Over the next weeks I will post my own exit poll on my four decades at the University of Sydney.
I joined the University of Sydney in January 1974. My first pay check, back-dated one week, was issued on 7 January of that year. (After five years as a penurious graduate student following four years of hand-to-mouth undergraduate study, being paid was a Very Big Deal.) My last pay check from the University of Sydney was in April 2010. In my recent detachment from the University I have been asked about of those four decades. I will ruminate on changes to the University. I personally have changed, too, but those ruminations will have to marinade longer.
The first change is the easiest to document. In 1974 the University had about 13,000 students. Today that number approaches 50,000. Over the years, the campus has changed, more buildings, less parking, and the like. But the campus has hardly changed its borders and now accommodates 2 ½ if not 3 times as many students. The result is a crowded campus. Perhaps the students below are volunteering for a tutorial. Who knows.
(Yes, I know that some of those thousands have been at Cumberland and Rozelle but their needs are still meant on the main campus, and as I will note below calling the historic grounds of the University the ‘campus,’ or the ‘main campus,’ was itself proscribed at one time. One of many wars of words.)
Graduates from the 1970s, 1980s, and even the 1990s are surprised when they visit the campus to see lines, queues, congestion, and crowds everywhere in teaching weeks. The simple act of buying an iPod card or a coffee now means waiting one’s turn.
The pressure on the physical plant takes many forms. Classrooms are at a premium, and scheduling classes demands great effort and skill on the part of those stalwarts assigned to the task. They are seldom thanked, but I thank them here for the service they gave me. (In this digital age, the University continues to divide the word into two: ever larger lecture halls and tutorial rooms. The former seats hundreds, while the latter seats 20+. I mention this because one frustration I had in room scheduling was to get a flat room with free furniture (that is, not fixed) seating classes of sixty or so. Such rooms are very few. But in such rooms I found discussion and other classroom activities easy and so did not need those tutorial rooms. But the University continues to assume a single model of teaching and learning. The lecturer lectures, well, shows PowerPoint and some web links, on the days they work, and the students sit, and then tutorials, where all too often the tutor talks and the students continue to master the art of sitting.
People used to complain about parking in the 1970s, but that was just to keep in practice complaining. Today the car parks fill about 08.15 a.m. most mornings.
That is not a problem for me since I walk to work to the University. But a parent who drops off children at a pre-school or school when it opens and drives to work struggles to find a spot. Sometimes drivers are creative.
