UTAS city move needs reviewing

Lack of consultation with staff and students over plans to relocate the uni is concerning, writes Richard Doyle

I READ with interest UTAS’s chief operating officer David Clerk’s letters to the Mercury recently explaining the updated reasons for the UTAS plans to abandon the leafy Sandy Bay campus for a disjointed set of buildings in the city.

These reasons have changed from those relating to greater access for northern suburban students and the challenges of the ageing infrastructure at Sandy Bay to financial ones.

All these arguments are open to numerous and more cost-effective solutions that allow UTAS to retain the southern campus at Sandy Bay. But I doubt anyone at UTAS management is listening, never mind acting on the challenges and alternative solutions to this planned move.

The declining federal funding per student and the failure of successive Australian governments to adequately support our public universities have led to an over-reliance on income from international students. Selling off (leasing) public land gifted for educational and research purposes does not solve the problem. More income or lower operating costs are the only long-term solutions.

For UTAS to increase the income and utility of its large and picturesque campus should not be difficult.

To abandon the Sandy Bay campus, one of the most beautiful in the world, with its mountain-to-the-estuary landscape, full of botanic diversity, wildlife, streams, rocks and carbon-retaining soils without broad consent and acceptance by most students, academics, alumni and the broader Hobart city community is, in my view, without moral authority or legitimacy. It appears to have been decided in Burnie by a dozen or so members of what is called a “university council”, a body that is largely unelected and contains but one elected academic and one student.

What troubles me most is the lack of consultation with the working coalface staff and students. No better example is the planned move of agricultural sciences (TIA) teaching and research to Launceston, which was announced to the media by the Vice-Chancellor Rufus Black with no consultation and no business plan.

This represents a major gamble for the agricultural sciences school. Of the 55 or so staff in Hobart, only about a dozen will be retained there and the remainder will most likely leave the organisation — risking a loss of skills, capability and connections to the agricultural industries, which help drive the agrifood-tourism sectors in our state.

The School of Agricultural Sciences was specifically developed at Sandy Bay, including the industry-supported construction of the Horticultural Research Centre on Mt Nelson, and later the University Research and Teaching Farm at Cambridge. This occurred despite much of the agricultural industry being in the North of the state, due to the need for greater numbers of science-trained students in our agriculture sector, an industry critical to the state’s future. The close links to the other sciences, engineering and business schools were, and remain, critical to the ongoing success of agricultural sciences.

In my view, the UTAS city move needs to be reviewed, along with the balance of power at the University of Tasmania. We need to return to leadership driven by the teaching and research staff, rather than administrators and ex-officios. This is because these active staff interact daily with the students and their families and receive feedback on their teaching and research initiatives, the core activities of any great public university. Even the university’s teaching oversight body, the Academic Senate, has nine more ex-officio members than elected members.

If more teaching and research staff were in the key leadership and decisionmaking roles at UTAS I doubt this move and its dire consequences would be troubling the people of Hobart.

Instead, we would be discussing a green campus that welcomes the students and the public into it and provides amenities of real face-to-face lectures, including public lectures, science walks and tours, sporting and community events on its grounds and collaborative research that allows for natural growth.

But this requires powersharing and embracing and trusting academics, students and the wider community.