Tuesday, 23 January 2007. A Discussion was held in the Senate-House. Deputy Vice-Chancellor Lord Wilson of Tillyorn was presiding, with the Senior Proctor, the Junior Proctor, two Pro-Proctors, the Registrary, and 72 other persons present.
The following Report was discussed:
Report of the General Board, dated 6 December 2006, on the restructuring of the Faculty of Oriental Studies (p. 314).
Professor M. C. MCKENDRICK (read by Professor R. L. HUNTER):
Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, in October 2004 the General Board, at the request of the Council of the School of Arts and Humanities, set in train a Full Review of the Faculty of Oriental Studies. This Report is the outcome of recommendations made after extensive consultation by the Review Committee, which included three external members, and of discussions that then took place over the ensuing eighteen months between the Faculty and the Advisory Group appointed by the General Board to oversee the implementation of the Report's recommendations. I chaired both the Review Committee and the Advisory Group.
The Review Committee's terms of reference included the organization, management, and administration of the Faculty, the identification of its core activities, its arrangements for teaching, learning, and assessment, and the future development of its work.
The Committee's report acknowledged that the Faculty has a distinguished reputation and includes many renowned scholars working in fields where provision elsewhere in the UK has been severely eroded. It also acknowledged that it offers educational provision of a kind not available in most UK universities, and makes a very important contribution to the study of major non-European cultures. At the same time, however, the Review Committee identified areas of significant concern and came to the conclusion that, if the Faculty were to continue to thrive and enhance its contribution both to the University and to the wider world, various issues would have to be addressed. The four major issues to be tackled in determining the Faculty's future prosperity and long-term direction were, in the Committee's view, the Faculty's governance arrangements, the structure and content of the Tripos, the future of the minority subjects, and the Faculty's engagement with contemporary issues within the regions covered by the Faculty. The Committee's recommendations on these and other issues are reflected in the General Board's Report.
Conscious of the fact that its recommendations represented a very challenging agenda for the Faculty, the Review Committee also recommended to the General Board that an Advisory Group be established to work with the Chair of the Faculty Board in the implementation of the Committee's recommendations. For the Faculty the review process has involved not only a huge amount of work but a radical rethink of its educational and administrative operation, and both the Review Committee and the Advisory Group have greatly appreciated the constructive spirit in which the Faculty and its officers have engaged with the issues.
The Faculty Board has already made significant progress in regard to many aspects of the reorganization of the Faculty and its educational programme, including most notably departmentalization, the creation of a Standing Committee on Academic Vacancies to facilitate strategic planning, and a draft East Asian and Middle Eastern Tripos. These plans have received the preliminary approval of the General Board and the Faculty is to be warmly congratulated on what has been achieved so far in difficult circumstances.
Two other areas have caused particular anxiety in the context of the division of the Faculty - which until now has had six sections - into two Departments: the Department of East Asian Studies and the Department of Middle Eastern Studies. These two areas are the future of South Asian Studies, where undergraduate numbers in the Faculty have been particularly small, and the proposed relocation of Ancient Near East Studies.
The Advisory Group felt that while there was great potential for development in South Asian Studies, particularly at graduate level and including language studies, their future within the Faculty should not be considered independently of provision for South Asian Studies across the University as a whole, and it advised the General Board accordingly. The recommendations of the separate Advisory Group set up to consider this wider picture, chaired by Dr Pretty, are included in the Report, and others will, I know, wish to speak to them.
As for Ancient Near East Studies (ANE), the Review Committee itself raised the possibility that, in view of the already close relationship between the two disciplines, the logical home for ANE might be the Department of Archaeology. The Advisory Group has spent a considerable amount of time exploring this option and is convinced that Ancient Near East Studies could flourish in that new context. The Department of Archaeology has produced course proposals both for integrating ANE teaching into the Archaeology and Anthropology Tripos and for extending M.Phil. provision. Ancient Near East options will still be available to undergraduates in the Faculty of East Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. These proposals have been broadly welcomed by the ANE Teaching Officers, and a constructive discussion between the Officers and the Advisory Group has now led to the formulation of provisions, fully set out in the Report, to safeguard the future of ANE language-based teaching throughout the Archaeology and Anthropology Tripos. The Group considered very carefully indeed the question of whether all four ANE Officers should be reassigned to the Department of Archaeology, and came to the conclusion that the concentration of all ANE studies within the Department of Archaeology would not only provide cohesiveness and a clear pathway for the subjects concerned but would offer the best guarantee for the impact and success of ANE in the long run.
Because the Faculty is complex and the changes recommended were far-reaching the Review process has inevitably been a protracted one, and there is still work to be done. I am confident, however, that if the proposals are implemented, the Faculty of East Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Ancient Near East Studies, and South Asian Studies will all have a strong and successful future to look forward to. That is certainly the aim of this Report.
Sir RICHARD DEARLOVE (read by Professor P. F. KORNICKI):
As a relative newcomer to the University, but one with significant experience of foreign affairs, I have been disappointed by the General Board's Report on the restructuring of the Faculty of Oriental Studies. The Report does not consider the importance of Oriental Studies (both ancient and modern) in relation to the way in which the international situation is evolving, and is likely to evolve over at least the next twenty years or so.
The Report itself is logical and considered, but in a very limited way. It is most striking for its omissions. It lacks a broad vision of the future importance and relevance of the Faculty. It also fails to address the question of future resources for the Faculty. Does the importance of the regions covered by the Faculty justify the University making a sustained effort to increase the funding available to it? If not, how will the University face up to the implications of a lack of funding for Oriental Studies? The Report gives no answers.
As we look ahead, the regions, cultures, and languages that make up Oriental Studies have probably never been more relevant globally, never been more important to the national interest, nor to Europe's. During the 19th and 20th centuries the UK, and Cambridge in particular, built a formidable reputation for producing oriental scholars who were also outstanding linguists and cultural experts. They played an influential role as policy advisers in and across the whole region. Surely it is the moment for the University to aspire to re-invigorate this tradition (particularly the teaching of the languages as a means to understanding the culture). The demand for profound regional expertise and understanding is high, and rising; the demand to teach both undergraduates and graduates will also rise.
The authors of the Report will, I am sure, claim that their recommendations are designed to assist the reorganized Faculty to meet these challenges. However, the impact of the Report on the Faculty to date has been to demoralize it thoroughly. I conclude that a Report which has this impact has either ignored or failed to recognize or react to the wider context in which the future of the Oriental Faculty views itself and should be viewed. Academic comparisons are invidious, particularly between Arts and Science, but I do not believe that oriental scholarship is currently any less important in a beneficial sense to the future of the international community than, let us say, certain highly funded areas of new scientific research. Cambridge aspires to pre-eminence amongst the world's top universities - a vibrant, inspired, and growing Oriental Faculty (or whatever name or names the General Board chooses to give it) is an essential part, in today's and tomorrow's world, of Cambridge's reputation and academic endeavours. The Report leaves me with the impression that the General Board is far from sure about this and has missed an important opportunity to make a confident statement of intention about the Oriental Faculty's future.
Professor P. F. KORNICKI:
Many people will be wondering why two Discussions on Oriental Studies are scheduled to take place on the same day. On 6 November, a group of us in the Faculty, feeling that it was long overdue for the Regent House to be informed about what has been going on, decided to call for a Discussion on a topic of concern and asked that it take place as soon as possible, in other words during the Michaelmas Term. It is unfortunate that the Discussion was not called for 5 December but postponed until today; how did that happen? I received a letter on 21 November informing me that there was insufficient time to alert members of the Regent House to a Discussion on 5 December, but in fact the very next day the Reporter of 22 November announced two new topics for discussion on, yes, 5 December. So why not the topic of concern? I think the usual word for this is 'stalling'. The result is that we have two parallel Discussions. In this Discussion I shall address myself to the published Report alone.
After a process that has lasted three years, and a bruising and demoralizing process it has been, the General Board's Report on the Faculty of Oriental Studies has finally been published. Time to rejoice and move on? Not really, because its recommendations make puzzling reading. All four of them relate to the name of the Faculty and its proposed Departments and to the consequences of these changes for Statutes and Ordinances. As such they seem at first sight unexceptionable. What is important, however, is not what the recommendations say so much as what they omit to say. They do not say that South Asian Studies and the study of the ancient Near East will no longer have a place in the Faculty, but that is what they imply by creating just two new Departments of Middle Eastern Studies and East Asian Studies, leaving no room for the ancient Near East or for South Asia. So although the body of the Report before us does indeed explain what is to be the fate of South Asian Studies and the study of the ancient Near East, the recommendations adroitly avoid any mention of these major alterations to the structure of the Faculty and thus deprive the Regent House of a chance to vote upon them one way or another. This is legislation by obfuscation, and the Regent House should be aware just what the consequences are of approving these seemingly harmless recommendations.
It is astonishing that it has taken so long to produce a Report that says so little; not much to show for a process that has taken nearly three years. I will talk about the process itself in the other Discussion, but here I want to address the thin insufficiency of the Report itself. One of the two incidental consequences of approving this Report will be a drastic curtailment of South Asian Studies in the University at precisely the time when most people outside the city boundaries are aware of the rising importance of South Asia, and particularly India, in the global economy and in international relations. Few members of the Regent House will be aware that, as early as 7 July last year, a member of the Advisory Group entrusted with the task of overseeing the Faculty told the Senior Tutors' Committee that no further students were to be admitted to read South Asian Studies; this was in spite of the fact that no decision had yet been taken about the future of South Asian Studies in the University and in spite of the fact that the admissions prospectus still advertised the availability of this course of study. The same person told the Times Higher Educational Supplement that South Asian Studies were to be discontinued. What authority was there for such steps to be taken? None whatsoever, of course. And yet the General Board Report published on 10 January 2007 states that the 'Board have further agreed … that the South Asian Studies papers in the Oriental Studies Tripos be rescinded, and no further students be admitted'. Let me remind the Regent House, however, that even now no recommendation or Grace has been brought forward to rescind the South Asian Studies papers contained in Statutes and Ordinances. Should we say that the Advisory Group adopted a rather cavalier approach to normal procedures, or should we be frank and say that they clearly acted ultra vires?
If this Report is ultimately approved in the form of a Grace, the Faculty will be left with one Reader in Sanskrit and one Language Teaching Officer in Hindi, both languishing outside the new departmental structure, and two vacant positions will not be filled; the two survivors will be unrepresented on the Faculty's Standing Committee on Academic Vacancies and reduced to the role of a rump, so who would place any bets on those jobs surviving beyond the tenure of the incumbents? Presumably they will fulfil service roles for the rest of their careers, for nobody can seriously imagine that teaching in and using South Asian languages could be carried out by one Reader in Sanskrit and one Language Teaching Officer in Hindi alone. If the Board have no conviction of the importance of the study of South Asia using South Asian languages, let them have the courage of their convictions and produce, for the Regent House to vote on, a recommendation that the two remaining members of staff be made redundant, being surplus to requirements.
The Report does, it is true, envisage concentrating South Asian Studies in the Centre of South Asian Studies in the future and to that end the two vacant posts in Indian history have been transferred to the Faculty of History and have recently been advertised. That much is good. But irrespective of where South Asian Studies are to be based in the future, it is undeniable that acceptance of this Report will lead to a substantial reduction in the number of posts in the University devoted to South Asia. As a result the University will, I fear, find itself ill-equipped in the future to prepare students for a world in which India and China loom much larger in our consciousness than they do now. 'South Asian Studies have a very important role to play in the University', the Report claims, but it shamefully fails to address with any conviction the future of South Asian Studies in the University and avoids presenting the Regent House with anything to vote on.
The Report under consideration today tries to present itself as the logical outcome of the Review Committee's Report. This may seem obvious and uncontroversial to most members of the Regent House; after all, very few of them have seen the Review Committee's Report, for it has not been published. The General Board Report is not, however, the logical outcome of the Review Report. This is obvious from the following sentence in which the Board, rather unwisely, quote from the Review Report: 'the Review committee strongly recommends that two Departments, of Middle Eastern and Asian Studies, be formally established, each with a Head of Department, and that the Faculty be retitled accordingly.' Note the word 'Asian', not 'East Asian', here: the Review Committee, which included the distinguished South Asianist, Professor Christopher Shackle, FBA, was quite clearly recommending not the exclusion of South Asian Studies from the Faculty but its inclusion in one of the two Departments, a Department of Asian Studies. The recommendation before us today, that Departments of Middle Eastern and East Asian studies be created, is transparently not an outcome of the review.
I turn now to paragraph 13 of the Report under discussion, which concludes as follows: 'The General Board are confident that the proposals, if implemented, will give the Faculty a sustainable basis for future development and for responding to the challenging recommendations set down in the Report of the Review Committee. These recommendations will need to be pursued with vigour by both the Faculty Board and the Heads of the newly constituted Departments.' One presumes that the recommendations being referred to here are the ones quoted in paragraph 7: 'A review of both the structure and the content of the Tripos is essential, in terms of rationalising provision, making the Tripos more accessible to students taking other Triposes, reviewing the heavy emphasis on language learning, and addressing the need to introduce more thematic and more contemporary papers.' Everyone agrees that the structure and content of the Tripos need reforming, but the impression given by this sentence, that the Faculty's teaching and research is overwhelmingly focused on the pre-modern world, is false, and is in any case a bit rich coming from an Advisory Group consisting of specialists in Verdi's operas, ancient Greek literature, the Spanish Golden Age, and archaeology. Had the Advisory Group contained one member, say, from Social and Political Sciences, then they might have arrived at a clearer judgment of the balance between contemporary and historical subjects offered to our students. Then there is the implication in the sentences I have just quoted that the emphasis on language learning should be reduced: this is not exactly in tune, is it, with the Dearing Review into language learning, which is seeking remedies for the decline of language learning in Britain. As one of my colleagues wrote to me: finding this in the 'General Board report of a top university in a country where languages are no longer required at GCSE level is deplorable'. It may well be the case that 'the Faculty's emphasis on language acquisition … will make closer relationships with certain other institutions difficult', as the report of the Review Committee put it (paragraph 14.2), but why is the Faculty of Oriental Studies being made to carry all the blame here? It would be equally true to say that the neglect of language competence in other parts of the University is just as much to blame: in what parts of the University, apart from Modern and Medieval Languages, Oriental Studies, Classics and, exceptionally, Divinity and Engineering, is language study even an option? 'Languages lite' is surely not the way forward, and far from pursuing this recommendation with vigour, it ought in fact to be resisted with vigour.
In the embryo Department of East Asian Studies we are keen to move forward and to work together to bring a more regional focus to our undergraduate and postgraduate teaching. This will mean a revision of the current Tripos offerings, and I welcome the prospect of renewal and change at the same time as regretting that the Tripos system as it works in the humanities makes cross-fertilization between Departments so difficult to achieve. We shall continue, however, to give our students the linguistic tools they need in order to function in the societies they are studying and to use appropriate sources for their studies, whether their interests lie in the social sciences or in the humanities. As many others will doubtless emphasize today, it is a fact of life that Japanese, Chinese, and Korean are time-consuming and demanding languages to master, but without the competence we aim to equip them with our students would find that a Cambridge degree in Chinese, for example, would enjoy little credibility in the outside world. This is the quality that we can assure our students and their future employers we will continue to furnish to the best of our abilities. Let me note in passing that, in terms of both the historical past and the contemporary world, the study of Korea is indispensable to the study of East Asia; this is a point of view that the Advisory Group was not exactly sympathetic to, but I am happy to be able to announce today that the Korea Foundation has generously provided the funds to make this possible with a post based in one of the Colleges.
Deputy Vice-Chancellor, I have long been in favour of a change in the Faculty's name and I am not opposed to the establishment of Departments, but this Report is disingenuous in its recommendations and I therefore oppose it. What is needed is not a handful of structural recommendations but a comprehensive examination of the place in the University of teaching and research concerning huge regions of the world where, inconveniently enough, languages other than English are written and spoken. Let me quote from the Report:
'In the Faculty's words 'the current world situation, dominated by events in the Middle East, the continued growth and importance of the East Asian economies, and the increased prominence of South Asia, make this a particularly appropriate time to be reviewing the role of the Faculty…'. The Faculty saw the Review as an opportunity to set out its academic role within both the University and a national context.'
We did indeed, but this Report does not begin to address such issues.
The Review of the Faculty of Oriental Studies and its aftermath have laid bare the Eurocentric short-sightedness of the Advisory Group and are not worthy of a university that seeks to take the rest of the world seriously; the University's reputation as a place of learning of global distinction is at stake here, and what is being proposed is hardly going to enhance that. While the study of Asia, the Middle East, and Africa grows and develops apace at Oxford, Manchester, and elsewhere, Cambridge cuts back: is that really what we want the headlines to say? There is, I submit, an urgent need for a comprehensive rethink and this incompetent and damaging Report should be kicked back where it belongs, in the waste bin of the School of Arts and Humanities.
Professor H. VAN DE VEN:
Deputy Vice-Chancellor, the General Board Report on the Restructuring of the Faculty of Oriental Studies is the product of more than three years of difficult work. The recommendations it makes are (1) that the Faculty be divided into two Departments, one for East Asian and one for Middle Eastern Studies and (2) that the Faculty's posts devoted to the Ancient Near East be transferred to the Department of Archaeology.
I have been the Chair of the Faculty Board since last October, and I am partly speaking as the current holder of that post, with concern not just for my own subject - Chinese Studies - but for all other ones in the Faculty as well. From various discussions with colleagues, my strong impression is that most of them support departmentalization. Broad agreement also exists on the future shape of the Tripos and the internal restructuring of the Faculty's governance arrangements. While I and most colleagues continue to believe that joint posts with the Department of Archaeology would be a better solution for our Ancient Near East post, the conditions set out in the Report provide strong guarantees for the future of the subject. I expect that they will be accepted in that light. The Faculty is keen to move forward now, in part because the review process has taken so long, and has been so difficult. I believe that the changes to the Faculty's teaching programme that have been worked out and a number of new and imminent appointments provide a good foundation for the future flourishing of the Faculty, at least of its East Asian and Middle Eastern components.
Many people who are not conversant with what has gone on in the Faculty over the past few years might well see the Report as proposing a few minor and rather uncontroversial measures. Since becoming Chair (after a year's sabbatical in China) I have become aware of just how disruptive and demoralizing the process has been. I believe that there are a number of reasons for this, including the fact that the University manages change in a way that seems both rushed and protracted at the same time.
An illustration of this is how the Review has dealt with South Asian Studies, for which the Report under discussion makes no explicit recommendations as it does for departmentalization and for the re-assignment of our ANE posts, even though its consequences will be far-reaching for the subject. At some point during the Faculty's review process, it was thought that a separate review needed to take place for South Asian Studies. After a couple of meetings and consultation exercises, a further report was produced which recommended that the Faculty cease the teaching of South Asian subjects at the undergraduate level, that a number of our posts be re-allocated to the Faculty of History, and that the Centre of South Asian Studies be made responsible for an M.Phil. programme. These recommendations then became the subject of a circuitous correspondence involving the Faculty Board, the Advisory Group set up to 'help' the Faculty change itself, the General Board, and the Education Committee. With no one wanting to be seen as imposing a decision but also not wanting to give way, proposals and counter-proposals went back and forth. The end result is messy and significant issues remain unresolved.
While I will support the Report, I would also like to make two suggestions, one with respect to South Asian Studies and one with regard to the way we conduct Reviews of Faculties in the future. I fully support a new M.Phil. programme run by the Centre of South Asian Studies and the concentration of South Asian Studies in one place. I realize that further delay would create difficulties for the revitalization of the Centre and the new M.Phil. programme. I nonetheless hope that the General Board will consider, once the M.Phil. has run for two or three years, once more whether it was really wise to terminate South Asian Studies as a distinct undergraduate specialization.
I also strongly urge the General Board to review the Review. Change must be possible, of course, and it is inevitable that Reviews generate controversy and upheaval. But I don't believe that the process needs to be as difficult as it has proved twice now. A number of principles seem to me important: 1. The Review Committee must be made up of highly respected academics not just from the UK but also from our international equals; 2. Its remit must be properly thought out and cover an academic subject rather than what is merely an administrative unit; 3. The creation of an Advisory Group was a useful innovation, but it should not be dominated by members who are the natural competitors for resources of the subject that is being reviewed. They should also not be so busy with other matters that they do not have enough time for the task; and 4. Discussion should be based on argument, not assertion. I have been irritated by documents stating that a given body 'considered' such and such an idea, but then went on to say that this body had not been 'persuaded', without giving reasons. If we care about the democratic nature of our University, as I do, and don't want it to be run by executives, we must resolve our disagreements through considered arguments, not bureaucratic obfuscation.
Dr A. K. BENNISON:
I was initially reluctant to speak at this gathering, feeling that perhaps I would simply reiterate the statements of others. However, I think it is important for this body to realize that there is a broad consensus in the Faculty of Oriental Studies on a number of points, some positive and some negative. I was elected deputy-chair of the Faculty in Michaelmas 2005, shortly after the Faculty received the report of the original Review Committee. In the intervening period, I have had to step up and serve as Chairman twice when the tensions generated by this restructuring process forced two excellent Chairmen to resign. I therefore concur with others in the view that mechanisms for change must exist, but that the current review process is not the best way to achieve it. In our case, there has been little recognition of the significant culture-change required for us to reach our current position and the impact that would have on UTOs within the Faculty, or the iniquity of asking us to take the lead in either dispatching colleagues to other Departments or even closing their specialisms down. Moreover, the state of our subjects across the University was not properly considered, in my view. Whilst I think an academic case can be made for the new structure, particularly for East Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, many have felt that it is an administrative convenience and that the academic rationale for change has been conspicuous by its absence, adding to the tensions generated by the restructuring.
That being said, I support the opinion that the majority within the Faculty of Oriental Studies now accept and support the departmentalization of the Faculty into Departments of East Asian and Middle Eastern Studies respectively, and would like to proceed with its full implementation. Speaking from the Middle Eastern side, we are excited by the new Tripos stream which we have designed and feel that it will offer students more courses of a contemporary and modern type whilst also preserving the core of the classical programme which has been our traditional strength.
