1 Spike, silver jubilee number, Easter 1924, p.vi.

2 Programme, Victoria University College Conversazione, 10 Aug. 1928, VC file 189: box 10B, P46.

3 Programme, Victoria University College Jubilee, 1899– 1949, Conversazione, VC file 1211: box 1G, P5.

4 Spike, foundation number, 1934, p.93.

5 Hunter, Otago University graduation address, 16 May 1934, p.6, VC file 189; ‘Poverty in an age of plenty’, NZ National Review, 15 Sept. 1933, p.19. An article in Spike in 1937 (on ‘Town and gown’) discoursed on this theme: ‘The world is awakening now to a realisation that a great development of the social studies – economics, psychology, political science, education – is essential before the forced growth of the physical sciences can profitably be applied to human service.’ (Spike, 1937, p.7.)

6 Council minutes, 1932, p.409; 1933, p.583. The prospect of university colleges absorbing the training colleges had already been raised in the 1928 Atmore report, and considered by the 1930 parliamentary education committee; and was discussed by the conference of colleges in February 1932. Victoria was the main proponent of the idea, with some support from Auckland. The Reichel–Tate report in 1925 had also proposed postgraduate university training for secondary school teachers.

7 Council minutes, 1933, p.582. Over the previous three years geology classes (including geography) had averaged 41 students, half the size of the next smallest, physics (76), biology (80) and history (83). Chemistry averaged 141 students; modern languages 138; commerce 262.

8 Cotton to the registrar, 23 Apr. 1934, VC file 1395: box 2F, P8.

9 Already this year a Finance Act had been passed giving the government the power to dismiss university teachers (and school teachers and public servants) who made any public statement intended bring the government into disrepute.

10 Four councillors voted against the resolution; eight for. The longer motion continued: ‘… as it believes that no real university education can exist where university teachers feel that they have not full liberty to give expression to the results of their thinking and investigation because they fear penalties that may be imposed by political or university authorities’. Council minutes, 27 Apr. 1933, p.466.

11 K. Sinclair, A History of the University of Auckland, Auckland, 1983, p.154.

12 Sinclair, p.159; R.M. Campbell, ‘In the name of national security’, New Zealand Listener, 23 Feb. 1974, p.9. The page 387 Council's selection committee consisted of the chairman, Phineas Levi; the chairman of the Professorial Board, education professor W.H. Gould; and Hunter, the Board's second representative on Council.

13 NZPD, 1934, Vol.240, p.1081.

14 This work was not commissioned but purchased from prominent Wellington portrait artist M.E.R. Tripe in 1932 (at a special price).

15 Williams was born in Wellington, but he grew up and was educated in Taihape and Auckland.

16 R. Cooke (ed.), Portrait of a Profession, Wellington, 1969, p.200.

17 H. Mackenzie, ‘Short farewell address’, undated news clipping, VC file 189.

18 Ian Gordon interviewed by Brian Edwards, Radio New Zealand, 10 May 1997; Victorious, Summer 1998–99, p.18.

19 It may be debated whether the department has fully exploited its proximity to this library – it was the opinion of the 1995 review of the department that it did not encourage its students strongly enough to do so – but members of its staff have made scholarly use of its resources, while a number (W.J. Cameron, Reg Tye, Don McKenzie and Brian Opie, as well as Gordon) have played a very prominent role in the Friends.

20 J. Ritchie, ‘Sutherland, Ivan Lorin George’, in The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Vol.4, Wellington, 1998, p.506. Sutherland took his own life in 1952.

21 Evening Post, 1936, news clippings, 1935–36.

22 These included two future professors of education, C.L. Bailey and A.E. Fieldhouse.

23 Professorial Board minutes, 1919, pp.201, 205.

24 The student representative did not have to be a current student, but ‘a person who has attended lectures at the College within the period of two years immediately preceding his appointment’. Not until the 1960s did it become the norm to elect a current student, or one who had just graduated, as opposed to a graduate of a few years' standing.

25 Council minutes, 14 Dec. 1927, p.97.

26 Miller gave lectures for some years on medieval history to stage-one philosophy students, and on the origins of the Maori wars to history students.

