Campus Collaboration to explore campus life and disagreement

During Semester Two, the Sydney Policy Lab established the independent Campus Collaboration to begin work with staff and students across the University on big questions: How might we make the University a place where difference and disagreement are generative? How can we centre care and compassion in the University’s mission in an era of global crisis and dislocation? How might we foster experimental, creative and democratic approaches to life on campus?

Led by Dr Kate Harrison Brennan (Director, Sydney Policy Lab Director), Associate Professor Sophie Gee (Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow) and Professor Danielle Celermajer, the Campus Collaboration seeks to understand the wealth of existing thinking and practices at our University that go to the heart of how to invigorate campus life and foster a culture of thoughtful disagreement.

The Sydney Policy Lab spoke with the Collaboration’s academic leads about the initial explorations and next steps.

What moved you to work on this initiative?

Associate Professor Sophie Gee: The crisis around universities over the last year has paradoxically highlighted the ways in which communities do, in fact, turn to universities to be exemplary institutions – to be leaders in shaping and forming community.

The focused criticisms also tell us a lot about what universities can be. Universities have an opportunity to lead and build communities in new ways. For me, one of the opportunities here, perhaps the biggest, is rethinking the purpose of a university in a world driven by polycrisis and in a world facing the reality of polarisation where most people are seeking community.

Dr Kate Harrison Brennan: For me, it’s great affection for the University of Sydney where I grew up as an undergraduate and now work. In various faculties, I experienced the skill of lecturers and tutors in drawing out very different points of view. That shaped me and led me to want to have braver conversations.

In a time when people have fewer opportunities to exercise those skills, it’s vital a university supports the development of skills and capabilities that enable us to be with people who are very different from ourselves, to learn from their perspectives and sit in what is often deep discomfort before we try to find common ground. This collaboration is trying to put that into action in a modest way. It is a practical answer to the question I posed with a coauthor in a recent essay, ‘What do universities owe communities?’ 

Professor Danielle Celermajer: As the ecological systems on which we have relied for everything we do collapse, tremendous pressure is going to be placed on our social, cultural and political institutions and relations. The irony is that it is precisely at this point that we are going to need our relationships and institutions to be robust and flexible – to support us all as we find ways of living, learning and working together. Looking around the world and seeing the rise of social and political polarisation, and with this, authoritarianism, precisely the opposite is happening.

Our relationships and the institutional forms that can foster good, just and trusting relationships, are unravelling when we most need them. This is such a daunting problem but one I also feel moved to be part of addressing. So, I am starting literally where I am and where I think I can be part of co-creating the conditions for good, just and trusting relationships. 

So what has the project set out to do?

SG: The simple mission of the campus collaboration is to co-design a university environment that moves beyond polarisation and enables difference and disagreement to be part of teaching and research excellence. In promoting ideas of compassion or collectively held discomfort and generative disagreements, the project also seeks to understand why disagreements often deteriorate into irreconcilable polarities, silenced voices and over-amplified viewpoints. Acknowledging obstacles to being able to disagree productively together is a crucial step in making change.

What has the Collaboration done in this exploratory phase?

KHB: We have experimented with ways of bringing people together that can inform the collaboration’s future work. The first step was holding what we called “house calls,” deep semi-structured conversations with colleagues across the university to discuss their lives on campus. We then moved to larger groups. First, with students drawn from all faculties in a series of workshops and seminars. Second, by collaborating with Michael Dagostino from the Chau Chak Wing museum on two “culture clubs,” arts-based events to build community and critical thinking.

The house calls have been a wonderful opportunity to meet colleagues from all faculties known for being able to navigate difference or conflict, those who use their voices to create greater opportunities for going beyond consensus in a way that’s constructive, calling out at times, things that are problematic, but also finding ways that people can hold together in a community as diverse as a university.

With Sophie’s expertise in the arts and humanities, the culture clubs have helped people reflect on some of the bigger questions in life together.

SG: As Kate said, we realised for this project to have success and credibility, the most important thing is consultation with the University community, which will continue.

