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From The Archives Professor Stephen Salsbury
St Andrew’s generous community of benefactors have always come to the College’s aid when in difficulty. One such time of need was in the late 1990s when the College’s scholarship funds had fallen to a low ebb. Indeed, some particularly able students had been attracted to other Colleges by more generous scholarships and, as St Andrew’s entered a period of transition to co-residence, the Council began to take difficult decisions in order to improve access to College. By 1999, the scholarships at St Andrew’s amounted to barely one tenth of what was available at St Paul’s College.
Having been privy to the many discussions about the shallowness of the scholarship pool, College Fellow, Professor Stephen Salsbury, left a substantial bequest to the College. Following his untimely death in 1999 aged only 66, Professor Salsbury’s gift has established four annual scholarships in traditional economics, agriculture, veterinary science, and law which have supported many students in their studies over the past 21 years.
Stephen Salsbury was one of Sydney University’s more prominent professors. Born in 1931, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1953 from Occidental College in the USA, one of the West Coast’s leading Liberal Arts institutions. Salsbury’s excellent undergraduate work took him to Harvard to study for a Master of Arts where he later gained his doctorate in 1961. After Harvard, Salsbury held a number of important academic posts before his appointment as Professor of Economic History at Sydney University in 1979. At Sydney, he worked to intergrade political and economic analysis into a unified approach. This interdisciplinary work was an important part of his contribution to scholarship. Professor Salsbury was subsequently made Dean of Economics at Sydney University and distinguished himself as a conspicuous advocate for the GST.
At St Andrew’s College, Professor Salsbury held the Hunter Baillie Fellowship in English Language and Literature – an appointment that showed the disciplinary latitude of these fellowships.
Like Professor Spann, Professor Salsbury had also made a long contribution to the College, ever since he visited St Andrew’s as an undergraduate from his native California. The Council Chairman, the Revd. D. F. Murray, recalled, ‘He would regularly dine in College with Senior Common Room members at High Table when he would contribute to the conversation and debate with knowledge, wisdom, insight, humour and disarming candour and frankness.’ Several of Salsbury’s volumes enhance the bookshelves of the Senior Common Room where many of them were written including the emphatically titled No Way to Run a Railroad.
Mr Alex Wright (Fr 2014)
Dean of Studies and Acting Archivist
