Week 1, Semester 1, 2014
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Abbott, an inconvenient past
honi soit q ui mal y pense
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Asylum seekers and International Women’s Day
r u o t u o k c e h ite s c b e new woit.com honis
The man, the myth, the manager Max Chalmers profiles the evolving career of Michael Spence On a sunny March morning last year, a small group of picketers stood together at the University of Sydney’s Ross Street entrance and tried to halt the traffic. Using a long, homemade banner as a makeshift traffic gate, they blockaded the inbound lanes. Hand-painted, the sign was decorated with two guillotines and an image of a dowdy looking man. Capitalised text spelt out the visual metaphor: “SPENCE, THE ONLY CUT WE NEED”. It has now been almost six years since Dr Michael Spence became the University of Sydney’s 25th Vice-Chancellor. In November last year – just one month after the National Tertiary Education Union voted to end its industrial campaign – the man depicted in the makeshift mural joined me in Taste Café. In spite of my request, Dr Michael Spence arrives accompanied by his head of Media and Public Relations, Kirsten Andrews.
It’s a Friday, and hundreds of students are graduating, celebrating the conclusion of their tuition by drinking champagne and orange juice on the Quadrangle lawns. More than 30 years ago Spence was working towards completing his own degree. While a student at the University of Sydney he achieved a bachelor’s degree in law and two separate honours degrees, first in English and Italian, then in law.
With a busy life beyond the sandstone halls, Camperdown was a place of intellectual preparation rather than cultural enrichment for the young Michael Spence – a fact some use to explain his testy relationship with student organisations, vividly demonstrated during a hostile but ultimately thwarted effort to take over the University of Sydney Union’s bars and food outlets in 2011.
For most of the conversation Spence leans over the table and rests his head on his right hand, like a schoolboy in an interminable afternoon class. His posture is casual, off-guard and surprisingly lackadaisical. It’s only at moments of contention – for example when discussion moves to last year’s Dalai Lama incident – that his head jolts into an upright position and his hands become animated, his shoulders rigid.
I ask if it is true, as I have been told, that he was a quiet, studious, and very religious student. He laughs with a forcefulness intended to answer the question.
It was not until his time at Oxford in the late 1980s that Spence was embroiled in the non-academic side of university life.
When I ask Spence if he ever took illegal drugs during his university days, Kirsten Andrews glances at her boss with intrigue and slight concern. He continues to lean on his right hand.
“I don’t think anybody who knows me would describe me as quiet ... Outside university I did music, I organised a church choir and band and stuff and was very involved in my local church and had a wide circle of friends,” he says.
“[My time at Oxford] gave me a concern when I came back to Sydney for the large numbers of students that there are at Sydney who were people just like me – that is, kids from the suburbs who aren’t part of the already established Sydney debating scene, or the music scene, or the drama scene,” Spence recalls.
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