Staff on well-established campuses may not immediately and universally embrace the raucous and tiresome but dependent infant. Established academic staff whose quiet and scholarly lives have been disturbed by the very different culture of a newer arm of the institution may resent the upstarts , and arrogance may as a result be displayed by both sides. A few metropolitan campus staff may view themselves, with or without reason, as intellectually more sophisticated than their country cousins. A very important sign of maturity, which cannot happen too soon, occurs when the satellite campus becomes a site where some staff want to be housed and from which some courses and other initiatives are generated for the wider University. The progress from derivative to contributing is a great morale booster.
Many differences boil down simply to a jealousy about distribution of scarce resources.
Those at well-established locations may resent the diversion of funds to provide facilities at greenfields sites. Community expectations of economic development through campus expansion can be very insistent from the areas housing smaller sections of the operation, while those which are home to larger sections want to keep it that way. The structural tensions in the operation of distributed universities arise from a number of factors. With good leadership, realism, and goodwill from the parties concerned, these tensions do not assume importance. However, although they are not a feature of my life at USQ, let me outline a few that I am aware can be disruptive.