Andrew G. Bonnell reviews Andrew Saniga and Robert Freestone’s (eds) Campus: Building Modern Australian Universities, (Crawley, WA: UWA Publishing, 2023).
There is a growing literature on the history of Australian universities, albeit one that is uneven in quality, with some recent commemorative works closer to public relations puffery than scholarly history. In this literature, the built environment of universities has not always received as much systematic treatment as it deserves. This gap is now addressed by this handsome volume edited by Andrew Saniga and Robert Freestone, who are joined by several experts in architecture and planning. They provide a thorough treatment of the development of Australian university campuses from 1945 to the present, capturing the periods of great postwar expansion of higher education in the 1960s and 1970s and the upheavals of the Dawkins reforms and their aftermath, as well as the more constrained conditions of more recent years.
The first thing that strikes a reader about this book is that it is visually very impressive. It is richly illustrated with photographs and plans of universities, some historical and some original to the volume. Anyone who has spent years working in Australian universities will enjoy perusing the book for its evocative visual material. (Unfortunately, my review copy suffered from a production glitch – in a few places there was some missing text and some duplication of other passages of text).
Reading the text is not always such a pleasure. The prose is often frustratingly inert, full of impersonal and passive-voice constructions, which sometimes read like an outside consultant’s report written with the help of artificial intelligence. Sentences like the following abound: ‘The broader economic, social, land use, and design trends which promote the production of mixed-use and multifunctional buildings and landscapes are impacting the higher education sector’. It is impossible to disagree with this statement, but the evocation of such broad impersonal ‘trends’ can occlude agency and power relations. This is despite a very useful survey of the developments in postwar higher education policy in the chapter by Christine Garnaut and Susan Holden, and a stimulating chapter on ‘Radicalism and Social Spaces’ by Hannah Lewi and Andrew Saniga, which shows how the spaces of the modern campus were used by protest movements, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. One would have liked to have seen some of the insights from these chapters integrated more thoroughly into other parts of the book.
To give one example, younger readers might be very surprised to learn that in the first postwar decades, at new campuses like the Australian National University, individual professors exercised a significant influence on the planning of buildings and campus design. This was the era of the ‘god professor’ – an oligarchical form of university governance, but one that left some space for collegiality, and one which was followed by a degree of democratisation at the departmental, disciplinary level in the 1970s and 1980s, until the imposition of neo-liberal managerialism in the wake of the Dawkins reforms resulted in the creation of more top-down and authoritarian governance structures, which still prevail. Academics’ influence over their campus environment has correspondingly diminished. To cite an example from personal experience: in 2001, as a relatively junior academic, I was a users’ representative representing the interests of staff in my school on the panel overseeing the refurbishment of floors in the University of Queensland’s Forgan Smith and Michie buildings. I am not aware of users’ reps being involved in any more recent works of that nature. Instead, I frequently hear complaints from academics about new campus developments that consign them to Dilbert-style cubicles: open-plan offices, or offices with glass walls, or walls that do not reach the ceiling. The rationality of campus facilities managers pays little attention to the demands of teaching and research in specific disciplines.
As argued in Hannah Forsyth’s A History of the Modern Australian University, the Dawkins changes empowered vice-chancellors at the expense of more collegial forms of governance, in order to enable them to enact government-mandated change. As the proportion of public funding has diminished, vice-chancellors increasingly act as the agents of private corporate interests, the representatives of which now dominate governing bodies. This has had an impact on campus development in numerous ways: for example, the increasing popularity of co-located research parks, making public university facilities more available for corporate research and development (partially compensating for the Australian private sector’s traditionally low levels of investment in R & D). Universities with fine stand-alone campus grounds and facilities have been jostling for CBD office premises, to try to supply the training needs of businesses. The recent preoccupation with the ‘sticky’ campus[i] is an attempt to react to the fact that increasingly time-poor students have had to rationalize the amount of time they spend on campus grounds. This is largely a result of the shifting of the costs of higher education onto students themselves, with the result that they now spend much or even most of their week in paid employment. Their campus and educational experience is the poorer for it.
Campus ends with timely reflections on the challenges facing contemporary Australian universities as physical spaces: these include the need to give greater recognition to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage of the country that they occupy, something that was neglected in the early history of our universities as they replicated British models, and the need for greater environmental sustainability.
The university campus was originally envisaged as a special, dedicated place where students could spend their formative years focused on learning and their personal development. Whether that concept of the campus can survive will largely depend on the future of public funding for the sector and the recovery of a notion of higher education as a public good. Otherwise, more of us will end up in cubicles in CBD office blocks, trying to sell commodified bite-sized chunks of credentials to time-poor professionals and business middle managers hustling for their next promotion, while vice-chancellors morph into property developers.
[i] As the authors note (pp.25, 103), the term ‘sticky campus’ has recently come into vogue, partly in an effort to counteract the effects of the student disengagement which university management has partly enabled (e.g. through promotion of online learning). Retention of students on campus for longer also helps to justify investment in facilities and assists the viability of increasingly commercialised student amenities on campus.
