John Macmillan Brown, the first chair of English and Classics at Canterbury University College, was perhaps the most prominent academic during the first thirty years of tertiary education in New Zealand. Macmillan Brown held the English Chair at Canterbury College from 1874 until 1895. During this time Macmillan Brown was reputed to work sixteen hours a day: he carried a heavy teaching load, ran Sunday salons for his students and established cultural institutions such as the Dialectic Society. He maintained substantial contact with the University of New Zealand after his resignation, holding the positions of Vice Chancellor from 1916 to 1923 and Chancellor from 1923 until 1935. He also published a substantial number of works on subjects ranging from women's education to ethnographic studies of the Pacific. In short, Macmillan Brown was involved in a vast range of activities, and certainly earns the title which New Zealand historian W. J. Gardner bestowed on him of 'encyclopaedic god-professor' (1979: 59-67). (1) In this paper I aim to explore the philosophies that underlay Macmillan Brown's career, both as English Chair and later in his private capacity as a spokesperson on university education. I aim to draw attention to the ways in which seemingly paradoxical ideologies underlay his work, and by extension the establishment of the discipline of English in the university colleges of colonial New Zealand. Macmillan Brown's career as an educationalist cannot be seen in isolation from broader historical trends that shaped the discipline of English Literature. Firstly, then, it is necessary to discuss some of the competing theories about the genesis of that discipline. I would then like to suggest how Macmillan Brown's career reflects some of the diverse factors that led to the institutionalisation of English, both here and overseas.