Nonetheless, the loss of South Asian Studies as an undergraduate option is a serious blow, and I also hope that the General Board will reconsider its position on this subject in the future and make every effort to ensure that the Centre of South Asian Studies does flourish as the focus for graduate studies on the region. At the very least it is imperative that proper care is taken of undergraduates currently reading the subject who already feel disadvantaged by the possibility of having substitute teachers for several courses for the duration of their degree. I believe that the option of having a South Asian Studies Department in our Faculty and grouping UTOs in history and language in it should have been considered more seriously by the Review of South Asian Studies.
It is also vital, as others have said, that the language aspects of the Ancient Near Eastern subjects are fully supported in the Department of Archaeology and that these aspects retain a connection with the Department of Middle Eastern Studies.
Professor R. J. BOWRING:
Deputy Vice-Chancellor, as one of those who have for many years desired to move away from the term 'Oriental' and who welcome the establishment of a Department of East Asian Studies, I am in a delicate position. Whether this Report represents the break-up of a Faculty or merely its rationalization remains to be seen, but there can be no doubt that the process of review has been the most bruising and unpleasant experience I have had in my 25 years at Cambridge. It is this experience I wish to explore. Some members of the University may be distressed by what I have to say and for that I apologize in advance.
Six years ago I was a member of a group that advised on the future of Oriental Studies at Oxford. Members were drawn from a variety of subjects and a variety of universities. Most importantly, in addition to myself there were two professors from Harvard, one from Vienna, one from Edinburgh, and one from Manchester. Oxford participation was restricted to the Chairman of the Faculty Board, who acted purely as a 'guide', and the Chairman of the group, who was the equivalent of a General Board representative. The group was put up for three nights, met on two consecutive days, and worked from 8.30 a.m. to late in the evening. Each of us produced a report on our speciality, and each of us was allowed to comment on the tenor of the report as a whole. It was produced on time. The proposals that resulted were radical and almost entirely beneficial. At no point was there any discernable unhappiness. Since then, the various elements of Oxford's 'Oriental Studies' have forged ahead, penetrating into other disciplines with joint posts in History and the Social Sciences, raising substantial funds, and leaving Cambridge struggling in its wake. The new Professor of the History of Art in Oxford is a Chinese specialist. The input of scholars from abroad was a vital element in bringing home to the University the present and future importance of the various languages and subjects studied and of the serious consequences if any of these was allowed to remain isolated, as if in some exotic backwater.
Contrast this to what happened here. First, the make-up of the Review Panel. I have not succeeded in getting a straight reply from anyone as to why the Review was called for in the first place. No one seems to remember. It was certainly not planned as part of the normal review process but was suddenly brought forward by at least two years, interfering with the normal timetable. Of that, I am certain. I stand to be corrected, of course, but what seems to have happened was that the devolution of budgets to School level under the RAM highlighted something that we already knew: that the Faculty was expensive, so expensive indeed that the School could not handle it in-house under the new devolved arrangements. It was therefore forced to hand the matter back to the General Board, suggesting in the process a major review. The preamble to the Report says that the Review was set up 'at the request of the Council of the School of Arts and Humanities', who must have felt under pressure. It was therefore from its inception a parochial affair: fair enough for a preliminary review, perhaps, but not for a major one. The make-up of the Review Panel is revealing in contrast to Oxford. The Faculty's request for non-UK participation was either rejected or ignored. Yes, there were three external members from other UK institutions, but four were internal to the University and three of those members came from our own School, the same School that had asked for the Review in the first place. Much of the subsequent distress, and there has been much distress, stems from this arrangement. I am not accusing the members of having their own agenda; I am trying to explain why the Review began in an atmosphere of fear and suspicion. Was it set up to save the School money and so impose savage cuts? After all, the majority of reviewers stood to gain from our demise. Or was it to reorganize a failing institution? The answers to these questions were evasive at best and exacerbated the distrust.
I shall not go into the details of the Review itself. Suffice it to say that some felt that the questioning was far too aggressive. There seemed to be two major concerns. One was that we expected too much of our students. We taught too much. There was too much emphasis on language training and too little attempt to make our courses available to the wider community. We were consciously isolating ourselves and it was largely our fault. The fact that some of us already had courses cross-listed with SPS and indeed had joint appointments with Archaeology, the fact that our historians had been banging at the doors of the Faculty of History for the last 20 years with little or no response; all this was downplayed and our supposed obsession with language highlighted. The atmosphere was unpleasant. The external members seemed at times bemused and occasionally saw it as their role to defend us. The other concern was that we did not seem to act like a proper Faculty: we were all sub-divided into our own language groups and were difficult to deal with from the outside. Why were we not organized sensibly like MML or Classics? The answer is, of course, that 'Classics' is a subject: it deals with two cultures which are inextricably linked and two languages that all students have to learn. 'Oriental Studies' is not a subject; it is an administrative convenience. I cannot even read most of the exam papers for which I blithely sign the class list every year, and I am sorry but you cannot have just one 'year abroad co-ordinator' in a Faculty than has to deal with Tokyo and Teheran and points in between. For some reason this seemed to come as a bit of a surprise to the internal reviewers.
The Review that eventually arrived, after a long delay not of our making, was a curate's egg. We were urged to change the title of the Faculty and to departmentalize. Given that some feared we might be dismantled completely, and others hoped that we might be at the very least assigned to the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, this felt like a damp squib. Little sign of any radical thinking. Eventually the General Board gave us an Advisory Group to 'help' us carry out the necessary changes. This is where it fell apart for the second time. The attitude of these minders was that of a parent bringing a recalcitrant child into line. Don't argue. Just do what you are told and stop procrastinating. But the issues were by no means clear cut. Departmentalization helped some but left others stranded, notably Sanskrit and Hindi on the one hand and the Ancient Near East on the other. These were a source of concern and it is difficult for a Faculty Board to vote for chopping off some of its own limbs. Soon the feeling grew that the Advisory Group, under the pretence of 'allowing' the Faculty Board to reform itself, was in fact forcing it to do the dirty work. And behind it all was the unanswered question: why had we been turned upside down in the first place? The atmosphere quickly became poisonous. The minders mishandled things badly, putting heavy pressure on Professor Kornicki as Chairman, who found himself willy-nilly becoming their mouthpiece. Yes, 'they' might accept this; no, 'they' probably wouldn't accept that. But since 'they' only agreed to meet the Faculty Board once, at the beginning, who was to know? Small wonder then that the Chairman became seen by some on the Board as having lost the will to resist. He resigned. Dr Montgomery tried to take over and eventually fell into precisely the same trap. Meetings with the minders were requested and refused. You're just prevaricating. You've just proved you don't have the right structures for difficult decisions. Yet as we proceeded to tear ourselves apart, it must have finally dawned on someone in the General Board that the Review had indeed been ill-conceived from the very beginning; its remit had been far, far too narrow. Hence the hurried decision to set up yet another review, this time of South Asian Studies, which should, of course, have been an integral part of the first review. The results of that review were also, as we know, highly problematic and almost caused a diplomatic incident.
In short, I am happy with the establishment of two Departments. I am not very happy that the future of South Asian Studies has been fudged. I am unhappy that the Report fails to address the long-term future of our subjects in the University at large and fails to offer us a clear path out of our isolation, something on which I shall speak again in due course; I am, however, extremely unhappy at the way the Review itself was conducted. It generated the most enormous stress to little purpose. I would urge the General Board to rethink how reviews are carried out before it subjects yet another Faculty to such an experience.
Professor G. W. W. BARKER:
Mr Deputy Vice Chancellor, I speak as Disney Professor of Archaeology, Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Head of the Department of Archaeology, and a member of the General Board's Advisory Group. Given my role in Archaeology I have a central interest in the future arrangements for research in, and the teaching of, the archaeology, history, and languages of the Ancient Near East, the ancient empires of Egypt and Mesopotamia.
Cambridge archaeologists work on all major periods of antiquity from deep prehistory to recent centuries, in most regions of the world, and across the full spectrum of humanities and scientific approaches. The study of text-aided archaeology is one of the strongest research clusters within this community, embracing scholars in Archaeology, Classics, Continuing Education, the McDonald Institute, and Oriental Studies. There have long been strong teaching links between the archaeologists in Archaeology and Oriental Studies, at undergraduate and graduate level, and in doctoral and postdoctoral activity, and from its inception the McDonald Institute has supported the research of the Ancient Near East archaeologists with fieldwork grants, project space, and publication.
Research on the archaeology and languages of the ancient civilizations of the Near East is one of the oldest traditions in the study of antiquity, with its roots in the pioneering and heroic days of script decipherment and archaeological exploration in the early nineteenth century. The integrated study of the languages, textual archives, and material culture of these ancient civilizations - and I emphasize 'integrated study' - has a critical contribution to make to our understanding of the emergence of urbanism, statehood, and empire. Cambridge is one of a relatively restricted group of centres of excellence in the world engaging in Ancient Near East Studies at an advanced level, though the four posts concerned, two primarily in archaeology and two in language, represent the bare minimum necessary to maintain Ancient Near East Studies as an intellectually sustainable activity in terms of both research and teaching. Dividing the archaeology- and language-based posts between institutions would make this activity even more vulnerable. I fully acknowledge, but do not share, the concerns that have been expressed by some that language-based work might in time be marginalized with Ancient Near East Studies having a new home in the Department of archaeology, because losing language expertise would critically undermine the whole rationale for studying these ancient civilizations at Cambridge: they cannot be understood by approaching the archaeology without reference to the text-based evidence, or vice versa. It will be essential to maintain an integrated portfolio of language, archival, and material culture studies to attract high quality undergraduate and graduate students interested in studying the Ancient Near East. I therefore welcome the recommendations of the Advisory Group regarding procedures for future appointments to ensure the continuation of the archaeology/language mix.
A working group of teaching officers from the Ancient Near East group, Archaeology, Biological Anthropology, and Social Anthropology, has drawn up outline course structures for teaching undergraduate and M.Phil. Degrees in Assyriology and Egyptology within the Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology. In line with the Advisory Group's recommendations, Ancient Near East students will, as presently, take a relevant language from their first year to ensure that their level of language ability at Part II is comparable with that achieved at competitor universities. They will take two of the existing three Archaeology and Anthropology Part I core papers (Archaeology, Biological Anthropology, Social Anthropology), so will have flexibility to transfer across to different Part II specialisms if they wish. The Part II pathway will combine general teaching in the practice of archaeology with advanced language papers and papers covering the history, archaeology, and cultures of Mesopotamia or Egypt. The archaeology options will be available to Archaeology students and the language options to Middle Eastern Studies students. Archaeology's M.Phil. portfolio will be augmented by an M.Phil. in Ancient Near East Studies with clearly badged Assyriology and Egyptology pathways integrating language, history, and archaeology. These proposals have still to be scrutinized in detail by the two Faculty Boards later this term, but have the in-principle approval of the Archaeology and Ancient Near East teaching officers. Once approved, it will be essential to make the new arrangements visible and clear to potential applicants, and to College admissions tutors.
There will be significant challenges ahead, not least regarding the eventual bringing together of staff and library collections, but I am convinced that the proposed transfers will secure a positive future for Ancient Near East Studies at Cambridge. In time the critical mass of the enlarged Department of Archaeology should create opportunities for new synergies in teaching and research that should allow Ancient Near East Studies not just to survive but to grow and prosper as a centre of excellence, with positive benefits for both staff and students.
Dr J. D. SMITH:
Deputy Vice Chancellor, this is a bad Report. Its badness comes as no surprise, since it is the outcome of a protracted bad process. Others who have been more directly involved in that process than I have have already spoken of the events that have traumatized an entire Faculty over a period of more than two years: suffice it to say that we have been repeatedly bullied, demeaned, and lied to - and all for what? A casual reading of this Report would suggest that all that has been achieved is a proposal to change our name and to establish two Departments; but, as is the way in Cambridge nowadays, the formal recommendations serve not to express but to conceal our masters' real purpose.
To deal briefly with those recommendations, the Faculty long ago agreed to the change of name and to departmentalization, as proposed in Recommendation I. The other three recommendations are purely consequential and need not detain us. But these cosmetic measures are not what this Report is actually about; what is really happening is that one substantial part of the Faculty, study of the Ancient Near East, is being transferred against its will to another institution in another School, and that another substantial part, South Asian Studies, is being dismembered. As a Sanskritist, I propose to address the second of these issues.
In the past, plans to abolish an entire subject area have been put forward in the form of Graces, and have sometimes been voted on, with varying outcomes; but that is not how we do things these days. Not merely is the Tripos in South Asian Studies being discontinued without reference to the Regent House; it has actually already been discontinued by executive fiat, an act of very dubious legality. Senior Tutors were instructed last year to admit no further undergraduates in the subject, several months before this Report was presented, never mind approved. Similarly, the Faculty establishment in South Asian Studies has already been reduced from 5.5 teaching officers to three. This has been achieved in two ways. First, our 1.5 vacant history posts have been reassigned to the Faculty of History - where they are both, predictably enough, to be filled in the first instance with historians of the British colonial period, and where there is no long-term guarantee that they will remain within the field of South Asia. Second, the Faculty itself has been informed that the only way it will get to fill the Hindi vacancy is by reassigning it to a middle-eastern subject; a neat approach, since it makes the decision appear to be our own. This all seems a curious way to put into practice the Report's contention 'that South Asian Studies have a very important role to play in the University, and that further strengthening should be an important priority for the 800th Campaign'. (It also seems, shall we say, somewhat tactless given the University's recent successful cosying-up to the government of India.)
As to why all this has had to be done, the 'Advisory Group' responsible have had little to say. They have, however, consistently asserted that financial considerations were not involved, something the former Chairman of Arts and Humanities repeated as recently as last month. It is an odd coincidence, then, that the overall effect of the measures affecting South Asia and the Ancient Near East is to reduce the Faculty's establishment by five posts, with further reductions apparently to come. I am reminded of the old joke: when a man says,'It isn't the money, it's the principle of the thing,' it's the money. But what has been done to Oriental Studies, and the manner in which it has been done, are not laughing matters at all. The entire process has been scandalously badly conducted, and the General Board should think long and hard before letting loose any further 'Advisory Groups'.
So what should actually now be done to achieve the 'further strengthening' of South Asian Studies that we have been promised? Here the Report seems to see a way forward, but it is curiously reluctant to come straight out with it. After noting that there is 'general support for the strengthening of the Centre of South Asian Studies', which is to be responsible for a new M.Phil. programme, it nonetheless goes on to suggest 'that the two Readers in Sanskrit remain on the establishment of the Faculty'. This seems bizarre, given that it also states that 'South Asian Studies do not fit well in the restructured Faculty', and that the Sanskritists would be 'expected to contribute in a central way to the new M.Phil. offered through the Centre of South Asian Studies'. It even envisages a possible future in which 'Sanskrit is eventually to be brought into the Centre of South Asian Studies'; why not do it now, rather than wait for 'the occasion of a vacancy'? As it happens, a vacancy has already arisen: I am taking early retirement. I ask the General Board to take this opportunity to transfer both Sanskrit posts to the Centre, which is clearly where they now belong. Though I am sorry to be leaving the University in such circumstances, I do at least have the consolation of learning from the High Commissioner for India that the Vice-Chancellor has given an undertaking that my post will not be reassigned to another subject.
As for Hindi, its future is expressed in even more diffident terms: 'Hindi [should] continue to be offered, in some form, at undergraduate and graduate level'. In some form? Mr Deputy Vice Chancellor, this will not do - this is not the language we expect of a General Board Report. What is the poor Language Teaching Officer in Hindi to do? Is he to determine what 'form' the language is to be offered in? If not, who will? To leave the remnant of a half-axed subject in such ill-defined confusion is to add insult to injury. The General Board must take a proper decision on what is to happen to Hindi teaching in the University. If they wish to consult the South Asianists, we would be happy to give our views; but let any such consultations be direct. No more 'Advisory Groups', please.
Professor R. L. HUNTER:
Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, I speak today principally as (since 1 January of this year) Chair of the Council of the School of Arts and Humanities; I also served as a member of the Review Committee for Oriental Studies and of the General Board's Advisory Group set up in the wake of the report of the Review Committee. I was a member of the Council of the School continuously during the setting up and conduct of the Review and have served on the General Board since 1 January 2005; I am also currently Chair of the Management Committee of the Centre of South Asian Studies.
A Full Review of the Faculty was established at the request of the Council of the School of Arts and Humanities as part of a strategic consideration of institutions within its remit; the principal reasons for this strategic review were preparation for the next RAE (in the light of the 2001 exercise) and the need to ensure a level of planning within the School and its constituent institutions commensurate with the academic and financial responsibilities which were now to be devolved to School level. The 1999 review of the Faculty had also suggested that five years would be the appropriate lapse of time before another review, and the complexities of the Faculty suggested that a Full Review, with the participation of external members, was the way forward; the Review was welcomed by, and derived much assistance from, the Faculty's officers. The Council of the School was clear that the Review 'should allow consideration of the whole institution (teaching, RAE, research funding, relationship with other faculties, language facilities, structure, and management)'. In the event we have all travelled a long, and at times slow, road, and I would like to place on record my appreciation for the constructive and patient engagement with which the Faculty has confronted a difficult review process and, in particular, for the work put in by successive Faculty Chairs.
The Review Committee identified 'four major issues to be tackled in determining the Faculty's future prosperity and long-term direction: the structure and content of the Tripos; the future of the 'minority' subjects; its governance arrangements; and the Faculty's contribution to the University's engagement with contemporary issues within the regions covered by the Faculty'. In all of these areas significant progress has been made. Faculty governance had long been felt to be an area of particular concern, one exacerbated by the 'sectionalization' of the Faculty into discrete language units; different sections had very different application and student numbers, very different student and academic workloads, very different approaches to quality assurance procedures and monitoring, and very variable access to trust funds and research income. The Faculty itself acknowledged these problems. The proposed reorganization into two Departments and the establishment of new cross-Faculty structures for the allocation of academic posts mark major steps forward towards coherent planning and communication; these reorganizations have been accompanied by significant progress towards the kind of Tripos reform which preserves what is most distinctive about Cambridge's offerings in the areas of Middle Eastern and East Asian Studies while also meeting the urgings of the Review Committee for a wider range of 'modern' options. The aim of the whole process has been the creation of structures, which need not of course be restricted to any one School, offering positive and flexible academic frameworks for the University's engagement with all of the areas covered by the review (cf. paragraph 4 of the Report of the General Board); the omens - such as the recent appointment to the Sultan Qaboos Chair of Modern Arabic Studies - are encouraging.
The Review Committee noted that it was 'not realistic to consider that all existing activities and areas of expertise can be maintained, whilst also expanding into other areas'. In the event, the Faculty, the Advisory Group, and the General Board have made proposals which, while certainly not a universally acclaimed panacea, set out a clear and productive way ahead. Others will, I am sure, speak at greater length of the move of posts in Ancient Near Eastern Studies to the Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology. The judgement that these posts have excellent prospects of a secure and flourishing long-term future in the Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology is supported by the progress which has already been made towards devising suitable Tripos arrangements within Archaeology and Anthropology; the School of Arts and Humanities, of course, very much welcomes the General Board's guarantees about the continuing nature of these posts and the fact that these subjects will still be available to undergraduates of the (former) Faculty of Oriental Studies. As for South Asian Studies, the Report makes clear that there is an exciting opportunity here for the University which must be grasped. Language study, in particular Sanskrit and Hindi, is part of that opportunity, and the Report makes clear that these languages will continue to have a place within the University's overall provision; as someone whose own subject is ancient Greek, I very much welcome the Board's recognition, in the light of historically low student numbers, of the 'need to raise the profile of Sanskrit in Cambridge'. The exact future position of Sanskrit and Hindi in the University remains a work in progress, and one in which the School will continue to take a very active interest.
Let me conclude by stressing that, from the point of view of the School of Arts and Humanities, the new Faculty has excellent prospects of moving from strength to strength. There is, I believe, a general desire to get on with doing the things that we are all here to do, within the framework proposed by the General Board. We all wish the Faculty every success.
Professor J. D. RAY:
Deputy Vice-Chancellor, as a response to the proposal to restructure the Faculty of Oriental Studies, it might be helpful to take a closer look at the way the General Board, and the Council of the School of the Arts and Humanities (CSAH), have chosen to operate. My own section, the Ancient Near East, is the one I know best. Here, the Faculty was submitted to an exercise which was designed to break down the trust between the various sections. This trust had held the Faculty together over many decades. The largest section, Arabic and Middle-East Studies, was offered the inducement of an extra post or posts if it was prepared to shed the Ancient Near East to another School. It is still proposed that this should happen, but the extra post or posts have not materialized. To an outsider, this could look like cynicism.
In the Ancient Near Eastern section there are four posts, one of which is entirely endowed. Three of the office-holders happen to be Fellows of the British Academy, and all four are active in research (at least they are when they are not being put through a process of restructuring). The implications of this for the Research Assessment Exercise are likely to be considerable. The SAH is a distinguished body, no doubt, but how many of its sections can claim a comparable research performance? Yet the School is apparently prepared to give up this area to a rival School. Within the SAH itself, there is a Faculty where the Ancient Near East would have fitted well, and cohered intellectually (a notion which the CSAH claims to hold dear). This possibility was never properly considered. If a business is in difficulties, the normal strategy is to cut the losses, not shed the assets. If the members of the CSAH were the board of a public company, the shareholders would now be calling for their resignation.
At Oxford, they do things differently. Not only have they chosen to keep the title Oriental, which our General Board reckons is an embarrassment, but there subjects such as ours were long ago given a controlling say in admissions. This way they have been encouraged to expand. Here, a request for the same treatment was turned down several years ago. In Cambridge, the General Board tied Oriental Studies hand and foot; now it is accusing it of being immobile.
The rest of the University may think that this is the sort of thing which happens only in Oriental Studies, a faraway place of which we know nothing. Appeasement has its attractions, after all. But what if the Schools and the General Board get a taste for balancing their books by arbitrary restructuring? The Roman poet Horace put it well, as he so often did: mutato nomine, de te fabula narratur. Change the name, and it could be about you.
