The Faculty of Arts Renewal Strategy
2008
Introduction
The Arts Renewal Strategy is designed to ensure that the Faculty maintains its commitment to high-quality teaching and research in the humanities, social sciences and languages while it deals with its continuing operating deficit.
The Faculty recognises that it must reinvest and reshape itself to ensure it remains a world-class arts and humanities faculty – an important place of ideas, new research and high quality teaching.
As a result of cost containment plans by the Schools, the voluntary departures last year and some revenue gains, our projections for this year show a small budget surplus. To achieve that result some Schools are planning to reduce their outgoings by a very considerable amount. This is exactly what they need to do to get back into the black and I congratulate Heads and their executives on the significant progress so far. But projections are not achievements and so we have a busy year ahead of us to ensure our financial security.
We now have three important policy papers on the Arts Renewal website for discussion and I encourage you to read them carefully. The first is the draft White Paper on curriculum reform in the BA which follows from the D’Agostino Report released late last year. This paper articulates key principles for ongoing development of the degree, including the way majors will work, how interdisciplinary subjects contribute and the role of capstones. I hope we will be ready to finalize these policies at the May Faculty Board once wide discussion with staff and students has taken place. We will also discuss these proposed principles at our first meeting of the Committee of Disciplines on the 17th of this month.
The second important policy paper is the outline of our New Gen masters coursework offerings. It is proposed that we market test two new generalist degrees, a Master of Liberal Arts and a Master of Public Affairs, each designed to attract graduates from around Australia and overseas. Faculty Executive has approved a draft curriculum for discussion with disciplines and later modification in the light of market feedback. We also intend to use resources available through the Teaching and Learning Fund administered by the Provost to help academics develop specialist subjects in each program. Once we have agreement on these new offerings we will look at ways to locate them and our other main coursework programs in a new Graduate School. If all goes to plan we will be ready to launch and market this during second semester.
The third paper briefly outlines the Faculty’s language review. This is an important review to secure the future of the languages for the Faculty of Arts, the University and the wider community. It focuses on finding ways of teaching languages to different cohorts and exploring new pedagogical methodologies and modes of delivery.
Finally I want to remind you that the proposal for a further round of voluntary departures has been circulated for comment by April 11th. I know that there is legitimate concern about the workload impact of any further reductions in staff levels in some programs. We will be in regular discussion with all parties to do everything we can to manage these processes, although as I said on Tuesday, it is in the nature of all voluntary strategies that there will be some uncertainty while we see who is interested. I want to reiterate that the Faculty Executive is committed to reviewing the impact of these changes at all levels.
I am looking forward to an energetic debate in regard to the policy papers we have released this week and if I may I would like to express my thanks to all of you for the positive start we have made to this year, our first year of the New Gen BA!
Mark Considine
April 4th, 2008
- Workforce proposal: April 11th
- Curriculum review white paper: May 1st
- Graduate Programs: June 30th