Time for Premier, MPs to ‘step up’ and take action on UTAS plans
University management ignores community, council, staff and students, writes Michael Foster
UTAS Chancellor Alison Watkins says (Talking Point, December 20) that the University of Tasmania’s story, for some, “is one of avarice, of real estate and profit at the expense of learning and research”.
Despite the fact Ms Watkins said it saddened her that, that was some people’s understanding of the story behind the move, her words pretty well sum up the message from 149 submissions to the Legislative Council inquiry into UTAS and the evidence given by a long list of students, staff and eminent academics at five days of inquiry during public hearings in December.
That message is also reflected in both the Hobart elector poll, which showed the community overwhelmingly opposes UTAS’s relocation, and the latest resolution by the Hobart City Council, in December, which called on UTAS to pause relocation and instead talk to key stakeholders like university staff and the state government.
The HCC resolution was also critical of the ShakeUp panel process which UTAS ran last year and presented as a form of “community” consultation.
UTAS management worked hard to control the ShakeUp panel outcome. It hired a top PR firm to run it, then limited involvement to 80 hand-picked but unidentified persons (resignations by disillusioned participants reduced that to 63) and then purportedly refused to let those 63 discuss relocation.
The ShakeUp panel’s report, written by the PR company, was released in December and would have no doubt disappointed UTAS management. The panel’s findings reflected what nearly everybody except UTAS management already knew. “Students want a studentfocused campus heart,” it was reported in the panel’s findings.
Instead the UTAS relocation plan is to scatter students and faculties across the Hobart shopping precinct in disconnected buildings.
The panel’s findings also warned that “current footpaths in the city are already narrow and in poor condition”, not ready for the “pressure as larger groups of students move around the city with the general public”.
The panel said, “the mental health and wellbeing of students requires ‘green spaces’ and a campus that ‘should facilitate great interaction between faculties, groups and societies’.”
Instead the UTAS plan is to
abandon the grassy Sandy Bay campus and replace its parkland with synthetic lawn and “green walls” that the panel commented “can be very water hungry”, implying their environmental unsustainability.
Ironically the panel said there was a need for “honest, open and transparent communication” by UTAS. Presumably no-one had told them that Chancellor Alison Watkins has steadfastly refused to reveal the business case and options which were before the UTAS governing body, its Council, in April 2019, when it made the fateful decision to abandon the Sandy Bay campus.
UTAS staff and students won’t be surprised by the panel’s finding that UTAS is not seen as trustworthy or accurate, an extraordinary and sad indictment of Tasmania’s principal institution of higher learning.
But many know that nothing phases UTAS management: not calls by the Premier and the HCC for consultation, not hours of evidence given to a parliamentary inquiry, not even the findings of its own carefully selected “community” consultation group.
In a provocative move, on December 20, UTAS lodged with the council its next CBD building development application so that it can get on with relocating from
Sandy Bay to the CBD as soon as possible. UTAS charges on, deaf to the community, to the Premier, to the council and especially to its own staff and students.
The job of preventing the destruction of Tasmania’s only university will now fall on those who control the parliament which controls UTAS. It’s time for the Premier and his two Clark electorate members, Elise Archer and Madeleine Ogilvie, to either step up or to accept responsibility for the end of a fine public institution.