I am grateful to Ian Bland, Branch Secretary of the University Colleage Union for this update on the Senate vote which took place this evening on the future of the School of Social Care:
'Senate vote was 32 for the recommendation to close, 27 against and 6 abstentions. Although the vote is lost this is a surprisingly good result. Firstly, there are nine members of the Senior Management Board on Senate and no one expects they will vote against. Take this out and the vote would be won. Secondly, do the math and see that they do not have a majority in favour."
Alan Budd, social work student at Reading University and founder member of Facebook Group Is this Social Justice? posted the following message to supporters of the campaign earlier tonight:
"Ok, so we lost the vote in Senate today, but have a look at Ian Bland's post to see how close things really were.
We still have the Public Meeting to gain further support, and of course the Council. On that note, the Petition will be presented to Council, so please encourage family and friends to sign.
The future of our School is still worth fighting for!!"
Please continue to support this vitally important campaign. Key dates as follows:
16 March Public Meeting. 7.00pm-9.00pm
Waterhouse Chambers, Reading Town Hall
20 March University Council
Time and Venue TBA
The petition is up to 582 signatures. Sign it here.
A couple of weeks ago a motion to Reading Borough Council tabled by the Lib Dems secured all Party support.
The Chief Executive, Michael Coughlin, as per the Council resolution, has already written to the University Secretary & Director of Governance and copied our resolution to other Berkshire unitary authorities.
As of 4 March Mr Coughlin said he hadn't yet heard back from any other local councils. However, I believe a meeting of local council chief executives in Reading was due to take place this week and Mr Coughlin said he would be raising the matter there also.
I am aware that RBC officers are also intending to send a representative along to the public meeting on 16 March to air the Council's concerns.
Our thoughts continue to be with the staff and students of the School. We will continue to do all we can to stop this thoughtless closure.
What is happening here is a consequence of the way the government funds universities.
Most people seem unaware that universities do research as well as teaching. As a university lecturer, I just get used to being asked "have you broken up now" in June and "have you gone back to work now?" in September by people who do not understand that our contracts mean we have to be slaving away doing research when the students are not there.
Now, this is all well and good, of course students should be taught by people who are experts in the field as shown by their research record, but the government's funding mechanism works as a perverse incentive meaning in effect the ONLY thing that counts for a university is its research impact - that is the number of papers it get can published in academic conferences and journals. So any time spent doing teaching better, or doing research which is primarily oriented towards keeping up with the subject in order to teach it better rather than producing academic papers is deemed time wasted. The funding and promotion system in UK universities means any lecturer who puts more than the minimal effort into teaching is cutting his or her own throat. Doing that instead of producing research papers certainly means you won't get promoted, may mean you face a visit from he Head of Department saying "Have you considered working in another job?" and may mean your department gets closed down if the Head of Department doesn't take this attitude in managing the department.
The reason for this is that universities get a fixed amount for teaching, but a variable top-up amount based on research impact. So they reckon teaching doesn't matter, because the research impact and the extra money it brings all serve to push universities up the league tables, and the higher up the league table you are, the better the students you will get will be anyway.
One of the consequences of this is that small departments doing useful service teaching but not producing large numbers of papers in the really top journals and conference face closure.
This seems to me to be the real reason for the threatened closure of this department, so it means to fight it properly you have to go further and fight against the perverse way the government manages university funding. I don't think government ministers themselves really understand what their funding mechanisms are doing.
In writing this, I'm not saying I'm opposed to research being done at universities, not even to them employing people who see their main job as research not teaching. All I'm saying is that the balance is currently wrong, and this unbalance in incentives is causing serious harm to university teaching.
Posted by: Matthew Huntbach | March 12, 2009 at 09:51 AM