I write this in support of the terrific historian Pam Sharpe, who is leading the resistance to the move of the University of Tasmania campus, and the great philosopher Jeff Malpas, who has written in support of Pam’s campaign.
I first attended the University of Tasmania in 1969 as a 17 year-old law student, and I have to confess that academically I was just above par – one D and three passes. (I did quite well in constitutional law.) But I had a fantastic time acting in plays and the University Revue, and participating in student life to the full.
One of the most important times of the day was sitting in “the Ref” at lunchtime drinking cheap coffee (probably Nescafé as there were only two or three espresso machines in Hobart at the time) and smoking cigarettes that you could get for 2 cents each. You see, the refectory was run by the student union and so was a not-for-profit set-up.
This comfortable, and sensible, arrangement (I’m not talking about the cigarettes) was destroyed by Brendan Nelson in the Howard years. Nelson perceived the National Student Union as a dangerous, radical organisation and proceeded to legislate to make student unions not possible by making compulsory union fees illegal. Don’t believe the people who are saying that governments are powerless in the face of bad stuff – they can do things when they want to. And they have repeatedly done so to higher education.
Back to the refectory. What made that time so special was the cross-cultural interaction between people from different disciplines. More so in my case because of my involvement in the Uni Revue. A dozen of us would gather in the refectory at lunch-time, all with our copies of The Australian – which was, believe it or not, at that time a leftist-leaning publication. And we would discuss the issues of the day from our various viewpoints. I remember a PhD physics scholar explaining the, then, quite new Big Bang Theory to me. I said that it sounded like the name of a rock and roll band – he had the grace to laugh.
While this seems trivial, this sort of conversation is at the heart of the Socratic dialogue.
I left Utas for greener pastures in 1970 to a spectacularly unsuccessful academic career at ANU, but a springboard to a much more successful life in theatre and film. Fast forward 35 years and I was back at Utas, researching a PhD in Aboriginal studies, and again cross-disciplinary discussion – and the Socratic dialogue – was completely germane to the experience. We had formal research paper meetings every fortnight when a topic was allocated to someone and we all read it critically. Aboriginal studies was a broad church, comprising historians, anthropologists, cultural studies people and more.
The department no longer exists. It was rationalised out of existence a few years ago.
The Socratic dialogue – combative discussion – was also at the heart of self-organised weekly meetings between myself and other PhD candidates from two different schools to discuss progress, gee one another up and comment on our work. Very collegial. I even instituted some History/Aboriginal Studies seminars along the same lines which went very well. And I always went to philosophy public lectures, and kept in touch with my old philosophy teachers. I still annoy them with a letter now and then.
The point that I am “lumbering towards” (to quote my dear departed friend, Margaret Scott, a stalwart of Tas Uni) is that you can’t have this interaction, and you can’t have the Socratic dialogue, if you separate disciplines across space. I well remember when I was contemplating leaving Utas at the end of 1969 (God, that’s a long time ago), I thought about going to Sydney Uni Law School, but I found out that it wasn’t at the main campus, but somewhere in town, so I thought not, and went, as I say, to ANU to study arts/law.
The Utas I went to in 1969 was a small place. One campus at Sandy Bay and definitely less than 1,000 students. The uni I returned to in 2005-ish was different. The Dawkins “reforms” of the Hawke years had meant that the place was huge, Three main campuses, not counting hospitals and the Maritime College. More than 2,000 students and the look was different, there were a lot of Asian students. This must be discussed. Not, I hasten to add, because of racial reasons, but because the whole business model of Australian universities – as teaching institutions – is fatally flawed and has been since that time.
The Dawkins “reforms” entailed the amalgamation into universities of the teachers’ colleges, nursing schools, arts schools – nearly everything that couldn’t be nailed down. Even the Australian Military College at Duntroon became a branch of the University of NSW. Shortly after came HECS. So tertiary education, which, briefly and sensibly, had been free, was no longer.
Now, suddenly, the idea that we should draw on the whole of the population to gather our brightest to study, and that anyone was worthy of a chance of a better life through education, was abandoned.
Going to uni returned to being a privilege of the privileged – as it had been in my youth. When I returned to tertiary study in the early 21st century, I remarked that it was nice that the uni was in Sandy Bay, because the students didn’t have to travel too far to attend. The demographic – apart from the overseas students – was so obviously middle-class. And I don’t suppose the overseas students were poor, given the fees their parents were having to pay.
Susan Ryan’s drive to make education an “export” industry, to try to finance higher education somehow – any how – led to the influx of overseas students. It was a huge business success and a societal disaster: the commercialisation of higher education.
Education should be about the aspirational future of students, not some grubby money-grabbing exercise – such as Tas Uni’s move to the CBD.
Just days before the pandemic hit, in February 2020, at a memorial service for a mutual friend, I was chatting with the (then) Chancellor of the University, Michael Fielding. I was expressing my feelings about this. The Chancellor informed me that 30 per cent of the university’s revenue came from Chinese students. Thirty per cent! And then came Covid and, of course, that revenue evaporated. Our relations with China are such that I don’t believe Chinese students will be returning in great numbers post-Covid. We could say that we are “riding the tiger”. How do we get off without being eaten? How, otherwise, do we finance higher education? Does HECS work?
HECS may seem an egalitarian system, but of course it is not. No one of less than middle class position signs up to debt for half one’s working life. Well-off students don’t have to; their parents pay the debt. HECS means that no-one of less than well-off parents goes to university. And so we have the position that we are not drawing on the whole gene-pool to go to university, and limiting opportunities for the less privileged.
To sum up, and to answer the Vice-Chancellor’s argument that moving the uni to the CBD will increase access for students, I say that that statement is disingenuous in the extreme. It is no problem for a student to ride a bus – we’ve all done it going to school.
It is not distance that limits access to higher education, it is socio-economic position.
That is an idea that the University of Tasmania seems to be either blissfully ignorant of, or to be wilfully ignoring in pursuit of a business model which has nothing to do with educating Tasmanian students. A once fine educational institution has become a somewhat rapacious property developer which has completely forgotten what it is supposed to be for.
This, by the way, is a symptom of our increasingly unequal society, as well as a future cause of more such inequality. Read the recently published figures on educational outcomes between posh and poor schools – utterly disgraceful in a supposedly liberal democratic society where education is supposed to be “free, secular and universal”.
James Parker is a historian, writer and community volunteer. And he’s crabby.
