Content
Adherence to Master Plan is vital
25 October 2008
At this time of year in universities, pressure builds because of budgets, exams, fatigue or whatever and certain issues recur.
For some students at present, speculation on the future of the Student Guild in the wake of voluntary student unionism legislation is a genuine concern. Guilds have to be reconfigured and made attractive to large numbers of students to sustain themselves financially. It’s a hard task in the current economic climate, and at a time when students worldwide are not identifying socially with campuses as they have traditionally done in the past.
In this context there is frequent reversion to Guilds running cafeteries and/or bars, which has been done with mixed success on many campuses in the past, in particular.
Running a student bar on campus is seen by some as a panacea to solve the Guild’s financial woes and resolve the problems associated with ‘uni nights’ at various locations around the Coast.
It is not, of course, the imagined panacea, and there are huge issues associated with an on-campus bar, and we have rehearsed the arguments annually for over a decade, since we settled on our first campus master plan for the development of the University to 15,000 students by 2021. With the master plan that was agreed, that would be the capacity of this needed, fully-developed campus, whilst retaining its unique environmental characteristics.
It is a master plan that cannot sustain extensive at-grade, free, car parking, nor student residences, nor some of the commercial or professional outlets associated with some city or remote university campuses. We want to retain our wildlife, for example.
The provision of non-core activities of the University have always been conceived to be placed in the Sippy Downs Town Centre. Hopefully, the Town Centre Plan will be signed off by Minister Lucas in the next few weeks. It provides an excellent blueprint for how all the needed infrastructure at Sippy Downs can be planned. One of the first developers has plans for a tavern, provided within two years, next to the University and at no cost to either the University or Guild. That enables us to define and concentrate on our core businesses.
These sorts of provisions are far better located in the Town Centre rather than on a constrained, environmentally fragile but beautiful campus, that we want developed in a distinctive way, not as a pale-shadow of other universities at other times with more resources.
Christmas is coming and hopefully some of these issues will be resolved in the life of the University for at least another year, until revived by another group. But the extensive master planning still stands as our clear guide to physical and social possibilities and non-starters.
Professor Paul Thomas AM is Vice-Chancellor at the University of the Sunshine Coast.