Talk:Victoria College, Melbourne

This was good stuff to read. Thanks to the contributors for that.Jaker5 01:30, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Dominant?
I changed the "dominant" to "largest" in the opening paragraph. While Victoria College was indeed largest in terms of student numbers, its major focus on teacher education and relatively low exposure in graduate education (compared with Swinburne and Chisholm) meant that it didn't really dominate the CAE scene in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. At the time of the mergers in the early 1990s, the head of the Post-Secondary Education Commission, Dr Ron Cullen, said at a meeting at which I was present that Victoria College was a bit of a problem as its large teacher education component made it an unpalatable partment formany of the potential merger partners.JimBreen 05:35, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

Lilydale
I can find no direct evidence that Victoria College's "Lilydale Study Centre" was operating at the time of Prahran's merger with Swinburne or that the "Lilydale Study Centre" was transferred to Swinburne at that time. The transfer of Lilydale operations to Swinburne is not mentioned in either of the Victorian Government acts formalising the mergers with Swinburne and Deakin, nor in the excellent "Razor Gang to Dawkins" thesis referenced at the bottom of the article page, nor in any other source that I have been able to find. It is not reasonable to assume that simply because Victoria College previously had a Lilydale Study Centre and Swinburne now has a Lilydale Campus that one necessarily followed from the other. I have also deleted the only remaining mention of Lilydale in the article as it was a pretty insignificant development in the overall context of Victoria College's history, with an apparent peak enrollment of only 137. For the record, I worked at Swinburne's Lilydale Campus for eight years and my understanding is that establishment of the Lilydale campus had more to do with lobbying from Richard Pratt than VC's history there. "Establishment of an outer-east campus" was ultimately a condition attached to Swinburne being awarded university status by the state government about six months following the Prahran merger. Debate 03:28, 11 November 2007 (UTC)