When I contemplate life in today’s universities I have two comparisons to draw on: my undergraduate days in the late 1960s at the University of Melbourne, and my more than 20 years teaching Australian politics at La Trobe. Of the many changes the one that stands out to me is the loss of the face-to-face in student life and of teaching.
When I was an undergraduate, student life was on campus – in the clubs, the caf, the union, the library and in the tutorials where a dozen or so young people and a rare mature-age student would be led in discussion by a tutor, sometimes a new graduate, sometimes one of the tenured staff. Coming from a suburban high school, I knew no one when I started and made my first friends in tutorials as we continued our arguments outside, in the caf or walking downtown to catch our trains home, and gossiped about our fellow students.
