| subtext | |
|
|
subtext issue 101 21 February 2013 ***************************************************** '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, news in brief, college mags, scan, career opportunity, strategy, music, underpass, lunch, more lunch, iconoclasm, letters. ***************************************************** EDITORIAL Perplexing as it is that University management appears not to utilise (or at least consult) staff in the world-renowned Lancaster University Management School when it comes to the running of our institution, perhaps they can be more persuaded by some basic lessons emanating from the Physics Department. The third of Sir Isaac Newton's Laws of Motion states that 'Every Action has an Equal and Opposite Reaction'. If you push on something, it pushes back. The University repeatedly appears surprised that when it embarks on fundamental change, usually with little or no consultation, staff tend to react with disquiet and even anger. For example – and there are many - when UMAG dictates 'non-negotiable' entry grade requirements across the University, having elicited and then ignored the views of the overwhelming majority of departmental admissions directors who used to have a say in setting entry grade requirements and who might be supposed to have an informed opinion on the subject, and when these dictates cause quite drastic reductions in student applications, they are surprised to find that staff express genuine concern about the future of the University. Given this foot-shooting tendency, it is scarcely surprising that when attention turns to the two unique selling points in the arts at Lancaster - the multi-disciplinary nature of LICA, and the Imagination research centre - staff are again confused and concerned. The proposal to close Music would effectively destroy the first of these unique features. An institute for the contemporary arts which lacks Music would ignore a significant component of the arts sector and would not be credible as a multi-disciplinary department covering the contemporary arts. Elsewhere, on a smaller but similar scale, the transfer of the Criminology degree scheme from ASS to Law has led to ramifications which staff predicted immediately but which management either did not see coming or did not care to ask about, and so now they find themselves desperately searching for solutions to problems which were substantially of their making. It seems to happen every time. To use another Physics cliché: it's not rocket science. Ask the Management School. ***************************************************** NEWS IN BRIEF Admissions We hear of some disquiet expressed by University management about the forthcoming University-wide emergency meeting called by UCU to discuss the implications of the proposed redundancies in Music for other FASS Departments – see below. One would hope that these rumours of disquiet are mistaken – we would like to think that the challenging of ideas within the University would be regarded as a good thing, not a bad one. The 'implications' refer to the problems surrounding admissions. Decisions by the University Management Advisory Group (UMAG) to increase A level entry requirements have caused some departments with a good record of recruitment to face drastic reductions in the number of applications for the next academic year. Follow this link for details: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/users/ucu/campaigns/EGMflyers.htm ****** Open Access We won't be discussing the potential impact of the Government's plans for Open Access in this issue as it's a huge subject and there's quite enough about FASS in this issue already, but anyone interested should write to us for the next issue, wherein we'll try and explain what's happening. ****** Rough Music Regardless of the merits or otherwise of closing down the Music degree scheme, (see above, below, all over the place) the University has held onto the idea that, as Music is a degree scheme and not a Department, what happens to Music is Faculty business, and so does not require or merit discussion at Senate (this is surely such a can of worms, it's hard to know where to start. One might ask, if closing down an entire Degree scheme isn't of interest to the wider University community then what on earth is? But let's move on swiftly.) Now subtext hears a murmur that FASS may not have followed correct University procedure. Apparently FASS Faculty Management Committee (who did the decision making) doesn't actually have the authority to lay down degree schemes. On 13th October 2010 Senate in its wisdom delegated those powers to the Faculty Teaching Group, who are then supposed to forward their decisions to the Dean of Undergraduate Studies for approval. This, we understand, didn't happen. And since Senate delegated these powers (stick with us, this is interesting) and since it seems that those powers have been used incorrectly, one might suppose that this creates a perfect, cast-iron, bang-to-rights case to get it discussed at Senate. (To be clear, this is not an issue of how many committees can be balanced on the head of a pin; asserting the principle of academic democracy is never wasted time. The point is not just that Senate should revisit FacMag's decision on the merits in this case, it's that such decisions shouldn't be taken by FacMag at all). This sort of administrative fine detail might just get lost in translation, or the University might just retrospectively move the goal-posts. We shall see. Meantime, we aren't lawyers, but if our Music colleagues do eventually get made redundant and it transpires that proper procedure was not followed, then they would presumably have a strong case for unfair dismissal? ****** More