2025 Annual Academy Lecture

Event details

Event Date: 5.30-6.30pm (AEDT), Wednesday 12 November 2025 Venue: Chau Chak Wing Auditorium, Business School, Building 8, UTS campus (14–28 Ultimo Road, Ultimo) Registration: This is a free event. Bookings are essential.

This event will be followed by the Fellows Signing Ceremony, and a catered reception. Find out more here.

‘When Universities Mattered’

In the 175 years of universities in Australia, the Commonwealth has only been funding and setting the policy frameworks for higher education system for only 82 of those years. Yet today it is the dominant player in shaping the system and understanding the history of how the Commonwealth became involved may tell us something about the imperatives driving the policy framework in which universities continue to work. In this lecture I attempt to trace the origins of the Commonwealth involvement in Australian universities, focusing on the late 1930s till the late 1950s, when the Government saw universities as integral to transforming Australia’s economy and society. It was a time of intense interest in how universities could drive the public good, requiring significant investment and oversight. It was far from a utopia as the contested role of the humanities in shaping this future highlights. As we stand on the precipice of the fourth industrial revolution there is an urgent need to rethink the fundamentals of our current broken system and recover the ethos that universities matter and the humanities matter and both are central to Australia’s ability to navigate the challenges ahead.   

Professor Stephen Garton is the current President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (2023 – onwards). He is the Principal Advisor to the Vice-Chancellor at the University of Sydney. 

He has held senior management positions at the University for two decades, including Vice-Chancellor and President (December 2020 to July 2019), Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor (September 2019 to December 2020), Provost and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (2009 to 2019) and Dean of the Faculty of Arts (2001 to 2009). 

Professor Garton is a graduate of the University of Sydney (BA) and the University of NSW (PhD). He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, the Royal Australian Historical Society and the Royal Society of NSW. 

His area of research expertise is Australian history, although he has also published in the fields of American and British history. His major books include Medicine and Madness: A Social History of Insanity in NSW 1880-1940 (1988), Out of Luck: Poor Australians and Social Welfare 1788-1988 (1990),The Cost of War: Australians Return (1996 and republished in 2020) and Histories of Sexuality: Antiquity to the Sexual Revolution (2004). He is also a co-author with Shane White, Stephen Robertson and Graham White of Playing the Numbers, a study of the culture of the numbers rackets in Harlem in the 1920s, published by Harvard University Press in 2010, and Preserving the Past: The Unified National system and the University of Sydney 1986-1995 with Julia Horne. He has published extensively in such fields as the history of psychiatry, crime, poverty, social policy, eugenics, policing, masculinity, higher education, nationalism, war and society and returned service personnel. 

At the University of Sydney Professor Garton has also been Head of the Department of History (1996-98), an Associate Dean and Pro Dean in the Faculty of Arts (1991–95, 1999) and a member of the Academic Board for nearly 30 years. He was appointed Professor of History in 2000 and Challis Professor in 2004. In addition he has been a member of the Editorial Board of the Australian Dictionary of Biography, the Executive Committee of the Australian Historical Association and on the Council of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. 

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