s Graham Jackson and I ran a Pan Pacific Conference of University Administrators at which Gareth Thomas from the Institute of Education in London was a guest. Don Watts of WAIT and Tony Kearney, Registrar of the University of Tasmania, as well as Alec Lazenby, Vice-Chancellor of the University of New England gave support.

From this point, the concept of AITEA was taken seriously. There were still some pockets of resistance, represented by Sam Rayner (Queensland) and Keith Chester (James Cook), but they were now in the minority.

Our motivation was the conviction that we should be taking an interest in the quality of our work and the way that it advanced our institutions. The motive was not related to what we could derive from it, but rather how our colleagues and the institutions where they worked could benefit. We wanted to understand the structure of the machinery and how it could best be oiled and maintained.

Eventually people came to realise that what we were doing was important and my legacy remains the satisfaction that we achieved something worthwhile. I noticed in a recent publication of the Association of University Administrators (UK and Ireland) that the aims of their programs are to promote “reflective practice”. This, in a nutshell, was our aim in the 1970s.

The Future

There is a degree of schizophrenia in ATEM at the moment. Are we an organisation devoted to promotion of reflective practice, or merely an organisation that allows a person to acquire further letters after her or his name? Are we lighting a fire in the minds of our members in which they strive to understand the nature of what they are involved in, or are we merely teachers of clever techniques for solving problems?

If we are lighting the fire, then we are giving staff the ability to derive the deep satisfaction that comes with mastering a craft. If we are only providing management techniques, then in my view we still have a long way to go.

I should add that we were a happy bunch in the old days of AITEA. I have noticed lately that there is much more rivalry in the organisation and much less cohesion. This might simply reflect the world in which we now live. Things do change, and the older Ghosts watch with some concern from the sidelines at the same time as we cheer you. However, we wish you all well. ATEM has passed to your hands.