Music Subscribers looking for background on the Music Department situation may also find this link useful. http://scan.lusu.co.uk/comment/2013/02/09/breaking-music-course-in-crisis-redundancies-inbound/ ****** Yet more Music Just a thought: wasn't the whole point of LICA that it was supposed to give non-Departmental degree schemes like Music 'critical mass'? It's not a secret that the three former departments that were welded into LICA have never really found a common purpose and have continued to behave essentially as separate departments – and that's fair enough, it worked for them, and other departments have a similar attitude and make it work. Within Music itself, it seems that there have been problems building a common academic identity and research profile. However, while one might wish things to be otherwise, we have to start from here. The staff in Music must surely represent a resource that good leadership should be able to channel in a common direction. It would, perhaps, be hard for an insider to achieve this; but simply to sack everyone in one section of LICA and shut down that scheme seems a destructive and arguably petulant response. FASS leadership has hardly covered itself in glory on this occasion. Would it not be best for the University to call in one or more outside people to sort it out and make the best of the undoubtedly excellent staff that LICA has in post? ****** Sit-in at Sussex Subscribers of a certain age will no doubt feel a faint thrill of recognition at the phrase 'sit-in at Sussex'. Students there are protesting at the university's decision to outsource its estates and catering provision. There are petitions to be signed and places to send messages of support, should subscribers be so minded. Info on this story is Googlable everywhere, or try http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=422653&c=1 ****** Water, water, everywhere Some dispute on the fourth floor, we gather, about the recent flooding of the main approach road to the University by the duck pond. Seems that some who may be expected to know about such things think that the recent expansion of the surface area of the duck pond (which has, let it be said, made it look very nice) has also increased the area of potential 'run-off'. Put simply, more water now comes into the pond and there is less space for it to go. So it overflows onto the road. This will apparently happen every time we get a period of rainfall, and there is little that can be done about it. This is of course one view of the cause of the situation; there are those who disagree. Now, there aren't any hydrological engineers in the subtext collective, and so it might be suggested that our opinion isn't worth a crock of spit – which is, we gather, the exact amount of spit it will take to cause the pond to flood the road - but if it turns out that actually Estates are wrong about this and the critics and carpers and dissenters are right, it's very fortunate for all of us that it seldom rains in Lan...oh, hang on a minute. ***************************************************** COLLEGE MAGS After Marion McClintock's typically useful and informative article in subtext 100 on the subject of subtext's predecessors, someone should really do a similar exercise on the magazines that until a decade or so ago every College produced regularly – not something that present students will be particularly aware of, but a real feature of College life back in the day. Many of these productions were of course cut and paste College-centric Rag Mag knock-offs, utterly amateur and largely incomprehensible to anyone outside the editing clique's immediate circle of friends, but occasionally someone would produce a really good one. One thing that we should remember is that the College magazines were a feeder for SCAN – anyone standing for SCAN editor who could point to their editorship of a successful College magazine had the inside track. (See article immediately below.) A further thought: the reason these magazines died out was largely financial, but that's all changed now - why couldn't a College Magazine be produced online and sent to all its members, at a cost of approximately £0.00? A bit like subtext, in fact. ***************************************************** SCAN – Here we go again Further to the above, we understand that after this academic year the post of SCAN editor is no longer to be sabbatical. As ever, those who know no history are condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past. Let us therefore rehearse once again the arguments for a sabbatical SCAN editor, which one would have hoped would have been so simple and blindingly obvious as to be self-evident. Argument 1: if we want SCAN to be done properly, then someone has to be deputed to keep their eye on the ball and to be held responsible if it is done badly. We cannot expect someone doing it in their spare time to be there 24/7, and we cannot reasonably hold them to a standard. Argument 2: those of us with long memories will recall that before SCAN became a sabbatical post, every editor was on permanent academic report. It is not possible to produce SCAN and do an academic degree simultaneously, period. Something has to give. It was bad enough for prospective editors back then; how many present-day students paying a lot of money for their degree are likely to respond to the following call: 'Come and be SCAN editor: it'll probably mean you get a bad 3rd instead of a 2:1, you'll be writing every essay at the last moment, you won't sleep or have a moment of free time all year, it's hard work and there's no pay or benefits, you'll have lots of responsibility and no power, you'll be at the mercy of others and then when it all goes