Isles subsequently attended Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he studied the economics tripos under Maynard Keynes.
He was a member with Sidney Crawford and half-a-dozen diverse people of influence in the liberal South Australian think tank "Common Cause", which discussed post-war reconstruction.
He was appointed Vice-Chancellor of the University of Tasmania in November 1956,[5] succeeding the ineffectual Torleiv Hytten, and served from 1 July 1957 to 31 December 1967.
[2] Sydney Sparkes Orr, who had been appointed, on the basis of falsified documents, Professor of Philosophy, University of Tasmania, in 1952 was sacked in 1955 for allegedly having sexual relations with a female undergraduate student, a celebrated and controversial case at the time.
In an effort to clear the air, though having had no part in the sacking, Isles published a leaflet entitled Dismissal of Sydney Sparkes Orr by the University of Tasmania setting out the University's case, and was in 1961 sued by Orr for defamation, claiming £50,000 in damages as he had been unable to find employment for five years.
[1] He was in 1967 conferred CMG[7] Isles married fellow teacher, English-born Irene Francis Clayton, on 4 September 1926 in Tasmania.