Angry Music Students

Premier of NSW and Sydney University Senate to see Facing the Music

Special private screenings of a new feature-length documentary film about Sydney University have been arranged.

The government and the university senate is sitting up and taking notice.

Bob Carr wants to see the documentary and decide for himself.

The filmmakers, Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson are famous for their previous expose Rats in the Ranks and it has been said they could have used the same title again for this film.

Dedicated academic Professor Anne Boyd fights to maintain standards for her students while all about her other academics decide to do little or nothing to help and the dean of Arts, Bettina Cass, behaves like a bank manager not an academic.

The release of the film two weeks ago during the 2001 Sydney Film Festival coincided with ill-timed efforts by Sydney Conservatorium of Music (located near Circular Quay) to try and take over the university's Department of Music on the main campus in Camperdown/Darlington.

While the Conservatorium of Music has an enviable reputation as a music school which has been producing the cream of Sydney's performers for about 100 years, the Department of Music has an equally enviable academic record.

The take-over bid by the Conservatorium may have been an attempt to buy research expertise and academic clout for a pittance.

Sydney University has been starving the Music Department of funds for the past ten years and all pleas for replacement of academic staff however lost have fallen on deaf ears.

At the same time, the Conservatorium has recently had tens of millions of dollars of State funds lavished on a vast new building on a basically unsuitable historical site sitting astride the City Circle railway line.

The cost of sound- and vibration-proofing the new Conservatorium building from the noise of hundreds of trains rumbling past every day would have been enough to double the original size of the main campus Music Department and keep it running for decades.

The subtle but far-reaching conceptual differences between a university department and a conservatorium were not lost to a Chinese benefactor willing to pour millions into Sydney University Music Department last year.

In spite of this magnificent offer of foreign funding which would have seen SUMD strengthened and expanded, the Pro Vice Chancellor of Sydney University, Ros Pesman refused the money unless the Chinese benefactor agreed to fund the Conservatorium instead of the Music Department.

The offer was withdrawn from Sydney University and the University of New South Wales in Kensignton, Sydney is where it found a home.

Professor Pesman has refused to discuss her refusal of the offer, but in the light of the clear intention of the authorities to strangle the Music Department at the expense of the Conservatorium as revealed in Facing the Music, it appears she should be compelled to face up to her action publicly.

In particular, a public investigation should be asking the question: "Has the ten-year strangulation of the Music Department at Sydney University been intended as an easy way of closing it down and removing the academic pursuit of music from the Main Campus?"

Academic deplores University attitude
[full story follows this letter]

Music-loving citizens in New South Wales are horrified. The University of Sydney seems to be about to close its music departmental doors.

The plan to "merge" the department of music with the Sydney Conservatorium is driven by profit motives and ignores culture and art.

The Sydney Conservatorium has never been properly a part of the University. It was an ill-fated marriage brokered by the Labor Government during Dawkins' "let's turn everyone into a university".

The University has a student-run orchestra (SUSO) which gives frequent concerts in the Great Hall. The orchestra, while loosely associated with the Department of Music, draws on musicians in all faculties as performers and rehearses on-campus every week.

In contrast, there is no true orchestra at the Conservatorium and what orchestra there is has three rehearsals only each year.

Community groups as well as Music Department students and staff work with and perform on the two gamelans (Indonesian percussion orchestras) which have a permanent home on the main campus of Sydney University. This valuable cross-cultural musical synergy has no hope of continuing at the Conservatorium.

The Renaissance Players, a semi-professional medieval music group, is housed within the Department of Music. Those planning the "merger" have not taken the future of the Renaissance Players into account.

There are three prime-movers instigating this ridiculous "merger" plan: Sharman Pretty who runs the Conservatorium; the Dean of Arts at the University, Stephen Garton; and the Pro-Vice-Chancellor Ros Pesman.

These three have been masterminding a secret campaign to rush the merger through before 2 June 2001, a date which has passed already

Garton, the Dean, has told students that there would have been consultation had they not got wind of the merger and started protesting. This is blatant nonsense and Garton is not prepared to answer questions about what sounds more like a threat than common sense.

Conservatorium head, Pretty, claims that she threw the whole idea together on about 19 May this year and presented it to the Dean, the Pro-Vice-Chancellor and the Music Department at about the same time. It seems inconceivable, but the Dean and PVC apparently immediately backed the scheme and seem intent on going ahead without taking any notice of the wishes of staff and students.

It ought to be impossible for a major University in Australia to allege that students are being punished for finding out a secret plan. Yet that is exactly what seems to be happening.

For years Professor Anne Boyd has been teaching three to four times the reccommended maximum academic teaching load in order that music students in her department (she holds the Chair) not suffer.

For years the Faculty of Arts has been prepared to admit far more music students than could reasonably be taught properly by the available staff.

A new film Facing the Music tells the heroic story of Professor Anne Boyd's fight to maintain academic standards while the economic-rationalist university hierarchy cries poor and starves arts of funding. (Sydney University is the second-richest after University of Western Australia and at the ned of the last financial year had cash reserves in excess of $100m.)

Facing the Music was first screened at the Sydney Film Festival and will be screening publicly in early July.

The film graphically shows the starving Music Department and contrasts lecturers devoted to their students and prepared to carry an excessive academic load with others who are content to teach the standard load and let the wheels of rationalist destruction attempt to destroy the department.

The Department of Music at Sydney University (SUMD) is not dead yet and has a startlingly impressive list of alumni.

The Conservatiorium of Music has a long and illustrious history. It is both a high school and a teritary institution, but it is not structured like a university.

Students currently have the opportunity of choosing between the dedicated music-school atmosphere of the Con and the broad acadmic culture of SUMD.

If this merger is allowed to take place then the numerically smaller SUMD will lose its unique character and strong main campus links with arts, engineering, science and other faculties and their students.

The following email dated 16 June 2001 typifies the attitudes of SUMD students and explains why the Con is not for everyone.