Dr J. H. SWENSON-WRIGHT:
Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, any process of administrative reform or restructuring, as this University knows only too well, is likely to involve difficult decisions that challenge traditional practices and conventions, generating concern or even opposition from those who perceive themselves as disadvantaged. Today's Discussion demonstrates that, in the case of the restructuring of Oriental Studies, these concerns are extensive and widely shared throughout the Faculty, by those who might be perceived as both the beneficiaries and the casualties of the review process. For those whose subject areas have been eliminated at the undergraduate level or relocated to another Faculty, the cost of these changes is easy to grasp. My colleagues in the affected subject areas will, I have no doubt, have already expressed their serious concerns in great detail and very persuasively.
For those of us whose subject areas ostensibly stand to gain from the University's evident desire to promote the continued success and international competitiveness of East Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Cambridge, a more intellectually coherent and sensitive programme of restructuring could have opened up attractive new opportunities. A change in the name of the Faculty could signal a commitment to modernization while also underlining to the wider international community our well-established record of combining the study of both traditional and contemporary issues, with rigorous undergraduate and graduate training in the languages and cultures of some of the world's great civilizations. Departmentalization could also offer important new opportunities to marshal and co-ordinate our research and teaching resources and provide valuable new administrative benefits.
I would enthusiastically welcome such improvements and would be happy to see departmentalization proceed. However the current restructuring appears to have focused on administrative convenience and cost-efficiency in isolation, as if such changes would necessarily bring about intellectually coherent reforms and encourage the long-term vitality of regional studies at Cambridge. There are many aspects of the review process that are deeply troubling. Procedurally, the General Board's Report talks of 'extensive consultation' between the Advisory Group and the Faculty Board and individual teaching officers in the Faculty. This is not a description that many of us in the Faculty would recognize. Certainly, for my part, I can think of not a single occasion (outside the formal structure of the Faculty Board) when the Faculty's members either collectively or individually had the opportunity to hear directly or clearly the views of the members of the Advisory Group. This despite a number of direct requests for face-to-face meetings, founded in large part on an understandable desire to seek clarification of the terms of the review and any strategic rationale that may or may not have shaped the restructuring process.
Indeed, it is the apparent absence of any strategic priorities or clear vision that has been most troubling during the restructuring process. While the Faculty has on a number of occasions pointed out the particular intellectual strengths and distinctive elements of our research and teaching provision that make us internationally competitive and attractive to both undergraduate and graduate applicants, this appears not to have been acknowledged or treated seriously in compiling the findings of the Advisory Group. In short, our distinctive strength - or to put in contemporary managerial terms the value we add - lies in the recognition that rigorous linguistic training is an essential prerequisite for serious scholarship and in understanding the regions and countries we study.
The language of the General Board's Report appears to suggest that, where South Asian Studies is concerned, this simple fact has been largely discounted. Vaguely phrased agreements that 'Hindi continue to be offered, in some form' or conditional, qualified commitments to possibly bringing Sanskrit into the new Centre of South Asian Studies, imply that the University's commitment to the rationale or the 'mission' of our various regional centres and Departments is at best superficial and only partially supported. At a time when the UK government is in the process of exploring ways to enhance area expertise and training, both in South Asian and East Asian Studies, this seems to be a curious and poorly judged message to be communicating to the outside world. Some international comparisons are perhaps instructive here. The United States government employs some 600 trained Chinese language specialists within a variety of departments, including the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Department of the Army. Such levels of provision is in part the result of government-supported initiatives to develop substantial, integrated university programmes combining international relations, social sciences, history, and language training.
This is something that Cambridge, and the Faculty of Oriental Studies, has already been doing and which we are well-placed to continue to do, perhaps in a restructured context. However, to do this successfully requires a well thought-out and comprehensive strategy that both acknowledges and builds on past academic achievements built up over many years and which continues to stress the central and indispensable importance of linking language training to disciplinary training. This will require, I suggest, a willingness to think beyond the artificial confines of the existing Schools structure and to accept that acquiring linguistic expertise cannot be treated as an optional, ancillary extra. In some respect, the Centre for South Asian Studies may well stand as a useful model, but as a Centre it should be able to draw on the resources - both teaching and research based - of University staff across Faculties and Departments, and not limited to, or even focused primarily on one School as the General Board Report appears to suggest. While the expertise of social scientists and members of the School of the Humanities and Social Sciences is of critical importance in understanding contemporary India, so too arguably is the work of theologians, cultural specialists, and trained linguists in the School of Arts and Humanities.
A serious and well thought-out review of Middle Eastern and Asian Studies - broadly conceived - would surely need to address the intellectual role and administrative functioning of such centres, both existing bodies such as Oriental Studies' own East Asia Institute and the Centre of South Asian Studies, as well as any new institutions that might be developed. We need also to consider the extent to which traditional geographical conventions and boundaries shape and define our regional scholarship. Arguably, to many of us, India's rise as an fast-growing economic and strategic actor, with critical political and diplomatic ties to both China and Japan, places it firmly within the disciplinary centre of Asian regional studies. As such, a coherent case could be made for retaining South Asian Studies as a central element in any future undergraduate Tripos in Asian Studies. Similarly, no intellectually credible programme in Asian Studies, either at an undergraduate or graduate level, could afford not to provide students with training in Korean language and the politics, culture, and history of the Korean peninsula. Yet these critical issues appear to have been largely overlooked or in some cases rejected out of hand. It surely is a case of putting the cart before the horse to embark on wholesale restructuring without taking into account such important matters. We appear to be rushing to make potentially irreversible changes that involve the dismantling of well-established centres of academic excellence without putting in place strategically coherent and securely funded new institutions. Before we take precipitate action from which the University may be unable to recover and which may end up seriously eroding and diminishing Cambridge's global reputation, surely we should pause and consider how best to improve the reform process without the short-comings that I have outlined above.
Professor G. R. EVANS (read by Dr D. R. DE LACEY):
Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, 'the Advisory Group have subsequently made four further reports to the Board and undertaken extensive consultation with the Faculty Board and individual teaching officers in the Faculty'. The assertion that there has been consultation is easily taken to be an assertion that there has been agreement. I hope there has. It is important that the papers of such groups and of the committees to which they report, should begin to be published, especially those of the Council and General Board. HEFCE publishes its Board papers. Otherwise those who wish to comment sensibly in Discussions may find it difficult to be sure they have all the facts and opinions taken into account, and can see how particular proposals have been arrived at. From what we have just heard, greater transparency at all stages might protect against stress and damage too.
There is a mention of 'difficult decisions which need to be made'. Why will they be 'difficult'. Because they will be contentious? Because they will involve unpleasantness like the creation of redundancies? Because they will involve policy decisions of a quite fundamental kind about the natural shape of disciplinary clusters and whether Cambridge should continue to offer small number subjects and whether the financial pressures of the moment should encourage the axing of areas of intellectual endeavour or decisions to make them available only to graduate students. In the case of Sanskrit, for example, 'the Board … consider that a good future for the subject lies in research and graduate study'. Why? I hurl all these thoughts into the pot because any one of them has the capacity to change the flavour of the resulting stew.
Dr D. R. DE LACEY:
Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, this is a most extraordinary Report. It comes after a Full Review of the Faculty which was authorized in 2004, and, subsequent to that, various advisory, review, and working groups. These produced reports for the General Board which were so secret that I was obliged to lodge a Freedom of Information request in order to see them, and which provoked in large part the topic of concern which we shall shortly consider. And all for what? To propose a change in the name of the Faculty of Oriental Studies and to divide it into two Departments. This seems a rather minimal return for the effort.
A read through the documents released to me yields some surprises. Little justification is offered in them for the concerns which the Review Committee frequently expresses, for the nature of or reason for the 'difficult' decisions which must be made, or for the decisions finally taken. What is clear is that the Faculty is a reluctant partner in this process (the Faculty Board suggested removal of various uses of the word 'welcomed' in the first draft of the Report before us) and the only justification given is a RAM deficit to which an adequate response might be 'so much the worse for the RAM'. Professor Bowring has noted how damaging this factor has proved. Nor is it clear how the recommendations before us this afternoon, which entail new posts and more expense, meet any of the problems actually tackled in the various reports.
In fact the major thrust of this Report is a decision which does not appear in the recommendations at all, and which indeed has already been implemented before the Regent House has even seen, let alone discussed it.
The Board has already taken steps to abolish the South Asia Studies Tripos. An Advisory Group report to the Board in February 2006 acknowledges the increasing geo-political importance of South Asia, but recommends reallocating the present vacancy in Indian Studies and one of the two Sanskrit posts away from South Asia. This Report is somewhat less destructive, but while noting 'that while South Asian Studies do not fit well in the restructured Faculty, there is very great potential for future development' it offers a proposed restructuring which is remarkably incoherent, with Sanskrit and Hindi teaching effectively in limbo. By all means let us revitalize the Centre of South Asian Studies. Let us have a proper Report on its structure from the General Board, to be considered in tandem with the reformation of the Faculty. But let us not approve a half-solution, in the hope that the resulting mess will somehow sort itself out.
Dr R. STERCKX:
Deputy Vice-Chancellor, I wish to look beyond the mechanics with which this particular review has been conducted. I am sure others will wish to speak to this. I belong among those who think that this Report contains a number of good recommendations, and I would like to highlight these first as I hope that they will indeed be implemented. I will then comment on what I judge to be its weakness.
I believe that the recommendation to create Departments is a good one and long overdue. That it is presented as somehow the logical outcome of a change in the Faculty's name is insignificant. Many among us would have happily continued living under the umbrella of 'Oriental Studies' provided that Departments with a strong profile are in place, and that is what is being recommended in this Report. After all, what's in a name? To some in the outside world 'Oriental Studies' must have been seen as less arcane than, let's say, a Department that until recently was named 'Other Languages' in a Faculty of 'Modern and Medieval Languages'. So let us not dwell on nomenclature. Departmentalization provides us with a profile within the University and the wider community, it makes intellectual and administrative sense and more importantly, it offers a platform for us to develop our programmes, present them with greater clarity to prospective undergraduates and graduates, and it offers a less ambiguous disciplinary label beneficial for other purposes, not in the least fund-raising. So I fully endorse the prospect of being able to work in a Department of East Asian Studies and am heartened to see that we will no longer remain the only institution in this country not to have crystallized the study of China, Japan, and Korea into one unit.
I also believe that the Review Committee was right in forcing us to take a long and hard look at our Tripos. Such procedures are difficult, not just for our Faculty, yet without external pressure, the significant progress made in Tripos reform at present would not have happened. And while a great deal of work remains to be done, I am confident that internal changes to the Tripos, whatever its name, will be beneficial overall. However, departmentalization and Tripos reform, in my view, should not be seen as the end of the process but rather as the start of developments that far transcend our current predicament. To this I hope to speak briefly in due course.
Yet I must also express concerns about two recommendations in this Report which, in my view, could have consequences for the welfare and reputation of this University that far transcend the fate of the present generation serving in academic and administrative office.
It is with considerable apprehension that I note a suggestion in this Report that we are asked to review our heavy emphasis on language learning. As the Review Committee concluded and this Report gracefully acknowledges, our Faculty enjoys a high reputation for teaching and research nationally and internationally. I submit that the reason why our programmes are the envy of many is precisely because of the high level of linguistic proficiency we achieve in undergraduate education and our insistence on research through sources in the primary languages at graduate level. It is this commitment to languages that has seen Cambridge undergraduates in Chinese win national and international speech and essay competitions broadcast on television across China. It is this type of training that has seen our alumni carve out careers as bestselling authors and journalists producing books for the wider community. Indeed, it is also this type of training that has seen our students serve this country in high diplomatic office across the world. We are, and indeed should be, rightfully proud of this. If this Report's reference to 'reviewing language' means taking stock and monitoring the balance between language instruction and disciplinary course offerings and its timing in the Tripos, I welcome it. For that is effectively what we have been working hard at in Tripos reform. If however the implication here is that somehow we are asked to dumb down, then that should be vigorously opposed. If there is any mileage in the recommendation that we rid ourselves of Orientalism, it lies precisely in our commitment to genuinely engage with our respective fields not through the convenient lens of the English language only, but on the terms and in the languages in which those civilizations express themselves, and that includes the Babylonians and the inhabitants of ancient Egypt. In my experience there simply is no shortcut to gaining oral, aural, and written proficiency in the languages of China, Japan, or Korea. And, yes, they are extremely time-consuming and labour-intensive to teach. But we do not expect our undergraduates in French to study French poetry through the medium of English or graduate students in Classics to write dissertations on the basis of translated primary sources. I hope it will remain the ambition of our Faculty and its new Departments to foster the same kind of genuine engagement with the cultures under discussion today. Therein, for me, lies the true and rightful demise of Orientalism.
Secondly I hope that the commitment expressed in this Report to develop South Asian Studies into a coherent unit will be acted upon as a matter of urgency. But I submit that this cannot be done without a serious commitment to the Indian languages, modern and pre-modern. I belong to a generation of students who, in the 1980s, when the first rumours about the political and economic rise of China hit the headlines, set aside their long held ambitions to pursue higher education in the Western humanities and took a plunge into the unknown by reading Chinese. We were a small group, tucked away in a tiny corridor, with our subjects brushed aside conveniently under the header 'Oriental'. As a small subject group in a large European university we were vulnerable and it was not inconceivable to see a scenario in which, for all sorts of reasons, the university authorities at that time would have allowed Chinese to suffer an embryonic death, much in the same way as the Report discussed here today effectively might lead to phasing out the study of Indian languages. I am grateful that my alma mater at the time did not make that decision and, today, barely two decades later, would not wish to be in the shoes of administrators who, back then, might have advised an institution to shut down the study of Chinese and China for undergraduates. Something tells me that the case of India is equally relevant on the back of this example.
To be sure it is the responsibility of all of us to work within the financial environment of the present time. Yet genuine strategic planning should also look beyond the current financial situation and consider relative costs. Have we assessed the implications in the long term of a scenario in which the languages of the Indian subcontinent are at risk of disappearing altogether from the Cambridge curriculum? Decisions taken now will have strategic implications far beyond the fate our own Faculty. We are facing a new global age in which the fastest growing educational markets are those of India and China. Every institution of higher education wants to be in on the act. Therefore if an institution of our standing is seen not to be fully committed to the study of the languages and cultures of our new partners, it will face harsh competition in this market. That we must remedy at all cost. We only need to remind ourselves of the origins of the generous benefactors that have recently endowed chairs and centres for business studies and cancer research in this University: India and China. So I would urge the Board not to make rash short-term decisions regarding the status of the Indian languages at Cambridge. Inviting external expertise to revisit the issue might in the end prove a smaller price to pay.
Mr A. KUMAR:
Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, I have been teaching Hindi at the Faculty of Oriental Studies here in Cambridge a little over four years now. I would like, on the basis of my experiences, to place before you some of my responses to the Review Committee's report. My comments are not meant to belittle the recommendations of the Review Committee and that of its members' opinions. I wish to articulate my views as someone who has observed at close quarters the experience of teaching and studying at Cambridge University.
I would like to first respond to the Review Committee's view that the South Asia Tripos is no longer viable because of the small number of students that opt for it. I disagree with this argument and the fact upon which it purports to base itself. The number of students since I first began teaching has not declined. In fact it has been increasing. The question of student numbers is not something that I myself have not pondered over. It is my concern for this issue that led me to query my students every year as to how and where they had learnt about the Hindi language courses at Cambridge University. The response from almost all my students has been that they learnt about it only by chance. SOAS in London is well-known as the premier institution in Britain to offer South Asian languages and literature courses. Not Cambridge University. It is my considered opinion that the allegedly small number of students opting for the South Asia Tripos cannot be categorically connected to student disinterest in South Asian languages like Hindi but to the lack of information and publicity about this particular Cambridge University course.
In the course of the last four years my former colleague Dr Francesca Orsini and I took steps to publicize the South Asia Tripos and Hindi Studies at Cambridge University. That our efforts had some impact is evident from the fact that in the year 2006 as many as ten students applied for Hindi alone. I wish to emphasize here that the question of student numbers cannot be seen from the narrow perspective of students formally registered at the Faculty of Oriental Studies alone. My students over the last four years have included not just those affiliated to the Faculty but also those - M.Phil. and Ph.D. students - coming from other Departments such as the Departments of History and Philosophy of Science, Geography, Politics, History, and the Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology. These students have not been taken into account while assessing the issue of student numbers.
I welcome the plan to introduce an M.Phil. course at the Centre of South Asian Studies with Hindi, in the words of the Review Committee, continuing in some form there. I would like to emphasize, however, one point very clearly here. It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for one- or two-year M.Phil. students to achieve the kind of language expertise that four-year Tripos students can achieve. To acquire a good command over the Hindi language and literary culture students need to be familiar with not just grammar and language usage, but also with the specificities of South Asian culture and history, all of which entails serious sustained study over a period of at least four years. The question, 'why four years?' may be raised by some. What is relevant is not whether three years or four are needed for gaining a good command over language but that sufficient number of hours over a sustained period of time is devoted to language study. I would like to emphasize that the Hindi course offered by our University is designed for serious students of South Asian culture and civilization and not for touristic purposes. We aim to make our students achieve a standard of language expertise that is sufficiently high for them to negotiate successfully the challenges of a range of research material in Hindi without missing out on its many nuances. We equip students to appreciate this and the variety of language usages through not just grammar alone but through discussion and study of varied kinds of Hindi writings. It is important to appreciate that we have come a long way since the time of the colonial official's mentality when language teaching and learning were approached from a very narrow functional perspective. Recognized and offered by many universities all over the world today as an independent and distinct discipline of knowledge, Hindi Studies cannot be pursued by de-linking language from cultural studies and vice versa.
There have been some major shifts in South Asian historiography since the 1980s in particular. The scope of South Asian cultural and historical studies has expanded considerably with research now being pursued on such varied themes as Dalit (low caste) literature and Dalit movements, caste movements, women's history, domesticity, language and identity politics, literary culture, and popular print culture. While pursuing research on these topics a growing number of scholars have turned to South Asian vernacular language sources, of which Hindi has been one, important particularly for the study of large parts of northern India. Several M.Phil. and Ph.D. students from other Departments in this University have come to me for help with Hindi sources while pursuing research topics like the ones I have referred to earlier. As I have mentioned before their number has remained unacknowledged and unrecorded since these students are not required to pursue Hindi studies formally and they are, of course, not formally registered with the Faculty of Oriental Studies. It is completely up to the students pursuing topics on or related to South Asia to pursue language study or not. When such students come to us we are obliged to assist them but our contributions are not acknowledged by anyone anywhere in terms of the total number of students seeking instruction in a South Asian language. We need to count these students amongst our South Asia students. This can happen only if we acknowledge the need of students from other Departments for instruction in languages like Hindi and if language study is formally introduced as a component of all courses that demand an examination of aspects of say South Asian Anthropology, Politics, Economy, etc.
To maintain Cambridge University's reputation as one of the world's foremost universities it is vital that it continues to offer high levels of instruction in at least the major languages of the world today of which Hindi, which is not only widely spoken and understood in the Indian subcontinent but also used in many other parts of the world including Britain, is certainly one. Advanced language study is essential if Cambridge is to remain a leading player in the international field of area studies including South Asia Studies and if Cambridge is to continue producing cutting edge research on various aspects of the South Asian experience. In the light of my experiences in Cambridge I am firmly of the view that the issue at stake is not whether or not Hindi survives in some form but if it is to remain as a subject of study then what is the form in which it should continue. As a language teacher I believe that offering M.Phil. or Ph.D. students who have no previous grounding in Hindi some instruction in this language will not make a huge difference in terms of their expertise to read complex literary or historical sources. My appeal to the Review Committee is to review its report and consider retaining the South Asia Tripos or if that is impossible allow for courses on South Asian languages that are serious in intent and rigorous in practice.
Professor C. A. BAYLY (read by Dr K. M. GREENBANK):
Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, I regret that I am not able to attend this Discussion. I have, however, taken short leave from the History Faculty in order to attend a conference and give a number of lectures in Delhi and Calcutta connected with the sixtieth anniversary of the independence of India and Pakistan. I accepted these invitations in part because it is essential to refute the notion that has regrettably been spread in India that South Asian, and in particular classical Indian, studies have died in Cambridge. Nothing could be further from the truth. South Asian Studies are flourishing in the University. The General Board will be aware that upwards of 40 senior members attended the consultation on the future of South Asian Studies last summer. By my calculation there are at least another 30 senior members with strong interests in India or other parts of South Asia who could not be present then. Undergraduate interest in the Faculties of History, SPS, Geography, English, Divinity and Economics, and Archaeology and Anthropology, to name only a few, remains very strong. We have supervised and continue to supervise a large number of very able graduate students from India, continental Europe, and North America. Some of these have gone on to key positions in university departments across the world. The combined resources of the University Library, the Faculty of Oriental Studies, and the Centre of South Asian Studies represents one of the finest collections of archival and printed material in Western Europe. Finally, we should remember that South Asia will become, over the next generation, one of the major drivers of the world economy, especially in the area of information. This country's and this University's connections with South Asia - cultural, scientific, and linguistic - are infinitely stronger than those of any other part of Asia or the Middle East and we would be not only remiss in the extreme, but very short-sighted not to capitalize on them.
It is very important that the future of South Asian Studies in the University should not be endangered by recriminations over past decisions either about the Indian Studies Tripos or by the more general issues surrounding the Report on the Oriental Studies Faculty. As the new Director of the Centre of South Asian Studies, I endorse the decision to move the Centre into the School of Humanities and Social Sciences to which the vast majority of the students working on the region are affiliated. But if this is done it is essential that the resources of the Centre - at present very limited - are maintained and indeed significantly enhanced. We need our graduate research post, our administrative staff, and an enhanced library grant. If the Faculty of Oriental Studies is forced to discontinue the purchase of books and journals on South Asia in the short run (and I believe it should not), it is essential that funds should be provided to the Centre of South Asian Studies to continue these purchases. Otherwise a major national resource will be abandoned quite unnecessarily and monies emanating not only from the University, but also from trust funds, such as the Smuts Fund, will have been misused. Above all, the Centre must eventually be re-housed or given further space on the Laundress Lane site. At present storage capacity has run out and we are finding it difficult to house important collections that have been offered to us.