27 Spike, foundation number, 1934, p.25.

28 C.W. Collins, ‘Harold Gladstone Miller: valedictory’, New Zealand Libraries, Vol.29, No.3 (Apr. 1966), p.51. The reorganisation of the library also extended to its financing: library funds were no longer divided equally between departments, but allocated according to the needs of each subject. However, Miller was not accorded a place on the Professorial Board, as librarians at other universities would be – ‘through some difficulty in the interpretation of their Act which Victoria could easily have cleared up,’ according to Collins – and for many years ‘declined … as a matter of principle, an invitation to “attend” meetings’.

29 Calendar, 1949, p.94. As the college had no music department, the music set was placed under the control of the Professorial Board.

30 Spike, 1935, p.13.

31 On Beaglehole's relationship with Heenan see R. Barrowman, ‘“Culture-organising”: Joe Heenan and the beginnings of state patronage of the arts’, New Zealand Studies, Vol.6, No.2 (July 1996), pp.3–10.

32 ‘It is not important that his [the public servant's] grasp of the history of grammar should be exhaustive, but he should know Paradise Lost and Hamlet.’ J.C. Beaglehole, A School of Political Studies, Wellington, 1938. Spike in 1937 (‘Town and gown’) also argued for Victoria to develop the science of government: ‘Never was the time more propitious than now, when a new alignment in politics has accelerated the development of a party not only possessing the understanding of the mass, but concerned also with some knowledge of the science of government which politicians of our early history had neither the opportunity nor the inclination to acquire.’ (Spike, 1937, p.7.)

33 The first choice for the lectureship was also a Chicago graduate, who declined. A late application for the chair came from R.M. Campbell of the High Commissioner's Office in London, a Victoria graduate, and a later Public Service Commissioner.

34 Lipson and Parker in M. Clark (ed.), School of Political Science and Public Administration: jubilee, May 1989, Wellington, 1989, pp.11, 15. Lipson, incidentally, remains to date Victoria's youngest professorial appointment.

35 This prospect, mind you – of the creation of ‘an aristocracy of intellect’ in the public service – was not univerally welcomed. The New Zealand Railways Officers Advocate commented: ‘In effect, if these demands were acceded to [for preferment to be given to university graduates for employment and promotion in the public service], it would mean that without a qualification, any member of the Public Service would be in extreme danger of remaining a hewer of wood and a drawer of water for the whole of his working days.’ Christian Science Monitor, 5 Aug. 1940; New Zealand Railways Officers Advocate, 20 May 1940.

36 J.C. Beaglehole, Victoria University College, Wellington, 1949, p.232. Another wartime development was an idea – unrealised – early in 1939 to appoint a ‘distinguished refugee scholar or scientist’. Auckland University College had first approached the minister with a proposal for a refugee scholarship (government funding was requested), and Victoria planned to follow suit. Later in 1939 £600 was anonymously offered for a two-year scholarship at Victoria for an Austrian refugee, but the scholar in question was unable to get here. Perhaps it was the same £600 anonymously offered in 1939 that established an International Research Fellowship in Botany in 1945. (Council minutes, 23 Mar. 1939, p.31.)

37 When shipments of books for the library arrived with leaflets printed with the message, ‘arrived safely thanks to British convoys’, the librarian pasted some of these into the front of volumes ‘as a reminder to future generations’ – an initiative that earned him the congratulations of the college Council. (Council page 388 minutes, 28 May 1942, p.273.)

38 Council minutes (special meeting), 3 July 1940, p.271; 24 Apr. 1941, pp.66–7. Almost 10 years later the issue of pacifism returned to trouble the Council: a junior lecturer in psychology (and future professor of social work), John McCreary, was appointed only after the Council had ascertained that he had been released from internment camp during the war as a genuine conscientious objector.

39 These included a difficult relationship between the professor and the Public Service Commission, partly ameliorated by halving the size of the advisory committee (from 10 members to five).

40 When the chair was first advertised in 1947 the selection committee put forward two names, Parker and Leicester Webb, then head of the Stabilisation Commission (and from 1948 director of marketing) from the nine applicants (who also included Ian Milner). The Council deferred its decision; in the meantime Hunter set out to find an American academic prepared to spend a sabbatical year in New Zealand to fill the gap, and the Public Administration Advisory Committee displeased the Council by making its own recommendation in favour of Webb. When the job was readvertised in 1948 there were no further suitable candidates, and Parker was persuaded to curtail his Commonwealth Research Fellowship by several months to take up the chair from the beginning of 1949.

41 Annual report for 1941, Council minutes, 1942, p.258.

42 He had published a book on the subject, Labour and Capital, in 1922, and established the Employee Partnership Institute of which he was director.

