subtext

Home
Archive
Subscribe
Editors
Contact

 

 

 

 

 

subtext

issue 92

14 June 2012

*****************************************************

'Truth: lies open to all'

*****************************************************

Every fortnight during term-time.

All editorial correspondence to: subtext-editors [at] lancaster.ac.uk. Please delete as soon as possible after receipt. Back issues and subscription details can be found at http://www.lancs.ac.uk/subtext.

The editors welcome letters, comments, suggestions and opinions from readers. subtext reserves the right to edit submissions.

subtext does not publish material that is submitted anonymously, but is willing to consider without obligation requests for publication with the name withheld.

For tips to prevent subtext from getting swept up into your 'junk email folder', see http://www.lancs.ac.uk/subtext/dejunk/.

If you're viewing this using Outlook, the formatting might look better if you click on the message at the top saying 'Extra line breaks in this message were removed', and select 'Restore line breaks'.

CONTENTS: editorial, senate report, senate effectiveness review, Olympic delivery, classical club night, Katharine Holmes Paintings, Thought for the Fortnight, letters.

*****************************************************

EDITORIAL

It was only a matter of time before academic institutions began to feel the combined effects of the current economic malaise and the radical changes to university finance. Unfortunately it was equally predictable that, in some institutions, a climate of fear would be generated by managerial tactics and pronouncements.

The latest of such horror stories concerns Salford, where staff in many departments are being invited to reapply for their jobs. As one would expect, the tasks which have been set for hopeful re-applicants reflect the workings of the managerial mind; they will have to deliver oral presentations on 'strategy', and undergo 'competency-based' interrogations. The areas of particular interest include 'communication', 'team working' and 'decision making', which might seem perfectly sensible in any other context. For the staff of Salford such criteria are accompanied by such ominous considerations as 'embracing change' and 'acting commercially'.

The interviewees will also be asked to give their views on 'motivation'. One suspects that this category was included by someone with a penchant for satire. Equally, though, in some quarters the difficulties facing the sector must seem like a welcome opportunity to embark on a spot of 'creative destruction'; and the motivation of such individuals is likely to have been boosted rather than crushed. As explained to subtext, the process at Salford seems to indicate a feeling among managers that universities depend upon them, rather than students and teachers.

As part of a campaign to resist the Salford scheme, UCU has organised a petition (https://www.ucu.org.uk/nosalfordcuts), and other action can be anticipated. The very different situation here at Lancaster does not affect our obligation to register our dismay at these developments. We should also be aware that the kind of approach shown at Salford can prove infectious among people who keep a calculating eye on the way in which other institutions handle personnel problems. A degree of uncertainty is inescapable at the moment, but the corrosive effects of insecurity must be minimised, rather than increased by ill-advised decisions. Subtext believes that the proposal to reduce academic input to the university Senate is wrong for many reasons (see below). But in the current circumstances, it would certainly not help staff feel secure and valued.

*****************************************************

SENATE REPORT JUNE 2012

Was this the shortest Senate we have ever had? Opinions vary but the consensus is that if timing starts from when Senate actually commenced (2.05) then a new record in brevity has been set (36 minutes, according to the subtext atomic clock). The late start was probably due the need to wait until a quorum had been achieved, as senators were very thin on the ground at 2.00 (no doubt due to a combination of marking, school half-term and post-Jubilee hangovers). This is not to say that this Senate was not worthwhile or informative.

The VC continues to impress with his relaxed and down-to-earth style of communication. He began by thanking those senators whose term of office was coming to an end for their services to the University. He also made a point of thanking two senior officers, John Gallagher and Andrew Neal, who are to leave us this summer (older hands might observe that it's a long time since this happened in Senate).

The Academic Registrar followed with a paper on the proposed replacement for the QAA Institutional Audit, the 'risk-based' Institutional Review. Institutions like Lancaster who have a good track record in quality assurance will be reviewed less frequently (7 to 10 years) than those who have not. However, because of our high levels of collaborative provision with international institutions, we are likely to be subjected to more intense scrutiny when those reviews take place.