horribly wrong you'll be held entirely responsible. Oh, and yes, while you will get some journalistic experience for your CV, given that you won't ever have the time to do a proper job on the paper, your portfolio isn't going to look all that impressive anyway'. Yeah, that'll bring 'em running. Of course, if LUSU don't care whether SCAN appears or not, or whether it's any good or not, then making the post of editor non-sabbatical is the best way we know of making sure that it becomes amateurish, half-baked and irrelevant. ***************************************************** CAREER OPPORTUNITY There will, no doubt, come a time when the name of Anthony Marsella will cease to mean anything to most subtext subscribers, and on that day subtext will stop keeping its readers au courant with his latest activities. Pending that time, we would suggest that subscribers might enjoy a look at his latest venture, a hotel resort in Thailand of which he is CEO. This can be seen in its full glory at http://www.thailannaresort.com/index.html. The subtext subscriber who drew our attention to this Siamese garden of delights was particularly taken by the list of charges for the 'Thai Girlfriend Service' and the 'In-Room Thai Massage and Companion Service'. Our subscriber suggested that 'less charitable and good natured people than ourselves might wonder precisely what sort of business this actually is'. ('So, young lady, what do you want to be when you grow up?' 'I want to be an In-room Companion Service in Mr Marsella's Thai hotel'.) Given Marsella's alleged background in marketing, so ably demonstrated during his appointment at Lancaster and stop that giggling at the back, it's good to see that the website for his 'hotel' has some rather nice misspellings too – inter alia it claims to be 'Combing (sic) luxury with tradition', which would be a new take on both of those things. Elsewhere, fans of Marsella's more traditional literary output will be overjoyed to hear that he has now put another of his Ancient Egyptian tales on Amazon, and they can be assured that it is every bit as good as the previous one. As one of his two Amazon reviewers puts it, 'when the writer of Fifty Shades of Whatever is better than you, you know it's time to stop'. (The other review was more dismissive.) We understand that Marsella is now writing a modern thriller set in Thailand. We look forward with breathless anticipation to the next triumph from this modern McGonagall. ****************************************************** LET'S STRATEGISE The VC is, we know, very keen on sorting out the University Strategy document. We are in hearty agreement with his enthusiasm – the present document manages to be half the length of a novel without containing either a single interesting idea or an active verb, no mean achievement. In compiling the revised strategy document, we would suggest that providing the answers to a couple of simple questions might be helpful. First, the University's present attitude to research appears to many non-insiders to be the attitude of the fascinated rabbit to the approaching cobra – the testosterone-charged phrase 'research power' tells us all we need to know. But there's much more to a University than research, and it's not the reason why most people come here. Can anyone produce a single undergraduate who came to Lancaster because we are 'strong in research power', or perhaps a single undergraduate who feels that research power is more important than good teaching? If not, then could the Strategy document explain why Lancaster should not promote itself as a Top Ten teaching institution in the same way and with the same degree of confidence and assurance as it does presently with research? Secondly, regarding links with other institutions, when we approach other larger institutions, and it always does seem to be that they are larger than us, could the Strategy document be clear about exactly what we get out of it? The recent aborted union with Liverpool was a good example of a proposal which seemed to make a lot more sense from their point of view than ours. Might we, for example, think about the University of Cumbria (just as an example) which appears ripe for the plucking, and which we could asset-strip in the same way that large organisations always do to any smaller ones that come into their orbit? It would be nice to feel that, for once we were the do-er rather than the done-to. (For the avoidance of doubt, yes, those last few lines would come under the heading of irony.) It would be refreshing if the Strategy document contained not just a list of the things we'd like to do, but a rationale for them as well, so that any future proposals could be seen and assessed in that light. Just a thought. ******************************************************** EVEN MORE (ACTUAL) MUSIC: BEATS AND PIECES BIG BAND On 7 February, Live at LICA featured the Beats and Pieces Big Band in the Great Hall's International Concert Series. Formed in 2008 by graduates of Manchester University and the Royal Northern College of Music, the band has won a number of awards, among them the 2011 European Young Artists' Jazz award and Best UK Newcomer at Jazz FM Awards 2013. This is an excellent pedigree - and on this showing they certainly deserve it. They use a typical big-band line-up of three trumpets, three trombones, three saxes, and rhythm section of keyboard, bass, drums and guitar. All of the instrumentalists were excellent individual performers, and seemed equally capable in individual improvisation as well as in ensemble playing. The keyboard player, Patrick Hurley, showed an exceptional creative line in his free solo riffs, which pushed the boundaries beyond jazz almost into modern classical