Failed kickstarter for university
Oh no not again. It’s time for the semi-annual breathe new life into the University of Waikato pitch again.
Please not another go round of that hoary old chestnut.
This time it’s about yet more bricks and mortar and a new on-campus studentfocused hub that will apparently bring students in their thousands to drink coffee at the campus in a fog-shrouded Hamilton in mid-winter.
Yeah right.
The idea is to build a $90 million front door to the university. The multi-milliondollar development, dubbed The Pa¯ , is tipped by University of Waikato management to breathe life into the 55-year-old university and be a magnet for thousands of students.
Really?
Is The Pa¯ wishful thinking or well researched planning based on information (wants and needs) gained from the student population, alumni and wider community?
At least they got part of it right. The university needs new life.
It’s a dead dodo of a campus with about as much life right now as the Chiefs will have at the end of the Super Rugby season.
The Pa¯ is yet another costly initiative to attempt to fix a basic problem; Hamilton is not an exciting student destination. Taxpayers are paying $90m to build it so students can sit on their asses drinking lattes on campus and that’s student life? That’s it?
If The Pa is anything like the Waikato medical school concept it’s going to be oversold, undelivered marketing for enrolments with a high percentage of it being the emperor’s new clothes on campus masquerading as innovation.
It is empire-building with little evidence to say thousands of students are going to boost enrolments or make a difference to campus culture.
Let me share this with you:
B Block. It was 1997, the WSU had the Young Nats running the joint and they introduced voluntary student membership. I was the marketing manager for the WSU at the time.
They wanted to interview me on Contact 89FM, the radio station I had built with other students during the mid 1980s. Eleven years later I step back into that familiar studio for an interview with the architects of VSM.
It would change my view of higher education culture.
As the interview unfolded in the studio I had built, it became clear one of the first casualties of VSM would be student media – Contact 89FM would close.
So I asked what did the Young Nats want to leave behind on campus as their legacy for later student generations to use?
‘‘Why would we want to leave anything behind? We just want to get our degree and get out,’’ came the now infamous reply.
After digesting that sentiment over the months that followed, I started referring to student life in New Zealand as petrol station culture – pull in – fill up and pull out.
Any sense of contributing a lasting legacy to the campus was overridden with study requirements, student loans and the need to get employment as fast as possible to pay off debt.
Student life was temporary and students just wanted to get the degree paper in the back pocket and get the hell out of there.
Times had changed.
It’s a noble sentiment to breathe life into the campus. Vice-Chancellor Quigley is aware student life is dead, and the campus needs resuscitating.
‘‘What happens in winter is students come onto campus only for their classes and then go home, whereas we want them to stay on campus and enliven the place as much as possible. So a place like The Pa¯ is necessary,’’ Quigley said.
The VC is right. The campus is lifeless, corporate and stagnating, but new bricks and mortar isn’t the answer, just as it hasn’t been a solution to campus culture in the 30 years since I was there. There are more facilities, less green space and more bricks and mortar than ever.
But there was more life on the Waikato campus in the 1980s with fewer than 5000 students enrolled and fewer buildings than there is today.
Despite the millions spent on marketing, student enrolments stay much the same.
The place is still dead and students still want to leave.
Waikato University remains distant and faceless.
The new life on campus pitch raises the vexing issue of what is student life today and in the internet era do we need lecture theatres and campuses at all?
Isn’t the real innovation building cyber campuses and abandoning the need to be on campus at all, thereby ending the oldworld university model of bricks and mortar campuses? A growing trend is students don’t want to attend lectures on campus.
Ask Otago students if they chose that campus for its facilities or if they chose Dunedin because of the student lifestyle. My guess is they’d say they’re on campus to hook up, get drunk or get laid. It’s about the student lifestyle in the country’s student city.
At least that’s the way it used to be. City student lifestyle is more important than campus walkways and shops, so where is Hamilton’s Castle Street?
Quigley said the Waikato University Council reflected on student enrolment numbers when considering the new project.
‘‘It’s sort of a chicken and egg situation. Yes, to make good use of The Pa¯ , the university needs to keep growing but, on the other hand, if you don’t provide the facilities that students want, by comparison with what other universities are offering, we won’t grow either,’’ he said.
Well it’s a $90m wager then. If EFTS ( enrolments) remain static and students don’t come, then you’ve got even more university buildings and new shops and students still wanting to get the hell out of the place as fast as they can.
My wager: The student enrolment figures will stay much the same, the campus will still be lifeless and Hamilton city will still not be seen as a student town.
The Pa¯ will breathe new life into Waikato University?
No; the city will. This has always been a Hamilton city marketing issue not a university marketing issue.