The Old Teachers’ College apostrophe catastrophe
A secret war is being waged on campus. In, around, and upon the very buildings we use everyday.
A secret war is being waged on campus. In, around, and upon the very buildings we use everyday. It is a war of words, or, more specifically, a war of letters and characters.
The battleground? The name of the “Old Teachers’ College” building.
The combatants? A mass of confused sign writers, uni PR wonks, and campus infrastructure professionals.
And what are they all fighting over? Well, it all comes down to one pesky apostrophe: to have it, to move it, or to lose it — those are the spoils of war.
Like all great wars, it started some time ago. This one dates back to the founding of the Sydney Teachers’ College (STC), the institution that the Old Teachers’ College building (OTC) we know today was originally built for. At its conception, the STC had an apostrophe following the s in ‘Teachers’. A 1908 Government Gazette article referred to it as the “Teachers’ College” and annual reports of the college in 1913 and 1915 (the earliest reports available) refer to it similarly. Crucially, the Teachers’ College Act 1912 No.47, authorising the construction of the building, uses an apostrophe following the s both in its title and body. With that in mind, it is quite conclusive that the College was founded on a single grammatical principle: when it comes to its name, the apostrophe followed the ‘s’.
Sadly, that principle was built on shifting sands. While the apostrophe after the ‘s’ persisted in official documents from its founding up until 1967, an annual report in 1973 recorded the first exclusion of the precious original punctuation in a formal, written setting.
But what led to this radical departure from previously established policy? While no one can know for sure, there is a possibly obvious explanation. NSW reformed higher education in 1969 with the passage of the Higher Education Act. It gave the State the power to convert existing and disparate tertiary education institutions into ‘Colleges of Higher Education’ — a uniform and streamlined classification which sought to standardise the rogue and lawless higher ed landscape. They did just that to Sydney Teachers’ College in 1971, and in the Government Gazette announcing this conversion they failed to include an apostrophe (a huge blow to its fans everywhere). My thinking is that this official spelling, proclaimed in the Government Gazette following the College’s conversion, became an accepted norm from that point on. Academic Board minutes from the late 70s and early 80s show the continued use of the apostrophe-less name — the STC had been stripped of its possessive punctuation. This theory received a tacit “endorsement” from Professor Geoffrey Sherington, co-author of Sydney Teachers College: a history, after I presented him with my hypothesis in an email. Professor Sherington said that he was sure I was “right that that was when the apostrophes disappeared” and that my research on signage was “very interesting.” Case closed then?
Sadly not. While the how may have been resolved, the why still hangs firmly in the balance. Romantics might say this all goes back to the STC’s first Principal, Alexander Mackie. A Scottish academic of high regard, Mackie fiercely guarded the College’s independence — often fending off interference from the Minister for Public Instruction, the Director of Education (his frequent nemesis S.H. Smith), and the various oversight boards that attempted to meddle with College affairs. The apostrophe, in this case, represented possession in more than one way — not only a grammatical technicality, but a mark of the College’s independence and possession by Mackie himself. Under the apostrophe, the teachers really did own the College. And with the shift from possessive to attributive following the 1971 Gazette’s exclusion of the apostrophe, this simple grammatical change embodied a pivot in higher education in NSW and Australia. This was a pivot towards centralisation, consolidation, and control. There was no room for independent possession in this New (South Wales) World Order.
But now much of that tug of war has been forgotten. After NSW higher education went through another round of sweeping reforms, Sydney Teachers’ College (apostrophe or not) ceased to exist. It was replaced by the Sydney Institute of Education in 1981 and, on January 1st 1990, it was absorbed into the University of Sydney. At some point following the amalgamation, the building that was originally referred to as the “University Grounds Campus” became the “Old Teachers’ College”. Sadly, and perhaps suspiciously, the Grounds and Buildings Committee, which would have been responsible for naming buildings at the time of the College’s amalgamation, has no archived meeting minutes from the time when the Old Teachers’ College would have become Old Teachers’ College. So while we may know where the apostrophe was upon the founding of the Sydney Teachers’ College, we’re mostly in the dark when it comes to the building itself.
The main problem we face today is less philosophical and more practical. Campus signs, University news articles, and official maps simply cannot decide if they want an apostrophe or not.
Three variations exist across these mediums.
The traditionalist: “Old Teachers’ College”
The purist: “Old Teachers College”
The wildly incorrect: “Old Teacher’s College”
The Northern and Southern building name signs opt for the traditionalist spelling, whereas the Eastern building name sign elects to drop the apostrophe with a purist interpretation (Note: it’s possible this sign previously contained an apostrophe, but time and poor maintenance has seen it fade).
