1
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=414397
2
Interim Evaluation of the Higher Education Academy: A report to HEFCE, HEFCW, SFC, DELNI,
GuildHE and UUK by Oakleigh Consulting Ltd, section 1.5, (HEFCE, January 2008) and 1.6.4
The SCs are perceived as belonging to their subject communities: this sense of
ownership is vital to their success. And the reasons which underlie the extraordinary
success of the SCs also doom the HEA’s alternative proposal – to replace the SCs
by generic, York Academy based specialists – to failure. Lecturers have no
confidence in instruction in pedagogy from those who are not practitioners in their
own fields. Hence they will have no confidence in instruction provided directly – and
generically – from a centralised body such as the HEA.
4. Alternative Futures.
Many are asking how the HEA can have got it so wrong, disbanding the only element
both valued at home and emulated abroad in order to shore up a centralised
structure which is of limited credibility amongst staff in UK Higher Educational
Institutions. Yet there are many ways in which the Subject Centres, and the valuable
work that they do, might be saved: they might, for example, be funded through the
Academy, with a reduced role for the centre; or directly funded through HEFCE. The
HEA could regain a good deal of its credibility amongst ordinary academic staff by
listening to the many voices speaking out so loudly in support of the Subject Centres.
Whether or not the HEA chooses to do that, what is fundamental is that no other
bodies in the UK at the present time support teaching – and hence student learning –
as effectively and as efficiently as do the Subject Centres. At this juncture, where
what students get for the time and the money that they invest in their education is a
more pressing public concern than ever it has been before, it is imperative that the
HEA decision to disband the Subject Centres be reversed. Anything else, as a
signatory to the online petition on the subject put it, is an act of academic vandalism:
short-sighted, unimaginative, and grossly detrimental to the interests of university
teachers and their future students.