Dookie Campus is set for an $11 million upgrade to research and residential facilities at the campus on the back of a $2 million boost.
Victorian Higher Education and Training and Skills Minister Gayle Tierney toured the campus on Tuesday, March 28, to unveil a $2 million upgrade to classrooms and accommodation delivered by Growing Victoria’s agriculture industry project.
The University of Melbourne has also contributed more than $630,000 for upgrades to animal handling facilities to support teaching and research activities.
The $21 million Dookie campus student accommodation project will provide 85 new student ensuite bedrooms on campus, providing a much-needed upgrade to accommodation and allowing the campus to host more students.
The project will be co-funded by the Victorian Government to the tune of $11 million, with the rest coming from the University of Melbourne.
Ms Tierney, who is also Agriculture Minister, said the current upgrades were “pretty fantastic”, and that she could not wait to see the next round of improvements.
“This is pretty exciting because it means that Dookie will be able to have a real student campus community with the state-of-the-art facilities,” she said.
“It’s a really important investment in agriculture and it’s a really important investment in young people who are interested in agriculture that are coming here to to to study.”
University of Melbourne Acting Vice Chancellor and Provost at Dookie Nicola Phillips said she was delighted to see the minister in Dookie.
“We’ve been working on this for a long time and so to have not only the opportunity to launch the upgraded facilities, but to make this big new announcement today is really wonderful,” she said.
“We’ve got plans at the university to make sure Dookie campus is used by as many of our students on different kinds of courses as possible. So it’s not just about the specialist subjects.”
University of Melbourne Dean of Science Moira O’Bryan said the funding would be a boon for the campus.
“It actually means we can get more students or more community members or researchers on campus to actually experience the campus and then link them into the community,” she said.