Letter and powerful Testimonial sent to Goldsmiths Senior Management Team from former Sociology Department academics
Dear Frances Corner,
Senior Management Team,
Dinah Caine and members of Council,
As academics who have benefitted from the work of the Administrative Staff in the Department of Sociology, as former teachers and researchers there, we are writing to express serious concerns about your proposals to centralise administration at Goldsmiths. As you are surely aware, centralisation of administration at other institutions has had lamentable effects on student experience – and student evaluations and league tables. We know the Administrative Staff in the Department of Sociology to be exceptionally well-organised, hard-working and dedicated, and they have a wealth of institutional knowledge that is invaluable to students and staff alike. Student evaluations, and our own experience, suggest that it is the Administrative Staff in the Department at Goldsmiths that make things work, while Central services are very often problematic: unsurprisingly in a situation of rapidly changing government policy and the complexity of student recruitment, league tables, how to address the BAME attainment gap – the list of challenges for universities is long, and they cannot be met without administration that works closely with academics.
We urge you to reconsider this proposal to restructure Departmental Administration at Goldsmiths, which currently has such an excellent reputation, to appreciate and to support the staff now threatened with redundancy. We know that the quality of teaching and research in the Department of Sociology will suffer if these plans are put in place, and we urge you to reconsider before irreparable damage is done.
Yours sincerely,
Associate Professor Suki Ali (Sociology, London School of Economics)
Professor Andrew Barry (Geography, UCL)
Professor Michaela Benson (Sociology, Lancaster University)
Professor Alice Bloch (Sociology, University of Manchester)
Professor Roger Burrows (Emeritus Professor of Cities & Society, Newcastle University & Chair of Global Inequalities, University of Bristol, 2022)
Professor Paul Gilroy (Professor of Humanities, UCL)
Professor Yasmin Gunaratnam (Centre for Public Policy Research, Kings College, London)
Professor Michael Keith (Professorial Fellow, Merton College, University of Oxford)
Dr Monika Krause (Sociology, LSE)
Professor Celia Lury (Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences & Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick)
Professor Noortje Marres (Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick)
Professor Mike Michael (Anthropology and Sociology, University of Exeter)
Professor Nikolas Rose (Distinguished Honorary Professor, Research School of Social Sciences and School of Sociology, Australian National University & Honorary Professor, Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London)
Professor Vic Seidler (Emeritus, Sociology, Goldsmiths)
Professor David Silverman (Emeritus, Sociology, Goldsmiths)
Professor AbdouMaliq Simone (Senior Professorial Fellow at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield)
Professor Bev Skeggs (Sociology, Lancaster University)
Associate Professor Don Slater (Sociology, London School of Economics)
Professor Fran Tonkiss (Sociology, LSE)
Testimonial
Professor Nick Rose (HoD of Sociology, 1990s):
[Y]ou may not know… but when I arrived at Goldsmiths, the administration was very centralised and Departments were basically run by the then ‘secretary and head of administration’, whose name, if I remember, was Mary Barry. I, together with a number of other Heads, staged a long, difficult but ultimately successful campaign to devolve administrative responsibilities, and many other powers then held at the Centre, down to the Departments, and in my view, much of Goldsmiths’ success has been based on the relative autonomy of Departments to pursue their own strategies within an overall set of goals for the College. This now seems to be a move back to the bad old days, and as your letter says, in other institutions it has proved to have many undesirable effects. In fact, the same happened, in a more limited way, at the end of my time as HoD at KCL, where I waged a lonely and unsuccessful battle against it! There were no immediate redundancies, but our professional services colleagues were all grouped together at faculty level, and worked in a kind of call centre set-up and only the fact that we had built personal relations with key people enabled it to work for GHSM. Anyhow, enough, please add my name to your letter.