music. But the undoubted star is the band's leader, composer and arranger, Ben Cottrell. His arrangements recalled the Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus bands of the 1940s: both Ellington and Mingus used their bands effectively as their musical instruments, and Cottrell's approach is similar. Yet he goes beyond what Ellington and Mingus were able to do - as well as being a saxophone player, he uses live electronics in the band's performances. This was an evening of sophisticated music and performance. The Great Hall audience may have feared being blasted out of their seats - but they need not have worried: the three trombones playing together pianissimo in close harmony were a joy to hear. Let's hope the Beats and Pieces band stays together, and comes to the Great Hall again. Try to hear them if you have the opportunity. ******************************************************** UNDERPASSING The Underpass continues to be a headache to those who have no choice but to use it. (If they had a choice they surely wouldn't be there.) subtext has already commented at length on its dysfunctionality and the apparently disproportionate cost and time spent to bring it to its present unlovely and unloved condition, so we'll leave that there for now. More immediately, and at almost no cost, would it not at least be possible to paint some bays on the road, and have, say, the Lancaster bus come in one place, the Morecambe bus another, and the Heysham bus the next? At the moment everyone waiting for a bus stands in a big impatient crowd backing right up the stairs, and then when a bus appears everyone either has to push their way from the back down the stairs through a large crowd of people waiting to get on a different bus, or must fight to avoid being swept into the road or onto the wrong bus by the people pushing through from behind. The British are supposed to be good at queuing, so let's use that talent. If people knew where their bus was going to pull in, they would stand in the right place and it would all be a lot more civilised. Apart from anything else, one day someone is going to get hurt. If we can't make the underpass lovely, could we not at least sort the practical side of it out? It would be cynical and probably unfair to suggest that the reason no-one seems to care about this is because the people who make the decisions don’t use the bus service, but that won't stop us suggesting exactly that if nothing is done about it. ********************************************************* WORKING LUNCH One of the several 'drivers'(to use the modish term) behind the building programme of the last decade, alongside, oh, to pick a few things at random, wrecking the College system, making a point of clearly establishing that people really hate open plan offices before sticking them into them, and building us a really nice sports centre with tiny changing rooms that contain about half the number of lockers actually needed, has been the destruction of places that staff can meet and/or eat. Most academic departments used to have kitchens, staff rooms and mixing bays; most of these have been renovated into offices or have just disappeared. The College SCRs of fond memory, which were an excellent place to have an interdisciplinary mingle over lunch, are long gone. Even the cloisters which used to be along the wall of what is now the EL-Zee (of which more below) have been sacrificed so that people walking across the Square will have a clear view of people Doing Learning therein. The cloisters were cold, they were windy, and if the wind was in the wrong direction they could be surprisingly wet, but at least they were an alternative spot to sit and eat. So, we ask another simple question: if a member of staff has brought their own lunch in with them, and it is raining, where would the University suggest that they should go to eat it? All research we have come across in this area (and see final paragraph below) suggests that to eat lunch at one's desk except in exceptional circumstances is a Very Bad Idea, and we can’t believe that the University would wish this. There are of course plenty of cafes around, but there are good reasons for not wanting to eat there every day, and anyway both the independent places and those run by University Hospitality take a dim view of people bringing their own food. One answer to this question until fairly recently might have been to take one’s sandwiches along to the El-Zee. Admittedly it's usually half-full of people Doing Learning, but up till a while ago in the absence of alternatives a lot of University House folk went there at lunchtime. No-one has suggested that they were ever anything but tidy and well-behaved, but now it has been made clear officially to staff members and Learners alike that no-one is to eat hot food there and (rather less officially but nonetheless forcefully) that actually the El-Zee is a Zone for students to Do Learning, and not a place for staff to eat their lunch. OK, fine, but we repeat the question. There are already plenty of places to get take-away food, and now we're going to be blessed with a Subway; where exactly shall people go to eat these delights? Some academic staff do still have access to a kitchen of sorts, but if the El-Zee is off-limits, where on earth should administrative staff go? Or is the University's unstated policy to get all staff to spend their money here instead of bringing their own food? Just in case anyone thinks we're making this up, subscribers listening to Radio 4 on 8th February may have heard our own Distinguished Professor Cary Cooper talking about work-life balance. He is quoted on the BBC website as saying: 'The vast majority of people are having lunch at their desk