That’s not the rhetoric, of course, nor the intent. The very
word university implies not just unity but, from the Latin versare to turn, a
plurality turned into unity; many made one. The narrative too, the postmodern
university’s self-talk, is soaked in collegium; from the team-teaching and
“project-based learning” of undergraduate pedagogy to the partnership
polemic that allows – nay, welcomes – the muddy boots of commerce into those
hallowed halls.
The knowledge revolution, you remember, was supposed to
virtualise all learning, and by extension all campuses. This was probably
always fanciful, but we’ll never know because the funding revolution, so much
more formative, had precisely the opposite effect. On the ground, flesh-and-blood
campuses are these days of the essence.
Yet, funded or not, higher learning still suggests
something, well, higher, right? Not just “school the sequel”, or
“work the prequel” but an enchanted hiatus; an interregnum that is
magical precisely because it is distinct, inviolable, irrecoverable and
unsullied by compromise. Where inquiry is the hunt and truth the quarry; where
just chasing a new idea can set the blood racing. A place to feed the mind,
touch the soul.
So the question for universities now is, what kind of
created place best captures and holds such enchantment in its branches? The
same kind that attracts international rich kids and research dollars, or the
opposite? Should universities spread or consolidate? Should they cultivate their
uniqueness, or fawn on the global crowd? Should they lead or follow? Can they
serve both gods?
Sydney’s
two city-centre universities are addressing these questions in ways
diametrically opposed both to each other, and to what you’d expect. The University of Technology,
Sydney, and the University
of Sydney are part of what is known,
by them at least, as the “education gateway” – comprising also TAFE,
a Notre Dame University
rump and the largely promissory Australian
Technology Park.
Both are growing, in overall numbers, and to that extent weathering the funding
storm. But they’re taking opposite directions.
Sydney, Australia’s oldest and most campus-blessed
university, plans to more than double its volume by 2020, UTS, by contrast,
with less than half Sydney’s per-person floorspace, is determined to shed its
last outlying property, consolidating on a city campus people love to
denigrate.
Both moves are controversial, largely because locals fear
change.
UTS has been trying to drop its Sulman Award-winning
Kuring-gai campus pretty much since the Broadway Institute of Technology and
the Kuring-gai College of Advanced Education were John Dawkinsed together in
1990. The two campuses – one grunge-urban, the other a bush campus in the best
romantic-Brutalist tradition – should have made the perfect complementary pair.
But UTS found Kuring-gai unadministerable, due largely to the tyranny of
distance and near absence of public transport. (Even now it runs 24 shuttle
trips a day).
Finally, last month – and with callous disregard for the
sensitivities of Barry O’Farrell’s constituents – Frank Sartor rezoned UTS
Kuring-gai for 345 dwellings. There is an argument against selling ex-Crown
land for private profit, but UTS promises to reinvest all proceeds in its city
campus. Who could deny it that?
Sydney Uni, meanwhile, has 50 per cent more students, four
times as much building space, 10 times the campus space, half a dozen ovals
(instead of none) and exponentially more gardenia bushes than UTS will ever
have. Not to mention the adjoining park and pool. With it goes all the
confidence (and perhaps pitfalls) of old money compared with new.
It also has several new buildings – IT, law and the catchily
named Jane Foss Russell student centre (be thankful it’s not her married name,
Barff) with its clunky, pea-green footbridge. Not bad buildings, but
guaranteed, once the new native-nazi landscape is complete, to feel more
exurban office park than dreaming spires – the global campus look du jour, a
bland-leading-the-bland, death-by-vanillacide catering to kids whose primary
world experience is screen-mediated.
And so to Sydney’s
campus cravings. Apart from its main campus, it already has eight others, from Camden to downtown. But
it wants more. Eveleigh, where it proposes 160,000 sqm of built space up to 18
storeys; Harold Park, if and when; Callan
Park, slated for 100,000
sqm in four precincts – plus another three ovals.
This is already agreed. But the Callan Park Act bans building
outside existing footprints and any for-profit education. To amend it, the
argument is crucial. It hinges on Sydney’s
“demonstrated record, expertise and interest in heritage
conservation”. A year ago, maybe. But to see those fabulous sandstone
gothics now, stripped of their evocative ivy-league habitat, left naked among
the pitiless eucalypts, makes you wonder. How far will higher learning go to
prove it is really just business?