‘God-professor’: recovering the meanings of a contested concept in Australasian university history

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article seeks to recover the contested early history of the term and concept ‘god-professor’. Scholars of the histories of Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand universities and their disciplines have often used ‘god-professor’ descriptively, referring to nineteenth and twentieth-century professors said to have held absolute scholarly authority within and beyond the academy. It has been less commonly noticed that when the term ‘god-professor’ emerged in Australian academia in the early 1960s, it was not a historical and descriptive term but one used polemically in contemporary contests over academic authority. The rapid expansion of postwar Australian higher education made tractable the problems then debated. The article examines the emergence of the ‘god-professor’ concept within these debates, not to suggest the primacy of originary meanings but to foreground questions of academic authority and autonomy lost in many later descriptive uses, which are resonant for debates over academic collegiality and managerial governance today.