while working. That's the average person now. Very rarely do they get out of the office. If senior management create a culture that lunch is for wimps, it's counterproductive. We all need breaks. It's important to take breaks with colleagues - sitting in the park or outside a pub, going out to buy sandwiches - because good social relationships lead to good working relationships'. subtext would like to say that we agree with the Distinguished Professor wholeheartedly, and we would be interested to hear his specific recommendations to this, his home university, as to where exactly this desirable activity might actually take place. Meantime, staff will continue to lunch at their desks, getting stressed and sick, not making Professor Cooper's good social relationships, and getting peanut butter and crumbs in their computer keyboards. (Which is an expense to clean, by the way. There are no winners at all here.) ********************************************** LUNCH MONEY The roll-out of the new, very shiny, colourful, online expenses system (an IT system that apparently actually works – we really should try and adopt this idea for all our IT systems) has revealed that staff representing the University overseas are required to subsist on a per diem meal allowance of a paltry £30 (without receipts and let's not mention MPs' allowances in this context) or £40 (with receipts). Heaven knows how they are supposed to get by. We invite subscribers to send in their suggestions as to how our representatives might eke this paltry sum out – perhaps by boiling up rat bones in their hotel room to make a cheap but nutritious soup, or by paying beggar children pennies to search the waste bins outside fast food emporia and bring back any half-consumed burgers. As Private Eye would no doubt have Prince Charles say, this really is appalling. ********************************************** A LINGUIST WRITES Looking at the University website recently, as is our frequent pleasure, we noticed a reference to the 'iconic' sports centre. We weren’t sure what this use of 'iconic' meant, so, as we would tell our students to do in this sort of instance, we looked it up. In the order that the definitions come up on Google: 'An object of uncritical devotion'. Hmmm, no, that's definitely not it. 'Having a conventional and formulaic style.' Well, yes, though we suspect this is the opposite of what the University means when it uses the word. 'Something that is representative of something else.' Yes, the sports centre could indeed be representative of something very similar but quite a lot larger that would then be big enough to handle the number of people who use it. We suspect that the University uses 'iconic' in this way to mean 'striking' and 'interesting', or possibly just to mean 'the first thing you see when you turn off the A6'. It might also be using it in the slightly more sophisticated sense of 'emblematic of who we are'. Another subtext competition: we invite semioticians and lay folk alike to consider exactly what collection of signs and signifiers the sports centre represents – if the sports centre does indeed stand for us, as the website suggests, what does that say about us? *********************************************** LETTERS Dear subtext, Back in issue 98, one of your readers wrote in after reading a news article about the Catalyst research project and perhaps misunderstood the project. Sorry for the misunderstanding - we have not spent £1.9m of research funding to build a reminder printer with a component cost of < £100. The £1.9m was the EPSRC award for the entire 3-year research project, which is made up of large 6-9 month sub-projects (sprints) and much smaller proof-of concept projects (launchpads). The Catalyst project is interesting in that it encourages (and facilitates) academics to get together with community groups and apply for Catalyst funding for a sprint or launchpad aiming to develop digital technologies for social change. The sprint funding includes buy out of a portion of academic time as part of the funding. The larger sprints come with the services of 80% time of 3 full time research staff drawn from across disciplines with skills in qualitative research, quantitative research and computer science research. Patchworks (featured in the news article) was a 9-month Catalyst Sprint with a budget of £10k (which also covers the academic buy out time), and the project ran as a series of co-design and co-build workshops in collaboration with Signposts (local homeless charity), MadLab (DIY Bio/DIY Tech community), and Lancaster academics from across disciplines working together as a team, each with equal 'say' in the direction of the project. The result of the project was that the team upskilled each other and designed and built the reminder printer (#Pat) prototype themselves, a process which had impact far beyond the prototype produced. Signposts have taken ownership of #Pat and are leading a consortium of local organisations taking #Pat forward to help with service support for the entire region for all kinds of service users, not just homeless. This video: http://youtu.be/ydPcxuixhAw distils the project into 3 and a half minutes. For more information for academics and community groups seeking to get involved and perhaps bid into the next round of Sprints and Launchpads, please see our website at http://www.catalystproject.org.uk/content/participate or come and talk to any of us! Will Simm, School of Computing and Communications ***************************************************** The editorial collective of subtext currently consists (in alphabetical order) of: Sam Clark, Rachel Cooper (PPR), Mark Garnett, George Green, Ian Paylor, David Smith, and Martin Widden. |