Voluntary attendance. Online classes. Student numbers swelling. Australian campuses look very different today – and many academics don’t like it
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It’s easy to picture a university campus. The manicured lawns packed with students reading books in the sun, the commanding academic in a bustling lecture hall, the cheap beer at the student pub after class, debate getting livelier after each glass. We imagine it as the site of multiple awakenings – political, sexual, philosophical, intellectual.
But this cliched experience, if it ever existed, has become a thing of the past. With class attendance often not compulsory, academics now speak to empty rows of seats in massive, echoey lecture halls. Students watch their classes later online at a convenient time, if they get around to it.
