Monastalgia

I exit the Bookshop Co-Op, having purchased some correction tape for my electronic typewriter (I have essays due this week). I walk past the cork-and-hessian FOME noticeboard, glancing at it for any updates, then pass through the doorway of the West End Caf and take a seat in its south-western corner. My friends are there and some of them are arguing over a topic that is familiar to me. I decide I have time to get a chocolate ice-cream cola spider from the ice cream bar in the West End Caf, a weekly luxury with my current cash flow. I return and the argument is still on.

A new participant in the group is concerned by either the presence on campus of a Women's Room or the absence of a Men's Room. Normally I would patiently describe the societal phenomena that justify having a safe space for women on campus but today I'm in a frivolous mood, so my only contribution is to say that there is a safe space for men, made even safer because we have used our masculine wiles and disguised it as a nominally all-genders games arcade. My frivolity may arise from the fact that I had my first proper kiss in the Biology Garden a day before.

That anecdote is fictitious but very much based on the kind of experiences I had at Monash University in the 90s. Somebody (a current Monash Uni undergraduate) recently discovered I had been in and around Clayton Campus for a long time and quizzed me on how Monash has changed over the last two decades. One thing I should do more of is turn the subject matter of face-to-face conversations into blogging. In some ways it is difficult for me as I have been in regular contact with Clayton Campus since I graduated. Those who are gone for a long time and then come back notice the changes more starkly. I have to think back over the many tiny changes and try to discern the overall themes of change.

Environment And Architecture

The biggest change to campus geography is the replacing over time of sports fields with car parks. The fact that there are still huge swathes of sporting ground says how big Clayton Campus is. The most recent and visibly striking change is the power-armour that the Ming Wing is now adorned with. I'm expecting it to transform any day now. However there have been many other changes big and small. It seems that every 12 months the pathway round a pond moves or the carpet in the Campus Centre changes. I was once told there is some sort of annual capital works budget that must be spent lest it be slashed next time round.

I can sometimes look at something and try and superimpose over it what I remember. I did this recently inside the Campus Centre. The thing was once a bunch of right angles. Then it got extended with the addition of many wedges to its floor plan. One could once sit in the area now dubbed Airport Lounge and look out windows onto the Forum. Does anyone even call that lawn the Forum anymore?

Comforts

I do approve of Airport Lounge and the provision on campus of comfy seating. This was once a luxury one could only access if one belonged to a particular group on Campus such as Postgraduate Students Association or the regulars of the Wholefoods scene. Now anyone can find an armchair or couch on which to have a snack.

Snacks? They have gotten better. I cannot say for sure if this is because standards in Australia of takeaway food have improved overall or if it is specifically because of the entry into campus of an array of private catering operators. This is one instance in which I think some private enterprise on campus has been a welcome thing. In a lot of other cases I am suspicious however of such changes. A public institution like Monash pretending to be a multinational corporation has produced lots of problems.

Academia

We once had a lunch hour - most undergraduates of whatever course could come together at the same time of day between classes. I get the impression this is now a thing of the past. I can only imagine it has had an impact on those student groups that had weekly lunchtime meetings. Plenty of other changes have happened to the academic life of Monash and I'm only aware of the biggest.

There are now fewer departments and more inter-disciplinary centres. Cross-diciplinary thinking can be worthwhile but I reckon that behind this shift is the desire to cut costs. Also, my hunch is that it favours the more subjective of related disciplines. Alongside this trend there has been a shift from pure to applied research and, getting back to student culture, a shift from department-focused clubs with an interest in subject matter to faculty-based clubs with an interest in industry networking and getting pissed at huge anonymous shindigs.

Student Culture

I feel as if a lot of services that facilitated an active on-campus life have been lost. Possibly new things are developing to replace them that I'm overlooking. I suppose that the new Internet connection desks that look like something from Star Trek foster a kind of student culture but there are fewer face-to-face forms of activity.

I was disturbed recently to discover that the Short Course Centre has run its last ceramics unit. I was lamenting this fact to a friend who was a student there in the 1980s and she remembered a similar feeling of loss at the closing of a room full of weaving looms. And this puts it into some kind of context. I never missed the looms I never knew existed. Will it matter in future that nobody can play on a pottery wheel?

Political Activism

A theme seems to be that every successive generation thinks that a degree of richness has been lost from Campus life. I remember my VCE Politics teacher aghast after her visit to an Open Day to discover that the biggest group on campus was the Chocaholics. For her this reflected a trivialization of a setting that had in her student days in the 1970s been a fertile seedbed of political debate and activity. But then I got there to discover it was a fertile seedbed of political debate and activity. Everything is relative right?

We had Student General Meetings (SGMs) - do they happen anymore? They were the ultimate decision-making body of the Student Association (other than referenda) and it was there that I discovered that the mass meeting model of democracy is very much rule by the most engaging orator. We had lots of debates between different student groups - usually the Debaters versus a topic-relevant group but sometimes other more interesting and truly invested rivals faced off. And then-as-now there were student elections. There are two big changes in those.

One happened while I was still a student and it was a shift towards the use of content-free names for student election tickets. One ticket in particular with the name Spectrum had huge success on a platform that they were supposedly apolitical. They totally trounced the then-dominent Labor Students. Naturally I was suspicious of the 'we are just students' mantra of Spectrum. Some investigation showed them to be an alliance of students who truly were interested in everyday student issues with some involvement and direction by non-party political communitarians and religious international students. They are long-gone now but the legacy of every bloody political group using a stupid name that says nothing seems entrenched.

The other happened (if memory serves) once I had graduated and was just visiting campus around the turn of the century. For one fleeting electoral term the radicals who congregate in Wholefoods had a very successful election win and made good use of that short hold on power to reform the way student elections were run. Now all paper used in elections has to be provided by the Student Association (and have its own watermark). This reduced paper usage and redressed the issue that some tickets were richer than others. They also limited some ridiculous gimmicks (like bouncy balls with your ticket logo on them) that had become a part of getting students to even notice there were elections in what is a voluntary ballot. I understand that these rules still hold and that is a good thing.

I did a lot of observing campus politics. My only direct involvement (other than as a voter) was that as a graduate I helped the Monash Democrats (the third and last incarnation of that group) to operate and that in my own student days I stood as a candidate for the Korner joke ticket Cannibalism Legalize Now! Some of the student politicians had issues comprehending why anyone would want to compete with them just for fun. Merely confounding them was an amusing thing to do.

* * * * *

There are many other things I recall from my long association with Monash Uni Clayton Campus. It is difficult to choose a best memory but I will venture two.

One was of a few of us staying on campus overnight in the FOME tent rather than packing away our O-Week stall every day. The only other groups that did that were some very drunk Liberal Students and some surprisingly sober Mullers And Packers in their distinctive teepee tent.

The other was walking across that sky bridge that connects Administration with the Robert Blackwood Hall. MonUCS was putting on a concert and the room they put us in while we were off-stage was the fricking University Council Chamber hidden away in Administration - every fixture in there was nice.

There is something exciting about forbidden opulence but I must admit that of these two recollections it is the slumming it in a tent and getting a nasty brunch at the Small Caf the next morning that I am more attached to.