Interestingly, at Central Queensland University, Rockhampton, all the staff I’ve spoken to have consistently ranked the same set of lecture theatres in order of their ability to detract from the quality of a lecture.

One of our worst is more than 20 years old. The weather here is hot and often humid, but this lecture theatre has six big ceiling fans instead of air conditioning. Normal speech is impossible when the fans are on, but if you turn them off the students get very hot, and an even slightly demonstrative lecture style will leave you dripping with sweat. I have taken to keeping a couple of spare shirts in my office, and on really sticky days I dash out for a quick change half way through a two-hour lecture. As well as being hot, the lecture theatre isn’t soundproofed. Several large windows, one of which has been broken for more than a year, face out over the lawns. When the giant lawnmowing tractor starts thundering up and down outside, you might as well abandon your lecture entirely.

Old lecture theatres can perhaps be excused for being awful, but the other one at the bottom of the list is only five years old. It is airconditioned, soundproofed, fitted with modern audiovisual equipment and has comfortable seats. Unfortunately, the gradient of the auditorium is so extreme that half the audience are a very long way above the lecturer. Looking down, you feel quite removed – the top of the lecturer’s head and their foreshortened body are just visible below your feet. From the lecturer’s point of view, it is like standing at the bottom of a high cliff covered in knees and faces, many of which are impossibly far away.

Lately the theatre has been made even worse – apparently someone tripped and then tumbled down over several rows of seats, so two sets of wide wooden safety railings have been installed. These run across the room, creating a very effective barrier between the lecturer and anyone sitting further back than the third row. If you slump down in your seat just a little, your face is hidden and you can talk to the person beside you without the slightest risk of discovery. The wooden railings will eventually be replaced by clear polycarbonate ones, but I doubt these will remain clear for long. Lack of eye contact with the majority of your audience does not make for a good lecture.

By far the nicest of the new theatres I have ever used is in our social sciences building. The seating is unusual: it is split into three blocks, each of which faces inwards at right angles to its neighbour, so the speaker has an audience on three sides. The gradient of the auditorium is sufficient for everyone to see, but not excessively steep, so most of the audience are close to the lecturer’s eye level. This makes it difficult not to pay attention. But best of all, there is no fixed lectern or bench, so the speaker is very visible and can interact easily with the audience if she wants to.

Considering some of the recent constructions I’ve seen, I think we need a set of guidelines for designing lecture theatres. At the moment, I have the impression they are squeezed in wherever possible on the plan for a new building. First, perhaps, there should be recommendations for gradient, width to length ratio, and acoustics. More than one basic design may be needed, since teaching styles tend to vary between faculties.

Secondly, lecture theatres need to have simple, standardised, robust and well placed controls for lights and audiovisuals. Control panels can offer a bewildering array of (often unlabelled) switches, which can vary among theatres of the same age in the same building.

Thirdly, I wonder if those vast front benches or enormous lecterns which hide the lecturer and restrict their movements are really necessary? They seem to get exponentially bigger in relation to the capacity of the theatre, but usually only seem to be used for the lecturer’s notes, chalk/whiteboard markers and a glass of water.

A lot of lecterns are fitted with plenty of drawers and cupboards, but a quick check of the one in our main science theatre last week revealed a jumble of forgotten handouts from a conference, an expensive but chalky calculator, several well chewed pens, some overhead projection transparencies with print so minute that I took one and frightened my students with it, a pair of prescription spectacles (abandoned, perhaps, because their owner couldn’t read the words on the screen?), four broken projector bulbs and some putrefying sandwiches in a plastic box. I threw most of this away and took the rest to the lost property office, but the drawers and cupboards are filling up again already.

Giving a well-explained and stimulating lecture can be challenging enough, but a poorly designed lecture theatre can make a good talk ordinary, and an ordinary talk dull. Perhaps our architects and planners need to sit in on some long lectures in packed auditoriums, to see what it’s really like. Improving a lecture by modifying your presentation can be relatively easy, but once that lecture theatre has been built you’re likely to be stuck with its faults for decades.