The house calls brought together, I think, an extraordinary group distinguished by openness to difficult conversations and experience working productively with great differences. Together we developed this idea that to move past polarisation, to create an intellectual and community life that goes beyond polarity, also crucially involves going beyond consensus. Trust exists in the spaces between consensus, enforced consensus and polarisation.

One thing that’s emerged from these early conversations has been that being able to tell stories well is empowering for individuals. It also shapes the identity of an institution in very profound ways. That’s where the arts and humanities come in and the University of Sydney has a remarkable opportunity to claim – reclaim, perhaps – its historic pre-eminence because they are the way to surface the stories of many voices and create community beyond disagreement.

DC: We very consciously began this project trying to embody the ethos we also hope to nurture: one that assumes that we are surrounded by people who have tremendous and diverse gifts to bring, and that among our principal roles is creating the conditions where those gifts can be shared and grown.

None of us know how to solve polarisation or co-create communities across difference. We can learn from what others are doing and what is being done at our University, but we have never been in this situation before, at this historical juncture. So, we shaped the project to give us the best chance of walking together towards methodologies and then the relationships we need to ground us in our work of teaching, researching and serving in the context of unknown, but doubtless challenging futures.

How did colleagues respond to the chance to talk about these issues and life on campus? 

KHB: The response to our invitations could be summed up in the words of a colleague who told me, “it is profoundly encouraging that we’re being trusted with our expertise to navigate these challenges.”

People saw opportunities for their expertise – whether academic, professional or indeed from being part of communities way beyond the University – to be part of building very diverse communities within the University, that are truly thriving. There was a lot of energy around that.

SG: The best thing so far is the enthusiasm. It was just so encouraging to see the generosity and vulnerability people brought to the conversations. So much imaginative energy, often alongside a sense of frustration, disappointment and disenchantment.

What we felt was a willingness to reengage and get working, to build community and trust. To be honest, it was surprising to find such a level of compassionate community engagement and sense of what we were talking about becoming a broader collective undertaking. 

We’re talking about big global issues like polarisation, why are universities the place to be having these conversations? Are our communities a microcosm or an epicentre?

DC: Everywhere is the place to have these conversations, and universities in a distinctive way, commensurate with our distinctive capacities and mandates.

We are sites privileged with the space and time to critically reflect on what we can and ought to be doing, thinking, making, building, healing and so on – doing so in light of what is inherited from the past by way of knowledge, material production, technologies and, of course, mistakes. At the heart of the culture of inquiry, that is our foundation, is a willingness to suspend assumptions and consider alternatives. If we did not do this, nothing new would come into existence. I see us as having a responsibility to draw on this intrinsic character of our institution at this moment.

SG: While universities have been the target of criticism in this area, I think, in fact, they are uniquely suited to provide that sort of stability and trust with community. Sydney University, with its history, geographic position in Sydney and position in the Pacific world holds responsibility to be a university with a strong sense of purpose. 

The collaboration has intentionally emphasised care. Why is that?

DC: Thanks to several decades of work from feminist activists and scholars, care is no longer a concept or practice that needs to be cordoned off from the ‘serious’ work of ‘rational’ thought, ethics or institutional design.

Care is the often invisibalised and appropriated infrastructure that supports everything we produce. Care is not separate from thinking, teaching, working out problems, inventing and so on – it is their ground. Just reflect on what makes it possible for our university and all universities to function: the attention that we pay to each other’s ideas, aspirations and concerns; the willingness to provide others with a place and the time to test or share their thoughts and feelings; the generosity to respond and encourage. Explicitly valuing this care work not only casts light on what is often unacknowledged, but also puts care in front of us as a component or dimension, of our being together that is worth nurturing.

So, what does a vigorous, thriving campus life look like for you?

KHB: I think it starts with trusting academics and professional staff to be able to move beyond consensus. That’s the beginning, and that requires leaning into the expertise people have. I see being able to do that as the life blood of a campus.

