Davis McCaughey by Martin Sarah;

Author:Martin, Sarah;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of New South Wales Press

16

Widening horizons

As he moved away from the purely religious and took his place in the secular world, McCaughey found himself engaging more and more with political life and ethics. He had never lacked confidence to say what he believed, and as Master of Ormond College he now had a certain authority within the wider community. The 1960s spirit of revolt beginning to permeate student life brought to the forefront issues of social justice and political inequalities, and advances in science laid bare the lack of guidelines to cover previously unforeseen ethical consequences.

A meeting in Britain in 1959 had jolted him abruptly out of a 1950s mentality. He had been invited to participate in one of Joe Oldham’s ‘weekends’; in fact the weekend had been arranged around his availability. The topic under discussion was ‘Whether the affirmations made by Christians about God, about Christ and about the human person are any longer meaningful for the intelligent and thoughtful men of today’. As one of only two theologians present, he was soon made aware that the others, Kathleen Bliss, Joe Oldham’s successor as editor of the newsletter for the Council of the Churches on the Christian Faith and the Common Life, Sir Geoffrey Vickers, English lawyer, administrator, writer and pioneering systems scientist, and Michael Polanyi, scientist turned philosopher, had already ‘entered into the astonishing range of modern knowledge, which makes our theological talk sound like the chattering of babes’.1 Perhaps even more importantly, he realised that ‘as for our [theologians’] understanding of ethics, most of our text books are essays in triviality beside the issues which really confront men in a nuclear age’.2 While in Britain he saw that complex issues raised by scientific developments would require a rethink of ethical principles, and he was excited by the possibilities that could occur in a college where intellectual discussion must inevitably involve Christian principles, and ought to cross disciplinary boundaries.

He knew that the diminishing hold of Christianity on educational institutions had permitted a more ‘culturally liberal’ climate, and he welcomed that liberal humanist ideal, because the pluralist intellectual tradition where all knowledge was integrated seemed to him the most satisfactory model of education. Having seen the threats that Nazism, communism and the development of atomic weapons posed to the Christian foundations of society, he believed that universities served a fundamental purpose in counteracting these dangers, and that it was in a culturally liberal environment that the ‘ideal’ university could be realised. In this he found common cause with Ian Clunies Ross and many friends on campus at Melbourne. But it was perhaps only in 1988, when he saw that all he had striven to achieve was being destroyed by the new educational policies declared in Dawkins’ White Paper, that he felt the need to explain to a wider audience exactly what he had envisaged for Victorian universities.3

McCaughey had always believed that education should be based on the scholastic tradition, which consisted of three stages. In the first, the teacher passed on to students

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