When I was an undergraduate, student life was on campus. A lot is being lost in the shift to online learning

The Guardian

20-02-2025

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 recent 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.
When I moved into college in second year, and later into a share house, I could also go to meetings or the pub at night, and to the film society's Friday night screenings. Without cars or mobile phones, social life depended on running into each other and on informal gathering places. Few people had part-time jobs and most late afternoons in the final years of my degree a dozen or more of us would gather in the mixed lounge for coffee, some food perhaps, and to talk and flirt, making friendships and building networks which have lasted a life time. In those liminal years, between youth and adulthood, as we left our parents' homes, we were there, present to each other, face to face.
I have just finished a biography of the second wave feminist activist Beatrice Faust, who started at Melbourne University a decade before I did, and recognised the same pattern of intense daily interaction among students. When a decade later in 1972 she started the Women's Electoral Lobby she turned to her undergraduate networks for recruits.
When I started teaching at La Trobe in 1989, campus life was thinner. A suburban university, most students still lived in their childhood home, and they had jobs. During the day the car parks were full as students drove in for classes but at night the campus was empty, and even during the day many students simply dropped in for class. I'm sure friendships still formed but the campus was no longer the intense social world of my undergraduate days. Perhaps more of it survived at an inner city campus like Melbourne's but there too students were taking jobs and cheap student digs were being lost to gentrification.
Teaching, though, was still face-to-face. I was lucky to join a department which saw teaching undergraduates as our main raison d'etre and which included a number of gifted and dedicated teachers, including Robin Jeffrey, Joe Camilleri and Robert Manne, all of whom taught first year and took tutorials. Their styles were very different. Robin's was quirky and occasionally whimsical, Joe's urgent and Robert's urbane but all were built on extensive knowledge of their subject matter and rigorous thinking. They modelled for students how to work through a problem, how to organise and interrogate a body of material, how to come to a conclusion. They showed that thinking was hard-won and serious, and they invited emotional identification with the process. This more than the informational content is the lasting effect of great teaching, testified to in countless memoirs in which people remember teachers who turned them serious and changed their lives.
I've thought a lot about what is being lost in the shift to online teaching. Information can be conveyed, and people can be taught protocols, as in the ubiquitous compliance modules, but can they be taught how to think or, more importantly, inspired to want to learn how to think? Perhaps, but I'm not convinced. A talking head on a screen is not the same as a flesh and blood person standing in front of you, face to face, whom you admire and want to emulate or impress. It drains teaching of its emotional pull. And it is hard to fit a complex piece of reasoning on a screen. Dot points are a very limited cognitive tool.
The shift to online teaching is only one of the developments which has eroded the centrality and quality of teaching in our universities. Others are the availability of research-only positions such as ARC fellowships, which took many gifted senior academics out of the class room altogether and replaced them with casually employed less experienced teachers. Many of these were excellent, dedicated teachers but the message sent by the flight of leading academics into research-only positions was that teaching was a second-order activity.
The situation is different in the sciences but, to my mind, in the humanities and social sciences, teaching our fellow citizens is the core of our jobs, what the taxpayers pay us to do, and the source of our social licence.
Judith Brett is a political historian and biographer, and an emeritus professor of politics at La Trobe University. Her biography of Beatrice Faust will be published by Text on 23 April