Ted Wheelwright

Student protest

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

Frank Stilwell has just sat down for lunch at his favourite cafe when he starts dropping - in the nicest possible way - the names of some of his former students.

"This respectable federal minister, I recall, was actually suspended from the university for his activism on one occasion," he says with a smirk. "He broke into the clock tower of the main quadrangle as part of an occupation movement."

He's talking about Anthony Albanese, the federal Minister for Infrastructure and Transport, when a student at the University of Sydney in the early 1980s.

Stilwell played a role in one of the most acrimonious and long-running disputes in the history of Australian academia: the 40-year fight to establish a separate department of political economy at Sydney Uni, finally achieved in 2008.

The dispute was between rival factions of economists and students. The mainstream orthodox economists were on one side, proponents of an alternative program in political economy the other.

Stilwell says when he arrived at the university he found himself at the centre of this aggressive push by radical students to have a range of alternative theories taught.

As the decades unfolded, the protests stirred plenty: tactical police units called in; rooms occupied; the clock tower occupied; vehicles parked on the lawn in protest; tents erected; national conferences and dissident workshops held.

Stilwell says he had actually come to teach the orthodox economics in which he had been trained.

Once he got here his opinions of mainstream economics, and how it was taught, changed thanks to three big influences: the Vietnam War protest movement, his friendship with the late Professor Ted Wheelwright and the enthusiasm and dedication of his radical students.

Albanese says he remembers Stilwell's support for protesters in the early 1980s.

"[Frank] was very supportive of political activism," Albanese says. "There was an attempt by the conservative ideologues to shut down debate about progressive economic thought. That was the context. It was a very interesting struggle because it was overtly political about education and people's rights to learn a diversity of views."

The story of the long struggle is now documented in Political Economy Now!, penned by three of main combatants in the fight – Frank Stilwell, Gavan Butler and Evan Jones. These renegade academics were not deterred by the David and Goliath situation that emerged, as they came up against the likes of Vice-Chancellor Bruce Williams and other orthodox economics stalwarts such as Professors Warren Hogan and Colin Simkin.

Butler, Stilwell and Jones were relatively junior lecturers when they arrived in the early 1970s, but they were backed by other farsighted academics, notably Associate Professor ‘Red’ Ted Wheelwright and Geelum Simpson-Lee, staff-elected Dean of the Economics Faculty.

From the Financial Review:

In February (2022), after his belief in conventional economic theory was questioned in a newspaper article, Albanese sought to table in Parliament an essay he wrote for a Sydney University bachelors of economics degree that he started in 1981.

In the micro-economics paper, Albanese argued that companies will not increase output if costs are rising – and rising costs will discourage new companies from competing with them.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg taunted Albanese by describing the hand-written essay as a high school paper.

But the put-down ignored Albanese’s undergraduate involvement in one of the decisive conflicts in Australian university economics teaching.

In his first year, Albanese enrolled in a conventional economics course and an introduction to political economy, which argues that the economy is shaped by forces that serve specific interests, such as big business.

The head of the department, economist Warren Hogan, believed that political economy was too theoretical and wanted to introduce more rigorous teaching, including complex mathematics and statistics, according to his son, who shares the same name and is also an economist.

About 1983, Hogan proposed ending political economy’s status as a separate stream within the undergraduate economics degree.

The change would have downgraded its status and reduced the influence of two prominent left-wing academics, Frank Stilwell and Ted Wheelwright, who had developed a following on campus.

Albanese and other students protested. They occupied the clock tower in the university’s quadrangle. Several protesters scaled the tower and bent the clock’s hands. A caravan was towed on to campus to function as a protest headquarters and a place to sleep.

After three weeks, a new unit of the NSW police, the tactical response unit, removed the students from campus offices. Albanese and eight others were charged with discipline breaches by the university. Albanese was briefly banned from campus and fined about $100.

In an interview broadcast by the ABC in 2013, Albanese implied the university’s leaders didn’t take stronger action against the protesters because of the merits of their cause.

“The attempt to abolish the course had a very strident response from students, academics and the broader community,” he said. “If you like, a civil disobedience campaign.”