University institutions have been a recent innovation in Papua New guinea, a late product of that country's protracted development towards nationhood. Charged with rapidly augmenting an embryonic national bureaucratic-technical elite, they have been eminently successful in fulfilling their brief: since their foundation in the middle and late 1960s they have undertaken ambitious programmes of teaching and research, and have maintained the flow of graduates which helped make Independence possible in 1975.

There have been costs, however. The proper role of universities in Papua New Guinea has long been a topic for lively - and sometimes disruptive - contention. The universities are autonomous bodies at the apex of a pyramid of government controlled institutions of tertiary education, the very complexity of which has ensured the persistence of numerous tensions. There have been many individuals and groups with interests in the system to defend, and ambitions to promote. At the same time the universities have been so central to the government's task of nation building that in trying to maximize its investment in them it has habitually sought to bring them, against their will, more closely under its control. Relations within and between the universities, and between them and the government, have consequently often been uneasy, especially in the period following Independence as the country trod an uncertain path into nationhood.