Next on was the Dean for Undergraduate Studies with a brief report on undergraduate assessment and a preliminary analysis of marking which showed that this year was pretty much in line with last year. A full report will be made when all the data has been collected and analysed.

Then we came to what for many was the key item on this very short agenda - a paper from the VC on the processes for consultation to be followed in exploring the University's strategic options. He noted that despite the fact that the LLU proposal was now off the table, the questions and concerns relating to Lancaster's future position still remained. Indeed, the recent discussions had helped to bring these more sharply into focus. In his view, we needed to be 'fleet of foot' in meeting the realities of a changing environment and we don't have the luxury of having plenty of time to do so. He would like the University community to focus on the current University Strategic Plan, to identify what had been achieved and what had changed in the environment since. In particular, we should consider carefully a key sentence from this document: 'Our agenda is simple: To be a world-class university in the global top 100'. Did we still believe this was attainable? Were we sure what this even meant?

The consultation mechanisms he proposed – internal meetings on future strategy with Faculty PRCs, LUSU, Central Services etc, open 'town hall meetings' where staff can quiz the VC, a website to host the relevant documents with the opportunity for staff to give their feedback, external consultation with interested parties – signal a very different approach to the one espoused by his predecessor when LLU first made its appearance. He assured Senate that the alternative proposals and ideas that had come from staff as a response to LLU would not be lost in this new process. Senate was happy to endorse his paper.

Finally, after the approval of some eminently sensible amendments to p/g regulations proposed by the Dean of Graduate Studies, this Senate came to end, leaving us all with rather more time on our hands than we had planned for that afternoon.

*****************************************************

SENATE EFFECTIVENESS REVIEW

As mentioned in subtext 90, the consultation period for the review of Senate will end on 22 June, rather than 21 May as we originally thought. So those who are now finishing their exam-marking commitments should have time to contribute their thoughts on this important issue.

The notice in LU Text 566 confirming the consultation period began with the ominous words, 'As part of good governance....'. This phraseology is a familiar way of lulling the unwary into a positive view of the proposed changes; ideally, it can dissuade the majority of readers from paying further heed to the subject. However, as we pointed out, there are (at least) three controversial aspects of the review:

1)  There is no satisfactory rationale for any change to the current composition of Senate, let alone a drastic reduction of membership from 97 to 59;

2)  Heads of Department will no longer be ex-officio members of Senate, risking the possibility that some departments will not be represented even when issues which seriously affect them are under discussion;

3)  While the Heads are rolling out, management is swarming in. The percentage voting power of UMAG will be increased from around 12 to 20. This suggests that the people who play key roles in drawing up proposals – but will not necessarily suffer any of their consequences - are best equipped to decide about their suitability.

There is no reason for anyone to doubt the Vice-Chancellor's declared commitment to consultation; but this only makes the proposed changes more unsettling, and increases the incentive for colleagues to set a healthy precedent by seizing this opportunity to make their views known. The full consultation document is available at https://gap.lancs.ac.uk/Governance/SenateEffectivenessReview/Pages/default.aspx

*****************************************************

CLASSICAL CLUB NIGHTS

Regular attenders at the International Concert Series in the Great Hall, especially those who look down on the body of the hall from a balcony seat, can't help noticing the high proportion of grey heads in the audience.  The artists and the performances are excellent, but few young people are being attracted to come and listen. This is of course common at classical music concerts across the country, and indeed in other countries too.  It raises concerns for the future of the Lancaster concert series, and of others like it. And it is worrying that most young people are missing out on the opportunity to hear great music in live performance, which is usually the best way to experience it.

There is evidence that it's the formality of the concerts, rather than the music, that puts young people off. A growing number of classical musicians are now performing not only in conventional concerts, where audiences sit silent and immobile in rows, but also at classical club nights which are generally much more informal: often the venues for these are jazz clubs.  The performers tend to be closer to the members of the audience, they talk beforehand about the pieces they are going to play, and often they stay on for a drink afterwards. The performers seem to love all of this: see for example the Wikipedia entry for Limelight, the classical club night at London's 100 Club. Another club, called Nonclassical (http://www.nonclassical.co.uk), founded by the composer Gabriel Prokofiev, meets regularly at the Macbeth pub in Hoxton, and also at other London venues. This is clearly a growing movement.