These are all administrative matters. More important is the future of South Asian Studies as a scholarly field. My view is that in the medium-term the posts in Sanskrit and Hindi in the Faculty of Oriental Studies should stay within the Faculty, while the UTOs concerned should continue to teach in other Faculties and Departments across the University. In future, one of their most important tasks would be to teach and supervise for an M.Phil. in South Asian Studies which the Centre, under the auspices of the History Faculty, hopes to inaugurate in October 2008. The M.Phil. would be a one- or two-year course drawing on expertise in SPS, Economics, History, and the Faculty of Oriental Studies UTOs mentioned. I have no doubt that this would be a successful graduate course, drawing at least 15 to 25 students a year, many of whom would go on to Ph.D.s in different Departments and Faculties. If, after a period of transition, the Centre is properly funded and housed, with full administrative support, the posts in Classical and modern Indian languages might well be moved to the Centre. In the meantime, they should be lodged in the Faculty of Oriental Studies, and the Faculty Library's South Asian complement should be maintained, not least because undergraduate students, having been admitted before 2006, will still be taking the Indian Studies element of the Oriental Studies Tripos for the next three years. My view, once again, is that there is little point in agonizing over past failures and confusions. The General Board's Report should be accepted in broad outline, at least as far as Indian studies is concerned. I shall be telling the Indian public that the future of South Asian Studies in Cambridge University is very bright and I have confidence that the University will make the right decision.
Tuesday, 30 January 2007. A continuation of the Discussion on 23 January was held in the Senate-House. Deputy Vice-Chancellor Lord Wilson of Tillyorn was presiding, with the Senior Proctor, the Junior Proctor, two Pro-Proctors, the Registrary, and 60 other persons present.
The discussion of the following Report continued:
Report of the General Board, dated 6 December 2006, on the restructuring of the Faculty of Oriental Studies (p. 314).
Professor M. LOEWE (read by Dr C. P. MELVILLE):
Deputy Vice-Chancellor, I congratulate those who framed this Report for their recognition that the diversity of cultures handled under the term 'Oriental Studies' requires management in separate Departments. Some of us voiced this opinion some 25 years ago when the General Board had instituted an enquiry into the Faculty and its undertakings. At the time we were warned by some of our colleagues that division into Departments would spell disaster, as the General Board, in its wisdom, would then be able to pick off and eliminate one subject after another. It is ironic that presentation of the proposal for Departments is now accompanied by the first, and drastic, steps, in such a process of elimination. As an earnest of good faith, the University deserves, and even requires, a firm statement that the value of a subject depends on its intrinsic interest rather than its cost. Acknowledgement of this criterion would have precluded the proposals for Indian Studies; and it would do something to allay the fears of those who wonder whether, in time to come, posts founded by benefactors for the study of the archaeology of the Ancient Near East and Egyptology might be subject to replacement in favour of other subjects of archaeological concern. Without such an acknowledgement it would be improper to encourage donors to contribute to the University's foundation.
One element of the Report is highly disturbing and sets alarm bells ringing in the ears of any University Teaching Officer who is concerned with the maintenance of scholarly standards. This is the reference to undue emphasis on language training coupled with a preference for 'subject studies'. Vice-Chancellor, this is a slippery slope upon which the University stands. We have heard precisely these sentiments or views before now and at other universities, usually voiced by those who believe that a knowledge and understanding of a culture, whether past or present, does not depend on an ability to read accurately the written words, or understand correctly the spoken words, of that culture's thinkers, public leaders, and men and women of literature. Scholars know only too well that such a misapprehension paves the way for a descent into the trough of low-class journalism and that such a training can leave students the gullible prey of propagandists. The University deserves a higher reputation than that of a readiness to follow the trend and to abdicate from its scholarly responsibilities.
Dr C. P. MELVILLE:
Deputy Vice-Chancellor, I would like to preface my observations on the Review, which are of a slightly satirical nature, by acknowledging that there are certainly many influential people in the University's governing bodies who are committed to the welfare and continuation of 'Oriental Studies' in Cambridge. My intention is not to upset them, but to encourage them to think again about how this might best be achieved, and to seek more robust and imaginative ways to serve the common good.
The announcement of the Review of the Faculty of Oriental Studies in the summer of 2004 was welcomed by some of us as a chance to display our achievements and draw attention to our needs. I believe that the opening phrases of our submission to the Review Committee even reflected this optimism, and the sense of opportunity that could be taken from the announcement. I now look back with embarrassment at my naïveté; I should have realized, after working long and hard for over twenty years in Cambridge, that if anyone took the slightest interest in what we were doing, it was bound to be unfortunate. Since this was almost the first sign of interest in all that time, perhaps I can be excused for not knowing better. Nearly three painful and divisive years down the line, and what do we have? A restructuring of the Faculty, with a nice new name, and two darling little Departments instead of six naughty little sections. Is that what it was all about? 'Affords this art no greater miracle?'
It seemed at first that the reaction to the term 'Oriental' was a typically belated piece of political correctness, paying homage to the already thoroughly discredited notion of pernicious orientalism. But no, the underhand cunning of it all. How do you redefine the 'Orient'? - except that everyone knows what it is. Our administrators, no doubt, would locate it somewhere on the edge of the Fens, almost at arm's length, anyway. Well, it includes the Near East, the Middle East, something called Central Asia, the Far East, and South Asia, for a start - hardly a wieldy alternative for the name of the Faculty. How maddening of the Orient to be so large, to be so enormously populous, to have such a long history: several different parts of it are even thought to be the cradle of early civilization! The Turkish Uighur Empire surrendered to Genghis Khan before Cambridge was even a twinkle in the eye of the jaundiced dons in Oxford. But worst of all, how inconsiderate of the Easterners to speak so many difficult languages. I know, let's get rid of some, it will be much easier for the rest to make decisions quickly! It's not difficult to see that India sticks out rather. Let's imagine we're at the Faculty of Western Studies somewhere in China: Europe's such a muddle, it needs to be rationalized. Let's get rid of Italy.
Of course, once you're down to Middle East and Far East, there's no way back for India. The only problem is, India is central to the whole culture of the ancient east. So, a great opportunity missed there. An opportunity for what? Maybe, breaking down the divisions between the naughty little sections, offering some Faculty-wide courses, exploring the common experiences of kingship, empire, religion, trade, social organization, intellectual ferment, and cultural achievement across three millennia. But wait a minute: these are ACADEMIC objectives - and that after all turns out to be a matter of complete indifference. The review is not about academic issues, except that there's too much emphasis on teaching languages.
The solution's so easy - let's just do less of it! Since there aren't going to be any more resources for language teaching (or anything else), and since the Language Teaching Officers and their students are already struggling under a heavy load - as acknowledged by the report of the Review Committee in November 2005, but not mentioned here, along with many other issues raised by the reviewers - it would be better to cut down. Just a thought - we haven't heard much about cutting down on practicals, or time spent in the labs, if you're doing Engineering or Natural Sciences. What do we have here? Double standards, or no standards? One of our recent students served as interpreter for the British Forces in Basra until returning to the UK to take up graduate studies; the first British Ambassador to Baghdad after the fall of Saddam Husain is a graduate of the Oriental Faculty, where he returned to brush up his Arabic before his previous posting in the Middle East. Just two very recent examples; Cambridge Arabic - effective, excellent, useful. Modern. Maybe the Language Centre could be asked to teach it, preferably in transcription, then we wouldn't even need to bother with the alphabet. And no point reading the Arabic or Persian newspapers of course, when there's so much, far better informed and unbiased coverage in the English press.
This is the only other discernible area of academic concern in the Report: the modern world. The Tripos must be more contemporary. What a revelation! Everyone has understood for years that it is desirable not only to speak Oriental languages but also to understand the countries where they are spoken today. The Review did contain the rather charming disclaimer, 'the Faculty should not assume that the Review Committee's recommendations for 'opening up' the Tripos and realigning the balance between historical and contemporary study of the regions imply a case for additional staffing'. This too drops out of the present Report - certainly, there's no need to state the obvious. It's less clear how one realigns these balances, unless by getting rid of people who research on the historical past and replacing them with people who research on the contemporary world. Or maybe it's only teaching at stake here - maybe anyone can teach the modern world, after a little creative self-reinvention, without doing any research? Maybe that sort of approach would prove attractive to graduate students; I find it improbable. So that leaves filling posts of people who retire with people with the right interests. 'Filling posts': shurely some mistake?
Many members of the Regent House may be unaware that the Sir Thomas Adams's Chair in Arabic, established in 1632, has been left vacant since the last incumbent stood up and left in 2002. An opportunity for realignment? An opportunity to notice that the Middle East was featuring even more heavily than usual in the world news? Just a couple of wars, not in our backyard, nothing to heighten awareness. Islam - say no more. Vacant. The Chair, and those making the decisions. 'The lack of a Chair in Arabic is yet more serious for the health of the MEIS section, for the Faculty's (and the University's) reputation, and for the national health of the subject.' (Source: the report of the Review Committee.) Saved, in this case, by a generous outside benefaction; but Sir Thomas Adams's historic Chair remains unoccupied.
The interesting thing is, the need to fill the Chair was recognized across the Faculty and unanimously recommended by the Faculty as a whole, including all those naughty little sections. Year after year. But strategic planning and joint decision making are no use when the answer is 'no'.
It remains to be seen how the links with other Faculties and Triposes will be achieved by the recommendations contained in this Report. The Advisory Committee has stubbornly stuck to the view that 'identical subjects were offered in both the Oriental Studies Tripos and Archaeological and Anthropological Tripos',1 and that this is a bad thing. Sharing papers is therefore presumably out, and joint posts likewise. No reasons for this are given, except that it seems the system cannot cope with the difficulties of managing them and assigning resources appropriately. One wonders whether the system might be at fault, rather than the idea.
There are many more things one could say about the Report, and others will do so. The fact is, this is not a report on the Review, which actually raised some good points, but on what happened after the Review. Having two Departments certainly makes good operational sense, it's nice and tidy. It's easier to deal with an even smaller Faculty than the last one. The new name is, in my view, an embarrassing absurdity, but that is hardly an issue to die for. As it stands, and mindful of what the Report hides, ignores, or leaves unanswered, the question remains, are these changes part of a rational educational policy, have they been thought through in all their practical consequences? Are the measures recommended designed to meet the planned objectives? Possibly - though it's not obvious what these were.
The restructuring has never pretended to be about academic considerations. We have been repeatedly told it is not about money; if it were, then it would be a case of discussing the University's educational and financial priorities, and how it envisages fulfilling its presumed role as one of the world's leading universities. Whether or not we believe a non-existent financial case, the fact remains that some striking reallocation of resources has been achieved: History gains two posts, Archaeology evidently relishes gaining four, together with the Trust Funds and Library resources to go with them. In the commercial world, this might be called 'asset stripping'; on the high seas, it would be called piracy.
The past by definition is behind us, and we all want to keep it there and 'move on', as we are warmly encouraged to do. It's not difficult to adapt to a new situation. The problem is that past experience informs any thinking person about what the future might hold. But that is the subject of the second Discussion.
1 Reporter, 2006-07, p. 316, para. 9
Professor G. A. KHAN
Mr Deputy Vice Chancellor, the Report recommends that the Faculty reviews its 'heavy emphasis on language learning'. In response to this I would like to say a few words in order to clarify the importance of language learning in the Faculty.
The first point I should like to make largely reiterates what has been said by several speakers last week, and this afternoon. Unlike most other Faculties where languages are taught, we teach all languages ab initio. Nearly all the languages we teach, moreover, have no genetic relationship with English or European languages. Even those languages that do belong to the Indo-European group, such as Persian, Sanskrit, and Hindi, are far more remote from English than most Indo-European languages of Western Europe. All this means that the language teaching needs in the Faculty of Oriental Studies cannot be considered to be of the same nature as those in Faculties such as MML and Classics, where many of the languages have already been studied for several years by students in schools and even those taught ab initio have many familiar features that make them easier to learn. Greater resources must, therefore, be devoted to language teaching in our Faculty than in other Faculties in order for our students to attain a good knowledge of the language. We believe that it is essential for students to acquire a good knowledge of languages in order to understand fully the culture, society, and history of the various regions in question. Only by mastering the languages can they interact directly with the society and work independently with primary sources. The standard of language learning that our undergraduate students have reached at the end of their studies in Cambridge has been admired by other universities and has been recognized in a number of national and international language competitions, where our students have won top prizes.
Another point I should like to make is that the study of language can be an important discipline in its own right and not simply an ancillary tool for disciplines such as history, archaeology, or political science. The investigation of language is an important aspect of graduate and research activities in our Faculty. Research projects relating to language have in recent years brought into the Faculty a large proportion of its research income. Some languages, including ones that are in danger of extinction, are being researched only in our Faculty and nowhere else in the world. Such graduate and research activities can only take place if students have the opportunity of receiving the appropriate training in language orientated courses at the undergraduate level. This issue, moreover, has relevance for the proposed removal of certain teaching posts from the Faculty on the grounds of lack of 'cohesiveness'. An Ancient Near Eastern language such as Akkadian is linguistically very closely related to Arabic and Hebrew, all these being Semitic languages. This linguistic argument for cohesion is objectively just as valid as the non-linguistic argument that the languages of the Ancient Near East cohere more naturally with archaeology.
The failure of the advisory committee to discern all of these issues arises, I believe, from the fact that none of them are in the fields concerned and none are primarily linguists. It appears that language teaching in our Faculty has been assessed from an external viewpoint of language teaching in other Faculties and this has led to a lack of appreciation of the crucial differences. Furthermore, the external and basically non-linguistic viewpoint of the committee appears to have led to a lack of appreciation of the linguistic coherence of subject areas and the centrality of language in some graduate and research activities. I fully understand that a Faculty review has to be conducted by people who are external to the Faculty, but I would urge that those who make the final recommendations should have expertise in the languages represented in the Faculty. A review such as the one conducted in recent years on the Oriental Institute in Oxford, which was described last week by Professor Bowring, would be far more satisfactory. As we heard last week, this included academics who were external to the institution but internal to the field and could, therefore, appreciate the issues in a more accurate and balanced way.
Finally, I should like to make the point that the 'size' of so-called 'small' language subjects in our Faculty differs according to the perspective with which you view them. A language subject may be 'small' relative to other areas of the Faculty with regard to undergraduate numbers, but 'big' with regard to graduate numbers and research income. In my own subject area, Hebrew, we currently have relatively small undergraduate numbers, but our graduate numbers and research income are some of the largest in the Faculty. As a number of previous speakers have indicated, the current review process has been characterized by a lack of transparency with regard to its motives and trajectory. It has been claimed that certain small subjects are made 'safer' for the future by being moved to another Faculty. It has been decided that my own area, Hebrew, will remain in the Faculty of Oriental Studies, which, obviously, is the correct decision. Earlier on in the negotiations, however, it was initially proposed that part of Hebrew be reassigned to the Faculty of Divinity. We in the Hebrew section are clearly concerned for the future 'safety' of our subject and are keen to take the necessary action. I have been assuming that strength in graduate numbers and research would play an important part in protecting the subject. According to my calculations, for example, the fees of my graduate students and overheads from research income currently exceed my own salary costs and so must be taken into consideration if 'safety' is based on a financial cost argument. We have not, however, received any specific guidelines about this. It is difficult to take positive strategic action for the future without being given transparent, specific guidelines on the relation between research performance and the 'safety' of a subject.
Mr W. R. K. POWER:
Deputy Vice Chancellor, I am speaking as a current student of South Asian Studies and as undergraduate representative for the Faculty of Oriental Studies.
I would like to first express my thanks to the staff of the South Asian Studies Department, who have, throughout this difficult and uncertain period, never failed to provide teaching of the highest standard and offer their continued help and support. The Department epitomizes what I believe Cambridge should be: a place where it is the love of learning that is important, not its economic viability.
It is a shame that the passion and commitment to students shown by our staff has not been shared by the members of the Advisory Group chaired by Professor McKendrick.
Throughout this process of 'restructuring', communication with the student body has been woeful. Undergraduates have been given almost no opportunity to voice concerns and there have been no attempts to explain what the outcomes of this complicated process will actually mean. The Report refers to a mythical open meeting held sometime after term last year: a meeting to which none of the current students were invited, or indeed made faintly aware of. In my view this does not constitute adequate consultation and is indicative of the contempt shown by the University to students who feel that they have simply been brushed aside by 'the powers that be'.
The Report also pledges to provide 'necessary care and attention to the completion of the studies of current students'. This is already a hollow statement: undergraduates this year have found themselves with vastly curtailed options for papers, with more cuts set to follow way before any of us complete our degrees. In the face of potential cuts in other subjects, this surely makes a mockery of Cambridge's supposed diversity and its belief that it is among the finest academic institutions in the world.
The whole process has created an atmosphere of uncertainty and ambiguity. Despite this, however, it has not diminished my passion and commitment to the study of one of the most fascinating and relevant regions of the world.
The loss of South Asian Studies would be an avoidable tragedy. On behalf of the many students of South Asia I would urge the Board to reconsider its proposals.
Professor J. N. POSTGATE:
Deputy Vice-Chancellor, I am not sure that I can speak on behalf of the Faculty of Oriental Studies or its successor, since the effect of the General Board's Report will be to move me out of the Faculty, but as a long standing member of the Faculty and as its Chairman for the two years leading up to the Review I remain concerned for its well-being and anxious about its future.
Reading the General Board's Report anyone unfamiliar with the background could not be expected to realize that both the timing and the outcome of the Full Review of the Faculty were largely dictated by the financial constraints affecting the University as a whole and the School of Arts and Humanities in particular. The need for the School to save money by shedding posts is not alluded to, except in the Review's rather coy reference to 'difficult decisions which have to be made'. I think that the financial position should have been made clear, not only to give a less veiled rationale for the proposals, but also because it accounts for the limited ambitions of these two reports.
When the Review was instituted our expectation was that it would consider how the University as a whole can best benefit from the Faculty, and how the Faculty can best deliver these benefits. While the Faculty remains convinced of the fundamental importance of language acquisition for valid study of Asia and the Middle East (as of anywhere else in the world), it is equally convinced of the need to reach beyond this and teach and research in not only the history, literature, and religion, but also the politics, sociology, and economics of the world from Morocco to Japan. To live up to this massive brief, we have to consult and preferably collaborate with other Faculties. Unfortunately neither the Review itself nor the Report now under discussion devotes much attention to this wider picture.
It is true that the Terms of Reference for the Review cited by the current General Board Report included as their seventh item 'the Faculty's relationship with other cognate bodies, including relevant Centres of Area Studies in the University', but the Review Committee did not include within its brief a comparable review of the Centre of South Asian Studies. It is described in one sentence and its relationship with the Faculty of Oriental Studies is not explored. Subsequently, of course, it became obvious that planning the future of South Asian Studies within the University was meaningless without involving the Centre.
This reluctance to involve other parts of the University with common interests shows up in other ways. It was a disappointment to see that the internal members of the Review Committee came with only one exception from Faculties within the School of Arts and Humanities. As was pointed out last week, this ensured that a majority of the internal members belonged to Faculties which were, in this time of retrenchment, competitors for an inadequate funding stream; but it also meant that there was but one lone voice representing other subjects in the University with potential interests in the present and past of Asia and the Middle East, such as History, Economics, Anthropology, Social and Political Science, International Relations.
The Review itself does make frequent mention of our relations with other parts of the University, and implies that it supports a strategy which would 'seek to develop and extend those links on a more systematic basis so that Cambridge students can draw simultaneously on the strengths of both the Faculty and other institutions'. What neither the Review nor the General Board Report addresses is how, in their words, 'to develop and extend those links on a more systematic basis' so that they are not solely dependent on the initiative of individuals. The Review chides the Faculty for the 'haphazard' nature of its links with other institutions. Still, I believe it is the case that past initiatives have more often come from Oriental Studies than from elsewhere, and it is difficult to do things on a systematic basis where there is no system in place. It takes two to tango, and having one's hands tied behind one's back does not help.
The Tripos system does not make such links easy, or promote consultation, but there is one mechanism available to us, that of joint posts. It ensures that both academic constituencies are served from the moment the job description is formulated, that both institutions are committed to the academic interaction, and that subsequent developments in each Faculty continue to take account of the interests of the other. Moreover, it also means costs can be shared. In the specific case of Oriental Studies, it would open the door to ensuring that, for instance, if the University appointed a sociologist of modern China, they would not only have command of the Chinese language and scholarly literature, but would also be fully abreast of modern western sociological thought; and one could multiply examples ad lib.
Joint appointments are sometimes seen as administratively awkward, and have not found favour with the General Board's Advisory Group. I have experienced this in the context of my own subject, Assyriology, which under the current Report's recommendations will be transplanted to the Department of Archaeology, along with the post in Egyptian language. We welcome whole-heartedly the positive reception from the Department of Archaeology and the opportunity to strengthen our links with that academic constituency, but it is unfortunate that this will dissolve our institutional links with those who study the modern and ancient cultures of the Middle East, whether Arabic or Hebrew. From the standpoint of academic content, this is the equivalent of placing the entire Classics Faculty - language, literature, and philosophy - in the Department of Archaeology. One possible solution, which was favoured by the teaching officers in the Ancient Near East and by the Faculty Board, would have been to make the two language posts joint appointments. In section 9 of the Report the academic case is acknowledged, and very welcome (though not watertight) safeguards are provided against the erosion of the language posts. However, the Advisory Group considered that the case for joint posts is outweighed by other considerations. We remain unconvinced of the validity of these considerations, but there is a clash of cultures here, which cannot be resolved in this forum.
The point I wish to stress is that the Report under discussion today will terminate the joint appointments the Faculty has shared with two Faculties in the School of the Humanities and Social Sciences (and has not accepted the case for two others), and thus abolishes those institutional links we do have with the rest of the University. I very much hope this trend can be reversed. The Review recommends that under the RAM steps should be taken to enable the cost of joint posts to be attributed equally to the Faculties concerned, but I suspect that this remains an unresolved issue. For the sake of the re-branded Faculty I hope it can be resolved as a matter of urgency, for I am certain that the academic benefits of joint appointments should outweigh any administrative concerns.
