Regressive decision by Dean cuts centre for community & socially-engaged arts
Last week Parkville Station revealed that the Vice-Chancellor’s salary is $1.11million a year — no wonder the University can’t afford to keep a world leading centre for community and socially-engaged arts. Three weeks ago, in a regressive move, VCA-MCM Dean Barry Conyngham announced his decision to close the Centre for Cultural Partnerships (CCP) – Australia’s only centre for research and training in community and socially engaged arts. The Dean appears to have missed the VC’s memo that research and training in ‘engagement and partnerships with community’ are the central pillars of the University’s vision. Or maybe the name of the centre isn’t clear enough? The closure of the CCP is the cultural equivalent of getting rid of gene research in medicine – research and education that functions at the forefront of new knowledge, addresses social issues and promotes “real world” collaborations. If ‘Education is an act of faith in the future,’ according to the VC’s vision, then why is the University making this regressive decision?
It seems no one really knows why the CCP is being closed, not even the Dean. Initially he informed students (by email), that it wasn’t a question of economics but relevance to the VCA-MCM’s vision, but then changed his mind (in a follow up email). Actually it is about economics after all! Other than failing to engage in effective communications and other breaches of University of Melbourne protocols, the reasons for the closure and the ramifications of what is at risk of being lost have not been transparent or well thought through. Or maybe they’ve been conveniently ignored. It seems facts are not a strength in the University’s thin arguments.
Embarrassingly for the Dean he misquoted the number of students at the CCP in an article in The Age last week – there are in fact 23 PhDs, 12 MFAs, 43 Masters by coursework, and 30 Graduate Certificates – all of whom work in inter-disciplinary research practices and training. Since its beginning in 2005, the CCP has graduated hundreds of exceptional postgraduate students and housed largescale funded research in areas such as multicultural arts, disability arts, urban planning and cultural policy with many partners in the sector. It is this industry that recognises the significance of closing the CCP, as the near 2000 signatures on the Save CCP campaign indicate. They are not alone. The Tate Modern’s page on Socially Engaged Practices recognise it as a legitimate contemporary art practice that ‘includes any artform which involves people and communities in debate, collaboration or social interaction,’ with a set of powerful ethics behind it. This is not an area for dabblers but serious practitioners and thinkers, such as Oreet Ashery, Ai Wei-Wei, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Miwon Kwon, Suzanne Lacy, Claire Bishop, even Banksy all who challenge, rethink and imagine the social, environmental and the artistic.
A positive symptom of this cultural shift is an international move by many universities to prioritise community arts and socially engaged practice, demonstrating the value and relevance of this as an academic field of research: Middlesex University, University of London, Manchester Metropolitan University, University of Wolverhampton, National College of Art and Design (Dublin), New York University, Arizona State University, University of Jyväskylä (Finland) to name but a few. In the meantime Australian universities axe and pillage their arts departments – a symptom of ignorance and misunderstanding about the frontiers of arts and social research. Whilst forward thinking universities have developed a strong institutional foundation that validates community arts and socially engaged practice creating international recognition, how is the University of Melbourne competing? It isn’t. It is cutting.
Find out more at the SaveCCP website: www.saveccp.org.au.