Should we bother with Arts?

What should Arts look like?

What role should Arts play within the University?

What role should Arts play within Australian society?

One reason to get back to basics with Arts is that, if current trends in the Arts budget continue, in a couple of years the University may commission a greenfield project to build an entirely new Faculty of Arts. At the beginning of Movember, Peter Garrett announced a plan to close down our Music Academy at the end of the year and replace it with an entirely new Music Institute. Despite the assurances of the Provost that the plan would cure the Academy of loneliness and could only improve things for students, Garrett is now under pressure from fellow Labor members to drop the plan.

In the view of the Melbourne Arts Commune, no amount of double-sided printing is going to fix the growing hole in the Arts budget. It may help the budget to reduce tutorial hours, reduce contact hours and increase teaching loads; it may help the budget to bring in a new round of involuntary redundancies; but all of the many cost-saving measures that have been proposed recently are unlikely to fix the crisis of crises that has engulfed Arts unless some integrity is introduced into the process of reform.

What’s integrity? How can integrity be converted into more familiar quantitative measures such as EFTSL or DEST points? We are not sure. For the time being, we prefer to talk about what integrity means in relation to things that are already quantified, such as the Arts budget.

To get the conversation started, the Commune supports the following propositions:

First Proposition, that we should bother with Arts;

Second Proposition, that Arts should be structured such as to promote intellectual and budgetary integrity in relation to how courses are taught, research is conducted and in how the different schools and divisions within the Faculty relate to each other;

Third Proposition, that Arts and General Science serve as the foundation of teaching and research within the University as a whole;

Fourth Proposition, that one important role that Arts plays within broader Australian society is to support primary and secondary learning, for if arts faculties are unexciting, then there is little chance that high school English or Soc classes will be fun.

Please share with us your thoughts on what Arts should be about, or introduce any interesting readings you have come across relating to any of the above propositions.