In Issue 3, Matilda Rumball-Smith provided an interesting, well-written, and thoughtful take on how student life currently feels on Castle St and environs (‘Big Red vs the Administration: Who Controls Castle?’). Reading it prompted a few personal thoughts and observations. These aren't meant to be criticisms or correctives; more a complementary individual perspective from someone who was a student here in the early ’90s and has been on staff since 2000. That doesn't make anything I say here "right", just differently informed. And it definitely isn't "the University's" view of things – it's mine alone.
First, the concept of "tradition" is an interesting one. While I'd argue that Matilda's article is an example of a real and valuable tradition – Critic Te Ārohi's 100 years of excellent writing that informs its readers and challenges them to think – there are others that look a bit more confected to me. For example, "couch burning" was a thing that really only happened for a decade or so in the 2010s. Yes, for a while it was very popular, then the Uni and fire service cracked down on it. Was that really an overreach into harmless hijinks? Couch burning actually is fucking dangerous (drunk people jumping over what really are burning balls of petrochemicals is a recipe for disaster). It badly damages the road that the couch sits on, which costs a shit-ton to fix up. And, when it became "normal" to set stuff on fire, people started doing it to couches that were sitting on flat balconies... which isn't great.
So, the idea that couches always got burned by your forebears just isn't true; and, during the comparatively short period it did get done, it wasn't really the sort of "no harm, no foul" activity you might imagine. This is the case, I suspect, for many things touted as being important but now sadly ended "traditions" of life at Otago. On that topic, flat initiations are another thing that are a comparatively recent development – just because breathas say, "But it's what always happens," doesn't add any merit to them. As a collective, you really need to ask yourselves questions about what you demand your peers have to do in order to be a part of your culture. Is it valuable to your common life? What harm does it impose on those forced into participating by your invoking "tradition"? Does it build the sort of connections that are meaningful and healthy? Or, is it just continuing to act out the practices of dominance and privilege that we learned at our high schools and are unable to move past?
Second, to my eyes the biggest change has been in the size of the Uni and the wholescale "ghettoisation" (problematic term, I know) of North Dunedin. In the early '90s I studied with around 8,000 –10,000 others enrolled at Otago. Now the roll is way over twice that amount. And these extra bodies have been stuffed into the North Dunedin quarter, which has intensified in population while driving out all the non-student inhabitants. Which means you've now got 18-21-year-olds making the place entirely their own according to their own social mores.
That's all fine. There's a joyous freedom in being surrounded by your own and feeling able to live your life in a spirit of YOLO freedom. At least, it's all fine until Sophia Christani tragically dies under a pile of bodies, or a balcony collapses at an impromptu Six60 gig and a young woman is left with serious spinal injuries. That's something the University as an institution has both moral and practical reasons to care about. After all, it's the University that provides the reason for you all being here – for it to just bank your fees but then say it's not its concern what happens to you outside the lecture halls is intolerable. The University is not the same as your phone provider or your supermarket. You don't exist in a service-for-fee relationship with it. Rather, the University is a community. It is a place of reciprocal duties. And that means, for better or worse, it has to care about the welfare of you and those like you and take action to uphold that.
Furthermore, if the reputation of Otago becomes dominated by a "breathas on the piss" image then parents of Auckland students (as well as some Auckland students themselves, who want something more from their Uni experience than getting blitzed) start saying "nope" to Otago. Even a small dip in those enrollments collapses the Uni's finances and means departments have to close. Hence, the Code of Conduct. Campus Watch. Video cameras. The "requirement” (non-enforceable, but scary) to register your flat party and abide by police demands. And so on, and so on. I'm not saying all of these developments are okay, or that there haven't been problems with how the University has acted at times. But, equally, you've got to see what has been put in place against these sorts of concerns and pressures.
All this means that any idea that things could be just left "like they were back in the day" is, unfortunately, wishful thinking. You'd need to return the Uni to being a far more selective institution with far fewer people in it – which has real equity issues. You'd need to pepper North Dunedin streets with families who dilute the "studentville" nature of life there. And, you'd need to create collective spaces where students can meet and socialise without externalising the impacts. So, "back in the day" there were a half-dozen pubs near the campus, each with their own "vibe" so you could decide what experience you wanted. Plus regular events – bands playing, etc. – put on in the Main Common Room-Union Hall. Plus (and this really is a BIG change) there was a broader sense of collective student life. Things like protests against student fees meant that we didn't just see our "Uni experience" as being in terms of the parties we went to.
In that sort of environment, the Uni can (literally) afford to cast much more of a blind eye to whatever students get up to. But when the overpowering effect of North Dunedin breatha culture becomes a reason that more people start saying "no" to Otago than "yes" (and believe me, the Uni surveys the shit out of this sort of thing), then of course the Uni has to do something about it. Or else, there will be no Uni, because we live and die based on student numbers. Unfortunately, that might just be a part of the general enshittification* of the world – but the answer isn't to hearken back to "the good old days"; instead, it's to make your own new way of doing things.
Anyway – like I said in my introduction, these are just some comments and observations from my (aged) perspective rather than anything meant as a critique. I'm glad questions are being asked and the limits placed on student life are being probed. That, above all else, is an Otago tradition that should never be allowed to die.
*Enshittification (noun) describes the process by which businesses or digital platforms degrade over time – initially prioritising a user-centric experience (in this metaphor, students and staff) before shifting toward bureaucratic, profit-focused interests.