I joined the staff of Central Queensland University two and a half years
ago – seven days after it was proclaimed a university. It used to be the
Capricornia Institute. Some of my colleagues said I was absolutely mad to
leave the well-established University of Adelaide for a three-year contract
at the new CQU, which is 600 kilometres north of Brisbane in the tropics.

Internal funding for research was (and still is) relatively poor in
my former department. In contrast, there is enormous encouragement (although
one colleague calls it ‘pressure’) to do research at CQU, simply because
we have recently become a university. New researchers in my faculty are
offered generous ‘start-up’ grants and there are other internal grants designed
to foster ongoing research, publication and eligibility for external funds.

Even so, I have been fortunate compared to others. My research on intertidal
invertebrates requires little infrastructure and almost all experiments
can be done in the field, so the CQU funding has been sufficient for setting
up a productive programme. Some of my colleagues who need large pieces of
expensive equipment are unable to get their research started, despite CQU’s
generosity, and are extremely frustrated. Others, though, have got round
this by doing collaborative work with government laboratories or securing
funds from industry with which to establish their own infrastructural empires.

Laboratory space for staff research was virtually nonexistent at CQU
when I joined and is still at a premium. In Adelaide I had a very quiet
and pleasant office with an attached laboratory; here I have 9 square metres
of carpeted office space and no laboratory. Some months after I joined,
the CQU invited its staff to submit bids for space in a research building
under construction. My application included a photograph of me squatting
by some plastic trays of snails on the floor of a room in our house, captioned
‘Making do in the spare bedroom – ecological research at home.’

A week after submission I realised that a potted plant in the background
appeared to be sprouting out of my head, but it did the trick – I was offered
a half share of a large and empty concrete-walled room on the ground floor
of the research building, with the promise of benches and sinks. The person
allocated the other half spent a lot of time drawing plans for the laboratory,
but the room is still empty and plans have been replaced by pleading letters
to the Dean and Pro-Vice Chancellor. I guessed what was going to happen
and never bothered; my room at home has been sufficient, secure and at the
right temperature – the concrete room on campus is far too cold for tropical
snails.

I left a university that has an excellent library. Here we have few
journals and are several hundred kilometres from the nearest ‘old’ university
with a decent library. We do have access to other library catalogues and
abstracting services via the Internet, but these work out expensive.

Instead, I have got into the habit of making a 1400-kilometre round
trip to the library at James Cook University in Townsville, North Queensland,
to spend three or four days browsing and photocopying. Considering the cost
of interlibrary loans, the trip is very economical. I also seem to be reading
far more than I was when there was a good library only 200 metres across
the lawns from my office in Adelaide. However, being unable to access a
particular article within a few days inevitably slows the rate of research.

One advantage of being at CQU is that the buildings are relatively new.
Blue asbestos was found above our offices in the University of Adelaide
and the staff had to move into another building while it was contained
and removed. A few years later they found some more.

Meanwhile, to comply with new health and safety standards, some of the
old university buildings have had to be extensively modified. One of my
colleagues in Adelaide now has a set of emergency stairs where part of his
laboratory used to be. The noise and inconvenience during the building work
was bad enough, but then the builders found some termites and even more
asbestos. The need to modify and repair old buildings must surely compete
with funding for research.

Several new staff have been appointed to our department within the past
three years; CQU is one of many new universities which have provided welcome
opportunities for academic positions in a generally stagnant market. It
is almost 20 years since the last permanent academic appointment was made
in my old department in Adelaide.

The transition to university status must have involved quite an upheaval
for the staff who were appointed while it was the Capricornia Institute.
They had to cope with the rapid increase in student numbers, changes in
courses, the administration’s about-turn on research policy – pressure
to start doing research instead of the prohibition of the former years –
and a sudden influx of new staff. This turmoil must have been at least as
difficult to deal with as it was for me to cope with working in an environment
without the accustomed university infrastructure.

