Student activists from the Feminist Liberation Collective (FLC) called for an end to the University of Sydney’s residential colleges at a forum that addressed a nearly century-long history of sexual violence and hazing.
Dashie Prasad, a member of the FLC and former USyd SRC Women’s Officer, pinpointed a long history of elitism and nepotism as a key culprit behind universities’ chronic inaction on residential colleges.
“The Vice-Chancellors at Sydney have actively backed the Colleges and very few have done anything to actually hold out sexism. This university has a long history with the colleges,” Prasad said. “The Vice-Chancellors have an affinity to people who historically had and will likely continue to fund the institution, the colleges and will send their children here.”
Bart Shteinman from Labor for Ending Homelessness concurred with Prasad, describing universities like USyd as “unaccountable corporations” and criticised universities’ lack of affordable rooms for international students considering the nation’s housing crisis.
“Why can universities bring over hundred of thousands of international students but no obligation to house any of them? There is really a lack of requirements from governments to force universities to think about their priorities.”
Systemic inaction was a recurring theme cited by activists throughout the event. In 2018, the landmark Red Zone Report was released by End Rape on Campus following fierce criticisms of the 2017 Broderick Report voiced over Broderick’s “limited” terms of reference and “sanitised” response to sexual violence in university colleges.
Similar heat was also levelled at the 2017 National Student Safety Survey (NSSS) conducted by the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), when the Commission refused to publish campus-specific data and failed to include recommendations.
Panellists also expressed cautious optimism in response to the federal government’s endorsement of a National Student Ombudsman. Although current USyd SRC Women’s Officer Eliza Crossley supports the plan, she said that an Ombudsman “having teeth” is an “oxymoron” and that the endorsement represents only a “small” win.
According to the federal Ombudsman Act 1976, although the Ombudsman wields substantial investigative powers, it cannot enforce recommendations and has a high threshold that complainants must meet to demonstrate that an investigation is necessary.
Siobhan Patton from Action for Public Housing said that despite Australian Labor’s “solid power in all jurisdictions”, the governments were “not necessarily willing to use their levers against the housing crisis”. Having lived in a residential college at the University of Queensland, she said that colleges across the country shared a common sense of entitlement.
“The entire structure [of residential colleges] is irredeemable. For the most part these are old institutions whose forte is predominantly old school types. Whenever there were challenges to that culture, whether it was rape culture, doing anything that went outside the line of tradition, there was all sorts of obfuscation,” she said.
Later this year, the NSW Greens, spearheaded by Jenny Leong MP, are set to launch a private member’s bill to “abolish the colleges” and “create truly safe and accessible housing”. Motivated by the opportunity, there was a unanimous consensus among panellists that student activists need to bring new students and members of the public to break through years of regulatory inaction.
For Prasad, it means “pushing for Labor to care about the abolition of the colleges”. They pointed to the success of the years-long Placement Poverty Campaign in securing a recommendation from the Universities Accord calling for universities and employers to pay students for compulsory placements.
“I think increasing recognition of the radical roots of this campaign is really supporting this campaign. The more we talk about it, the more we advocate for it, this really brings us forward.”
Follow the Abolish The Colleges campaign through this link.
