Campus heritage

摘要

The process of recognising places as historical and having heritage value is never settled. It is an uneven process, somewhat quixotic and often contentious. Some moments seem to demand that we revise and reassess established critical judgements and cherished assumptions. A few years ago it became evident to us that this is the case for Australia's postwar university campuses. In around 2015 a group of seven researchers from five Australian universities, led by Associate Professor Andrew Saniga at the University of Melbourne, perceived a pressing need to undertake a rigorous reassessment of the so-called expansion-era university campuses. Places such as Macquarie, Monash, Murdoch, Flinders and La Trobe, developed in the wake of a higher education funding boom between 1958 and 1975. In 2016 the group was awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Grant to fund this work and produce a forthcoming book on the modern Australian campus.