Former UTAS dean Bruce Scott lashes plan to shift Sandy Bay campus to Hobart CBD

Bruce Scott feels a special connection to the UTAS Sandy Bay campus having worked there from the very beginning, and he despairs at plans to relocate to the city. LATEST >>

AT 98 years old, former University of Tasmania dean Bruce Scott has fond memories of his time working at the Sandy Bay campus – which is why he is dismayed at plans to shift university operations into the Hobart CBD.

“I’m sad to see what’s happening,” he said.

“And I don’t really know what more I can do.”

A former Dean of the Faculty of Science, Dr Scott, of Sandy Bay, started his studies in the 1940s when the UTAS campus was at Queens Domain. Upon completing his undergraduate degree in 1945, he immediately became a member of the physics staff.

He said his connection to the Sandy Bay campus dated back to its inception, when the state government took ownership of the Sandy Bay Rifle Range after World War II.

It was here that the university’s new campus would be built – but several of its departments first established themselves in wooden huts erected on the site, including the physics department in 1948.

Former Dean of the Faculty of Science Dr Bruce Scott is dismayed at the decision by UTAS to sell off the Sandy Bay campus where he worked since its inception. Picture: Nikki Davis-Jones

Dr Scott said he looked back fondly on his 43-year career at UTAS, particularly his time at the Sandy Bay campus.

“(Sandy Bay residents) like the leafy campus there, where students from all the different disciplines can intermingle and the academic staff can meet regularly,” he said.

“In all of this discussion (about relocation), there’s been very little said about the role of the academics, who, in my view, make up the fabric of the university, really – not all the bureaucrats who are running it at the moment.”

“The campus … is only 70 years old. You think of other universities which have been there for hundreds of years (and) this is relatively new.”

UTAS Vice-Chancellor Rufus Black unveiled a draft concept master plan for the future development of the Sandy Bay site in October.

An artist’s impression of the redeveloped UTAS Sandy Bay campus.

UTAS executive director of transformation Phil Leersen said the university had engaged “extensively” with the community regarding its development plans, including with staff and alumni.

“There has been a clear, four-round process for the community to participate in the development of the master plan for Sandy Bay and high levels of engagement including 1021 downloads of the master plan, 366 open house participants, 103 face-to-face focus groups and 11 online workshops,” he said.

“Detailed plans for both the city and Sandy Bay are publicly available and future developments will be subject to planning approval, including public input.

“We are deeply appreciative of the contribution of our alumni and former staff, and will continue to engage as these proposals progress.”

OPINION: Does the University of Tasmania have a future?

The fourth oldest university in the country, the origins of the University of Tasmania lie in the

educational aspirations and ambitions of Tasmanians from the mid-19 th century onwards. Those aspirations and ambitions led to Domain House in Hobart becoming the home to the new University in 1894.

The University’s first degrees were in humanities, and that reflected an ideal of education based around the focus on understanding the human – and so on understanding ourselves – as the basis for understanding anything else. This educational or academic vision was central to the original institution.

Blast from the Past column: Physics classes in temporary facilities as the University of Tasmania began its move to Sandy Bay in 1946. First-year students making their way to the original army hut classrooms.

If this is the University’s past, what of its future?

The key to that future is the present. But when we look to the University now, we see an institution no longer centred on any coherent educational ideal at all—an institution that is arguably spending more on property acquisition and development than on its strictly educational or academic activities.

The present situation is thus a distressing and depressing one. The University of Tasmania is an institution that is rapidly becoming little more than a vocational training organisation affiliated with a small number of increasingly industry-focused research centres. Over the last two to three years, it has lost virtually all its longest-serving academic staff. It has systematically gutted its arts and humanities departments as well as many others. Its internal operation has become mired in centralised systems of top-down control and surveillance. It now pays its Vice-Chancellor more than the State Premier and supports a host of highly paid administrators earning more than any professor.

International students studying at the University of Tasmania (UTAS)

It is currently in the process of abandoning one of the best campuses in the country for a stripped-down inner-city footprint that itself reflects the university’s abandonment of any genuine and broadly-based academic aspiration or ambition.

It has lost any distinctive conception of what a university might be, the language of academic scholarship and critical reflection being replaced by the empty rhetoric of the management consultant.

At times, one wonders whether the University of Tasmania any longer operates in the same island as the rest of us – whether it has given itself over to an entirely fabricated world in which property development and online courses are presented as heralding a new paradise.

What is happening at the University of Tasmania is itself a reflection of the systematic destruction currently being wreaked on Australian universities across the country. It is an act of deliberate cultural vandalism almost unparalleled in the history of Australia since Federation, enacted by the very leaders of the institutions being destroyed in concert with a Federal Government that is ideologically opposed to the universities and all they represent.

How ironic that, in a time when we need, more than ever, the capacity for self-critique and self-knowledge that universities ought to promote and sustain, we are seeing the effective dismantling, the cancelling-out, of that very capacity.

If the University of Tasmania had a future – a real future rather than the ersatz vision of its current leadership – it would be in the possibility of trying to reshape itself in a way more closely tied to the aspirations and ideals of the community that sustains it and to which it ought to be accountable. It would be in reshaping itself as an institution that still offers a genuinely human face – a small institution, perhaps, but one with a dedicated body of world-class teachers and researchers who offer something other than the anonymous, online experience that is increasingly coming to dominate higher-education.

New graduates, Tennessee Berryman and Kate Andrewartha both graduated with a Bachelor of Bio-technology and Medical Research from the University of Tasmania PICTURE: Luke Bowden

What would this require? Genuinely listening to its community – internal and external – and honestly responding to what is said. Being truthful and transparent in its communication. No longer condoning an endemic culture of managerial bullying and coercion.

Shifting its decision-making back to the academics and away from managers. Rethinking the adequacy of on-line teaching and re-committing to campus life and face-to-face engagement including a renewal of the Sandy Bay campus (and if access from other parts of Hobart is indeed an issue, then perhaps the best solution would be a new satellite campus, not in the CBD, but in Glenorchy or Claremont).

Unfortunately, this too may turn out to be an impossible dream. Yet if it is, then it seems likely that there is no future for the University of Tasmania that will match the promise of its past – neither as a real university nor as an institution that genuinely serves Tasmania and the Tasmanian community.

2011 Sir James Plimsoll lecture delivered by Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd at the University of Tasmania (UTAS) Stanley Burbury Theatre

The future is, however, something over which we all have some power – which future, then, are we to hope for and try to realise? If we want a genuine university that is indeed of Tasmania then we need to raise our own voices about the institution that belongs, not to the university’s managers and minders, nor even to its Vice-Chancellor, but to Tasmanians. We need to articulate our own vision, and we need to act, in whatever ways we can, to try to realise that vision. That may be difficult, but it is surely worth striving for.

The University of Tasmania has a history that deserves our respect and a wealth that we cannot afford to lose.

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Jeff Malpas is an internationally recognised and respected philosopher and ethicist. A Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, Distinguished Fellow of the Australian Association of von Humboldt Fellows, he is the author or editor of some 30 academic volumes and some 150 academic papers, was founder and original director of the University of Tasmania’s Centre for Applied Philosophy and Ethics (later the Inglis Clark Centre), is Distinguished Visiting Professor at La Trobe University, and is Emeritus Distinguished Professor at the University of Tasmania.