Features

It’s fair to say that Otago students don’t always receive the most favourable media coverage. While some of it is well-deserved, some of it is clearly a little hyperbolic. Phoebe Harrop considers the New Zealand media’s particular pleasure in outing the latest controversial exploits of students, and wonders whether students of today are particularly bad, or if the media just enjoys reporting on their activities more.

Jim Mora, the host of Radio New Zealand’s Afternoons programme, and Critic editor circa 1974 believes that students don’t always get fair coverage. He says that the media “have had the chance to establish a recent ‘scarfie’ narrative, and they stick largely to that entertaining script…students in turn feed that narrative, though not as much recently, by burning couches and getting ostentatiously drunk”.

This seems all too true: type “Otago student” into the search box on stuff.co.nz, and you’ll come up with some rather juicy headlines: “Otago student housing like a ‘ghetto’”, “Otago students to blame for Undie mayhem”, “Students’ pub dream down the drain”, “University to punish students over street party”, “Retailers call for compensation after toga parade”. To be fair, there are some stories with a more positive spin: “Otago students promote public health” and “Otago welcomes quake-hit students”, for instance. However, in general, the collection of stories makes the University of Otago look like a cross between the Bronx backstreets and Rio’s Carnaval on acid.

While is undoubtedly true that Otago students do love to get rowdy, it’s also undeniable that the media feed off it. They love outing student antics. Whether it’s from a deep-seated and suppressed desire to be out there smashing bottles and burning furniture themselves, or a love of tsk-tsking the wayward youth of today, it seems like students are veritable media scapegoats.
 
Things were not always so. A search of Otago Daily Times articles containing the word “student” from the late 19th century brings up no suggestion of student skylarking. Rather, some articles focus on celebrating student successes, for example a piece published on August 13 1900 about a research scholarship awarded to an Otago graduate in London. Particularly interesting are letters to the editor, for example about the day-to-day running of the University and its newfangled courses. My research brought to light some intriguing revelations about Otago’s med students of the era, for example in a letter entitled “Our University” of May 3 1890, a correspondent wrote: “it is notorious that in the med school there is no supervision [during examinations] whatsoever, and cases of ‘cribbing’ [i.e., cheating] have been of frequent occurrence, while on yet another occasion, a student has asked another student the answer to a question and received it.” Ah, how things have changed.
 
Another correspondent asks, in his letter entitled “Medical Final Examination”: “is there not something radically wrong with our University medical teaching, when only three students out of 11 who entered for the final have passed? And two of these three went up for the final last year and failed.” He makes a good point, although I later discovered that the medical finals of that period consisted of eight solid days of exams without a break, and the students were lucky to make it out alive – let alone pass. I don’t know what current HSFYs are complaining about.
 
Fast forward to Mora’s time at the University and Critic, and things had changed a little. It was the 1970s, and Mora recalls Critic being fairly similar to today’s incarnation. He says: “I remember disapprobation when as Critic editor I debated the then mayor in the Student Union over Dunedin’s rates rises. Local telly turned up, and people tut-tutted to my parents. Even in Dunedin, which is so student-dependent, there has always been a dichotomous attitude towards the varsity from the citizenry. The media reflect that suspicion.”
 
Sometimes, that suspicion may be well-founded: “when property is destroyed or police lives endangered…it’s responsible to report student ‘mayhem’, and students can have no just quarrel with that. You’ve got to say you asked for this kind of reportage when an Undie 500 rolled into town.” But the media aren’t opposed to giving credit where it is due: “I think what has rehabilitated the student image nationally has been the marvellous Student Volunteer Army effort post-quake in Christchurch.”
 
These anecdotes suggest not that today’s students are a particularly rebellious cohort, but rather that students have always been a dastardly bunch. Youth, independence, being far away from home, course-related costs to fritter away and all that. It’s just that things have escalated a bit from copying others’ exam scripts to throwing glass bottles at police officers. To take the med school as an example though: the med class has expanded by 20 times, from a dozen to over 200 in the last 110 years. The increase in numbers puts cutting loose on a whole different scale. Not to mention that commerce lectures commenced in 1912, and that ushered in a whole new level of scarfie.
 