Some of the concerts in this year's Great Hall series have in fact had some of the features of the club scene. One such was the evening with the Brodskys (reviewed in subtext 88), where the four players sat on a podium surrounded by the audience, the programme was chosen before our very eyes by a kind of roulette wheel, and the items selected were then introduced by a member of the quartet before they were performed. Members of the audience of all ages seemed to enjoy this evening, so there would seem to be no reason to fear that a less formal atmosphere would offend the existing audience, although there may be no certainty that it would deliver a new one.

It has been pointed out, for example in an article for BBC Music magazine by Richard Morrison, music critic of The Times, that having audiences sit in sepulchre-like silence is a fairly recent phenomenon. The aristocratic patrons of Mozart and Haydn would probably have chattered away while their symphonies were being played, and in Paris audiences were noisy well into the 19th century - but Morrison certainly doesn't advocate this. He argues that composers' masterpieces demand full attention. All the same, there is clearly a case to continue exploring new formats and new venues for the concerts in University's winter series; and also to experiment with different ways of inveigling young people to come along and experience them.

*****************************************************

DELIVERING THE OLYMPICS: LECTURE BY SIR JOHN ARMITT

The London Olympics will involve 36 different sports. Special venues for many of these have had to be designed and built from scratch, at the East London Olympic site or elsewhere.  Before any of this could start, over 100 businesses operating on the East London site had to be persuaded to move.  A number of these businesses had contaminated the soil around them, so 2 million tonnes of soil had to be decontaminated - and decontaminated in situ, because shifting all this soil out, and of course an equal amount of clean soil in, would have entailed an intolerable burden of heavy road traffic. 52 pylons of the national electricity supply grid had to be taken down, and the cables placed in underground tunnels. And so on - just hearing about the size of the project is almost overwhelming. Equally staggering is the size of the overall budget - £8 billion.

Faced with the task of appointing a chairman for the Delivery Authority for all this, with a strictly limited time of six years to do it, probably not many of us would select the former Chief Executive of Network Rail. But that was the most recent employment history of Sir John Armitt when he took on the chair of the Olympic Delivery Authority in 2006. In his lecture last week to the Faculty of Science and Technology, he gave a presentation which convinced at least this member of his audience that the Authority will in fact succeed in getting everything ready for the opening ceremony of the London Olympics in 43 days' time, and what is more it will have done it within the (admittedly enormous) budget. Possibly more important, the legacy of the London Olympics should on balance be beneficial to the Stratford area of London, and there should not be any useless white-elephant buildings left behind afterwards.

With disarming humour, Sir John described the major factors in this project, from the Singapore meeting in July 2005 where London beat off challenges from other cities, most notably the old adversary Paris, to the opening day next month. This included dealing with prima donna architects who were very reluctant to have parts of any of their buildings treated as temporary and removed afterwards, even if they would be useless and far too big for any later crowds, and pacifying the Mayor of London who felt that, even close to the centre of London, the Olympic village should look like a village, presumably with streets of cottages rather than apartment blocks - Poundbury in Stratford East. Already most of the construction work is complete and many of the sporting facilities have been tried out. The project has many ramifications - providing 50000 meals per day for participants, 50000 for media people, and presumably similar numbers for spectators; building a new power station to provide electricity and heat water for changing rooms and toilets; all this water has to go somewhere, so new effluent handling plant had to be built; public transport had to be upgraded so that these huge numbers of people will be able to get to and from the Olympic site - the list seems never-ending.

But the London Olympic Delivery project appears to have gone well - so much so that the organisers of the 2016 Rio Olympics have been almost camped out in London to see how to go about it. The disastrous record of the UK's railways following privatisation has left most people with a tarnished view of their performance, but in the period between 2001 and 2006 when Armitt was the chief executive of (briefly) Railtrack and then Network Rail, the punctuality record of the trains and the cost efficiency of the company improved very significantly. Anyone who can turn round that shambles must be a magician as well as an excellent manager, so his appointment to lead the huge Olympic Delivery project could turn out to have been an inspired one.

