Only one case led to a prosecution - of a soldier who allegedly killed a former student protest leader who was said in court to have carried a knife.
Attacks on staff and threats, and assaults on students have been commonplace. On several occasions, student journalists on the 24-year-old university training newspaper Uni Tavur were physically attacked - once by off-duty police officers. Few cases were investigated.
Periodical raids on campus led in one case to police seizing an arms cache in a student's dormitory room.
In July, Papua New Guinea's leading daily newspaper, the Post-Courier, reported: "University academics who have taught in some African countries, such as Nigeria, where restructures of this nature have been imposed on government departments and institutions, crippling the education system, have spoken their minds. Many, if not all, have slammed the proposed trimester and school system, saying the trend the university is taking is very dangerous."
Among outspoken critics have been the head of the commerce department, Professor John Oliga, of Nigeria. He believes that graduating students with general degrees, as is planned, will work against their futures because business, the professions and employers want graduates with specific degrees.
Oliga also rejects claims that the restructuring will be a cost-saver for UPNG.
"It will cost the university a lot," he says, citing a controversial decision to appoint five deans to be employed as fulltime heads of the new schools and paid a professor's salary. The positions have been advertised in regional and international media.
"To make matters worse, these five personnel would be employed from outside the university, meaning anyone who is not an academic who may not be able to perform to professional level," says Oliga. "Such serious problems have not been addressed by the administration, nor did Dr Hills have the courtesy of addressing the students about these issues."
Anger and frustration over the lack of consultation led to the clashes on campus in late May when students were injured by flying canisters as police fired teargas to disperse the demonstration.
About 100 police moved onto the campus and ordered the students to remove their barricades. When they refused, the police fired teargas.
The Waigani campus has often been a volatile hotbed of dissent in recent years, and governing politicians tend to regard students as a sort of unofficial political opposition.
In 1995, cars with government number plates were seized, driven onto campus and burned in protest over proposed land reforms under a World Bank recommended structural reforms regime.
Four years earlier, the Waigani campus was closed down for a semester and the Students Representative Council banned over rioting in protest against salary increases for MPs.
However, this time students were angry over a negative response from the standing committee of the University Council to their petition demanding that the proposed legislation for the university restructuring be withdrawn, or indefinitely postponed.
According to Dr Topul Rali, who gained the country's first doctorate in chemistry and was regarded as a potential future vice-chancellor (until he was sacked by the university in 1995 following a violent protest over the murder of an academic), the PNG government should shoulder the blame.
"Lack of funding to UPNG by successive governments reflects Government mentality in its view of a country plan for the next 20 years," Rali says. "Governments have lacked foresight to stimulate and create a prosperous PNG during the past 20 years.
"They simply have no country plan. This is the reason why the kina is falling and I am convinced the kina will fall further, especially when little renewable business creation is levelled at villages.
"Any government can do better by giving some K30 million extra to the current level of funding to UPNG as well as to other universities to stimulate those academics to create novel research directions good for this country and, thus, sound advice to any government.
"Malaysia is a good example of a country that has invested heavily in tertiary education in the last 20 years. Today it is bearing fruit."
Science faculty dean Dr Kofi Argyman argues that given the need to maintain standards amid the falling value of the kina and the fact that the university purchases most of its equipment and resources abroad, the idea of cost-effectiveness of the restructuring is "quite impractical".
Welcoming the "healthy debate" over the future of the university, the independent campus newspaper Uni Tavur says "most of the flaws of the new structure will not be known until it is implemented".
In an editorial, the paper cited the vice-chancellor having said the new structure would enable each discipline to draw from a wider range of teaching staff within their respective schools, thus easing one of the long-standing problems of the university - staff shortage.
"This implies, for instance, that a library studies lecturer can come in and teach journalism students how to produce a newspaper. Or a commerce lecturer going over to teach international law.
"We fail to see how that can be done without undermining our efforts to get quality education."
