Ziggy et al.

You know what? Passwords are a pain in the bum. Especially the long string of random characters that the password reset function gives me when it’s been too long since I’ve logged in and I’ve consequently forgotten my last password.

This may be a sign that I need to log in and post more often.

Anyway, all is well. As of last Thursday, I am no longer the President of the Music Students’ Society, or indeed the anything of the Music Students’ Society, and as of yesterday, I have completely handed over all forms of power, responsibility, and stress to my former Vice-President, now President proper, and his absolutely wonderful-looking new committee, having celebrated my new layperson status with a glass of wine on a boat at Music Cruise.

Nevertheless, I feel compelled to comment on the result of the Ziggy Switkowski Review of the future of the arts training at Melbourne (accessible from http://vcam.unimelb.edu.au/discussion/ as of two days ago), seeing as how I nearly failed my Evidence and Proof take-home exam to write the MSS submission to it. For those who haven’t been following at home, the basic gist of the document is that they will go ahead with the somewhat awkwardly merged entity called VCAM, but that they will run two autonomous divisions – Music and Everybody Else (called ‘Melbourne Arts’ in the paper) – and delay the introduction of the Melbourne Model for Everybody Else (Music has already been absorbed into the Melbourne Model, for the former Faculty of Music as of 2008, and for the former VCA School of Music as of early 2010).

I’m not really sure what to make of this finding. On the one hand, I think it’s great that they’ve heeded the pretty much unanimous Music staff call for budgetary and curriculum independence from VCAM, and the relatively strong Music student support to similar effect. And I also think it’s a good thing that they don’t want to introduce the Melbourne Model to Everybody Else yet, because aside from the obvious problem that it is totally at odds with the way the VCA works, I think the timeline they set to push through changes in Music was a major mistake and had some pretty disastrous side effects (including a transition period that was so rushed that pretty much every timetable that students need to function ran behind schedule and a distinct lack of communication of some absolutely crucial information like changes to support staff at the beginning of the year). I’m also quite pleased that there’s acknowledgement of the fact that 1) a long transition period is necessary to do any curriculum change well, and 2) that the name VCAM sucks.

On the other hand, I am pretty disappointed that the report answers so few questions. It’s really one big call for further examination of, among other things, whether the university/government/external donors want to keep funding it, how the curriculum will be designed, and how we will get new facilities, all of which basically says nothing. It makes neither bold statements nor forms the basis for any kind of action plan, other than one that calls for more reviews. I worry that it will basically be taken as an endorsement of the status quo, but with separated accounting for Music.

I’m also ambivalent about this convoluted structure of one faculty, split into two divisions, one of which contains three further schools. It’s miles better than VCAM, but given that the current university decision-making structure puts most of the power at the Faculty level, I would have preferred two Faculties, because I think that much of this merger has been badly handled because the people with the power are no longer the people who are close to the students.

In non-music related news, we lost in the International Humanitarian Moot quarter-finals. As far as losses go, though, it was a pretty great way to end a season – a nailbitingly close match with a seriously tough opponent and some very positive judge feedback for both teams. Also, I’m starting to get some lovely new books for the MJIL book reviews section. It’s great being a book review editor; I have this little library full of free copies of the latest titles from the Oxford University Press in my pigeonhole at the Journal. And my new research assistant job is going pretty well too, being both intellectually satisfying and really well paid.

On the study front, not much is happening. Every time I think of doing my Corporations Law reading, I instead go check the websites of small medieval towns in France and Switzerland that I can visit during the free days of my winter subject in Geneva. Oh well.