Of course, having institutional links in place is only part of the solution. Academic planning is also essential to identify demands and opportunities for co-operation between Faculties. Without this, links are bound to remain adventitious, or 'haphazard'. The most dispiriting aspect of the Review was the scant attention given to the academic objectives of the Faculty as a whole and its component parts. Much emphasis was laid on administrative restructuring, with the clearly expressed purpose of enabling the Faculty unilaterally to reach the 'difficult decisions'. There was no consideration of the role the Faculty is expected to adopt in fulfilment of the University's academic objectives, whether within the Faculty or elsewhere. In the wake of this Review I hope that the General Board will give serious consideration to putting in place mechanisms for formulating academic policy which transcends the boundaries of the Schools and capitalizes on the expertise of the Faculty, strengthening all parties.
Mr J. G. HEAD:
Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, when compared to the speeches already heard in this Discussion, I fear that these remarks might seem slightly churlish in their brevity. Although I agree with much that has already been said regarding the proposed changes, I feel that I should confine myself to explaining why, when this Report was presented to the General Board, I declined to sign it, and refrain from offering more personal views about the future of the Faculty.
The first reason for not signing the Report is quite simple and is, perhaps, already obvious. As a former member of the Oriental Studies Faculty Board and a current Oriental Studies undergraduate, I am somewhat personally involved with these issues and I wanted to avoid any accusations of having a conflict of interest.
The second reason is more substantial, if not much more complex. Students within the Faculty have not been sufficiently involved with the review process which led to this Report, nor have they been kept sufficiently informed of the proposals. As far as I am aware, the only direct consultation of students occurred during the evidence-gathering phase of the Report, which took place between 31 January and 1 February, 2005. Since then there have been few official statements to the students on the current situation and no additional attempts have been made to solicit views.
This lack of consultation has led to a Report which seems to badly represent the concerns of students within the Faculty. To dwell on just the most obvious example, the gradual reduction in the number of courses offered by the Faculty has been extremely unpopular within the undergraduate community. If this process continues it seems inevitable that the most able students will be tempted to apply to other universities and not to Cambridge. Indeed, this must already be occurring with the closure of the Hindi and Sanskrit courses to new students. The best applicants for these subjects are, presumably, now be destined for Oxford or SOAS rather than here, at detriment to this University. There are, perhaps, sound academic or economic reasons for these actions. However, they have not been effectively explained to current students and there is no great feeling amongst the undergraduate community of having being involved with the process. Similar concerns seem to be held about many other areas of this Report and many of its more controversial recommendations. This is why the lack of explicit consultation is so unfortunate; it seems to have cut off the majority of students from involvement with the Review and this Report.
Admittedly, students are represented on many of the bodies associated with the Review and part of the blame for this lack of involvement must lie with them, myself included, for not being more effective in publicizing all the issues. However, the length of this Review, which has been discussed for at least four generations of student Faculty Board members, makes it impossible for any one student to have a grasp of the totality of the issues. Therefore, the University must take greater responsibility in order to ensure that students are suitably involved. It seems that if 'Advisory Groups' are to be set up for Reviews of other Faculties, then part of their terms-of-reference must be to ensure that the whole Faculty is consulted and not just the senior members. In particular, I would hope that draft proposals are made easily available to students and that their views should be explicitly solicited, not just during the evidence-gathering stage, but as proposals are being drafted and finalized. In this way, I would hope that future Faculty Reviews will produce proposals that work towards the improvement of the experience of students and accurately reflect their views and concerns.
Dr A. M. MCMAHON:
Joint posts: for the moment, my post is the only one remaining that officially connects the Oriental Studies Faculty with another. And one of the General Board's recommendations is that - just as the joint Oriental Studies and History posts have already been stealthily hijacked - my joint post shall cease to exist and instead that all four Ancient Near East posts should be transferred 'whole hog' to the Department of Archaeology. The Advisory Group's and General Board's unwillingness to consider joint posts is shamefully short-sighted.
Are not UK research funding councils increasingly encouraging interdisciplinary research projects? What better way for the University to promote interdisciplinarity than with posts which link two Faculties and thereby two intellectual disciplines? As has been said already, papers offered by other members of the Oriental Studies Faculty are cross-referenced in the Tripos offerings of SPS and History, as well as Archaeology; and Oriental Studies teaching officers supervise graduate students in a variety of other Faculties. Why not acknowledge these connections with more joint posts, rather than eradicating those few that exist? Joint posts could even make financial sense - although we have been repeatedly told finances are not at issue - and more importantly they make academic sense.
I have never found that the students in my lectures - whether Oriental Studies or Archaeology students - have been confused about what is on offer or how my lectures combine with the other elements of their separate courses. Being part of a community which comprises both students who can read the Epic of Gilgamesh in the original and those who can recognize a flint burin at twenty paces has surely made the students' experience richer, as it has enriched my own. I can only hope that this cross-fertilization will thrive once we have been conscripted into the Department of Archaeology and that a genuine effort will be made there to value language, literature, and history equally with isotopes, material culture, and post-structural critique.
Meanwhile I mourn the demise of my joint post, as I mourn the passing of the joint posts that linked Oriental Studies and History, and I mourn the lost opportunity to reaffirm or promote the potential connections of my Oriental Studies colleagues with Divinity, Economics, History and Philosophy of Science, International Studies, Linguistics, Philosophy, Social and Political Sciences, and probably others. Perhaps uniquely within the University, virtually all members of Oriental Studies could - and should - also be members of at least one other Faculty. The Review and its fallout never addressed this extraordinary situation, which is a virtue to be celebrated, not a failing deserving to be eliminated.
I have no faith that this Discussion will change anything - opinions and arguments, even extremely eloquent ones, have never stopped a runaway train. The Ancient Near East section is appreciative of the new home offered by the Head of the Department of Archaeology; we are generally resigned to the compromises we must make; and I am cautiously willing to hope that the light at the end of the tunnel is not a lamp on that train coming back at us but the entrance to a world of new possibilities. That said, it has been recommended that, among other things, the Ancient Near East posts be hastily reassigned to Archaeology with effect from 1 March of this year. I understand that there has been some unofficial change of that date, but whatever date it occurs, this transfer will have significant consequences for our current students in the Ancient Near East - undergraduate, M.Phil., and Ph.D. - who will be suddenly un-represented on the Faculty Board and Degree Committee of the new East Asia and Middle East Faculty. Our current undergraduates will be with us for up to the next three and a half years and some graduates for two and a half years; a formal provision for continued administration of their course must be made. Arrangements for Ancient Near East papers and courses within Archaeology and Anthropology have not yet been finalized, and this process seems unlikely to be complete by 1 March. We wish the move of our posts to be delayed, at least until the new Ancient Near East courses are formalized.
My next concern is an issue for Colleges but deserves to be raised here. The Ancient Near East must maintain and would like to increase its student numbers once we have moved to Archaeology. We foresee little problem and, in fact, potential for fresh opportunities at graduate level. But there is already a perception that Ancient Near East undergraduate student numbers would come at the expense of student numbers in other subjects within Archaeology and Anthropology, an iniquitous situation that sets us in competition with our new colleagues from the outset. The transfer of the Ancient Near East to Archaeology and Anthropology will mean that those of us who have been Directors of Studies in Oriental Studies for our respective Colleges no longer have a foothold in the admissions process. The General Board must encourage Colleges to ensure that Ancient Near East subjects are not disadvantaged by this transfer. Without intervention, our student numbers will drop; and I fear that someday soon we will be back in the Senate-House discussing a future review which recommends that the study of the Ancient Near East 'shall fold their tents, like [South Asia], and as silently steal away'.
Finally, I worry about the General Board statement that the proportion of the budget in the Oriental Studies library currently devoted to the Ancient Near East be preserved in the 'medium-term'. We are grateful that our library will be maintained for the moment but are troubled by the vagueness of 'medium-term'. As an archaeologist, I define 'medium-term' as 100 to 150 years. I am fairly sure this is not what the General Board has in mind. The length of time envisioned for this temporary arrangement needs clarification, as does the General Board's vision for a 'long-term' solution for the library and for the eventual physical location of the people involved. As others have mentioned, this review process has been toxic, and continued uncertainty and the possibility of more unpleasant surprises just prolongs the difficult atmosphere.
Professor R. J. ANDERSON:
Deputy Vice-Chancellor, I declare an interest in this debate, in that both my wife and my son-in-law are from Indian families. I have Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim in-laws.
As Professor of Security Engineering I also have a professional interest in the subject of this debate. Since 9/11, the security industry has been transformed by the perceived threat from radical Islam. Whatever my engineering colleagues may do to harden our critical infrastructure, and whatever my policy colleagues can do to reassure the public about the real magnitude of the risks, we still need to understand Salafist Islam.
Thirty years ago it was possible for an Arabist to believe that the Wahhabis were a tribe of iconoclasts found only in the Nejd, while an Indian historian could believe that the Wahhabis were a bunch of ruffians from Patna who instigated the Mutiny. Thankfully, the historians have now started talking to each other, and the tale that emerges - for example, in Charles Allen's recent book - is both fascinating and disturbing.
Radical Islam in Arabia and India have been intimately intertwined since the early 1730s, when Shah Waliullah and Abdul Wahhab were both students in Medinah and taught by Al-Madani. Scarcely a generation has passed since then without people and ideas flowing one way or the other. The very word 'Salafiyya' appears to have been coined in the Deoband Madrassah north of Delhi in the nineteenth century. And it should surprise no-one that Usama bin Laden finds sanctuary among the Afghan tribes: Indian Muslim radicals used the Mahabun mountains as a refuge from 1823. During the nineteenth century, they co-opted many local tribes to their point of view - read the history of the Ambeyla campaign.
Their take on the British Raj was exported when Jamal al-Din al-Afghani became a major inspiration for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which gave us Ayman al-Zawahiri. It should also surprise no-one that the 7/7 bombers spoke Urdu rather than Arabic. The radical tradition founded centuries ago by Ibm Taymiyya has been developing steadily in South Asia for two and a half centuries.
Deputy Vice-Chancellor, while it is just as respectable to study Rumi's poetry as it is to study pure mathematics, the sad fact remains that Middle Eastern studies stand to be well-funded for the same sordid reason that Russian studies were during the Cold War. We need to know our enemy. I would therefore like to ask the General Board the following questions.
First, is Cambridge to conduct research into radical Islam? Will this now be a joint venture between Oriental Studies and the Centre of South Asian Studies? If so, who will direct it, where will it be located, and how will it be funded?
Second, is Cambridge going to conduct undergraduate teaching on radical Islam? I presume we must, unless we discontinue Arabic teaching altogether. So who will teach South Asian history to our Arabic undergraduates?
Third, has the General Board conducted a competitive analysis of our position, and considered whether we need to expand our offerings - for example by offering a degree in Arabic with Urdu?
Sir NICHOLAS BARRINGTON:
Deputy Vice-Chancellor, I am not an academic. I speak as an M.A. of this University and an Honorary Fellow of Clare College. I spent 37 years as a diplomat around the world, including a lot of Asian posts: Head of Mission in Iran and Pakistan. I've also served in Vietnam, Japan, Afghanistan, and so on.
There is no need to remind you that Asian countries are assuming increasing importance in our globally inter-connected world. Britain's links with Asia have been strong, partly as a legacy of Empire, and have given us advantage over competitors in many fields.
The Government were right to recommend some years ago that priority in the study of Asian languages should be given to Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese. But a world-class university needs, of course, to cover a much wider spread. It is not just a question of the number of undergraduates interested in specialized studies, though there could well be a role for the University in stimulating interest in certain areas. There is a need for research. And much academic work these days is interdisciplinary. Students of religion, history, philosophy, art history, anthropology, archaeology, business studies, international affairs, and other sciences benefit from having regional expertise at hand and suffer if it is not available. It should be possible, for example, to arrange combined courses such as Business Studies and Hindi.
Cambridge's recent record on oriental languages has not been good. Abolishing Turkish, was, it seems to me, a serious mistake. Turkey's relationship with Europe is a major issue and Turkic-speaking countries of Central Asia are assuming increased economic importance. The Professorship of Classical Arabic, a post which has a great tradition in Cambridge has still not, I am told, been filled. We are appointing a new Professor of Modern Arabic, but this only with an outside benefaction. The gap anyway has been disgraceful at a time when Britain has been deeply engaged in trying to administer and pacify an Arab country. I understand that the key post of Professor of Chinese is also temporarily vacant.
As a university of the highest international standing I consider that we should re-establish the prestigious Professorship of Sanskrit, a great classical Indo-European language that can compare with Greek or Latin. Teaching Persian in Cambridge has survived with difficulty, thanks to the efforts of Peter Avery, Charles Melville, and others in tapping expatriate funding for one of the positions held in the Faculty. Not only is Persian civilization historically significant and rich in literature and art but Iran is now one of the world's political flash points. In my view there should be a Professor of Persian at Cambridge, as there is at Oxford.
On top of all this, the administration have apparently decided that it is inappropriate to retain an Oriental Faculty at all. I find this astonishing. If there is objection to the word 'oriental' it should be countered by the esteem enjoyed by the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.
I am told that scholars in some ancient civilizations and languages, such as Egyptian and Assyrian, have been consigned, without much consultation, to other Faculties where they will lose the advantage of working alongside colleagues studying more modern languages. Far Eastern Studies are to be hived off, as are those of the Middle East, though where that puts Persian-speaking Afghanistan and Turkic-speaking central Asia I don't know. Tibet will presumably be separated from India.
What has fallen through the gap, ironically at a time when the Indian Prime Minister was being given an Honorary Degree, is South Asian Studies. It is said that there are to be no further undergraduate courses in Sanskrit, Hindi, or Urdu. A popular Hindi lecturer, who also covered Urdu, felt unappreciated and has left for SOAS. There is a prospect of having no Hindi teacher in Cambridge. I can hardly believe this is happening with a part of the world that has a particularly close relationship with our country, and with millions of our own citizens; a part of the world frequently cited by British ministers as being of great importance, politically, economically, and strategically. When a gathering of academics interested in South Asia was assembled last year to be addressed by one of the deputies, I am told that she was astonished by the number of people that turned up, from a wide range of disciplines. I know there is talk of an expanded Centre for South Asian Studies, but this seems unlikely to be possible on the present restricted site or on any alternative site in the near future. And what will happen to the Oriental Faculty library?
I was given to believe by the Vice-Chancellor before Christmas that all concerned were happy with the new plans. I have told her that I am afraid that this is not my impression, talking to a number of friends who will be affected. Many do not feel that they were sufficiently consulted. I hope that the University administration can reflect further on this important issue, and think again before taking any drastic steps.
This was my general view. I only read the Report of the General Board this morning. I don't think the world has really woken up to what is being proposed in Cambridge. I thought that the Report was full of very dubious assertions. I am a member of various bodies in London linking Britain and Asia, such as the Royal Society of Asian Affairs, Asia House, and the Royal Asiatic Society, and I am in touch with the High Commissions of Pakistan and India and others. I don't think people understand the enormity of what is being proposed, particularly in relation to South Asian Studies and also in relation to Oriental Studies generally.
Dr R. M. HARRIS:
There is a lack of clarity in the General Board's Report, as there has been most of the way through the restructuring process, about the relationship between administrative and academic considerations in the restructuring of the Faculty. The division into two Departments appears to be essentially an administrative one. As the Report says in paragraph 8, 'the creation of two Departments … would create clearer, and simpler, lines of responsibility, more viable academic units capable of responding better to changing circumstances and academic needs, and remove the current language-defined sectional divisions of the Faculty', although the current language-defined sections are each academically coherent in themselves. This administrative approach has substantive effects: it is one reason given for removing South Asian Studies from the Faculty, as a Department of South Asian Studies would be too small to be tenable, we are told (see the Faculty Board minutes of 6 June 2006).
On the other hand, the Faculty Board has been led to understand that within each Department there needs to be a single coherent 'pathway' through the Tripos, so that the Ancient Near East and South Asian Studies have come to seem untidy adjuncts that cannot cohere with the other subjects offered. Yet the Faculty as a whole is required to keep one Tripos, rather than two separate ones. Clearly the Tripos as it currently stands does need to be made more coherent and consistent. But the Tripos resulting from the proposed changes will be less coherent than it is now because of the loss of South Asian Studies, which, as we have heard, has links both with the Middle East (through the importance of Persian in India and of influences flowing in the opposite direction) and with East Asia (from the spread of Indian Buddhism further East, as well as the growing contemporary relationships and parallels between East Asia and India). To say then that 'South Asian Studies do not fit well in the restructured Faculty', as the General Board Report does in paragraph 11, makes no sense in academic terms; and in administrative terms there is no reason why South Asian Studies should not fit into either of the two new Departments, nor why the Ancient Near East should not fit into that of Middle Eastern Studies. While the potential benefit of the proposed administrative restructuring and the encouragement to develop a simpler and more consistent Tripos is clear, the confusion in the underlying logic behind the details of it is muddled, and tends to undermine academic concerns rather than facilitate them.
On a final related point, the General Board Report states in paragraph 8: 'the Faculty Board have accepted that the title of the Faculty should become Faculty of East Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.' The Faculty Board agreed on 14 February 2006 that the name of the Faculty should be changed to the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, but has not in fact agreed to a further change of name since. This new name proposed by the General Board only makes it clearer that the restructured Faculty will in fact have less coherence than the old one.
Mr C. LAND:
Deputy Vice-Chancellor, as an undergraduate of the South Asian Studies Department there are a few points I would like to briefly raise on behalf of the students, before reading out a statement on behalf of Sophie Ibbotson, another undergraduate who is unfortunately unable to attend.
I would like to begin by emphasizing how important I feel it is to study and research South Asia in the 21st century. The area itself contains around one quarter of the world's population, with India's alone estimated at 1.2 billion. This is expected to overtake China's population by the year 2025 and by 2050 is set to peak at 1.5 billion. Besides being the world's largest democracy and a focal point for all the world's major religions, it is also one of its fastest growing economies and key political players. There are as many as 600m Hindi speakers, making it the world's third most widely spoken language, of whom, contrary to popular belief only between 2 and 3 per cent have a good command of English. In the face of all this, it is almost incomprehendable that the University is considering axing such an important area of study.
As has already been pointed out, if Britain is to benefit from a booming Indian economy, then it is important that its culture be taught at undergraduate level. The South Asian Studies course offers exactly that: a unique opportunity to study the languages, history, religion, literature, cinema, philosophy, politics, and media of the region in depth and it was this inter-disciplinary nature of the Tripos which inspired me to apply for such an unusual course in the first place.
It is also important to point out that departmental student numbers in the Oriental Studies Faculty are subject to great change over time. In the 1980s, when Japan's was the world's new economy, that was the Faculty's main Department, followed by Chinese in the 1990s, and now Arabic, with current affairs in the Middle East prompting an intake this year of around 30 undergraduate Arabic students. As India's prominence increases so too will applications for South Asian Studies. Cambridge has a long and distinguished history of teaching and research into South Asia, with Indian languages having been taught here for over 200 years, long before there ever was a Faculty of Oriental Studies.
Yet all this information should be irrelevant. I arrived at Cambridge with great expectations of the University and the understanding that we studied to promote awareness and understanding of such influential and diverse regions. I have since been disappointed. The Report has put undue stress not only on the staff of the Department, but also on the students. Our course has already been severely curtailed by its effects, with several key papers, including those in other major Indian languages such as Urdu and Bengali having already been withdrawn, despite both having more speakers than French. The Report claims that adequate provisions would be made for existing students, yet I feel that this is already not the case and that closure of the Department would make matters even worse for its students. This is all the more frustrating considering that we were never consulted on this, nor our views taken into account. Closing the Department would make SOAS the only major centre for teaching on South Asia in the United Kingdom. If this Report is a means to an administrative end, then I ask you Deputy Vice-Chancellor, what price does Cambridge University place on academia?
Ms S. IBBOTSON (read by Mr C. LAND):
Today, for the first time since arriving in India in September, I regret being so far from Cambridge. I do not regret the decision to study a degree with a year abroad programme - far from it - but it is a matter of much concern to me that I cannot stand up in Senate-House and defend before members of the General Board the members of my Department, my personal decision to study South Asia, and the validity of South Asian Studies as a discipline.
It seems that for centuries the East has always held a significant place in the imagination of Europeans, and, with its princes, palaces, plethora of animals, and vast pantheon of gods, India has provided an unending source of wonder for the curious. Unfortunately, that is all that most people have ever had the opportunity to do. People can stand on the outside looking in, but few have had the privilege to begin to understand, and therefore appreciate, what is before them. I have never been content to stand and stare. It is for that reason I committed myself to four years - and potentially after that a lifetime - to learning about one of the world's oldest civilizations, its largest democracy, and what will undoubtedly become one of its largest economies.
Applying to university I received offers from five different South Asia related courses. I chose to study at Cambridge rather than its competitors, most notably SOAS, due to the Department's long and distinguished history of undergraduate teaching, the unrivalled breadth of its syllabus, and what I believed would be an ongoing strength in the field. Cambridge men and women have a formidable reputation in South Asia as academics, journalists, and politicians to name but a few; I wanted to stand beside them.
Reading South Asian Studies at Cambridge has exceeded my expectations. At every stage I have been taught by academics who are at the forefront of their respective fields. In the two years I have spent to date in Cambridge I have already gained a broader and more in depth understanding of my subject than many of the American Ph.D. students whom I am studying alongside here in India. The credit for this must certainly go to the vision, efforts, and enthusiasm of the South Asian Studies Department's staff and the visiting lecturers who are attracted to Cambridge by the formidable global reputation of the Department.
For those of you who doubt the value of a degree in South Asian Studies, I would like to reiterate a few points that have no doubt been raised repeatedly in this debate but are still, I believe, of sufficient value to warrant being voiced again. India alone, not to mention the other countries covered under the South Asian Studies Tripos, is home to one sixth of the world's population and, contrary to what popular perception may have us believe, they do not all have a good command of English. English is, unfortunately, the preserve only of a relatively small, urbanized elite. It is not the language of the masses.
