Faculty History
Expansion
As student numbers increased, and as funding was provided to enable the expansion of the Faculty, new departments were added and the very restricted course offerings of 1961 and 1962 gave way to a much more varied body of subjects. Some of these, Geography, Russian and Music for example, were subjects which might be found as a matter of course in the Arts Faculties of other Australian universities, but there were differences of substance and emphasis. The Faculty established Australia's first Chair of Linguistics. This reflected the particular approach of the Faculty's existing language departments. In establishing a Department of Anthropology and Sociology, and, indeed, in seeing these as closely linked subjects, Monash was perhaps a little ahead of the field though Anthropology already existed in Sydney and Western Australia.
A special interest in Asian studies was reflected in the early addition of Indonesian and Malay (located at first in the Department of History and then in Modern Languages where it belonged) and of Japanese, and in the formation in 1964 of a Centre of Southeast Asian Studies. The latter was devised as way of providing an interdisciplinary environment for graduate students who had placed an emphasis on Asia in their undergraduate studies. Apart from the relevant language departments, the Departments of History, Geography, Music and Anthropology all included Asian subjects in their lists of course offerings and so did the Department of Politics, located in the adjoining Faculty of Economics and Politics. There was thus a basis for inter-disciplinary co-operation at the postgraduate level.
In one respect Monash made what some saw as an odd choice for the modern world. It was the only one of the new Australian universities to decide that at least some study of the Classical world should be available in a properly constituted Arts Faculty. Recognizing that Latin and Greek were unlikely to attract enough students to make these subjects viable, and that very few students nowadays took these subjects at school level, it nevertheless thought it important to provide a study of the Classics in translation for those who lacked the necessary languages. It therefore established a "Department of Classical Studies" which offered Ancient History and Classical Civilization to larger numbers of students, in addition to the small classes in languages.
By the end of the 1960s the University had a student population of over 11,000 and had a diverse and balanced Faculty of Arts.
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