Arts restructure avoids staff cuts
By Shelly Simonds The Faculty of Arts has avoided forced redundancies under a restructuring plan unveiled last week by Faculty Dean, Professor Paul Thom. The avoidance of forced staff cuts was welcomed by both the National Tertiary Education Union and the ANU Students' Association and followed negotiations with four departments identified as needing to restructure. Under the new plan voluntary redundancies, fractionalised appoint- ments and secondments in those departments - Art History, History, Modern European Languages and Political Science - will provide savings of $575,000 this year. "While Arts still has to meet its savings target of $800,000 for 1999, these plans are a major advance," Professor Thom said. In addition to reductions in staff costs, the creation of a new revenue-generating Languages Institute and some changes to course offerings will produce the savings. The institute will provide full-fee academic language courses to business and government clients from outside the University. Dutch will be added to the curriculum as will several Asian languages. However, Professor Thom said the Faculty could not commit itself to funding Russian after this year because of serious declines in student enrolments. Students' Association president, Harry Greenwell, welcomed the introduction of Dutch at the Language Institute, but said students were still concerned about the number of lecturers who would be on secondment, or fractional appointments, next year. "Quite a few students have heard about the announcement and their general impression is that a large number of staff are still going away next year. So the same problems they were concerned about with courses not being offered and the tutorial size, the same old things, are going to continue to be problems. If you reduce staff, however you do it, you are necessarily going to see a lesser diversity of courses," he said. The NTEU's Peter Davidson welcomed the move away from redundancies. "But much of it is possible because of the self-sacrifice of many of the staff in Arts who have fallen on their own swords to save their colleagues," he said. Professor Thom said that the plan had been devised to allow the Faculty to continue contracts with some of its young academic staff. "These people are the future of the Faculty and it's vital that we make efforts to retain them." Prof Thom also announced that the Faculty of Arts would: · maintain teaching in threatened areas such as British and US History; · broaden teaching in the Art History Department's courses to include aspects of Film Studies and continue course majors in five of the six languages taught in the Faculty.