Where is the student life at La Trobe?
University is meant to the best years of your life, where you meet new people, make new experiences, and engage in clubs and societies. Your student experience at university should encompass aspects of both academic and intellectual development alongside a cultivation of cultural, political, sporting and arts, all of which are integral to one’s ability to interact within a social framework. It’s difficult to articulate what student life at La Trobe looks like. Why? Because there isn’t one. At least not anymore.
Did COVID take away our student life or was it just a good excuse to not have to fund and invest in student experiences? I had this conversation with a friend the other day. Their answer was both. The pandemic shut down university for almost two years, turning classes into online spaces of disengagement, it removed any way to interact with other like mind human beings, and it also closed many beloved businesses. Since we’ve properly returned this year, La Trobe is a shell of a place that was once vibrant and bursting with life. You only have to walk through the Agora to figure that out for yourself. You could hear a pin drop, at almost any point of the day. That hustle and bustle is just a facade of traffic on the way to class or to stop at the few places you eat at. It’s the intersection to class, not the destination anymore. The only time you will ever see the Agora “spring to life” is during orientation week. A failed attempt to showcase to new students that their time at university will be one of the most exciting experiences and that there is always something happening around campus. Come back two weeks later and you’ll find out that it was all a rouse.
2022 was the perfect time for the university to get creative and think of new and creative ways to revitalise the campus, to encourage students to get excited to be back in person. But the sad reality is that La Trobe operates as a business first and a university second. Why spend thousands of dollars on creating a social hub around campus, full of activities that create pathways to engage and make new friends, when they can keep that money for themselves.
Why should we have to rely on our already underfunded student union to try to organise events to create somewhat of a student life. A lunchtime barbeque is a great idea but imagine an Agora full of thriving businesses or live music events to connect students together. In an ideal world, both the university and the union would work collaboratively to create opportunities for students, but the university, notorious for making the student union’s work more difficult than necessary, would never agree to such cohesiveness, no matter how much they pretend they do.
And if you thought having no events on campus was bad, just look at club culture, it’s gone, or at best it’s not a heavily present one. In truth, unless you’re a political hack who wants to devote all their time fighting for important issues and injustices, there really isn’t anywhere for you to go with your interests. It’s up to you to the groundwork to find out what clubs exits and just because you find them, doesn’t mean they’re actively running. That too is the universities’ fault. Clubs used to be controlled by the student union and recently the university has taken over. Most things they touch surely die.
Your happiness, extracurricular interests and friendships don’t make the university money, so why would they pay for that. La Trobe doesn’t care about your experience, they just want your money. As long as you pay your fees, you’re just another statistic, another source for them to suck the life out of, to boost and boast their rankings and to line their pockets. Student life will always be grim and abysmal, and you can thank La Trobe for your miserable experience.