It’s a Tuesday evening. You stayed at uni late to finish that essay and you’re breezing out of the Lawbry on a high, when suddenly you’re confronted with it. That dreaded whiteboard, snuck between the sensors and the glass doors. ‘Need to Go Out?’, a sign taped to it asks, rather smugly you might think. That’s it, you’ve gotta go trudging up the stairs through Fisher to buzz your way out.
What you experienced was the University’s new security policy regarding the Law Library’s Victoria Park exit. Since earlier this year, that entrance has only been open to students 9am-5pm on weekdays and 10am-2pm on weekends.
When asked for comment, a University spokesperson told Honi they had ‘reinstated student card swipe access to the Law Library through the Victoria Park entrance from 8-9am and 5-8pm on weekdays, after it was inadvertently restricted.’ Last Wednesday I checked if this was true and remarkably, at around 6:30pm, the glass doors to the Law Library did swing open. The whiteboard was still standing there for some reason, although it seemed smaller somehow and less irritating. Apparently the security guard had not been clued in to the University’s reinstatement of the old policy: he told me ‘the door was broken otherwise it would be closed at its usual 5pm’. He was kind though, and told me he would not ‘throw’ his ‘body in front of me’ if I continued to use the apparently ‘broken’ door.
You might be fair in saying that the closing of the door was always small fry, since it only added an extra two minutes to walk from the Victoria Park gate up and around to the front of Fisher to go in that way. But, without sounding trite, it’s the principle of the thing: don’t you want to live on a campus where you could tumble out of the library and waltz through Vic Park at 5:15pm? Or, rather, take an immediate right to make your City Road bus which is coming in those suddenly precious next two minutes? After all, if you checked Maps, Google did not factor in the M.C. Escher journey one had to make, snaking through the bottom of Fisher, up the stairs, and then retracing your steps top-side on Eastern Avenue.
I suppose I am kind of thankful for the reinstatement, in the way a powerless medieval peasant would be thankful for receiving a minor indulgence from a vast techno-corporate behemoth. But the battle is not over.
Firstly, it is hard to believe the University’s claim that the Victoria Park entry had only ever been ‘inadvertently restricted’. The 5pm shut down had been in place since at least the start of semester. It required the establishing of a security checkpoint (which remains) at Fisher Library that, as my friend described, was ‘stricter than Berghain’.
Secondly, the University still closes the Fisher and Law Library complex to members of the public outside 10am-2pm on the weekend. Four hours? This is a ‘public university’, which means its resources should be available to the public. When I asked a law student about the weekend policy, they defended it, claiming ‘scat people’ would ‘go in there to use the bathroom’ otherwise. Which reminded me again that the opinion of the average Sydney Uni law student was usually disappointing.
But it begs the question, what end did the policy really serve? Certainly not the safety of students. There was no rational distinction between the Law Library being entirely open at the Victoria Park entrance at 2pm, when it is typically chock full of “vulnerable” students, and closed at 6:30pm when it was emptying out. The change seemed instead to be part and parcel of that ghastly Bruce Hodgkinson report. One of its key recommendations being to ‘increase the capacity of campus security’ in the wake of the Palestine encampment and the other commendable protest activity of 2024.
It, like the move to ‘increase [and] upgrade CCTV Monitoring’, represents an attempt by the university to exert greater control over who is on campus. This is not out of any bona fide concern for student safety, and definitely not for the accessibility of our libraries, but is expressly to limit the University’s liabilities and to smooth over its public image.
In the ‘executive summary’ of his report, Hodgkinson brusquely dismissed the University of Sydney’s history of protest. He wrote that some of “those traditions grew up in a different time and when the legal framework with which the University must comply was far less complex. The maintenance of those traditions has led to students feeling unsafe. There does not appear to be a reason for their continuation…”
Thankfully this time, the University was only ‘inadvertently’ mistaken about its security policy. But it’s a reminder that if these corporate big wigs and their security regime are to have their way, then free and unimpeded movement around campus is a tradition, like protest, that the University will keep trying to consign to the not-so-distant past.