The direction signs at the top of the stairs leading down from Science Road to Russell Place, at the end of Manning Road at the intersection of Western Avenue, and before the Brennan MacCallum steps leading up to the Graffiti Tunnel all opt for the traditionalist spelling as well. Perhaps most curiously of all, the direction sign at the intersection of Grose Farm Lane and Western Avenue puts the apostrophe between the ‘r’ and ‘s’ — implying that a singular old teacher either owns or inhabits the College building (but only if you approach from near Arena Sports Centre).
Things grow even more confused when you step inside the OTC. Evacuation diagrams and emergency contact sheets (often next to each other) use entirely different spellings, with one pair including the apostrophe on the evacuation diagram, but dropping it altogether from the emergency contact sheet. At this point, the apostrophe becomes a matter of health and safety. How is any student evacuating from the famously hazard-prone OTC building supposed to engage with emergency signage if they’re busy puzzling over the positioning of punctuation? It’s surprising we haven’t seen casualties already. The inside of the OTC also houses the only appearance of a fourth spelling variation — a divergent spelling, if you will: an apostrophe following the ‘s’, but with the apostrophe itself facing the wrong way. Sadly, not even Alexander Mackie and the history of the STC’s independence can explain that printing error.
Finally, we come to the cyberscape. Of all the spelling spaces, this one plays host to the most confusion and chaos of the lot. Five different internal USyd news articles and website resources put the apostrophe at the end, 10 have no apostrophe at all, and three put one between the ‘r’ and the ‘s’. Often, they use entirely divergent apostrophe placement throughout the text, switching back and forth as they please. For the reader, it is veritable grammatical whiplash. In a delicious twist of fate, one of the most shameful culprits of this is none other than Provost and Deputy Vice Chancellor Professor Annamarie Jagose. Between 2019 and 2020, she managed to use all three variations across two ‘From the Dean’ updates posted to the USyd website. It’s particularly disappointing considering that at the time she was FASS Dean and the Old Teachers’ College was in the process of welcoming the Sydney College of the Arts — a department within FASS itself. Shame!
But amongst all this confusion, surely there’s a spelling that is more correct than the others? When put to the University, they declined to make a formal ruling on where the apostrophe should be (instead directing me to the original authorising legislation). They did say they’d get back to me regarding my request for campus-wide signage spelling harmonisation though. So, with the University unwilling or unable to wade into the murky depths of this debate, the only thing we can rely on are the immutable laws of grammar itself.
According to Dr Mark Post, Acting Chair of Linguistics at the University of Sydney, “if the intended meaning is either ‘the old college that pertains to more than one teacher’ or ‘the college that pertains to more than one old teacher’, then the usual convention is to have the apostrophe after the -s.”
Dr Post says that this tradition dates back to around the 18th Century and has been the norm ever since, but did note that places such as Hunters Hill use a less conventional spelling that drops an apostrophe that might have otherwise been there.
Sadly, at least for those interested in the debate, dropping or including an apostrophe after the ‘s’ “wouldn’t mean anything different” and would simply mean you “stop using apostrophes altogether to show genitive case.” And according to Dr Post, who says that it's an “orthographic convention anyway, with no corresponding function in spoken language”, that’d be perfectly fine.
Something we can all agree on though, is that, no matter what, the apostrophe most certainly does not go between the ‘r’ and the ‘s’. Unless, Dr Post says, it's an old college that pertains to one teacher or a college that pertains to one old teacher. Of that, I think we can be certain.
With all these competing, conflicting, and uncertain conclusions, it really does seem as if it's a matter of personal preference. The book Sydney Teachers College: a history arrives at a similar conclusion, dedicating a paragraph of its prefatory note to deciding how it would refer to the College — settling on no apostrophe at all after much consternation. But there is reason to believe that this apostrophe is more than just an irritating bit of overhang chasing the end of a word. In the 1972 Journal of NSW Public School Teachers Federation, one John Shellard plumbs a similar meaning to mine.
“In these days of declining respect for the English language it might pass unnoticed that the apostrophe is being left out of ‘teachers’ colleges.’ This may be a matter of convenience or it may contain a hidden inference that these colleges don’t any longer belong to anyone, even to the teachers, inside or outside.”
As our University further distances itself from direct academic management and drifts increasingly towards what someone in 1969 might think of as a ‘College of Advanced Education’, it’s important to keep believing that higher education does belong to someone — both inside and out. And often that starts with one, pesky apostrophe.