India is already a major player on the world stage, and as her economic prowess, political influence, and military might continue to grow, it is imperative that Britain is able to communicate with her effectively and on equal terms. As a result of the value - and rareness - of people with a command of Indian languages, I have to date been offered jobs as diverse as textile exporting, art dealing, translating for the NHS, and teaching.
This shows clearly that companies and non-commercial organizations alike are already acutely aware of the need for more, not fewer, linguists in their dealings with India. Restricting ourselves to communication with a minority of the population is not only short sighted but smacks of neo-colonialism - something that in the current political climate especially we should be trying to avoid.
Even if we are to disregard the current need in the UK for Indian language graduates, South Asian Studies does have a significant role to play in the world at large. Here in India, the work of academics abroad not only complements research undertaken in the Indian universities but can also have rather more serious role. In recent years the work of academics, in particular in the field of history and archaeology, has been seized by religious and political groups and used in attempts to justify, amongst other things, sectarian violence and the desecration of cultural and religious sites. Those working in India at times come under significant pressure from these groups to produce papers that are supportive of their particular ideology and when they resist, the consequences are unpleasant to say the least. The attacks at BORI in 2004 are just one example of the threat academics must sometimes face. I would therefore argue that academics abroad, who are fortunate enough on the whole to operate without these constraints, have a moral responsibility to continue working on South Asia in order that their colleagues abroad may be supported and disciplines drawing on South Asian material or subjects may be as well-rounded and objective as possible.
If we are forced to put our work and expertise and values at the disposal of the highest bidder - whether this be a political party, religious organization, or group of accountants - the research we undertake will not only be devalued and discredited, but also call in to question the value and purpose of knowledge in our society as a whole. Cambridge University has a global and, to date, well deserved reputation for extending and disseminating knowledge across all disciplines. I hope that it will continue to do so, and thus uphold its reputation and responsibilities for many years to come.
Dr B. KUSHNER:
Deputy Vice-Chancellor, I stand before this body in a somewhat different situation from my esteemed colleagues. I am not angry and I am not frustrated … in the historical sense. I arrived here after most of the General Board Reviews took place. That in no way, of course, means that I am voiceless. In fact, far from being elated, I am afraid. I am afraid this University is missing an opportunity for radical change, change that would set Cambridge apart, change that would make Cambridge into what it professes it wants to be but in reality, in my opinion, has not yet achieved. My remarks are not meant to summarize what was said last week but probe further into the future, asking difficult questions about intent, and policy, and to ponder where we see ourselves, not next week, not in two years but in twenty years when I will hopefully be in the same shoes as some of the more senior Faculty members here, but not necessarily sitting in a similar meeting perturbed at the outcome of a review process gone awry. That is my intention in coming here and speaking today.
I arrived at this University only recently with a relatively poor understanding of the successes and failures of the review process. It may therefore be considered fairly cheeky for me to address this body, but as an outsider who has taught in four countries and worked for two foreign governments I believe I possess a measure of understanding to compare Cambridge with other institutions and environments. As I understand, and according to my reading of the latest report of the Review Committee, the review process set out no specific future plan for the Faculty or Departments; instead it chose to look backward on what was successful, basing its understanding of the issues on precedent.
We are currently beyond precedent in my opinion. Allow me to paint the picture why. Over the last few years Japan and China have grown as larger trade partners with each other and larger trade partners with India. In 2005 both China and Japan made serious overtures to India in a bid to get that country more closely aligned with their own political interests. This is a most intriguing development, in fact it's revolutionary given the last five decades of history, and yet few are truly capable of understanding this change for the simple reason that basically no one on this side of the world works in Hindi, Japanese, or Chinese, let alone all three. Many of my colleagues have cogently argued for the need to keep South Asian Studies and valiantly demonstrated against facile and superficial calculations, noting that such a topic needs to remain and in fact grow. But why stop there?
The Faculty of Oriental Studies is currently the only Faculty that is not bound by disciplinary bondage. That means while students need to acquire an extensive ability in a foreign language that is not the ultimate goal, for they must simultaneously study all aspects of history, politics, and culture behind that country or region. Where else is that done? In my opinion that is a good start, but it is not enough for the future. Cambridge needs to set the trend; Cambridge should set its sights above the bare minimum for success and that is why I chose to work here. By cutting off its arms and legs, Cambridge is settling on second best but somehow deluding itself that it will remain world class. It can't and besides academia no longer works that way. We have reached the era of people easily recognizing that the emperor will not be wearing any clothes! Retrenching to familiar and the well known is a sign of weakness and a fear of innovation - and that's far from world class in my opinion. It's second class.
So, in short, what goals does the University have for the Faculty of Oriental Studies? We are told it should be the best. I love that slogan, it's so ambiguous but it sounds so lofty and appealing. However, while being the 'best' is a great slogan the actual implementation of greatness is often much, much more difficult to attain. Without specific plans, outlined courses of action, and the consensus of those executing the change at the local level, the fine slogan of 'best' will consistently fail. It is a mere slogan that looks great on paper but will end up turning transparent to all who will arrive here as wide-eyed students, hoping and yearning to learn something beyond what they have already been taught. In fact, find me one university in the world that doesn't aspire to such lofty heights - to being the 'best'. The speed of the world is changing and interconnectedness is not demanding we learn less about what happens beyond our shores, but more. I argue that the review process is stymied in another era, and we have already moved beyond their suggestions and understanding. In another ten years it will not even be enough to know Japanese, or Chinese, or Korean - the market and demands are already shifting. Many of my Chinese colleagues in Japan are fluent in three languages and that is almost common. Koreans working in Chinese studies in Korea have excelled and created a hybrid market that virtually requires one receive a Ph.D. in China to be considered of excellent calibre. This goes back to the comments one of my colleagues made last week - what do we add here? What makes Cambridge worth coming to and paying huge sums of money for? Does that which makes the University great now continue and will it hold true for the future? I see none of these answers in the review report.
Let us move quickly away from ourselves as champions of education and think about the students. Does the eradication of South Asian studies and the precipice upon which we place Oriental Studies serve our national community of learners? Will our students compete with the rest of the world as it advances? What sets Cambridge apart now? Is it the students, is it the Faculty, is it the breadth of what we teach? Or will it be trying to rely on a bygone era of reputation and bravado as we shed the very vestiges and appendages of what set us apart in the first place?
Permit me to produce an interesting anecdote that I think highlights the false premise of our glib understanding of globalization, and how and where Cambridge can continue to serve its mission. To outsiders who have never taught in the Oxbridge system the place is a Byzantine labyrinth of unofficial and official affiliations among institutes, Colleges, and Faculties. Even after I visited and talked with my future colleagues I failed to appreciate the depth of what I was getting into. Once I realized I would move continents, eventually change my passport, and teach here I had to brush up on Cambridge history and the actual structure of the University. In English, surprisingly for the novice, while there are novels and films of a fictional nature, nothing truly explains Cambridge to the uninitiated. There are anecdotal, first person accounts, and complaints on-line, and various short articles describing dribs and drabs, but nothing over-arching. Strangely, there is in Japanese and Chinese, and I am sure in Hindi as well. For the most complete and thorough explanation detailing the College/Faculty system and how to complete research and teach at Cambridge was only revealed to me in two foreign languages. If we allow parts to decay, Cambridge loses a valuable tool for demonstrating what it is all about to the rest of the world, as well as losing conduits for the UK to understand the world around it. We tend to assume that all knowledge will soon be available in our 'globalized' world, when in actuality this is far from the case.
Our sense of globalization assumes too much about commonality, exemplified in the fact that I could not find the information I needed about Cambridge, a very well known institution that's been around for quite a while. Imagine the difficulty of learning about something even more remote, with less ink spilled about it. The actual sense of where Oriental Studies stands in terms of globalization is clear from the 2005 report where our topics are labelled as 'minority subjects'. I found this peculiar. Are Japanese and Chinese language, politics, history, and culture minority because few want to study them, in which case they should be discontinued altogether, or are they minority because no one knows about them but they retain importance and validity? I would argue that Japan, as the second largest economy in the world, a nation that destabilized and stabilized East Asia and Asia for the last century, has more relevance to the study of globalization than say Germany, or Italy. To be provocative, let's erase for the sake of rationalizing the sciences, pure mathematics - it's quite new, it has no real history, and to be honest, no one really understands it. Its applicability is dubious at best and there are very few students actually following it. What about developmental biology? It's truly a minority subject in the sense that it is understood by a few. I don't jest here; well, I do in part. However, I am sure we can all live productive, educated, and meaningful lives without either of these subjects. I understand neither and my world is none the less for it. But is that what we strive for in our bottom line, zero sum game oriented idea of a world class education? Come here, we are telling our students, and we will offer you the same if not less than our international competitors who realize that globalization doesn't just mean learning the English language and parroting empty slogans.
Or does minority mean that few people understand such languages and topics here in the United Kingdom? In that case I would agree, but that definition would appear to be fairly backward looking rather than forward looking. This returns to the idea I referred to in the beginning of my remarks - Cambridge should set the standard high, not let it sink low and then skulk away quietly, hoping no one notices the bar has been set only inches above the bottom.
Too often globalization means wrapping oneself in the cloak of respectability with an excellent knowledge of western theory about a given topic to the complete exclusion of anything domestically related to the area of study. I believe that this falls very short of informed, intellectual enquiry about the rest of the world. The fact of the matter is that true globalization is dirty, it's expensive, and it's damn time consuming. You have to trek out to Mongolia to see what nomads are eating, but to get there you need to take several trains through China. On the way you'd better be sure you have a dictionary because people rarely speak in the standard Mandarin accent in that area, which you might be able to follow after five years of full-time study. On the way home, you might stop off because the flight is cheaper, not in Tokyo, where people speak English, but in Kyushu to understand the impact of Korean investment there and how it is changing the political landscape between the two countries and their fishing industries, currently depleting the world's supply. All this knowledge requires extensive contacts, time, travel, an ability in four languages - and that's just for simple tasks. This information is not on the internet, it's not in books, it's not even known. You have to have the foresight to see beyond your own ken from a cosy office that overlooks a lovely river and venture into the deep unknown. As academics, most of us love this lifestyle and adventure and zest for learning. Cambridge should be promoting that zest, promoting the unseen, and promoting the future. Instead, I fear, it is promoting the known, it is standardizing the pat and tried, and settling for less than it could achieve with a bit more farsightedness, effort, and zeal of its own.
Are we old and ossified? Are we content to be monolingual, mono-cultural, and mono-syllabic in our research? The answer, not just from my Faculty, but from across Faculties that co-ordinate any research across cultures and linguistic barriers, ideology, or borders, should be a resounding no! Who translates the science papers, who corrects the funding reports when we all co-ordinate with agencies and governments abroad? Is this all magically done with computers nowadays? Unless we want to live in a black and white world that ceased to exist over a half a century ago the answer from beyond the walls of my Faculty should be a full rejection of a process that began incorrectly and already demonstrates it has no future.
Topic of concern: The future of the study of the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, and the Ancient Near East in the University (see Reporter, p. 170).
Dr E. G. KAHRS:
Mr Deputy Vice Chancellor, needless to say I share the concern, anger, and frustration expressed by my colleagues in the previous discussion of the Report of the General Board concerning the restructuring of the Faculty of Oriental Studies. However, as a Sanskritist, I have chosen to speak of my concern for the future of the study of South Asia in the University, particularly the future of the language-based study of the region, as this is one of the areas that have been most deeply affected by the Report.
Since we are not allowed to create a Department of South Asian Studies in the Faculty of Oriental Studies, the language-based study of South Asia needs to be relocated to and fully integrated in the Centre of South Asian Studies and the new proposed M.Phil., for which we would be able to contribute 3,000 years of linguistic and cultural history. The Centre ought to take on the role of a Department of South Asian Studies, and that is precisely because studying aspects of South Asia is not the same as doing South Asian Studies.
The General Board have agreed that the South Asian Studies papers in the Oriental Studies Tripos be rescinded, and no further students be admitted. This is a serious decision as it has been the only course in the University where students have been able to devote their entire course to South Asia, in particular Indian languages, history, and culture. The posts in South Asian history have been transferred to the Faculty of History, both of them advertised in post-1700 history, and the lectureship in Hindi has been transferred to a post in Middle Eastern politics. This leaves two Readers in Sanskrit, a Language Teaching Officer in Hindi, and an Assistant Director of Research in Pali Lexicography. No academic arguments have been put forward for dismembering the subject, although we have constantly been reassured that it has nothing to do with money. Of course it has. The Report itself states that 'the dedicated South Asia pathway in the Oriental Studies Tripos has not flourished, as reflected in the relatively small numbers of students'. There has certainly not been anything wrong with the quality of the course. For example, the 2005 report of the external examiner, from Oxford, of the Sanskrit part of the Tripos, concludes that Cambridge has the best Sanskrit course in the UK. There is no doubt that Sanskrit, Hindi, and other minority subjects in British universities are under threat for non-academic reasons of this kind. The application of resource allocation models to such subjects brings them into the firing line, since the cost of staff salaries generally exceeds the revenue received from students and research grants. So far Oxford, unlike Cambridge in the case of Sanskrit and Hindi, has been sheltered from this development. Their larger entity of the Humanities Division has been committed to protecting small disciplines on the grounds that they are vital to the maintenance of an adequate coverage in the Humanities: the strong have accepted the responsibility of protecting the weak for the good of the whole. The University of Edinburgh opted for a different resource allocation model than Cambridge, and although Sanskrit can only be studied there in combination with other subjects, they recently filled one of Edinburgh's two Sanskrit posts upon the retirement of a colleague.
It may be argued that we have not been able to attract a large number of Tripos students, but this is an artefact of the Tripos system and the RAM. Sanskrit and Hindi classes are attended by a substantial number of students from other Faculties, notably Classics, History, History and Philosophy of Science, Divinity, Anthropology, and English. The total number of Cambridge students that signed up to do Sanskrit or Hindi, either formally or informally, in October 2005 was 22, split evenly between the two subjects. This figure did not include our graduate students. Cambridge's way of drawing up its balance sheet always fails to recognize such contributions. That we are no longer allowed to have our own Tripos students, but are ordered to continue teaching undergraduates from other Triposes, seems to me perverse, particularly in the light of the Advisory Group's obsession with teaching stints, and it may be questioned what good this decision has done the reputation of the University as a whole. Reactions in the Indian media were fierce, and the image of Cambridge as a leading world university severely tainted.
A special issue of the Economist on the world in 2007 highlights the decision of the British Library to shift its collecting focus in 2007 on to China and India. The article ends in the following way: 'Demand for material on China and India is growing fast and administrators are busily courting Asian students, donors and business partners. But the management of resources is often eccentric. In October 2006, for example, Cambridge University awarded India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, an honorary doctorate. As such things go, this was a fairly high-profile affair. There was much talk of the university's strong historic connection with India and its plans for deepening that relationship. There was less talk about the fact that, for the first time since the 1860s, new students are no longer able to take a BA in Hindi or Sanskrit. Surely a case not so much of looking to the future as turning your back on the past.'
But it is to the future that we must look, and to rebuilding South Asian Studies in Cambridge. Hindi is the official language of the Republic of India, and the mother tongue of around 250m people. It is spoken by another 350m as the growing lingua franca on the subcontinent. Sanskrit was the principal language of learning and literature in the Indian subcontinent from Vedic times down to the late medieval period. The rich intellectual and aesthetic heritage handed down in the vast literature composed in that language is one of the great achievements of human civilization, at its height extending its influence not only throughout the subcontinent but also into mainland and maritime Southeast Asia, Inner Asia, China, Korea, and Japan. Nor is it valuable simply as a major part of the world's cultural past. Its values live on in the lives of a substantial proportion of the world's population in India, in the many societies influenced by India, and, through the Indian diaspora, in the West. For this reason too it is important that the study of Sanskrit should continue to be possible in the major universities of the world, both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
The General Board are clear that South Asian Studies have a very important role to play in the University, and that further strengthening should be an important priority for the 800th Campaign, and that any new appointments, wherever they are assigned, should have an association with the Centre of South Asian Studies. This is all welcome, but the Report is extremely vague as to how all this is to be achieved. To conclude 'that Hindi continue to be offered, in some form, at undergraduate and graduate level, and that the Language Teaching Officer should take an active role in the Centre of South Asian Studies and that further consideration should be given to the future assignment of the post' will only achieve extreme frustration on the part of the Language Teaching Officer in question. To transfer the Lectureship in Hindi to Middle Eastern politics is not exactly promising a bright future for Hindi in the University either.
This then leaves the question especially of Sanskrit, which is obviously what concerns me the most. The resources for the study of classical Indian languages are excellent in Cambridge, with the University Library holding valuable collections from the beginning of Sanskrit studies in Europe, a Faculty Library whose holdings grew out of the amalgamation of scholarly collections donated by various Cambridge Professors and scholars over the years, supplemented by the Oriental Collection of Queens' College. Cambridge has accordingly a strong obligation to maintain teaching and research in these areas, thereby keeping up the University's reputation internationally. During the cuts imposed by the UGC in the early 1980s the University was in fact instructed to maintain Sanskrit. It is therefore reassuring to read in the Report that 'the Board recognize a need to raise the profile of Sanskrit in Cambridge and consider that a good future for the subject lies in research and graduate study. If Sanskrit is eventually to be brought into the Centre of South Asian Studies, opportunities should be explored for developing new research projects collaborating with colleagues in other universities and institutions, especially in India'. However, the Report also recommends 'that the two Readers in Sanskrit remain on the establishment of the Faculty of East Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, outside the new departmental structure, for the remainder of the tenure of the current incumbents, to be reviewed, on the occasion of a vacancy, by the General Board in consultation with the Council of the School of Arts and Humanities'. This leaves the posts extremely exposed, and to have to wait for a vacancy seems bizarre. The sheer compass of the Sanskrit legacy, as well as its extreme diversity, requires at least two people to teach (never mind research). It seems to me that both the Sanskrit posts, together with the ADR-ship in Pali Lexicography, should be transferred to the Centre of South Asian Studies now since this is clearly where the language-based study of South Asia will have to belong in the future, regardless of which School the posts or the Centre belong to. This, of course, requires a strong commitment to the future of the Centre which ought to take on the role of a Department of South Asian Studies, and this, again, requires resources. However, if Hindi, Sanskrit, and other classical languages of South Asia are to have a secure future in Cambridge, this is what needs doing, and it needs doing now to prevent the University from becoming a laughing stock in South Asia and prospective students turning elsewhere.
Professor P. F. KORNICKI:
Deputy Vice-Chancellor, in the Discussion on the General Board Report on the Faculty of Oriental Studies much has been said of the inadequacies both of the review process and of the conclusions reached by the Advisory Group, so it would be superfluous to say more on this subject now. Before I proceed to consider the future of Oriental Studies in Cambridge, however, I would like publicly to express my thanks to one person. Over the last three years, the chairmanship of the Faculty Board has changed fully five times, a sad indication of the extent to which the Advisory Group, refusing to parley with anyone but the Chairman, has damaged trust and good working relationships in the Faculty. Had it not been for the willingness of Dr Amira Bennison, the Deputy Chairman, to assume the chairmanship at critical moments, it is hard to see how the Faculty would have kept going. We are all enormously in her debt for the continuity she gave us and the steady hand with which she kept our collective heads above the water.
I want now to look to the future and in doing so to consider a number of what seem to me to be key issues. Needless to say, I take it as read that, although the Faculty will indeed departmentalize and will change its name, the General Board Report should be quietly buried.
Let us start with the perennial tension between area studies and academic disciplines. It is a fact which the Advisory Group lamentably failed to recognize that the disciplinary interests of the members of the Faculty of Oriental Studies lie as much in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences as they do in the School of Arts and Humanities: not only archaeologists but historians and social scientists too, for the study of East Asia, for example, inevitably embraces many disciplines and, through externally funded posts or through shifts in emphasis, we now overlap in disciplinary terms with numerous other Departments and Faculties. By the same token, in many of those Departments and Faculties there are colleagues with academic interests in East Asia; perhaps not yet many, but various disciplines are actively globalizing their perspectives, and this is an inevitable and welcome development. What I have said of East Asia naturally applies also to the Middle East and to South Asia as well, not to mention other areas. At the heart of the engagement with any region, though, must surely lie knowledge of the relevant language or languages: could a political scientist working on France conceivably work without a knowledge of French? Of course not. This is not to insist that every researcher working on East Asia needs to know all or even one of the languages, but it is self-evident that East Asian Studies at Cambridge can only thrive if there is provision to acquire, develop, and use linguistic proficiency, for without it Cambridge would lack credibility and graduate students would be wasting their time and money. We do have this provision in East Asian Studies and as a result our engagement with East Asia, which embraces colleagues in many other parts of the University, is wide-reaching and dynamic. In the case of South Asian Studies, however, the Advisory Group's proposals envisage taking the linguistic heart out of the project. Since nobody seriously imagines any longer that India even in the colonial period can be studied without knowledge of any Indian language, it is obvious that graduate students will all have to be recruited from outside this University, for our own undergraduates will not be fit for purpose.
The problem of disciplines and area studies which I have broached here is one that is closely tied to the future of institutions like the Centre of South Asian Studies, the East Asia Institute, and the Cambridge Committee for Russian and East European Studies, to name just a few. These all wriggle uneasily in the rapidly hardening structure of Schools now being concreted into place, each divided from the others by high financial walls. How will it be possible for these institutions with their interdisciplinary interests and area focuses to eke out a living in a landscape dominated by Schools? That is a question to which I shall return shortly.
Let me turn now to money, a topic studiously avoided by the Advisory Group. If the General Board Report is passed in the form of a Grace, we in the Faculty are painfully aware that with the four Ancient Near East posts the Faculty will lose a great deal. It will lose the RAE benefits of four high achieving scholars, three of whom are Fellows of the British Academy; it will lose the HEFCE Minority Subject Funding accruing to these subjects, amounting to over £100,000 per annum; and it will lose their undergraduate and postgraduate student numbers with the funding they bring in. Given that one and a half of the four posts are funded by Trust Funds not the Chest, it is a legitimate question to ask what the net financial consequence for the Faculty will be - gain or loss? This question has been asked of the School officers many times but no whisper of an answer has been forthcoming. Why not? Surely it was their responsibility, nay their duty, to cost their proposals and include an analysis of the financial consequences?
