Publisher's Synopsis
Who really runs Australia's elite educational institutions? Who sets the agenda and determines the culture? Just as Helen Gardner's "The First Stone" reveals the influence of a powerful, intractable establishment on an elite Australian institution, so this study of one of Sydney's oldest university colleges finds a similar old guard at work.;This work assesses the college clinging to the past in many ways, from the regular rituals of a sporting and drinking dominated culture, to the darker side of "fresher" initiation and the entrenched resistance to co-education, or the acceptance of women as equal partners in the education process.;It was this last issue which precipitated the resignation of the author as Principal after increasing disillusion with a system he found himself unable to change. Any reader whose own education involved one of Australia's "elite" institutions may be interested by Peter Cameron's dissection of many sensitive, almost taboo issues; a wider range of readers may find this study an important exploration of a part of Australia's traditional culture.
