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Sandstone Doesn’t Burn Dismantling the Colleges
By Vivienne Guo
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In 1977, an 18 year old girl was found raped and murdered on the oval at St Paul’s College. In the decades since, throwing dead fish on first years, setting fire to pubic hair and ejaculating into shampoo bottles, have all remained part of a deep-rooted hazing culture at the University of Sydney colleges, St Paul’s, St John’s, St Andrew’s, Wesley, Sancta Sophia and the Women’s College. In 2012, 30 St John’s residents nearly killed a peer in a hazing ritual. And yet nothing has changed.
WoCo’s Dismantle the Colleges campaign has been one of our most radical and necessary campaigns to date. The burning need for structural change was made clear by End Rape on Campus’ Red Zone Report (2018), which draws attention to the horrors that universities seek to keep out of the public eye for fear that they will impact enrolment numbers and thus the University’s revenue. Women and vulnerable students are forced to bear the brunt of this; that is the cost of the University of Sydney saving face. wealthy and privileged. They are notorious for being hotbeds of sexual violence and hazing. Sexual violence is concerned with power and power structures not only enable the violence but fuel it by silencing survivors and protecting perpetrators. What has the University done? ViceChancellor Michael Spence certainly doesn’t give a fuck. He’s previously said that the University is powerless to stop the violent hazing that happens at the start of every year. The lack of repercussions makes for a complete lack of accountability within colleges and a lack of support for survivors.
At the colleges, students pay $30,000 a year in rent, ensuring that only the rich are able to buy their way into their hallowed halls. Amongst this highly privileged demographic, most of the residents are white men, usually from a small pool of private schools in Sydney. It is no secret that boys private schools often allow for the misogynistic ‘old boys’ mentality. Case in point is the Wesley College journal from
2016 which ranked women on attractiveness and repeatedly called them “bitches”, “sluts”, and “hoes.” This misogyny is enabled in elite private schools and it doesn’t end there; it is encouraged in the colleges and this experience is carried on throughout a working life in positions of high authority in politics, business, and the media.
The existence of the colleges and their $30,000 entry fee is made even more abhorrent by the student housing crisis. Many students are forced to sleep in places like Fisher Library, where they live in a state of perpetual uncertainty and anxiety. There is no doubt that the colleges are a shocking misuse of resources. They sit on rent-free Crown land, protected by state legislation that is over 160 years out of touch, born of a time where universities belonged solely to the wealthy elite, allowing the colleges to thrive ‘in perpetuity’. These laws also enshrine the self-governance of the six largest colleges, ensuring that hazing and sexual violence are ‘handled’ by institutions whose best interests lie with public image and not with survivors.
In the knowledge of all this, I would happily chime into chants of “burn down the colleges.” But of course we don’t want to literally burn down the colleges. Nor do we want to physically tear down the buildings, brick by brick. But the colleges as they are, with their blase attitude to misogynistic traditions a n d rape culture, cannot be allowed to stand. The entire system must be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up, to provide safe, affordable public housing for students who need it most. Epidemics of rape, hazing and bullying won’t just vanish with the archaic colleges by themselves either. Universities still have a long way to go in terms of action, to pull these problems out root and stem, and it must start with the colleges.
We don’t want to burn down the colleges. Sandstone doesn’t burn. But they must be abolished. Nothing short of closing the colleges will sufficiently address issues of student safety, sexual violence, hazing, misogyny and elitism.
To survivors: we see you. We believe you. We support you. We will fight for a better world.