Mora agrees that students themselves haven’t changed much, but the university – and the world – around them has. “Students of course are just as good and bad as they always have been. I will never think that a younger generation is somehow more unruly or less respectful or more selfish; it simply isn’t true. If anything I sense a return to the idealism of the 70s, when I was at Otago. We had the luxury of benign economic times but you don’t. We questioned society’s ‘establishment’ as we called it. You will (maybe) query the whole rationale of what we have created economically.”
 
The early articles conveyed a sense that Dunedin residents cared about students and the goings-on at the University, embracing North Dunedin as a hip and happening part of their community. In the meantime, with the student population expanding exponentially in the mid-1970s, Dunedin residents have sort of been shunted towards South Dunedin (not a good place to be heading) or up to the ivory towers of Maori Hill and Roslyn to live among the academics. Students have dominated Dunedin for a few decades, bringing a much needed injection of Studylink sponsorship to the city - but also somewhat of a headache.
 
Dave Goosselink, a TV3 reporter and long-time Dunedinite, is positive about Otago students: “In general I think students do have a good relationship between the city and other residents. I have many student friends here in Dunedin, and they are a credit to Otago. Great fun-loving bunch of people, entertaining, interesting, but knuckle down and work hard on studies when they need to.”
 
But he agrees that the local media is quick to hone in on student shenanigans: “Dunedin's ‘leading daily newspaper’ is a big fan of focusing on the bad side of student life, but it probably sells papers to the oldies in town. Events that could be just fun sometimes get turned into media and police/fire-fueled beatups, forcing major changes or cancellation of events after the ODT publishes a story on, say, a Facebook street party, and then gets the token reaction from opponents.”
 
The University is all too aware that a careful relationship needs to be fostered between Otago students and the people of Dunedin. Cancellation of the toga parade after 2009’s débacle was one move made by the University to curb drunken damage and keep us in the city’s good books. Goosselink says: “[The] University had a bit of a panic and has been trying to restrict all ‘scarfie’ activities in recent years. They decided to simply ban the annual toga parade from happening again, rather than actually reviewing what went wrong and taking steps to ensure it returned to the fun, positive, and trouble-free event it had been for many years before that. It's also why, despite all their claims to the contrary, they jumped at the chance to buy and close down The Gardies and The Bowler, as well as a number of flats in Castle Street, which are then only for rent to international students.”
 
Goosselink is also able to attest to the attitude of the New Zealand television media in general. He says that, particularly among the Auckland news media, there is a bias towards portraying students as fulfilling the “scarfie” cliché: “it's easier to copy and paste a stereotypical sort of story about drunken students/couch burning/mayhem than it is to compile a story about a more positive or interesting aspect of student culture or life. Couch fires and student riots make for cooler pictures in the minds of news editors, and while that's sometimes justified when there is a genuine story about that, there is a tendency to stretch or "beat up" the truth. I think the "scarfie" stereotype is still one that Otago Uni and Dunedin should be proud of, but focusing more on the creative and quirky side of students rather than just focusing on the negative.”
 
This in turn leads to an automatically-defensive response to media from students themselves: “I've been keen to do a story on [the Hyde Street keg party] for a number of years, focusing on the efforts the residents there go to in creating their themed flats and costumes, etc. However I know that we'd get a negative reaction from some students there if we turned up with a camera (as "you're only here to make us look bad"), and there would probably be a small group who would actually let others down by behaving badly and causing trouble because the cameras were there.
 
It is certainly possible to detect a hint of glee in the journalistic tone when student shenanigans are shared. It’s a shame, because there’s a lot of splendid things happening at Otago. Luckily, there are journalists like Dave Goosselink around to testify to the brighter side of life.