Being a university student is not easy. Being a tenant under the current real estate market conditions in Sydney isn’t either. In both cases, the expectations and demands from the key stakeholders (academics or real estate agents) might largely surpass what you anticipate, wish, or need while navigating the multiple demands of your personal roles and life in general.

As an academic, I thought that those stressors were largely away from my own experience until recently, when I received a notification in my personal email: “Intention to Sell Notice”. The process of putting in the market the place I was living in at the time has been initiated, and I could not anticipate what was ahead for me. Understanding the owners’ right to sell at their discretion, what followed were a succession of urgent requests due to my personal circumstances, but I was always met with the same answer: “the unit must be sold”. So at the beginning of term, I was teaching a new subject to hundreds of students, while in urgent need to find a new place. While working full time, marking assignments, and packing, I managed to attend 8-10 open houses every Saturday over several weeks. To my amusement, Sydney was going through a record high rental price for units and houses across the city. So the expectations of finding a suitable place at a reasonable price were quickly crushed by reality. An absolute perfect storm.

An ongoing disruption

While the process of moving houses found me in a secure financial position and with a supportive network of friends willing to help me along the way, I quickly wondered about how this would be experienced from someone in a different life stage and circumstances, such as our higher education students.

The increasing housing demand in the city means that nowadays more than half of postcodes in Sydney are not affordable for average income households, which skyrockets up to 100 per cent for specific groups, such as pensioners and students. This forces our students to go through university with basic uncertainty about their housing situation, handling precarious jobs, having to commute to campus for over 2 hours every day, all in the context of a cost-of-living crisis. On the other hand, as academics, we are expecting their full attendance, complete focus on their studies, and flexibility around changing conditions. But our own tenancy agreements cannot be dismissed.

Teaching & learning/renting in a post-pandemic world

The post pandemic higher education changes have resulted in increasing workload demands on academics, while facing the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence. As we explore what ethical use of this technology means, we do it in the new landscape of tertiary education as an expanding marketplace, with restricted budgets and competency as the rule. In this scenario, students can be seen as customers, an idea that remains controversial, as the implications for a favourable or negative understanding of it are quite distinctive and different. Under this logic, and getting back to the real estate metaphor, students could also be seen as our tenants as they temporarily “live” under our roofs. This creates the conditions for a growing and ambivalent power imbalance for those in the classroom, regardless of their role.

Kindness is the answer

What have I learnt since the “intention to sell” notification is that none of us should get too comfortable where we are. The ongoing level of uncertainty about our living/learning conditions might become the rule, if we do not embrace a kinder higher education system.

By ignoring the circumstances in which our students are living in and we work in, we are at an increased risk of replicating the current real estate market conditions in our own classrooms. A way to counteract this is through expanding and implementing the ideas of kindness in higher education. On the words of Denial (2024) “we deserve an academy that is kind” (p. 101) for all, regardless of where you are in the classroom and beyond.

When welcoming students in the classroom we are creating the conditions for trust and collaboration, and at the same time, learning with them how new generations of students are embracing the ideas and challenges of higher education.

References available here

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