Institute of land and food resources

The Melbourne School of Land and Environment (MSLE) was a faculty of the University of Melbourne and an important provider of Australian agricultural and rural industry education, the largest of its type in that country, as well as a node for research and teaching on environmental issues more broadly.

The Institute of Land and Food Resources, as it was then known, was officially created on 1 July 1997 as a combination of most of the agricultural, forestry, horticulture and food science higher education sector in Victoria, Australia. Its founding brought together the Victorian College of Agriculture and Horticulture (Dookie, Longerenong, Burnley and Glenormiston Agricultural Colleges, Gilbert Chandler Food Technology College, McMillan Education Centre, the School of Forestry, Creswick) and the University of Melbourne's departments of Agriculture and Forestry.

This merger of institutions was ultimately viewed as a 'take-over' by the University of Melbourne by many, with many within VCAH and industry suggesting that the action was a move by the University to remove the VCAH courses as competitors from the education market; there was a massive backlash to the 'merger' from within VCAH and the rural industries and associated media, and even State parliamentarians become involved. VCAH staff did not have any say in this change, with decisions being made at the highest level of VCAH with no consultation with rank-and-file staff. Certainly, the former VCAH lost its identity and most of its defining courses very rapidly after the merger, with the University imposing much higher entrance scores and specific pre-requisites for school leavers on existing VCAH courses, which resulted in most of the traditional cohort of students that would have previously enrolled in their courses as being suddenly excluded. A series of compromise courses were created in the aftermath to appease industry and former VCAH staff, but these were highly Melbourne-centric, and still with very high entrance requirements. It would appear as if these courses were destined to fail from the outset, which they did, given that insufficient numbers of students could be found for viable courses at rural campuses. Regrettably, no equivalent courses to the very applied agricultural and natural resource management-focused courses offered by VCAH (and the very highly employable graduates) are now found across rural Victoria, and certainly not from current University offerings, creating quite a gap in the agricultural and natural resources training market, a tragedy given the number of available positions still within the industries for such applied and employable graduates.

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