Not in my backyard or my greenbelt
There are plenty of bad arguments being made against the University’s Heslington East venture. Take, for example, the argument for the preservation of old trees. The Heslington Parish Council is concerned about ‘three particularly important ancient lime trees’ whose future is threatened by alterations to the road network. Worse tragedies have befallen the nation.
Here’s another one for bleeding hearts: the tenant farmer forced to relinquish part of his leasehold because the landowners have decided to flog it to the University. Well, call me a steely capitalist warthog if you will, but I fail to see how the unfortunate but legitimate termination of a lease like this can be an argument to derail the entire building project.
It gets better. Apparently, the people of Heslington see their sense of community eroded by ’studentification’: another gross neologism that sounds like the unhappy consequence of Hazel Blears making love to a filing cabinet. This word is a pejorative reference to the effect of students on local communities. Popularly viewed as a completely separate species, our numbers must be kept down.
“Studentification”: the term sounds like Hazel Blears making love to a filing cabinet
Allegedly, by extending the campus and increasing student population numbers, Heslington Parish Council will be prevented from achieving a ‘mixed and balanced community’ that they so desire.
It is specious drivel, all of it! York students do little to affect the community balance; the only real change they make to the neighborhood of Heslington is that they reduce the age average by a few years. As for the community, the University’s broad mixture of students (including dozens of international students) is more diverse than any of the villages surrounding us.
But the HPC is not after communal balance; this is just a delicate way of asking for fewer students around - preferably none. Only one main opposition to Heslington East remains, one to which most rational people, be they students or non-students, can rally: the environment.
After all, the economic arguments against expansion are weak, and we, as de facto customers, are in no position to wield them. To suggest that money should favour present students’ needs over long-term investment smacks of mean near-sightedness. Cheap snipes about Guardian League Tables and profiteering aside, York is a successful university and, nationally, the interest is in the growth of good universities rather than the preservation of Heslington’s farmland.
However, the contention over development on Green Belt land is understandable. The University refused alternative building sites in York, citing a preference to remain on a single campus. Certainly, any prospective business would prefer to waltz onto nearby lush, uncontested farmland than to fight tooth and nail for tracts of remote, urban land.
Nevertheless, there is something infuriating about the University’s total disregard for the hard-fought environmental campaign. There are promises of an environmentally sustainable Heslington East, but the feeling remains that going ahead with plans for a new campus is sweeping 70 years of Green Belt regulations into the bin.
The University will get its new campus and, with some new buildings being reserved for its spin-off companies, it will prosper. But we should not forgive its shameful trashing of the Green Belt code any time soon.
