Studying Architecture at UTS: the Ruckus of 2006

UTS' old course

Until recently, the UTS school of architecture occupied a very particular niche in the educational space amongst its competitors in New South Wales, Australia. The typical Aussie architecture professional degree requires five or more years of full-time education after high school. UTS put students into an income-earning job from their first year. They only spent a day or two each week at university. When they graduated six or so years later, they not only had a proper degree, but years of experience: a practice-base education.

Australian architecture students are traditionally drawn from privileged families. UTS tended to recruit from a little lower down the scale; from those families who could not afford to support their offspring for the full five+ years that a conventional architectural education required; or from those students wanting to work from the get-go.

The UTS glass ceiling

Firms loved UTS graduates: when they left uni, they could hit the ground running because they'd been running for years. Graduates from posher schools emerged into the harsh sunlight of practice blinking. But UTS graduates often seemed to hit a glass ceiling in their 30's, while their more well-heeled comrades sailed gently by them into partnerships or their own practices.

Enter Elizabeth Farrelly

In 2006 the school decided to restructure itself. What should have been a very esoteric storm-in-a-teacup about staffing in an average Aussie architecture school reached the public's eye with an article by Dr Elizabeth Farrelly¹, in our opinion Australia's greatest living architecture critic, writer, manager and activist. In a January 2006 article in the Sydney Morning Herald she lobbed a few grenades against the school.

If it ain't broke, why fix it?

So ran the headline on Dr Farrelly's article in the Sydney Morning Herald (Jan 28, 2006) on UTS. Dr Farrelly's article concerns some abstruse staffing changes at the University school. She starts:

The tenor of Dr Farrelly's article is that UTS has lost its unique practice-based style of education. It has become just another Aussie school, full of half-witted career academics with no idea of real-life practice. As a further insult, it has caved into the Australian federal government's public university funding policies: these favour schools who churn out research (read more about that here). After a lament against the demise of UTS' old course in 2002, she says:

Dr Farrelly continues by citing grumblings in the profession, throwing in some heavy-weight support by former professor of architecture Lawrence Nield, former president of his local chapter of the RAIA Richard Francis-Jones, and former government architect Chris Johnson (that does seem like a lot of ‘formers’, doesn't it?).

Defending practice or practising a defence?

Dr Farrelly's article seems to be a spirited defence of practice-based education and against dilettante research. Indeed, she goes out of her way to swipe at the school at the University of Melbourne, one of the best architectural research schools in Australia. She castigates them as a snotty bunch of fancy-degreed academics, the antithesis of the sons-of-the-earth at UTS.

We have written at length about the practice/research debate, and have a lot of sympathy with the idea of practice-based education.

Dr Farrelly gets her knickers in a twist

But Dr Farrelly's arguments are addled. Neither she, nor the people she is defending – nor any of those she cites in her article – ever underwent the salt-of-the-earth education that UTS provided. They were all at the schools she professes to hate, educated at posh research-oriented universities where the notion of actually working for a living was kept at a polite remove. All come from privileged backgrounds.

She affects to despise ‘career academics’ with fancy degrees, yet spent several years in gaining a research PhD (just like Dr Garry!) for herself under the tutelage of the career academics and academic regime she purports to hold in such contempt.

Plugging your old mates

After reading Dr Farrelly's article, we felt we had just heard Her Majesty the Queen scold us that the only way to the top was through hard work at a modest local tech {community college}. Ya reckon?

Why is the good doctor's article such an incoherent mish-mash in its call to arms to save UTS' old course? This is not like her. The answer is only found in this paragraph:

Dr Farrelly singles out Mr Philip Thalis and Mr Peter Hyphen John Cantrill, ignoring the other four fractionals under threat. Could it be that Dr Farrelly is too modest to mention the cosy friendship between those she defends? Her relationships with Mr Nield and Mr Johnson go back over decades. Messrs Thalis, Cantrill and Francis Hyphen Jones were drinking buddies when they studied architecture together at the University of Sydney.

Dr Farrelly has never hesitated to lob a few shots into the public arena in favour of her favoured's⁴. She has dutifully lobbied for Thalis and Cantrill for nigh on twenty years. When they were casuals at the University of Sydney, she castigated their employer for not according them their proper “dignity and status, befitting the magnitude of their contribution”, and further charged that the university would not “make a serious effort to pay them in a way that reflects [their] inestimable importance”³. Damn right, too! She stopped short of saying that their daily rounds should be preceded by showers of rose-petals and trumpet peals—but only just.

Messrs Thalis and Cantrill are far too shy to toot their own horns: when you can get your patrons to do it for you, why bother?

Nothing wrong in plugging your old mates

Nothing wrong in plugging your old mates, of course: archsoc.com does it all the time! But when we do it, you know that's just what we're doing! We are big believers in full disclosure here at archsoc.com, and we confess freely our biases and subjectivity. In fact we're so biased and subjective even we get offended!

We believe that Dr Farrelly does herself no favours by concealing her relationships. We think that her article is an advertorial for her cronies, a public plea for their continued employment, dressed up as a critique of UTS. Her article is far below the standard we have come to expect of Dr Farrelly.

We understand that the Sydney Morning Herald employs her as an opinion writer rather than a professional journalist, but we do wonder if she should peruse clauses one through five of the Aussie journalistic code of ethics.

Scholarly practitioner-tutors

Are Thalis and Cantrill the Sages of Sydney that Farrelly eulogizes? We know nothing of their prowess as practitioners or tutors (and can only assume it is of the very highest standard), but we can weigh in with a few observations about their scholarship. We calculated their standing (and that of a few other actors) in our widely-used Research Score measure:

• Dr Sandra Kaji-O'Grady, Professor, UTS: 14.9 (top 14%)
• Dr Desley Luscombe, Dean, UTS: 12.1 (top 17%)
• Mr Peter-John Cantrill, Lecturer, UTS: 3.7 (middle third)
• Mr Philip Thalis, Lecturer, UTS: 1.0 (bottom third)

Our brilliant solution

The solution is surely obvious. Messrs Thalis and Cantrill would be the first to say that they teach for the love of it. Money has nothing to do with it, of course. Given the bounty they receive from their thriving practices, they've probably forgotten they even get cheques from UTS!

We suggest that they continue their invaluable teaching at UTS while selflessly refusing to take compensation. Perhaps the title of Honorary Adjunct Professor would succour them. UTS could continue with its restructuring, happy in the knowledge that these scholarly practitioner-tutors would not be lost to them. Everyone would be happy!