Arts editor HELEN MUSA despairs that the ANU’s unpopular organisational changes are not primarily an attack on the Schools of Music and Art and Design, but on the very basis of the ANU as Australia’s national university.

The present leadership crisis prompted by the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, Organisational Change Proposal, has led to a febrile flurry of public comment.

That atmosphere has been worsened by the university’s low level of consultation and now, at the 11th hour, the date for responses to the paper and a similar one relating to the College of Science and Medicine, has been extended from July 24 to August 7.

The 82-page document (depending on which appendices you’re reading) is NOT primarily an attack on the Schools of Music and Art and Design, but on the very basis of the ANU as Australia’s national university.

The document details how cuts would be achieved by “disestablishment” (axing) of 52 jobs, some by voluntary separations or attrition, the fond hope that people might retire or die.

CASS is not the only target of Renew ANU, a series of changes begun in October, but several key institutions have been targeted, which will cut the ANU off at its intellectual knees.

A slash-and-burn operation

In a slash-and-burn operation designed to save $250 million across the university, The Humanities Research Centre, The Centre of European Studies and The National Dictionary Centre will go. The National Centre for Biography, which maintains the Australian Dictionary of Biography will be downsized.

The CASS document, full of double-speak and weasel words like, “it is proposed that the college architecture and nomenclature be streamlined”, is also packed with repetitive disclaimers, so that proposed cuts are prefaced with disingenuous praise for the targeted area of study, followed by the word, “however”.

But literacy is not dead, and among the many public responses there have been eloquent defences, including one by former ANU chancellor Gareth Evans of the national research centres, and another by academic historian Frank Bongiorno of his own discipline, history.

As for the aforementioned School of Music and School of Art & Design, along with the Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies, they are slated to become programs or departments within the larger School of Creative and Cultural Practice.

The most radical proposal

In many years of covering the arts in Canberra, this is the third serious eruption in that area, after with the defunding of the schools by Kate Carnell’s government in 1988, the sackings and restructurings in 2012-2013 under former vice-chancellor Ian Young and now this, the most radical proposal.

On every occasion, staff at both the schools seemed unprepared, despite years of warning. On every occasion, it was the music community who came out loud and strong in protest, the artists remaining tight-lipped.

All along, there’s been a sense that the ANU nurtures a highbrow distaste for the conservatory and atelier models of the two schools.

The proposal spells it out when it speaks of a “transition from a conservatoire style model to a School of Music embedded within a research-intensive university” and asserts that performance, composition, theory, and musicology “do not align with the future shape of the school’s offerings”.

But the proposal breathlessly predicts a bright future for music production and technology, indigenous music in a contemporary context, and Music and Wellbeing.

As for the School of Art and Design, the Foundation Studies course, where first year undergraduates used to learn skills like drawing will go, along with a position in the school’s Environment Studio, which will be reimagined and expanded.

The fate of both practical art and music studies looks murky, raising questions aobut where such studies should next go – to CIT? A private school?

What will happen to Llewellyn Hall?

And what will happen to Llewellyn Hall, transferred to the university when, in the wake of the Dawkins reforms to Australian higher education in the late ’80s and ’90s, the ANU accepted music and art studies under the name of the ANU Institute of the Arts, not in a casual agreement, but in the federally-legislated 1991 Australian National University Act, never rescinded.

Section 5 of that Act specifies that functions of the university include “providing facilities and courses for higher education generally, and other levels in the visual and performing arts, and in doing so promoting the highest standards of practice in those fields”.

The same section specifies that the university “must pay attention to its national and international roles and to the needs of the Australian Capital Territory and surrounding regions.”

As the vision splendid of a truly national university fades into the sunset, what if anything do the authors of the university’s new proposal have to say about that?

Helen Musa has been a cultural journalist in Canberra for 35 years. She is an ANU graduate in Asian Studies and a long-time contributor to the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

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