At least I was fortunate in that the staff from the institute days were
generally encouraging to newcomers. Several of my colleagues recently appointed
to other renamed institutions within Australia report that some of the established
staff in their departments have been surprisingly unpleasant and unhelpful.
For some, perhaps, the transition has not been welcome.

Looking back, after three years, I would say that the first year seemed
the most difficult, especially after the novelty had worn off and I realised
how many lectures and practicals had to be written for all the new courses.
After that, everything improved rapidly, but it’s largely what you can
make of it.

In my case it has been far better than I ever thought it would be. Central
Queensland University has become ‘home’, I have been given accelerated promotion,
teaching is a pleasure, my research is going well and I have been offered
tenure. Nevertheless, I have been fortunate that my research doesn’t require
very much infrastructure; some of the other staff may offer a very different
view.

Steve McKillup is a senior lecturer in biology at Central Queensland
University

For some researchers, a reprint request may be their only access to
scientific papers, because their libraries do not have the journals and
cannot afford to subscribe to an article supply service or even pay for
a trip to a large library. I spent two months doing research on the island
of Santo Antao, in the Republic of Cape Verde, where the small library was
composed almost entirely of reprints. At the University of Central Queensland
we rely heavily on reprints. Because we have been a university for only
18 months, our library has so few journals that I don’t bother to use the
catalogue. Unfortunately, we are more than 600 kilometres from the large
university libraries in Townsville and Brisbane.

Reprint requests also provide a way of letting someone know that you
are interested in their work and vice versa. I have, in fact, responded
to several hundred requests for reprints. Nowadays, my colleagues say they
often order extra reprints of their papers in anticipation of many requests.
Certainly they would never dream of charging anyone.

I cannot find any analyses of the costs and benefits of sending reprints.
But recently I received two independent pieces of evidence which suggest
that a new strategy is evolving between senders and recipients.

A month ago a request arrived from an American environmental consulting
firm. The usual polite postcard read: ‘Dear author, I would appreciate
receiving . . . Thank You. Sincerely etc.’ and a drawing of some nice fish
on the other side. But at the bottom of the card appeared the words, ‘If
necessary, please bill us for reprinting or postage’. It struck me as strange.
But the request came from the US. Perhaps researchers there are reluctant
to send papers to commercial enterprises. Send it off, save the stamp (40
cents) and forget it.

In late July, a large envelope arrived from a researcher in the Hazard
Reduction and Recovery Center at Texas A & M University. Inside was
a photocopy (of the galley proof) of a paper I had politely requested. The
big surprise was an invoice for $3 attached to the paper. ‘Recovery Center’
indeed. An interesting strategy and certainly one which is somewhat less
altruistic. Would you pay the $3? How much does it cost to send US $3
from Australia to the US? The members of my faculty recommended replies
ranging from the entertainingly impractical to the embarrassingly blunt.
But this is a reminder that distributing reprints is expensive.

More seriously, these examples may be a warning that the reprint request
system is beginning to evolve into one where the requester pays. Is the
‘A & M strategy’ a transitional stage between the current widespread
altruism and appearance of the individually rewarding strategy of requesting
payment before sending a reprint?

From the financial angle, giving out reprints to strangers is absurd;
every attempt should be made to recover your outlay. Does sending someone
a reprint really make it more likely that they will cite your paper? The
idea deserves funding in the current climate of cost cutting, where the
emphasis is on financially relevant research and the concept of the user
paying.

Any decline in the practice of sending free reprints may be hastened
by the availability of journals on computer networks where the user selects
and pays extra for a hard copy of the text. A reprint may become something
you send unsolicited to researchers who are publishing in your own specific
field.

Does it matter? It would affect some researchers more than others. The
scientific community is already divided into ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ and
the rapid development of electronic information technology is likely to
widen the gulf.

I shall not forget the yellowed and dog-eared Cape Verdian library and
I shall continue to send reprints. Surely, any mechanism that promotes the
results of research is likely to enhance the rate of scientific progress.
But this point of view is hopelessly altruistic.

Steve McKillup is a lecturer in biology at the University of Central
Queensland.