Students’ experiences can be excellent if they’re given the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of their teachers. If students see thriving campus life in the lives of faculty, it flows into the classroom and students pick it up just as they pick up love of a subject. That's at the beating heart of a thriving campus. 

It’s really important, then, to look at how students can spend more time on a campus. That’s going to take a lot of creative thinking.

DC: If I imagine what I would see if I walked onto a thriving campus, the two qualities to shine would be curiosity and wonder. And then if I dug a little deeper, I’d see the conditions for catalysing and sustaining curiosity and wonder, which would be justice, sharing power, generosity and humility combined with confidence that one has something of value to contribute, and a belief that we can collectively create worlds that flourish for everyone. I know that all might seem very abstract, but all of those concepts live in very material forms, like who gets to speak in which spaces and how we attend to each other and to others’ perspectives, or whose work is valued and who makes those decisions and according to which values.

If we take nature or the more-than-human world as our model, systems that are vigorous and thriving are ones that include a great deal of diversity and dynamism, but are also stabilised by reciprocal relationships. Similarly social, cultural or epistemic communities have vigour and thrive when we have a diversity of perspectives, approaches, methodologies and so on, but we also need to be stabilised by agreements that protect all parts of our system from domination or exploitation.

SG: I think that vigour is a collaborative undertaking. It’s a collaboration between professional and academic staff, leadership, and students. And while I’ve put students last in that list, I also think committed, vulnerable and engaged leadership, teaching and research are contagious: they pass energy and conviction to students.

Our core mission is excellence in teaching and research and the reason that’s the core is we are passing knowledge and values to the next generation of leaders.

The feeling of knowledge passing between generations is in and of itself invigorating, and can transform student experience. That’s why the emphasis so far has been on leadership and on staff. It’s part of reconceptualising what makes student experience unique in a university.

You've spoken about starting with a modest approach, and letting the expertise of staff and students lead. Where is that expertise taking the collaboration? What comes next?

SG: Our experiments so far are giving us a picture of what a thriving university community looks like. We are looking concretely at events, activities and times for engagement that reflect the broad enthusiasm for working beyond polarisation and consensus, in the spirit of showing “what does a university community look like when the focus is on building trust and mutual care for an intellectual life that embraces difference?”

One crucial challenge that has surfaced repeatedly is the necessity of training people in the skills of working with conflict, disagreeing well, and using uncertainty, discomfort and difference generatively. Everyone we have talked to, at all levels of the University, has emphasised how important skills training is. There can be good intentions, time and effort, but without sophisticated training by experienced and gifted teachers, it’s very hard to make good change.

KHB: I think it’s really about supporting the vigour of different communities: helping them navigate what’s possible and the discomfort of that, and celebrating what can be achieved when a university really is thriving in difference.

We’re particularly looking forward to involving more people from the many communities and campuses of the University in this collaboration.

DC: Sophie mentioned arts-based approaches. I’m very excited about this aspect of our plans. At universities, we like to think of ourselves as lead indicators, but often we are not: it is in the arts that we witness the greatest boldness of experimentation and methodological innovation. Coming at issues where we find ourselves stuck in certain positions, or at loggerheads with others, through artistic methodologies can open possibilities we had not yet imagined. At the same time, as a community who is often (rightly) serious, they give us an opportunity to play a little more, even if it is serious play.

Finally, what is the relationship between the Campus Collaboration and other projects and work at the University?

SG: It’s fair to say 2024 has been a wake-up call across campus. There is no part of the University, no part of the leadership, no part of the student life that is not rethinking how to approach the rising tide of polarisation.

Our work in the Campus Collaboration is independent and staff-led. It sits separately from fairly concrete, practical things that are happening at all levels of the University around the issues of polarisation, disagreement and campus life. We intend to remain independent of other endeavours on campus, but to keep building community in ways that ultimately supports other projects.

The Campus Collaboration will continue community-led work with staff and students from across the University of Sydney through 2025. Join the Sydney Policy Lab mailing list  to connect with the Collaboration.