Arts Future meetings

The AUS facilitated the first of its fora on the proposed BA review and associated proposals within the Arts Future Project. Our fora are conducted for two purposes. The first is designed to stimulate staff feedback on the proposed BA review. The second is to monitor the success of the management consultation.

Our primary objective is to motivate and assist staff making individual submissions, and to inform an AUS submission. In addition, members of the AUS Branch Committee meet in committee from time-to-time with the PVC and Governance Group (GG), where we feedback directly on the process.

Our main message to the PVC and GG has been that we believe no matter what plan arises from this process, it will only be a success if it accepted by, and acceptable to, staff. The prerequisite for success is thus a process that the staff believe in, trust and want to participate in. We will be advocating the view of our members, but a priori we will be judging the process by how we perceived it to have been considered a success by our members. Therefore, if the consultation process does not evoke buy-in at the levels necessary for success, that would be a concern for the AUS.

In the first fora, we surveyed participants about what they, at that time, saw as the most critical issues. The results of that survey and a summary of comments are reported below. We encourage members to use this list for inspiration and collaboration.

The preliminary AUS Branch Committee view is that:

1. the process is proceeding too quickly with respect to the ability of the University’s heavily committed staff to carefully and fully consider the proposal;
2. the process is proceeding too quickly for the quality of the written proposal, notably gaps or omissions in what is critical information;
3. the proposal cannot be fully considered in isolation from important factors that may or may not have been captured by the Review’s Terms of Reference, notably financial and workload implications.

Our present view can evolve, as can the views and concerns of our members, over the next few weeks. We view this as the start of the discussion on the Arts Future, and not the end. It is incumbent upon members at large to participate in the AUS-facilitated process in order for our Union to be maximally effective at advocating on the membership’s behalf.

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Friday4 May in E1
Notes from meeting

Discussion List

• Four domains above 100 Level
• Three course limit at 100 Level
• Double coding
  
• Composition of and constitution of “standing committee”
• Underlying financial model
• Programme realignment
• Issues of colleges (other than Arts) that teach into BA
• Problem of compulsory versus elective courses
• Time line for this process and the total Arts Future process
• Cross coding
• Defining the core domains

Four domains

What is the rationale behind the domains?
Sociology /Anthropology felt that as things stand students could not do a double major in the department because of the domain restriction
Who is in the New Zealand domain?
I case could be argued for an Asian domain or for that matter any regional configuration.
Domains operating at two levels?
A possible rationale for domains is the issue of breadth, one of the design principles for the Review.
What marketing has been done to inform the notion or choice of domains?
Is there a correspondence between discipline and domain?
What is the correspondence between individual courses and domains?

Three Course Limit

What is the rationale for this three course limit – it is unmotivated and “Stalinist”?
The limit might be addressing or allow room for depth – again one of the guiding principles.
A further rationale is to moderate course competition.
The three course limit is problematic because it doesn’t take account of semesterisation – summer school.
Hence two or four courses may be better?
Also how are the needs of language teaching catered for?
Why can’t there be a different rationale for 100 level courses?
Surely the rationale for the limit must take cognisance of the number of staff in a department a programme with 1.5 FTEs will not fare well compared to a department with 15 FTEs.
How seriously are the needs of languages been taken in this proposal?
The Review document states that normally there would be a limit of three courses but we recognise that this would not suit languages for very good reasons. The expectation is that you would provide the rationale why the languages would be treated differently and these reasons would be taken into account – there is flexibility here.

Double Coding

This is widely practised in other universities, very reputable universities.
Without double coding a student in Greek for example would miss out on a course as it can only be offered in one year.
We would dispute that double coding conflates the provision to the lower level, in fact measures are taken to differentiate the successive levels and to ensure there is succession between the levels.
This abolition has a great impact on smaller programmes. It will not work for teachers (loss of flexibility) or learners (loss of continuity).
We feel that the objections to double coding can be answered in a principled manner.
If this provision was enforced in Anthropology it would be questionable if the programme could be run. After all there is only three staff to run the programme, double coding makes it viable at the moment.
Is this a good pedagogical methodology or a contingency brought about by two few staff to run the programme?
Surely there is more that 2 levels of competence above a 100 Level course? Perhaps this is another measure that the authors envisage might improve quality of the BA offerings.
In terms of feedback on this report we will have to justify the best compromise.
We believe that the flexibility should still lie with the department rather than this proscriptive process.

“Standing Committee”

The idea of such a committee is not a bad thing my question is how it is made up – that is crucial?
Faculty has a standing committee – this committee might be better styled the: “Academic policy and resources committee”.
This will be a powerful committee – it will have a veto on what courses departments can offer.
How people are brought on to the committee is important, are the appointed, are they heads of programmes, are they voted on?
If there is a vote, given the differences in size of departments what will emerge is a tyranny of the majority.
If is programme based the committee will be unwieldy – there are ~ 40 programmes.

Financial Model

Finance is simply not mentioned in this review – how can this be?
A financial model was not in the terms of reference. Our viewpoint was that the financial implications were up to management – our task was to devise the academic model.
But you still need to be cognisant of the financial implications of what you propose?
Will students be interested in this BA. You have made no mention of the marketing implications. Very little has been done in terms of market research on the Arts degree. We propose that students who live within our catchment area but choose not to come to Canterbury, i.e. students who go to Otago or Victoria should be survey to find out why they are not studying at Canterbury. We acknowledge this will be expensive – but worthwhile.
We need to know what impact the new BA will have on EFTS and what are the implications for resourcing.
There are very implicit financial issues here – fewer programmes with the resultant loss of critical mass will have staffing implications. Staff will be delivering fewer courses and that has financial implications.
The new TEC funding model – which is a triennium funding model, will be inaugurated in 2008. We won’t make progress with the currents EFTS funding model.
We believe the current contribution margin model is still dictating our behaviour.

Programme realignment

How does the BA review fit in with programme realignment is it to provide the reason d’etre for another bout of realignments.
If there are any proposals for realignment than such proposals would have to go to faculty and be voted on. Faculty would be looking for the academic rationality behind any proposal to realign particular programmes.
In a sense we could be revisiting the restructuring of departments – some might welcome the opportunity others might find such a review controversial.
Take Classics and Linguistics it is widely thought of as a ‘marriage of inconvenience’.
No amount of realignment will solve anything substantively there are savings to be made.
What might be important here is the process whereby people might discuss realignment. It should be a voluntary process – the participation of departments should be voluntary.