The General Board Report is deafeningly silent on the subject of money, too. The Centre of South Asian Studies will move from a precarious funding position in one School to a similar position in another, and yet it is expected to take on much more. So where are the resources going to come from? Silence. Deputy Vice- Chancellor, this is all too amateurish. If the General Board wishes the Regent House to approve this move, then surely it ought to be promoting a Grace to that effect and it ought to be explaining how the Centre will thrive financially in its new home. This, though, as I have already suggested, is an issue that touches on all such bodies that work hard to focus research and teaching on important regions of the globe but languish outside the normative structure of Faculties and Schools. There is, I submit, therefore, a desperate need for the University to address this key structural issue. I might add here that the Centres based in or connected with the Faculty were part of the remit of the Review Committee, but the Advisory Group seems to have lost sight of this issue altogether. If the posts in Indian languages are to be moved to the Centre for South Asian Studies and the Centre is to thrive as the beating heart of work on South Asia in the University with adequate provision for language acquisition and a new programme of teaching, fine; indeed, there is no real reason why the East Asia Institute and the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies could not be reconstituted likewise. But, and it is a big 'but', they would have to have their fair share of the RAE money and a strategy for survival as they dodge between the megalithic Schools.
Given what I have said so far, it would be remiss of me not to suggest a way forward. It is in that connection that I raise the question of posts either shared with other Faculties or alternatively based in Centres. Shared posts were highlighted by us at an early stage as a way of cementing relations with other Faculties and the issue was considered by the Advisory Group, but this too seems since to have been forgotten. I am only guessing, but I presume it is the difficulty of accommodating such posts to the Resource Allocation Model, particularly if they are shared by different Schools, that stood in the way. If that is so, then the Advisory Group should withdraw their comments on our alleged failure to cement relations with other institutions and ask themselves if a Resource Allocation Model that obstructs academic co-operation is a good Resource Allocation Model; if not, then they should explain why they are opposed to shared posts. The Faculty has lived with shared posts for many years and many of us see them as a neat solution to the discipline/area studies problem I mentioned earlier. I repeat, then: this issue needs serious consideration, and not just by the officers of our own School.
There was an advertisement in the Times Higher Education Supplement last week for a university lectureship in the sociology of China in Oxford to be jointly held in the Department of Sociology and the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies, an umbrella body that covers a host of area studies institutions, including the Contemporary China Studies Programme. Within the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies in Oxford there are 30 academics, all but two of whom are in shared posts, and the School derives some of its funding from a share of the RAE income they bring in. Sitting here in the Fens, one can only look wistfully at such constructive arrangements: a School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies providing shelter for area studies institutions, a system of joint posts, and an emphasis on the indispensability of language. Could not Cambridge take a leaf out of Oxford's book here? Or is that simply to court instant dismissal?
Needless to say, the advertisement for the Oxford post in the sociology of China stipulated that applicants should be fluent in Chinese. Meanwhile here in Cambridge there can be little doubt that languages are on a downward slide. Hungarian and Polish have gone, Sanskrit and Hindi are under threat, and now, it seems, Portuguese, too. As the inexorable logic of the Resource Allocation Model works its way through the humanities, what will be next? Modern Greek, Dutch, Russian, or Japanese? These losses, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, diminish the University.
The concerns I have mentioned here about structures and language provision do not just concern the Centre of South Asian Studies; they concern also the Cambridge Committee for Russian and East European Studies, the Centre of Latin-American Studies, and other Centres, too. Here, then, is a proposal. Let the General Board convene a meeting, under the chairmanship of a head of house with wide experience of the world, at which representatives of all these bodies might confer to propose a strategy for joint survival in the brave new world of all-powerful Schools that is emerging.
By way of conclusion, I should like to refer to a matter raised by the Vice-Chancellor when she addressed the University on 2 October 2006. She spoke then of the 'global' horizons of education: 'The case for breadth centres on the proposition that the greatest challenges facing the world today are of huge complexity and global scope, best tackled by people whose education enables them to integrate different fields of knowledge and work across conventional academic boundaries'.1 Who would dissent from this? Nobody, I hope. And yet such a global outlook lies regrettably in the future for most of the subjects in the humanities and social sciences, with the striking exception of the Faculty of Divinity. Let me take history departments as an example. At the University of Michigan 54% of the academic staff (tenured and non-tenured) work on Europe or North America, and 46% on Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America; at Berkeley the figures are 66% and 34%; I won't embarrass the Faculty of History by revealing the figures here - suffice it to say that the percentage of teaching officers in the Faculty of History in Cambridge working on the history of Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America is by comparison tiny. It is, of course, outrageously unfair to single the Faculty of History out. Much the same could be said, by way of comparison with major universities in the United States and Europe, of subjects such as Music, the History of Art, Sociology, and so on. How long can Cambridge afford to go on offering its students an education that leaves them as ignorant about huge swathes of the globe as they were when they came up? Is this the way that we teach students to grasp the 'global scope' of the challenges facing the world? Deputy Vice-Chancellor, this is surely a debate that ought to be taking place not in the inner sanctum of the School of Arts and Humanities but in the University at large.
We need to address, therefore, as a matter of urgency, the benefits of a system of joint posts that could bring the Vice-Chancellor's vision closer to reality; we need to recognize the importance of languages in engaging with the wider world; we need to reflect upon the constrictive impact that the Schools are likely to have on interdisciplinary work across the University; we need to recognize the key roles played by the underfunded area studies Centres in extending the global horizons of education and in co-ordinating research and graduate work, and we must take their needs for institutional support seriously. This, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, is the agenda we ought to be pursuing.
1 Reporter, 2006-07, pp. 26-29
Professor R. L. HUNTER (read by Professor H. VAN DE VEN):
Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, I much regret that I cannot be here today to listen to the Discussions; the Council of the School of Arts and Humanities, which I chair, meets this afternoon and thus I must be elsewhere.
The wish for Middle Eastern, East Asian, and South Asian Studies to flourish in the University is something which unites us all, and I would like to reiterate from last week my strong support, as Chair of the School, for the restructured Faculty of Oriental Studies and for the proposals to raise the profile of South Asian Studies across the University. I very much hope that this Discussion will prove an important landmark in the way ahead; this subject concerns us all.
Professor H. VAN DE VEN:
Deputy Vice-Chancellor, I will restrict my comments to China Studies.
Genuinely encouraging signs exist that the University beyond the Faculty of Oriental Studies is beginning to take China seriously. The Vice-Chancellor is committed to visiting East Asia regularly. The Development Office is very active in Hong Kong. Only a week ago, the Department of Anthropology appointed a Reader who specializes in Mongolia and has a significant research interest in China. The Department of Politics has also appointed a Lecturer who specializes in contemporary Chinese politics.
Such appointments, I hope, are the beginning of a trend that will result in a much fuller integration of China in the teaching and research programmes offered by other Faculties. It seems to me curious that there are no China specialists in Economics, despite China's astonishing economic growth. Geography, History, Art, Music, Law, and Archaeology also lack China specialists.
I am convinced that many students at Cambridge would like to have some exposure to China, even if they do not want to study the subject full-time or wish to learn the language. One reason they cannot is the Tripos system, which restricts their choices. I therefore very much welcome the recent remarks by the Vice-Chancellor in favour of a broadening of the education of our undergraduates. I similarly hope that the consultation on the Tripos system now begun by the Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Education will result in a much richer set of opportunities for students in other Faculties to learn about China.
I would be very surprised if the courses we now offer on various aspects of China (and for that matter on Japan and the Middle East) would not attract substantial audiences, even if they will perhaps never be quite as large as at Harvard University. Its famous 'rice paddy' course on the history of China and Japan regularly is attended by 400 to 500 students and must take place in the largest lecture hall that university has. Such a broadening would in no way necessarily imply a reduction in quality or depth, and given the significance of China, would likely mean the opposite. This would be the case especially if it becomes expected that China is included in courses where it is relevant across the University, such as now is the case in Faculty of History's course on Population and Environment, run by Dr Szreter, rather than skipped over simply because the teaching isn't available.
Despite the two recent appointments referred to above, Chinese Studies continues at Cambridge with the same number of dedicated posts as when I arrived twenty years ago. Last year, the filling of the Professorship of Chinese was postponed under School pressure in the hope that substitute funding could be found. In contrast, Manchester, Bristol, Sheffield, Oxford, Warwick, Birkbeck, and Nottingham Universities have been willing to expand their China programmes or establish new ones, using their own resources.
I don't believe that at Cambridge there is serious opposition to an expansion of China Studies. Part of the problem is that our funding allocation model makes the redeployment of resources difficult. We may decry a metrics-based RAE, but we do rely on the RAM to allocate our own resources. The RAM has its uses, but it is also a device to avoid possible conflict by replacing human decision-making with a supposedly 'objective' mathematical formula. One consequence has been that the School to which we now belong is deemed expensive and therefore has to make savings. If the Review rightly argues for greater attention to contemporary China, this can only be done under current arrangements by taking posts from our three pre-modern China studies posts, which is not very many, or from other areas of the Faculty, which too must cope with minimal staffing.
The future that I would like to see come about is one in which China is integrated in the teaching and research programmes of other Faculties, while we in the future Department of East Asian Studies lead the hard core effort of teaching the language and training Ph.D. students able to handle Chinese sources expertly. China-related posts in other Faculties, preferably with a joint appointment in the new Department, the broadening of the Tripos system, and some of the reforms as outlined in the General Board Report would lay a basis for this. This would be a future in which China is not seen as the preserve of erudite Sinologists but is for all. While that would mean change outside the Faculty, it would mean too that we in the Faculty would readily and enthusiastically welcome the participation of those less intensely involved in the study of China. Beyond the structural changes, what is needed is also a change in attitude both within and outside the Faculty. To make the study of China flourish in Cambridge, then, much work remains to be done, but it is vital that it is done. To miss out on one of the most interesting and profound changes of our time - the resurgence of China - would be a grave error.
Dr J. H. SWENSON-WRIGHT:
Deputy Vice-Chancellor, nothing that has been said so far should obscure the consensus that unites all of us. We accept and recognize the need to evolve, and believe that reform should be at the top of the agenda of both the University and the Faculty. The challenge is how best to ensure that reform will secure the long-term interests of all the affected constituencies while remaining true to the educational and intellectual values and aspirations of this great University.
No one can afford to ignore the very real economic pressures faced by the University. But should such pressures alone be defining the way in which we respond to today's challenges? I would argue that effectively eliminating undergraduate provision in Hindi, a language spoken by no fewer than 500m people worldwide, is a retrograde step. It creates the damaging impression that we are the victims rather than the managers of economic change. We appear to be reacting in an ad hoc fashion to external forces, hunkering down and - constrained by short-term financial expediency - retreating from competitive pressures, rather than looking outward and seeking to learn from the best examples of our peer institutions both here and abroad. That the Advisory Group and the Review Panel that preceded it included no representatives from foreign academic institutions only confirms the parochial and blinkered nature of the restructuring process.
The University website trumpets Cambridge's very real achievements in establishing personal and institutional links with South Asia. These are worthy and important successes and a necessary part of remaining a world-class university. But are they sufficient to retain our leading-edge? Indeed, do such connections demonstrate our comparative advantage or are they merely what we should expect of any institution that has international aspirations? It is an all too familiar cliché to say that we live in a global-village. Instant internet communications, regular international conferences, and a steady stream of visitors, researchers, and foreign graduate students help to boost our international credentials, but does this add up to a secure foundation of genuine and lasting intellectual substance?
I would argue that fostering such international ties is the bare minimum required to stand still, and to avoid falling behind in an increasingly fast-paced, competitive educational environment. Where in the General Board's proposals is there any reassurance that we are genuinely planning for the future and investing in the human capital needed to sustain ourselves, both as an institution and as a nation that will remain viable, let alone competitive over the next ten or twenty years? We may attract high fee-paying foreign graduate students, but from where will the UK Hindi and Sanskrit specialists of the future emerge to take their place among the ranks of past British specialists? The website of GCHQ, the branch of our nation's intelligence service that recruits linguists, is currently soliciting applications from British citizens for its 2007-08 intake with fluency in a range of languages, including Hindi, Kashmiri, Punjabi, and Urdu. Presumably, if the General Board's proposal is approved it won't be long before Cambridge is no longer able to provide qualified candidates in any of these strategically important languages.
The danger of the cuts that we are being asked to approve is that short-term economic expediency will result in us squandering and eventually eliminating our resources of human capital. Only last week, with the surprise announcement of the axing of the undergraduate Tripos in Portuguese, we saw another worrying example of the tendency to allow narrow financial considerations to eclipse any larger strategic vision. Nor should we assume that the concerns of the lusophone world are separate from those of India. As any student of international relations knows, the BRICs group of Brazil, Russia, India, and China - a constituency first singled out some years ago by economists at Goldman Sachs - looks set to make up the four dominant world economies by 2050. Ditching both Portuguese and Hindi seems a curious head-in-the-sands gesture and a bizarre refusal to recognize the powerful forces of globalization.
We should remember too that eliminating smaller Departments in an effort to boost larger constituencies is a questionable approach, both because it undermines the morale and intellectual cohesion of the wider University community, and also because it is likely to prove a short-term palliative at best. As any David Attenborough enthusiast will know, the savaging of an individual, weak member of the herd by predators will often buy precious escape time for the rest. Similarly, any UK academic must appreciate that the sacrificing of a small or vulnerable Department will often, albeit only temporarily, relieve pressure on those perceived as larger or stronger. But is herd animal behaviour really the right management model for Cambridge University?
This financial, target-driven, short-term approach creates the impression that we are part of an institution with limited ambitions - controlled by, rather than responsive to or able to anticipate external events. If Cambridge is to be more than a glorified international conference centre, its internationalism needs intellectual substance. Learning a foreign language thoroughly and with a deep appreciation of the historical and cultural context in which it has evolved, while also acquiring the analytical and disciplinary skills of history, social science, and the arts and humanities in general is the key to developing a true internationalism. A quick language course may enable you to buy a 'happy meal' in Lisbon or log on at an internet café in Delhi, but Cambridge should surely be aspiring to something more valuable and of lasting strategic significance - educating Britain's policy-makers, analysts, and scholars rather than merely catering to its consumers and tourists.
It seems bureaucratically fashionable at the moment to regard academic subjects as non-viable if they do not automatically attract large numbers of undergraduates and unsolicited offers of funding from corporate donors. But if numbers and money were the best bench-mark of success and intrinsic value then Big Brother would surely be the unchallenged model of quality television programming. If subjects such as Hindi, Sanskrit, or Portuguese are not attracting record numbers of undergraduates and unsolicited offers of funding, is this necessarily the fault of the scholars who teach in those Departments? Surely the University also has a responsibility for promoting these subjects, and for supporting those who teach and study them?
I would argue that it is the role of the University, as well as individual Departments and Faculties, to champion subjects it considers intellectually important, to persuade potential funders to support those subjects and, in co-operation at times with government and industry, to encourage prospective students to apply to Cambridge - particularly in minority, specialized areas. Allowing the market to work its levelling, arbitrary magic is no guarantee of quality. If devolved economic decision-making at the Faculty level is no longer acceptable, then neither is the notion that individual Departments should go out and sell themselves in a strategic vacuum with little co-ordination or leadership from the centre.
It is curious that while the University attempts to give greater decision-making authority to the heads of the Schools it appears reluctant to provide a clear set of priorities in terms of subjects and disciplines or a comprehensive vision that would enable these bodies to shoulder the responsibility of planning strategically for the future. Where is the evidence of a coherent plan that examines the provision of integrated areas studies and language training across the University and its different Schools? Where is the consultation mechanism that would bring together Cambridge's various institutes and regional centres that separately and collectively can break down the disciplinary and administrative barriers that are proving such an obstacle to long-term creative planning? Surely a process that brought these different constituencies together would be a much more effective means of planning for the future than the reactive, opaque, and demoralizing process we have just been through.
My colleagues have offered a path out of the current confusion that involves looking beyond the constricting structure of the Schools and a decision-making environment in which major restructuring initiatives are un-costed and lack transparency. Surely, the breadth and depth of concern that the General Board's Report has generated and the international and economic pressures faced by this University provide ample justification for such a new approach. We should take comfort from these Discussions since they demonstrate that the democratic conventions of Cambridge allow critical but constructive views to be fully aired and debated and provide us with a means of escaping our current predicament. While accepting departmentalization and the merits of genuine reform, we should abandon this flawed General Board Report and carefully reconsider how best to promote change that will be in the best interests not merely of a selective few, but of the University community as a whole.
Dr C. CULLEN:
Deputy Vice-Chancellor, I am the Director of the Needham Research Institute, a research centre in Cambridge devoted to the history of science, technology, and medicine in East Asia (http://www.nri.org.uk/). The Institute is maintained by a charitable trust with a membership composed largely of senior members of the University, and stands outside the control of the University and its General Board.
Although I am an Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Oriental Studies, and count some close colleagues and friends in that Faculty, my professional identity and income are not dependent on that Faculty. Therefore, while I sympathize with the disquiet of my colleagues at the stress they have suffered over the last two years, and while I share many of their feelings about the extent to which the Report of the General Board on the restructuring of the Faculty fails to meet their needs, I have refrained from joining directly in the Discussion on that Report.
In this more general Discussion, I would like to insist on the urgent need to make better plans for the future development of East Asian Studies, and particularly Chinese Studies, in Cambridge. This is a vital matter of national leadership, going far beyond our purely local concerns. Everybody here will no doubt assent to such statements in general terms - let me explain briefly my own special reasons for coming here to say that today, and why I think we must move from policy statements to effective action with all deliberate dispatch.
The week before last I took part in a series of seminars in London organized by the 'think tank' Demos to conclude a year-long research project entitled 'The Atlas of Ideas: Mapping the new geography of science'. This project has examined the rapid scientific and technical rise of China, India, and South Korea. It has charted their likely trajectories in future decades, and evaluated the resultant risks and opportunities for the UK. The resultant report on China is startling reading for those who have not updated their stereotypes recently (full text is available via http://www.demos.co.uk/publications/atlaschina/). The 50 universities of the Beijing area now produce more science and engineering graduates than most of Europe. China's R&D spending has increased by more than 20% a year since 1999, and will overtake Europe by the end of the decade. Current long-term plans set the target of advances in science and technology accounting for 60% of Chinese economic growth. To have come so far, so fast, in the 30 years since the chaos of the Cultural Revolution is, as the Demos report says, astonishing. Of course some scepticism is in order about the more extravagantly optimistic views of China's potential, as Will Hutton has pointed out in his latest book. Major political, social, and economic problems await resolution. But if China succeeds in fulfilling only a fair part of its goals for the future, the impact on the rest of the world will be seismic. To quote again 'in the decades to come, China is likely to change science just as much as science changes China'.
I know that the leadership of this University is well aware of such projections, takes them with due seriousness, and is acting accordingly in promoting our relations with China through a variety of energetic measures. But that is not where the problem lies, as other contributions last Tuesday and this afternoon have made plain. The trouble is that the small- and medium-scale structures of this University do not yet enable us to co-ordinate our China-linked resources to follow this lead through in a way that will make the best of all our advantages.
One of those advantages is of course the striking success of our small band of China specialists in promoting Chinese language teaching. How important such teaching is hardly needs stressing, at a time when on a UK national scale the take-up of modern languages is actually decreasing, and is still dominated by on the whole not very successful teaching of the international language of a century ago - French (a language, I may add, spoken by less than half the number of people who speak Portuguese). Our Chinese language teaching should be celebrated and expanded, so that more and more students from Cambridge are equipped to operate in Chinese, whether at a specialist level or as a supplementary tool for other specialisms such as science or economics.
But language teaching alone is not enough. We need to find the organizational means to build China-linked excellence into all our principal areas of teaching and research. In some cases we shall have to build from the ground up: I scan the fields of interest of the 170 staff of the History Faculty listed on their website without seeing the name 'China' once. Since this is the UK's leading History faculty, that omission does seem to deserve some attention. In other cases, such as social anthropology and management science it is more a matter of ensuring that our present School and Tripos structures do not work against effective use of the good resources we already have. Some of these structures have helped build this University's excellence in the past: the point, however, is whether they will serve us well in a rapidly changing world. My feeling is that in the case of Chinese Studies at least they may need radical reform, and that is why I support the call for a more strategic and University-wide enquiry into our East Asian Studies provision, with international participation at the highest level.
My own Institute is of course ready to play its part in helping to build the strongest possible configuration of Chinese Studies in Cambridge. Our founder was Joseph Needham, former Master of Caius, and probably Cambridge's best known sinologist and historian of science in the twentieth century. For reasons that are now of purely historical interest, we were set up quite independently of the University, and I think it is fair to say we have flourished in that mode, both in scholarly and financial terms. But our Trustees feel that it is now time for us to find an agreed way to place our facilities more directly and formally within the University's China portfolio. The benefits to the Cambridge China brand from this would I suggest be non-negligible, even merely from the point of view of the RAE contribution from our active publication programme. But there is also the fact that Needham's work is accorded great respect in China: dropping his name - or rather talking about him at length - seems to be routine when senior Chinese leaders visit the UK, and indeed at the Demos event I mentioned the Director General of Basic Research at the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology began his presentation with a picture of Needham and a summary of his work. If the right institutional structures can be found to re-position the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge, there are clear opportunities for fund-raising and the establishment of relevant academic posts that can help continue building East Asian Studies in Cambridge to the world-wide stature and influence for which they already possess so rich a potential. I hope there will be no delay on either side in pursuing these opportunities at this time when the need for imaginative innovation in relation to East Asia in this University is so very pressing, and the rewards for success are potentially so very great.
Dr R. STERCKX:
Deputy Vice-Chancellor, last week I endorsed the Board's recommendation to establish a Department of East Asian Studies. But I do so in the knowledge that administrative surgery is the easy part of the exercise. Securing the development and future of our subjects in the University at large will require a more fundamental meeting of minds. I will single out the example of China and East Asia here but what I have to say rings equally true for our engagement with the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.
