1986: On the Gentleman Scholar and How He Misread the Syllabus
Sydney.
There are mornings when I pass the University of Sydney and think, with unnecessary poignancy, that I am walking beside my younger self: earnest in corduroy, academically inclined, and destined for disappointment. Education was supposed to be our salvation after the war and its awkward peace. Instead, for men of my generation, it became a form of conscription—into civility, into correctness, and, for some of us, into quiet failure.
I was among the intake of 1950, that first confident cohort of returned soldiers’ sons and grammar‑school successes. The sandstone seemed to hum with gratitude and superiority—a mixture of ancient dust and fresh entitlement. We were all told we were lucky to have the opportunity to learn. The word opportunity meant different things depending on one’s shoes. For the scholarship boy, it meant escape; for the rest of us, it meant confirmation of what our fathers already suspected—that cleverness, correctly groomed, could be hereditary.
The girls arrived with notebooks and careful diction. They seemed older than they were—self‑possessed in a way that only daughters of bankers and determined teachers could be. We admired them dutifully. Some of my peers married them; one or two even learned from them. I remained a spectator, caught between fascination and fatigue. I was already specialising in linguistics, which, if you wish to be popular, is the wrong science. Syntax rarely provokes passion. The women preferred medicine or law: fields that produced future husbands, not small dissertations on vowel fronting.
Those first years established the rhythm of university life for men: confidence disguised as humility. We learned to quote, to gesture, to disguise ignorance with politeness. It was said education produced character; in fact, it produced accent. By 1955 one could distinguish graduates by their vowels—those who faced the world broad and unbowed, and those who narrowed their speech as they narrowed their sympathies.
After the war, class was supposed to have collapsed. The soldiers had fought shoulder to shoulder, the rhetoric went; why should their sons not study side by side? Yet the Quadrangle lawn sorted us more efficiently than any army. Public‑school boys laughed differently, privately schooled girls lingered carefully at the edges, and the rest of us, lower‑middle and self‑improving, pretended not to notice we were invisible. A Master’s degree was our only acceptable accent.
For men, education promised authority, though few of us ever found it. We thought scholarship would guarantee stature; instead it bred apology. The confident ones, the Davids and the Felixes, glided into the professions—law, architecture, consulting—while those of us of more theoretical inclination were left guarding the ivory tower’s janitor’s closet. I obtained my Ph.D. in linguistics, a discipline prized for its exactness and ignored for its existence. My triumph was as local as the Sydney grammar of “mate.”
In those decades, university life was its own small empire. There were rituals—tutorials at which one nodded gravely, debates broadcast on the ABC, and evening dances where politics met perfume. To attend a lecture was to perform citizenship. To be uninspired was sacrilege. Still, education at that time served polite separation: it trained men to speak with conviction and women to listen with selectivity. We called this reciprocity.
By the 1960s, the mood changed. The boys who had once saluted authority began to question it—carefully, at first, and then aggressively, as though rebellion could be credited toward a degree. The old professors regarded the ferment with horror. Half of them published defences of “standards.” The other half adjusted their lectures to include Sartre. The Cold War lent everything moral weight. Declaring oneself progressive required courage; declaring oneself conservative required tenure.
The women’s presence altered us more than we admitted. Their competence embarrassed our ceremony. I remember one student, Margaret—an expert in philosophy, later a civil servant—who dismantled my argument about linguistic determinism in ten minutes. I fell in love briefly, defensively, and forever incurably with the idea of being understood. She married an economist who found enlightenment less romantic.
Education made women visible and men anxious. By the early ’70s, the distinction between the sexes inside universities was less about intellect than performance. Women had learned subtlety, sophistication, outrage with syntax. The new feminists quoted Beauvoir with local revisions. Men responded by either condescending or apologising. Those of us who tried collegial equality merely appeared tired.
I remained on the academic path out of habit. I corrected essays as if each one would restore my conviction that culture could be catalogued. Instead, the decades produced doubt: about merit, about learning, even about sentences. The intellectualism of 1975 looked less like rigour than nostalgia. The students knew it; they wore their irreverence like protest badges. What they refused to realise is that rebellion is a privilege earned by a functioning order.
I have, since my failed tenure review (a decision of “strategic streamlining,” according to the Vice‑Chancellor, who streamlined himself into a knighthood), come to see academia as its own Cold War—a world of formal detente, private resentments, and obsessive memoranda. The professors were empire’s last administrators; the tutors, its colonial interpreters. The women entered, dismantled, redecorated, and then left for corporations that appreciated efficiency. The men who remained developed theories about why they were ignored. I am one of them.
But let it not be said education left us unaltered. It taught posture: the carrying of defeat as evidence of refinement. It taught taste: the selection of friends and footnotes alike. And it gave us that smug restraint of the partially enlightened—the ability to make minor adjustments to truth in order to maintain composure.
I write this not as complaint but documentation. The life cycle of the university man between 1950 and 1975 is a story of limited triumph: matriculation, exposure, acquisition, contradiction, and accommodation. At 20, we entered certain of destiny; by 40, we had developed grammatical precision as compensation. The women ascended, the radicals decamped, and the system continued without us. That is perhaps its greatest success.
I used to believe that education created equality. I now know it simply refines envy into conversation. We learned to disguise ambition as irony, to mistrust our own learning, and to use acquired civility as defence against obsolescence. We became polite about decline—a courtesy that might, in retrospect, have been our chief contribution to civilisation.
If I have misread the past—and I admit a talent for misreading—it is because I still believe universities were created to maintain tone as much as intellect. The truly learned are seldom revolutionary; they are too well-behaved. I remain, in my way, a believer. If civilisation falters, it will be because we began to confuse fluency with understanding and education with apology.
For now, from my rented office in the suburbs, I continue to lecture to myself about language and manners, two subjects equally endangered. And perhaps that is the ultimate education of the university man: the knowledge that he has learned to observe success without ever being asked to embody it.
You are here: States of Grace > Evidence