Robert, do we have the actual name for the Dean of Arts, as opposed to his email.  Am about to write on behalf of AGS. Best, Frank

 

 

Dear Colleagues

 

I’m grateful to Frank Shaw for his post yesterday, and for the numerous messages of dismay, support and advice that have reached the Department, privately and more publicly, since then. I know Anne is very grateful for the strength of support she is receiving from the profession.

 

The situation is this: Anne was informed on Tuesday that she was to be made redundant because the University had decided to disinvest in the Medieval/Early Modern area of our subject. As Subject Lead (but not Head of Department – we are run via a School) I was warned that the letter was to be sent very shortly beforehand. Anne told colleagues on Wednesday and students on Thursday.

 

Earlier in the year, colleagues in German were told  that one of their number was likely to be made redundant: this was in April , I think, but at any rate a couple of weeks after I had signed my contract accepting the chair in the Department. I was told later that day ‘as a matter of courtesy’ and assured that this decision had not been made until after I had accepted the post. We, the Department, had been expecting further consultations between then and the decision on which member of staff would be made redundancy but have not had any such consultations.  The announcement has thus been sudden and brutal, especially for Anne.

 

Colleagues have asked about the situation elsewhere in MFL in Bristol. As I understand it (and I have no proper historical perspective so can’t absolutely guarantee every detail), French will have reduced from 14 to 9 over 5 years, without redundancies but with one (I think) voluntary severance; Italian used to be 6 and is  now 5; Russian/Czech is 5 and HIPLA (Spanish and Portuguese) will lose one member of staff to redundancy in a process that is ongoing but not yet finalized. A Chair in Iberian and Latin American Studies is currently being advertised (http://www.bris.ac.uk/boris/jobs/feeds/ads?ID=90449) . There are to be redundancies and posts not filled in the other Schools of the Faculty but I don’t currently have full information on that.

 

German will reduce from the 6 full-time academic staff that we have been since I started on 1 September to 5 (not 4 as Frank suggested, although he is quite right to point out the much more drastic reductions that we, like many other Departments, have suffered over a longer period). We have 3 other full-time colleagues, a permanent language coordinator and 2 posts sponsored and supported (but not funded, I believe) by the DAAD and the Austrian Government.  We are fortunate in having the help of a number of other staff, mainly teaching language. And last but very much not least, we currently have a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow. I say all this because, whilst we are angry and disappointed about the cut, we are not suffering the kind of savagery that Swansea is facing and it would be wrong to put ourselves in that category.

 

That said, I don’t need to tell this forum how damaging it is to the profession and the discipline to lose the fields of Medieval and Early Modern German and how much of a blow it is for a Department with if not a unique range of areas of German Studies covered to a high level then at least an unusually large one.

 

Students have been quite extraordinarily eloquent and forceful in their support for Anne and in their defence of the Department, and we would very much welcome formal support for our resistance to this cut from colleagues, too. Messages on this matter should be sent, I think, to the Dean of Arts:

 

[log in to unmask]

or

Dean of the Faculty of Arts

3/5 Woodland Road
Clifton
Bristol
BS8 1TB

 

I shall collate all the responses, internal and external, so it would be helpful if colleagues could copy any messages to me, blind or open as you prefer. Please get in touch with me directly if you have any more questions.

 

With thanks again, and apologies for such a long posting,

 

Robert

 

Professor Robert Vilain, MA DPhil (Oxon)

German Department

School of Modern Languages

University of Bristol

21 Woodland Road

Bristol BS8 1TE

 

Tel: (0117) 928 8794

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/german/ 

 

 

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