Friday, October 02, 2020
Monash students fight to save Centre for Theatre and Performance
www.limelightmagazine.com.au: Students at Melbourne’s Monash University are fighting to save the universities’ Centre for Theatre and Performance, which has been slated to close at the end of the year. The university’s cuts, which Monash has attributed to “a shortfall in revenue caused by the COVID-19 pandemic”, will also affect musicology units.
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3 comments:
It is an absolute shame that the university is making this decision. It seems like a panicked reaction to the reduced income due to Covid. However, this decision will be devastating to the students currently enrolled and also to any possible future students. As the article pointed out, once the university chooses to remove the major altogether there will be next to no chance of it ever returning again. Even once they have returned to normal funding. It will be nearly impossible to build up the program again once it has been taken away to the extent that the university is planning on. It is a very good thing that the students are speaking up about this issue, and attempting to fight back agains this decision. They are standing up for so much more than just the return of the program. They are fighting to maintain the very important cultural impact that the theatre has on the community.
And so it begins. I read a report earlier in the pandemic that detailed the tenuous existence of a substantial portion of higher education institutions in the United States, and I anticipated that there would be a period of scrambling and cuts to try to save them from COVID-related demise. I assumed that the first targets would be the arts, because the powers that be tend to view art as expendable (see public school programs around the country). Although I am sure that there are departments with poorer income prospects for graduates, I can’t imagine that they cost as much to maintain. I would guess that Monash University’s arts program is not independently endowed, but its proponents describe it as a major fixture in the Australian theatre industry, so I could be wrong. In any case, I would really like it if the industry didn’t lose any more jobs, please.
I read the article title and was in disbelief. So I read the article. And I'm still in disbelief. Perhaps I was being blissfully ignorant but I had never thought academic institutions would stop fighting for their students like Monash is described to in this article. Every fact I read about loss of income and enrollment and insufficient work was reasonable, but together with the fact their solution was to close the program, I don't think I was able to fully comprehend that. We have been seeing universities finding places to cut costs left and right, and because of how academic and research institutions are built and financially set up, it is very hard for me to believe how gutting the students from an arts program will make a significant impact. The cause that the students, faculty, and alumni are fighting is important and I wish them the best in their battle against such devastating news.
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