Arts Forum and the Press

This afternoon the University of Melbourne Student Union and University of Melbourne Postgraduate Association held a forum regarding renewed cuts to the Faculty of Arts. Dean of Arts, Professor Mark Considine was in attendance to answer the questions of undergraduates, postgraduates and many tutors.

Some highlights:
1. Voluntary redundancies - increasing workloads, stressing out staff and making working conditions inhospitable surely make getting rid of people easier.
2. Several casual postgraduate students and tutors related their experiences of not receiving proper training or pay.
3. One student asked if this wasn't violating the university's contract to provide the degree she was enrolled in.

At the beginning of the forum, Considine made a remark about the forum being in-house. This lead to an Age journalist being asked to leave. This shows how eager the university is to control its image and its lack of commitment to transparency. The general public is a stakeholder in the university, which is partly government funded:

1.9 [The university] is accountable to the wider community, particularly in Melbourne and Victoria, but also nationally and internationally, for advancing the economic, social, educational and cultural welfare of society.

The public clearly has the right to know about what goes in the University of Melbourne and its Faculty of Arts, yet this makes it quite clear that Arts and the broader university have no such intention of doing this.

In a similar way, it is accountable to its current students:

1.7 To its current students, the University must account for its responsibility to provide a rich teaching, leaning and research training environment in which support services and infrastructure are of the highest possible quality.

So if the Faculty of Arts is happy to ignore its responsibility to account to the wider public, how can students trust that it is upholding its responsibility to account to students?