43 Calendar, 1945, pp.97–8. Bertie Whitcombe of Whitcombe & Tombs had offered to print the advertisement for the fellowship gratis because of ‘his interest in this new work’. Hare had been unable, in wartime, to avail himself of the $2000 Carnegie grant the college had also secured for him to visit the United States and Canada on the way out.

44 1000 copies were printed by Whitcombe & Tombs, and a further 500 by Dents for sale in the United Kingdom.

45 Hare, Report of research fellow in social relations in industry, Sept. 1943, Council minutes, 1943, p.477ff. He also regretted his lack of involvement in the college's teaching. Indeed, two years into the fellowship he asked the Council what its position would be if he were to leave before the five years were up: the reply was that it could not release him.

46 H. Valder to the registrar, 9 Dec. 1946, Council minutes, 1946, p.1243.

47 Journal of Public Administration, Vol.1, No.1 (May 1938), p.10.

48 Report for university conference: new developments, July 1944, Council minutes, 1944, p.619; Council minutes, 24 Aug., 23 Nov. 1944, pp.649, 711. The college had already put in a request for anthropology and sociology in 1941.

49 Hunter, School of Social Studies, May 1845, Council minutes, 1945, p.806.

50 D.C. Marsh, Social Work and its Aims (inaugural address), Wellington, 1951, p.1.

51 J.R. McCreary, ‘The School of Social Science. Part One – The Martians’, New Zealand Social Worker, Vol.7, No.1 (Jan. 1971), p.11; Council minutes, 26 May, 28 July 1949, pp.87, 128.

52 McCreary, pp.11, 13.

53 C.L. Bailey in Ako Pai, Wellington, 1980, p.44.

54 Ibid., p.48.

55 The DSIR provided funding for teaching assistance in Hearnshaw's place. (Industrial psychology had been included in the syllabus of Hunter's department since the 1920s.)

56 K. Buchanan, Geography and Human Affairs (inaugural address), Wellington, 1954; Buchanan, ‘Man's tenure of the earth: the nature of geography and its contribution in a changing world’, Spike, 1954, pp.13–17; H. Franklin and D. Winchester (eds), Victoria Geography Teaching and Research, Wellington, 1993.

57 Maximum class sizes were set and a scheme of priorities drawn up: returned servicemen and women were given highest priority, students who had not made good progress and those who were not taking a degree course the lowest.

58 F. Page, memo [1956], VC file 827: box 4G, R95/100.

59 John Money had founded the Music Club in 1942. He studied psychology at Victoria from 1939 to 1944, while at training college: he has identified Ernest Beaglehole as the strongest Victoria influence on his subsequent, controversial career as a sexologist.

60 Page, Spike, 1949, p.71.

61 Page, ‘The beginnings of the VUW Music Department’, in V. Harris and P. Norman (eds), Douglas Lilburn: a festschrift, Wellington, 1993, p.53.

62 Report of joint committee on five-year plan: aims and functions of the university, Council minutes, 1946, p.1117.

63 Council minutes, 26 Aug. 1948, p.158.

64 Both the title and salary proposed were of concern. Hunter, memo to Council, 15 Dec. 1947, Council minutes, 1947, p.263.

65 Beaglehole, ‘The New Zealand Scholar’, in P. Munz (ed.), The Feel of Truth, Wellington, 1969, p.243.

66 Until 1936 New Zealand figured only within the section of History I on British colonisation; then – upon Beaglehole's arrival – as ‘outlines of the history of New Zealand’, making up a third of the stage-one course.

67 Beaglehole, ‘History and the New Zealander’, in The University and the Community, Wellington, 1946, p.124.

68 Council minutes, 1936, p.903.

69 Twelve out of the total of just over 100 were in the social rather than pure sciences.

70 By J.C. Beaglehole, mathematics professor F.F. Miles, and honorary lecturer in zoology Kazimierz Wodzicki.

71 Council minutes, 24 June 1943, p.443.

72 As were Florance and Murphy.

73 F.F. Miles and H.G. Heine to Council, 20 Apr. 1932, Council minutes, 1932, pp.320–1; Council minutes, 26 May 1932, p.335.

74 Principal's report, June 1947, Council minutes, 1947, p.102.

75 Membership was open to professors, full-time lecturers and their first assistants, the librarian, the registrar and their assistants.