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Senate Newsflash 21 April 2009 ***************************************************** 'Truth: lies open to all' ***************************************************** SENATE 22 APRIL 2009 The agenda for tomorrow's Senate meeting, released in the quiet days just before Easter, is exceptionally significant, and, we feel, warrants a break from the normal bi-weekly subtext publishing cycle. No doubt Senate members will already be thinking hard about the implications for the future shape of the University as they reflect on the agenda's contents and prepare themselves for the meeting. But perhaps it would be useful to contextualise a few of the agenda items, and raise some questions in relation to them. The centrepiece of the agenda is the proposal for a Standing Redundancy Committee which, despite a motion properly debated and voted upon, asking Council to reconsider, is returning to Senate on its inexorable and damaging path largely untouched, and with the stated intention that the Human Resources Committee sign off the committee before Council next meets. First, Senate should now be clear that, unless it immediately summons up the resources to object, Council is of the view it can over-ride Senate and ignore its resolutions. Secondly, all staff, and on this occasion especially academic staff, should be aware that the University has a Human Resources Committee with the stated intention that there should be a reduction in their number, either across the University as a whole or in selected areas. Potentially, the proposed committee destabilises the contracts of all staff, since who is to say what area of activity might in the coming months or years be deemed to be no longer strategic? Indeed, unless such activity is to be shut completely (move over, Continuing Education), Senate is likely to be informed rather than given a chance to agree or disagree. And no area can feel itself exempt from potential redundancies in 2009, with Science and Technology, the faculty that includes the most research teams on soft money, heading the immediately vulnerable list (137 out of 314 possible redundancies). Are Senators prepared to acquiesce in turning Lancaster into a university where short-term procedures, divorced from external economic cycles or local needs or expectations, become the guiding principle for staff relations? Senate is also revisiting the appointment of senior officers, six months and only a few days after its first attempt. The reservations of Senate members about consultation with line managers, and about peer influence in areas such as the colleges, are swept away in a brief and cursory paper by the University Secretary that simply pulls college principals and associate deans into the same net as the one for pro-vice-chancellors, deans, etc., that was passed in October 2008. Standard appointing procedures are to prevail throughout and the Lancaster principle of consensus and peer involvement in lines of authority is planned to end. Do Senate members actually want college officers who are parachuted into the colleges, or faculty associate deans who are imposed, rather than them evolving out of current colleagues? Senate is also having one, single chance to look at the revised Strategic Plan. It contains an insistence on moving to a 5% annual surplus by 2015 (at a time of severe economic difficulty), and to a payroll limit of 60% (when the recession is likely to cut back the boom in building expenditure, increasing the relative proportion of payroll costs and thus placing additional pressure on the latter). Such commitments will make the availability of redundancy procedures even more attractive to senior managers. And the colleges are being largely airbrushed out of the Plan: no longer do they figure as a key strategic strand; instead, we are presented with rhetoric about 'new residential and social facilities' and 'highly appealing and sociable places for living and working'. What headway can two small working parties on the colleges make against these over-riding statements, and is the University simply being cynical in allowing the working groups to proceed? And, by no means least, the duties of University members to H.M. Government as unpaid immigration officers are being internalised. Of course the University has no legal means to resist the new procedures, but given the recent spotlight on bogus colleges, a more profitable approach must surely be for legitimate higher education institutions not to roll over but to place the onus on the government's vetting of its own licensing system, rather than fundamentally to affect the relationship of staff to students. Might Senate determine to ask that Lancaster leads such an approach, rather than merely fiddling around the edges of making attendance monitoring marginally less obnoxious? subtext trusts that Senators will stand up and be counted for the kind of institution that most of them and the people they represent want for the future, and to be very clear and direct in making their views understood and passed to a Council that, at its most recent meeting, did not even make time to discuss the draft minute of the resolution from Senate, but merely noted it and glided onwards to its predetermined destination. How will Senate frame its message to ensure that Council gives it serious consideration? **************************************************** The editorial collective of subtext currently consists (in alphabetical |