*****************************************************

KATHARINE HOLMES PAINTINGS

If you should find yourself near the town of Settle and have a spare half-hour, a visit to Linton Court Gallery in Duke Street could be rewarding.  For anyone who doesn't know the town, Settle is just off the A65, between Skipton and Ingleton; it's about 25 miles east of Lancaster. The current exhibition features the landscape paintings and drawings of Katharine Holmes, most of them the product of a month's residency she spent in Ireland in 2011. The paintings are highly atmospheric, capturing the special character and climate of Kilkenny and (especially) of County Mayo so well that one can almost feel the wind and rain sweeping across the hills and the coast. Also on show are some fine paintings by Terry Frost, Norman Adams and Albert Irvin. 

The Gallery is run by Mary Gavagan, former director of the Peter Scott Gallery here on the campus: the web site is www.gavaganart.com. As the list of artists in the current show illustrates, she is attracting some quite big names to the gallery, and the exhibition is well worth seeing. As well as the paintings, there are some very attractive ceramic pieces on show too (but not shown on the web site). The current exhibition runs to the end of June.

Duke Street is the main street running through Settle: directions are given on the web site. Settle offers plenty of coffee shops and eating houses for those who would like to make a trip of it. 

*****************************************************

THOUGHT FOR THE FORTNIGHT (for those who missed it in the Guardian):

'The idea of "teacher knows best" is looking back to a time when teachers did know best' – 'Student Engagement Co-ordinator' at Reading University.

According to the same article (by Harriet Swain, 11 June), the new Quality Code for Higher Education includes an expectation that 'higher education providers take deliberate steps to engage students, individually and collectively, as partners'. Some members of the subtext collective vaguely recall hearing that this kind of thing was quite common in the 1960s, but surely there would be disciplinary implications if we revived the tradition?

*****************************************************

LETTERS

Dear subtext,

I share the concern expressed by UCU in a recent circular that proposals for Senate reform create an imbalance in membership. However, I am troubled by its suggestion that this means that, in diminishing the Heads of Department numbers, there will be a bias toward 'management' among those remaining. It feels to me, as Head of Department, that I am some kind of manager, and what we do in departmentland is deliver what the university is for - teaching, reasearch, third mission. It is of note that in UCU's US equivalent, the American Association of University Professors, a new slate of candidates under the banner 'AAUP Organizing for Change' has just been elected to its leadership (google it, folks). Not only does their manifesto seek to protect collective bargaining and academic freedom. There is a strong commitment to 'shared governance' of universities. In naming our administrative friends and colleagues the 'university management' UCU concedes too much of its members' authority in this respect.

Bill Cooke, Organisation Work and Technology

*******

Dear subtext,

I feel that many congratulations to the university are in order, for their most excellent banquet of cafeteria tea and sandwiches in Alexandra Square, in celebration of the Queen's Jubilee. Particular kudos to the singer they had for the event, who gave an excellent rendition of 'The Girl From Ipanema'. It is always nice to see indulgence in the great British tradition of Portuguese bossa nova.

Ronnie Rowlands

*******

Dear subtext,

RE: the latest subtext revelation about LUMS in Bahrain. Not sure there is much ethical difference to doing business in China. Both wrong in my view.

Interesting to note that LUMS' 'strategic partner' in this adventure is MSB consulting, whose MD is an alumnus (http://www.msbconsultancy.com/our-people/managing-directors/don-porter/) who also features at number 22 in this list: http://conservativehome.blogs.com/goldlist/2009/01/search-for-1-20.html.

Many thanks for drawing the google potentialities to my attention.

And long may my cave, I mean the underpass remain closed to the public.

Keep trip-trapping

Trina Troll (PhD).

*******

Dear subtext,

Can anyone suggest a sensible reason for the distance between the medical centre and the pharmacy in Bailrigg House?

Magnus George

Entrepreneurship, LUMS

*****************************************************

The editorial collective of subtext currently consists (in alphabetical order) of: Mark Garnett, George Green, David Smith, Bronislaw Szerszynski and Martin Widden.

Home | Archive | Subscribe | Editors | Contact