It doesn’t take a social science PhD to know that we’re living in a complex age. Pick up a newspaper, turn on the radio, flick through social media, and the polarisation in public discourse can drown you like a tidal wave. Toxic rhetoric that once felt peripheral seems to have moved to the centre and, like many, it’s made me question my moorings. Who are my people? Where do I belong? On some days, the sense that we are losing our collective capacity to disagree without dehumanising is overwhelming.
Higher education is not insulated from any of this. Research shows us that rates of loneliness, anxiety and diminished psychological wellbeing are rising among students. Staff are faring little better: the 2025 Australian University Census on Staff Wellbeing found that staff across every ranked Australian university are working in conditions that put them at high risk of psychological harm. Campus life can also be actively hostile: the Australian Human Rights Commission’s Racism@Uni Study, released earlier this year, confirmed that racism is deeply embedded and systemic across Australian universities, with profound impacts on the wellbeing and belonging of students and staff. The social fabric of campus life – the informal connections, the sense of shared purpose – has been significantly frayed.
All of which raises an urgent question for those of us who love our work, who feel mission-led to use our positions in higher education to make a difference: what do we do? Sure, structural reform in higher education is necessary and long overdue. But structures take time, and staff and students need something now. We need something that we can implement quickly, without massive budgets or bureaucratic roadblocks.
We need conscious community building.
Let me offer two examples from my own experience.
When I first arrived at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) – new to Australia, new to the institution, new to the Business School, and new to the Education-Focused academic role – I felt lost. I had professional competencies and baskets full of enthusiasm, but I lacked the relational scaffolding that makes a workplace feel like somewhere you belong.
So I did something tiny: I identified a few fun people I had met around campus and invited them to read a book together. We met weekly, working through a chapter at a time. What began as an informal intellectual exercise became a space where we laughed, grew, shared vulnerabilities, took intellectual risks, and felt genuinely seen. It was a community of care before any of us had language for it.
The second example began even more accidentally. I was on a university-wide Teams call when the speaker mentioned the word “kindness”. On impulse, I typed into the chat: “OMG. I’m obsessed with kindness atm. Anyone else?” A few people responded and we agreed to meet. That was the beginning of what became the UNSW Kindness Network. Our Network now has close to 100 members drawn from across the institution: all levels of faculty, professional staff, and HDR students.
What these two communities share is that neither formed around an institutional structure. Both blossomed around a value – curiosity in one case, kindness in the other. They grew because people recognised something of themselves in that value and wanted to be in relation with others who shared it. In both cases, what emerged was more than superficial collegiality. It was belonging: the experience of mattering to other people. This is foundational to everything else we strive for in universities – engagement, learning, perseverance, and care, for students and for staff.
Responding to fractures
This points to something important about how we might respond to the fractures both inside and outside our institutions. The antidote to polarisation is not argument – it is relationship. It is the patient work of encountering people whose experiences differ from our own and finding, in that encounter, something shared. My examples show that universities are, at their best, exactly the kinds of places where this is possible. Not automatically, but intentionally – with purpose, consistency, and a genuine commitment to the values that make connection possible: respect, openness, and the acknowledgement of shared humanity.
Someone has to go first. It might mean gathering a few colleagues around a book, or typing something honest into a chat box, or simply naming what you care about and seeing who responds. The world outside our universities is fracturing in ways that can feel beyond our influence. But inside them, we have more agency than we sometimes believe. We can build communities where people belong across difference, and where that belonging becomes, quietly, a reason for hope.
Dr Gabi Nudelman is a senior lecturer in the School of Management and Governance in UNSW’s Business School. She regularly shares ideas around building kinder, more humane universities at her blog, The Kind Academic
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