It is a truism that no institution of higher education can afford not to engage thoroughly with the Chinese world. The fact that Oxford has nearly doubled its China posts over the last five years and new departments of Chinese and East Asian Studies have mushroomed up around us in Bristol, Nottingham, Manchester, and beyond at the very same time we are under the microscope should be a stark reminder of the pressing urgency to re-examine our own institution and the ways in which it facilitates learning about China and East Asia across our University. I had the privilege of being a graduate student in this University when it was staffed with six posts in Chinese Studies, and backed by library resources unmatched anywhere else in Europe. The talent and resources are still here, yet, barely two decades on, those parts of the world that occupy us professionally and the demands they put upon us have changed drastically. On the eve of the Beijing Olympics with demand for expertise on China higher than ever before, I am now teaching in what shapes up to be a Department with exactly that same number of permanent staff. Yet now we are no longer expected to foster expertise in the time-consuming Chinese languages, but also committed to training our students in the entire gamut of humanities and social science disciplines as they apply to China, from Confucius to the bird flu. We are very fortunate to have a number of colleagues in other Faculties who produce excellent work on China-related subjects. And indeed we are surrounded by unique resources as yet outside our formal structures such as the Needham Research Institute that could contribute greatly to the development of a thriving East Asian Studies community. Yet, unless we take stock of present potential today, we run the danger tomorrow of fast falling behind the majority of institutions we like to compare ourselves with. On this very day, the Slade Lectures in fine art are being delivered on the topic of Chinese art to a university community that has no permanent specialist in Chinese art, material culture, or archaeology. The religious, philosophical, and intellectual tradition of over one fifth of the world's population, does as yet not figure anywhere on a curriculum beyond the present Oriental Studies Tripos and the same applies in parts to law, history, politics, and the history of science, technology, and medicine.
Deputy Vice-Chancellor, there is a great deal of energy and enthusiasm among colleagues in our Faculty and elsewhere to work towards ensuring that this University is capable to foster students equipped with the basic skills to be successful in a thoroughly changing world. The opportunities are tremendous, so are the challenges, yet no one single Department will be able to service the vast range of academic skills and learning that this new encounter requires. Just as no single Faculty can claim an intellectual or educational monopoly on the study of Europe in all its manifestations and disciplines, likewise no single Department or Faculty can carry that burden with respect to the study of East Asia. The real choice before us as a University community therefore goes beyond the administrative reshuffle put before the Faculty of Oriental Studies, however much I welcome some of its main tenets. The question we should ask ourselves is whether we are prepared and equipped to thoroughly engage the study of East Asia across disciplines and offer it its rightful place on our humanities and social sciences curriculum beyond the walls of one Faculty, one School, or one Tripos. This is a strategic question and one we can ill afford not to address, even within the confines of the financial limitations we all need to work with. The challenge we are facing today is not necessarily one that is solved simply by shifting more or less posts left or right. Much could be achieved within the present financial framework with a healthy dose of institutional creativity. At present, our administrative structures do not allow the talent and expertise present across the Schools of the Humanities and Social Sciences to come to its fullest fruition for the benefit of the greater constituency of students. While the nature of some of our disciplines has changed substantially in response to new realities, academic posts continue to be discussed within the confines of isolated Faculties. If it is indeed the case that the decades ahead will require us to train young people to operate in a knowledge-economy that is rapidly crossing the boundaries of the disciplines that our institution has historically grown accustomed to, then it is our duty to facilitate this type of education. A Department of East Asian Studies can and no doubt will assume a central role in promoting this vision, but it can not do this on its own. The challenge before us all is to ensure that the next generation of Cambridge students is given the opportunity to learn about East Asia in their respective disciplines with the same intensity as students in China, Korea, and Japan are offered a platform to learn about us. It is a task so important in my view that, if we fail to seize the moment at this critical juncture, we will not only fall short of medals in the Olympics of sport, but, more importantly, in the Olympics of global education. The occasion of the General Board's review of the Faculty of Oriental Studies should, I hope, be the impetus to launch this wider debate. If that eventually will prove to be its outcome then this exercise will have achieved what it should have set out to do in the first place, and it will have done so for the benefit of scholars and students not just in our Faculty, but across the University. It is time for us to get back to work.
Dr S. F. DARUVALA:
Deputy Vice-Chancellor, as the Discussion last week made perfectly clear, the conduct of the Review of the Faculty of Oriental Studies, and the resulting decisions, have caused deep unhappiness even among those of us whose subjects have survived. I share this unhappiness, even though departmentalization will enable me and my colleagues to work together in new ways. Much as I welcome the changes and the progress we will be able to make, it will be hard to shrug off what has happened unless we can confront the issues involved. The treatment of South Asian Studies and the text-based study of the Ancient Near East suggests a fundamental failure to appreciate the necessity and value of the training in the languages, histories, and cultures of the areas studied provided by our Faculty. This training provides the tools to understand the complexities of the areas we study, areas which are becoming more complex, not less, in the contemporary world, and sharing much more, not less, with each other. A recent article by Professor Michael Hutt of SOAS in the Journal of Asian Studies (May 2006) makes the first point very well: although globalization and the internet may have made it seem that English is the medium through which South Asia can be read, political, and social change there has been driven since the late 1970s by vernacular print and radio media. Writing about the still ongoing encounter between the state and the civil rights movement in Nepal, he comments that English language media can only convey the 'broad outline and distant sounds of the encounter'. It can only be fully comprehended through recourse to the language and assumptions in which it is embedded. A quarter of a century after such a massive change started in South Asia, Cambridge is turning its back on the teaching of Hindi and Sanskrit is to be given an uncertain home in the Centre of South Asian Studies!
However, no consideration was given to academic arguments when the decisions to rescind or remove these subjects from our Faculty were made. Instead the decisions have been driven by economic concerns: we were restructured into two Departments, dominated by a Standing Committee on Academic Vacancies under which it was clear South Asia could not survive. As a result the Faculty has been left in a very strange, mutilated shape, with the Middle East and East Asia trying to reach out to each other over the chasm left by South Asia. I feel this shows a disregard for the Faculty and what it does, and therefore does not bode well for our future.
Over the last two years it was repeatedly denied that money was the driver in the decision to demolish South Asian Studies and the other minority subjects within the Oriental Studies Faculty. However, comparison of the 'four issues' for consideration cited in the 1999 and 2004 Reviews of the Oriental Studies Faculty suggests otherwise:
| 1999 (p. 2) | 2004 Review (p. 27) |
| (i) range of languages and subjects | (i) structure/content of Tripos |
| (ii) cost | (ii) future of minority subjects |
| (iii) structure | (iii) governance arrangements |
| (iv) identity | (iv) Faculty's contribution to University's engagement with contemporary issues |
There is a strong correlation between the two sets of issues, and we see 'cost' in 1999 transmuted into 'the future of minority subjects' in 2004.
Of course, the University must conduct itself in a financially prudent way, but it must at the same time balance this with its primary duty to foster and develop crucial areas of knowledge. I would like to see more consideration given to the question of how we are to achieve this under the system we are moving towards, as detailed in the Joint Report on the Councils of the Schools. In this system 'the Resource Allocation Model at the level of the School exists alongside responsibility for a rolling five-year academic plan reflecting the teaching and research aspirations of each School's constituent institutions'.1 Does this mean that everything is up for grabs, all the time, or can some means be found to guard against short-termism? How can we ensure that the longer view of academic principles can make itself heard, and that academic and intellectual resources that have been built up over time can be maintained and contribute to the future, when subjects must be seen through the prism of money?
There is a Chinese view that education is an enterprise for which you plan 100 years ahead. This may seem a trifle on the long side, but it suggests a great seriousness about the purpose of education and unwillingness to be driven by contingency that we should match. We members of the University need to ask how we can best maintain ourselves as a flourishing intellectual and academic institution, strong in humanities and social sciences as well as sciences. I know some of my colleagues have concrete suggestions about the role of the Centres and the need to foster joint posts between the Schools, and I support them. By recognizing the value of language teaching and allowing the humanities to flourish, the University should be better able to attract the support it needs to fulfil its 800th anniversary aims and move away from dependence on government funding.
1 Reporter, 2006-07, p. 230
Professor R. J. BOWRING:
Deputy Vice-Chancellor, I am sure that my earlier remarks caused hurt in some quarters but they had to be said. I trust they will be taken seriously, especially the point about the make-up of review panels. I shall now be as constructive as possible and address the problem of our isolation within the University.
One of the most fruitful joint appointments we have had in the past was between Japanese Studies and the Judge Institute. Why is this kind of thing now so difficult to contemplate? Like many, I have come to the conclusion that it is the Schools themselves that lie at the root of the problem. Of course we realize that there are financial constraints and that we desperately needed a better system of financial control. We now have this in the form of the RAM. But the RAM is now driving academic priorities. Now that the Schools have been given full financial responsibility, resistance to change is much stronger, because the devolution of budgetary control to School level has had the unintended effect of setting the constituents of such Schools in aspic, and the Schools themselves have begun to erect thick perimeter walls, walls that are rationalized not on academic grounds but on budgetary ones. This might not be so problematic if the distribution of Faculties into Schools had some rationale, but it does not; it is merely historical accident and there are some bizarre bedfellows. The growth in power at School level is making it increasingly difficult to deal with matters of policy that by their very nature should be taken at a macro level. I would even go so far as to suggest that the devolution of budgetary control is masking matters of academic concern and rendering them at times all but invisible.
During the review process it became clear that the idea of joint posts across School boundaries, which I firmly believe to be the only sensible way forward, was simply too horrible to contemplate. When posts in such subjects as Chinese politics or Japanese society are financially geared to a Faculty with small student numbers, they find it difficult to survive or do not exist in the first place. The answer is to have a series of joint appointments so that these lecturers can share their expertise across boundaries. But the increasingly rigid system of Schools militates against this. We therefore have the strange situation that until this month, when two RAE-linked appointments were made in Politics and Social Anthropology, there was no lectureship in Cambridge devoted to Chinese society or politics post-1945, and we still have no one working on either Japanese or Chinese art or archaeology, and students of history denied access to specialists in China, Japan, or Korea.
There is another mechanism by which major routes between these School domains can be opened and widened: and that is the institution known in Cambridge as a Centre. There is, of course, a Centre of Latin-American Studies, a Centre of African Studies, and, closer to home, South Asian Studies, and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies which, unbelievably, is not even mentioned in the Report. South Asian Studies is, as we have heard, alive and well; Middle Eastern is, well, alive. When I mentioned the obvious, that we needed an East Asia Centre that would be able to co-ordinate activities across the University, the proposal was greeted with derision by the former Chair of the School. Incidentally, my experience of dealing with this particular individual is enough to convince me that to replace a Chairman of the School elected by peers through consensus by a Head of School who is appointed from on high would be a very serious mistake. As Dr Cowley said in a previous speech, 'persuade' rather than 'require' must be the right way to go.
You will find these Centres listed in Ordinances as 'Other Institutions under the Supervision of the General Board', but for financial convenience they are now placed under one of the Schools and their independent status has been lost in all but name: a clear case of budgeting convenience driving academic strategy. This a real problem, because a Centre should be defined precisely by being outside the structure of Schools, since its whole raison-d'être is to bridge the gap. Take the Centre of South Asian Studies. One must admit that there has been a long-running disagreement between the linguists and the historians as to priorities. As a result of the Review and the Report, the historians have won and appropriated two posts, so all of a sudden the proposal is to put the Centre into the other School. This is quite absurd. Not only does it perpetuate the mistake of having a Centre inside a School, it makes it difficult for our Sanskritists to join, because institutions in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences need languages but never quite know what to do with them.
I know that this runs absolutely counter to present General Board policy, which is, I understand, just about to propose that the placing of 'Centres' into Schools be formalized, but I would like to stick my neck out and ask the General Board to stop and think again. Centres should not be seen as administrative oddities to be shoved into one School or another for the convenience of budgeting, but redefined (or perhaps I should say reaffirmed) as vital bridges linking domains that are in danger of becoming fiefdoms. They should be allowed to run courses or at the very least co-ordinate courses. They should have lectureships allocated to them, staffed properly and not just run via secondment. The fact that this may be difficult under the present RAM structure is a reason to adapt the structure, not the other way round. And if we are worried about them being too small on their own, bind them together in a School of their own as they have been at Oxford. Only then will we be able to break out of our isolation and interact properly with the rest of the University as we must.
In her speech at the beginning of the academical year the Vice-Chancellor touched on a sensitive but vital issue: how to broaden the offerings we give to undergraduates in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. I agree that it is going to be a difficult task to marry this to the continued provision of depth for which we are so justly famous, but it must be tried and a major review of 'Oriental Studies' was the ideal forum in which such matters should have been discussed, since for many of us the much-vaunted Tripos is more straightjacket than well-tailored suit. This is why I am disappointed at the rather flabby nature of the General Board's Report. It talks of 'challenging recommendations' that 'will need to be pursued with vigour by both Faculty Board and the heads of the newly constituted Departments'. But you cannot just leave it to the new Departments to solve a problem that involves dealing with a barrier of increasing thickness between two Schools. May I repeat my conviction that the devolution of more and more powers to School level, entirely understandable from a budgetary point of view, has and will continue to have unlooked-for consequences: the localization of decision making has made it more difficult to recognize and then deal with issues of University-wide concern.
Dr D. R. DE LACEY (read by Dr J. D. SMITH):
Mr Deputy Vice-Chancellor, in between last week's remarks and today, the Press and Publicity Office has thoughtfully highlighted the importance of Indic Studies by a press release on Wednesday concerning UK-Indian research collaborations. Our Vice-Chancellor is quoted as saying 'our ability to share ideas and cross disciplinary boundaries with academic partners is of key importance in maintaining our stature around the world. These awards will facilitate projects that ensure our work is truly global in its reach'. I wonder how she expected those remarks to resonate in the Faculty of Oriental Studies?
The initial report of the Review Committee has some interesting but disturbing material about South Asian Studies. Section 16.5 contains the comment 'Cambridge's distinctive contribution in these areas could be extinguished over time. Aside from the damage to the disciplines, there would be severe reputational risks' if the subjects are lost to the Faculty. The section begins 'the Review Committee has considered a number of possibilities for the future of these minority subjects' (ANE, Hebrew, and South Asian Studies (SAS)). It raises three possibilities only to reject them, and finally opts for lumping SAS with Chinese and Japanese, a wholly inappropriate model.
The Advisory Group which was formed following the Review Committee's report began by focusing on 'intellectual coherence', ignoring the fact that the various areas of the world which we lump together as 'Middle East' display little coherence among themselves. However, by throwing out some bath-water and a surprising number of babies, the Group believes we could import a post in 'cross-language studies' to compensate. In the light of recent events the post-holder would presumably also have had to add Portuguese to the portfolio. The Group goes much further than its parent, proposing the effective abolition of one present vacancy and one current Sanskrit post and a 'broad survey' of SAS in Cambridge. It seems conveniently to have forgotten the dangers to discipline and to reputation.
The Working Group on South Asian Studies which was then set up had yet another approach. It discovered (surely to no-one's surprise) that South Asia does not fit well in the designation 'Middle East' and its study should be removed not just from the Faculty but from the School, to be amalgamated with the Centre of South Asian Studies. The Group also agreed that in the light of the 'relatively small student numbers' the Tripos could be abolished. So we are to have a research centre of excellence which is explicitly to be starved of any new intake in the form of linguistically competent students. Meanwhile the Sanskritists are not to be allocated to the Centre but remain in the Faculty, unable to teach there.
So here we have at least three groups set up to investigate the problems, merely tossing SAS amongst themselves like a bagatelle. None of them demonstrates any clear understanding of either the issues in studying South Asia today, or the structure SAS should have in Cambridge over the coming years. The Faculty offered a Department of SAS which could presumably encompass the Centre and provide that coherence which all these groups claim to be seeking; the Board appears to have ignored that offer (the Minute does not comment on it but reaffirms its own prejudice). The final Report which we have just discussed seems in contrast to provide an utterly incoherent solution, with the current teaching staff left in an uncomfortable position in the Faculty but not of it. This is surely a topic of great concern to our University, and a damning indictment of the General Board's approach.
Dr C. P. MELVILLE:
Deputy Vice Chancellor, let's imagine, for a moment, as employees, working for an organization that had an eye for significant developments in one of its spheres of activity and recognized the value of its place as a market leader.
Such an organization might be expected to notice a large territory stretching from Turkey to Afghanistan and on to South Asia, China, and Japan. Apart from current conflicts and economic strengths, which hardly need recalling here, this area is home to every one of the world's great religions and most philosophical or spiritual systems of thought. All these regions have a long and ancient past, which directly shapes their present; in addition, both the past, present, and future of these regions is intimately linked with our own past, present, and future. Secondly, commanding a capable and experienced personnel, with enviable resources and facilities, this ideal organization would recognize that there are few places better equipped to study these regions, to understand them, to prepare young people to work there, for their own interests, those of the organization, and those of the country. Thirdly, they would try to identify some of the structural obstacles towards realizing this potential, and having done so, seek to overcome them, with a mixture of encouragement, confidence, and commitment of resources. The organization would, overall, expect to take the lead in these fields, to justify a reputation earned by its forefathers, to strive to become the acknowledged centre of excellence concerning this region, to be ambitious, dynamic, bold, inspirational.
It is possible that, in an abstract sense anyway, this is how the University has approached its recent review of Oriental Studies and its provision for their future. If so, the results are a little disappointing. There is little sense of the importance of these subjects or of the difficulties in developing them. Oriental Studies, despite its vast scope, is firmly committed to remaining a 'minority' subject; its peculiar needs are not acknowledged, nor are the obstacles to its development and growth within the Cambridge system identified or discussed (admissions policies, the Tripos and examinations systems, the RAM criteria). There is little sense of pride in enjoying such a resource, of boosting or encouraging the subject; Oriental Studies are a thinly disguised nuisance, with an allegedly complex Tripos (impenetrable to those who have no idea of what it is trying to deliver). The Faculty is implicitly blamed for being prudent with its Trust Funds (fortunately, these funds, donated by benefactors of a more enlightened age, can now help the University meet some of its obligations to maintain teaching and support research); it is blamed for its diversity, its informality, and its flexibility. There is some sense, almost unavoidable for intelligent human beings, that the study of Asia and its languages is relevant also to many other disciplines within the University, but there is no serious engagement with the problems of how these links may be fostered and developed. And of course, there are no new financial resources dedicated to 'improving the service'.
Tinkering with the way the Faculty is organized is a wholly inadequate response to the opportunity for reviewing its remit. It is symptomatic of the situation, indeed, that the questions raised by the role and future of Oriental Studies in Cambridge are purely bureaucratic ones, as are the attempted 'solutions'.
A word about supply and demand - in Edinburgh, there are 103 students for Islamic History; 130 for the Modern Middle East. This may simply be a demand for Edinburgh, not for Middle East Studies, but I doubt it; the same situation is common outside Oxbridge. It would be insulting to suggest that these students are not bright enough to get into Cambridge: there is clearly more than that behind our pitiful failure to grasp and act on the importance and appeal of these subjects. Even in the USA, where policies towards the Middle East have been formed and carried out with breath-taking incompetence, numerous new University posts have been committed since 9/11 to Arabic and Islamic Studies, generally on the initiatives of individual University authorities. Cambridge, however, chooses to go in the opposite direction.
This may seem a long preamble to a discussion of the future. The fact is, that until attitudes change, the situation will not alter. We've all heard about the 'tough decisions' to be made by the Oriental Faculty (rather less about the bad decisions made for us); we all want to move on, to put recent events behind us. Move on to what?
Being an optimistic and energetic person, and having faith in my colleagues also, I have no doubt whatsoever that if we were allowed to get on with our jobs, in an environment basically supportive of, and sensitive to, our efforts, what's left of Oriental Studies would go from strength to strength. There's nothing wrong with change (even for its own sake); as Washington Irving put it, 'there is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse; as I have found in travelling in a stage coach, it is often a comfort to shift one's position and be bruised in a new place' (Tales of a Traveller). There is no doubt that the surviving subjects (Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian) are vital areas of study, will continue to command relatively high levels of applications and admissions, and that these areas are relevant to many other fields within the University. The Chinese section at last has permission to advertise for the vacant Chair; a new Chair starts in Modern Arabic, a Lectureship has just been filled in modern Japanese, and a strong case has been made for a Lectureship in Contemporary Middle East Politics and Society. These may seem like gains for the survivors (what happens to the study of the ancient Near East and South Asia remains mired in half-baked irresolutions: there even seems to be a new-found desire to develop South Asian Studies, but it is not at all clear why this cannot be done within the Faculty, rather than relocating it elsewhere). The gains, however, are illusory. With a verve reminiscent of British industrial management of the 1970s and 80s, we have already been notified that once the RAE is over, not only is there a total freeze on posts, but the Faculty (like others across the University) will have to lose two more; back to square one. Are we still paying the price of the CAPSA fiasco? Quis custodet custodes? These are issues that concern not just Oriental Studies.
Meanwhile, develop a new M.Phil., plan more outreach activities, plan how to address lifelong learning programmes, fill in more forms on time allocation, don't admit more undergraduates, teach less language, teach fewer hours, don't even consider recovering Turkish (a casualty of the last round of cuts) or offering Korean; when we say, list your ideal objectives or where you would like to be in five years' time, don't be silly and actually show any inclination for growth! Go off and raise money, but only for things we approve of. Oh, and by the way, don't forget to produce first-class research in your free time; but don't expect sabbatical leave to continue like this, and certainly don't expect substitute teaching money to fill your absence.
It is clear that Oriental Studies will be substantially weakened and reduced if the proposed restructuring and redistribution of its studies goes ahead. It is our task to ensure that this reduction does not increase our future vulnerability. We are confident that we have the vision and the energy to succeed, and to seize such opportunities as are presented by the present changes. How we will measure success, however, remains an unanswered question: it is normally measured by expansion, growth, and raising standards of skills and achievements. The University seems bent on making such targets unattainable. Our managers appear mindful still of the value of Cambridge's reputation, so there are always grounds for hope. Let's just remember, that the reputation of the University depends on the quality of its research, not on the number of its committees, bureaucratic initiatives, and advisory boards, and that research requires a conducive environment in which to flourish.