La Trobe University recently unveiled its University City plan, a $5 billion scheme to transform the campus over decades by building 9,300 homes and expanding businesses. La Trobe will become a fully fledged suburb, where students, staff and the public live and work.
This will be no academic paradise, though. It’s a plan to remodel the university for modern capitalism, combining neoliberalism with further integration into the military-industrial complex.
The centrepiece is the expansion of La Trobe’s Living Lab program across the campus. The Living Lab is operated by Cisco, a surveillance company involved in maintaining Israel’s apartheid regime in the West Bank. La Trobe plans to fit buildings with surveillance technology to collect data on everyone in University City—students, staff and even members of the public who live there, according to an article in the Australian Financial Review. The data will be used to train AI models.
This is a terrifying prospect. We do not know what data will be collected or how it will be used, but the history of university surveillance is cause for alarm. One role of universities in capitalism is to produce research for corporations and the state. Given Cisco’s role in Israeli apartheid, it seems plausible that La Trobe’s expanded Living Lab will be used for the military.
Surveillance is also likely to intensify repression of on-campus protests. The student Palestine movement has been a bright spot in the darkness of the last few years. In 2024, for instance, a mass meeting of more than 250 students demanded La Trobe cut ties with corporations complicit in genocide, including Cisco. University bosses responded with discipline. In 2025, the University of Melbourne used data from wi-fi tracking to expel two pro-Palestine student activists. The University City may help La Trobe crack down like this.
La Trobe vice-chancellor Theo Farrell told the AFR, “The next big thing is going to be physical AI, which is essentially intelligent robots. We can develop robotic aids to people to make sure that people can feel safe in their environment”. While these robo-cops are still science fiction, suppression of student protest is very real.
Even the ostensibly positive elements of the plan, such as housing, are subordinate to capitalism. According to the Universities Accord report, meeting Australia’s “skills needs” (meaning the demands of capitalists for skilled labour) requires increasing the proportion of tertiary-qualified Australians to 80 percent of the working-age population by 2050.
Some of these skills are useful, such as nursing. But many, such as nuclear science, are about preparing for war. The report states enrolments are constrained by factors such as the difficulty of living near campus. The University City is a neoliberal solution to this problem. By expanding housing, La Trobe hopes to increase enrolments from 24,000 to 40,000.
The bosses need education for skilled workers, but students are still expected to pay for it. The new buildings at La Trobe will not be rent-controlled student housing, as in the 1960s. Instead, the university is opening public land to private development. Hundreds of homes will be privately sold, according to La Trobe deputy director Jodie Harris. Instead of making student housing more affordable, this will replicate the problems of the broader rental market, where investors hoard housing and extort renters.
These changes are unlikely to be limited to La Trobe. Farrell promises, “This is the opportunity for us to use our new city as a test bed for what the future will bring”.
Students must reject the La Trobe University City plan in its entirety.
