No Contact with Students

While at no stage have they made direct contact with students for ideas about these matters that affect them, a body of English students has tried to open a dialogue with the Department. A staff/student meeting has been held, and many encouraging noises have been exchanged about mutual consideration, further investigation etc. etc. Fine. But soon the decisions are to be made. In order that the department gets evidence of what student feeling is about the future direction of English courses a petition will shortly be circulated around classes. The ideas in the petition are not anyone's ego trip, just a few suggestions that have come from the meetings. They're offered for your consideration, to agree, disagree, amend or replace with your own ideas as you will. And the petition will not be presented to the department in any spirit of antagonism. As yet, we have no reason to doubt the department when it says it will heed student opinion.

The changes are about two things.

So far, the only insights that the department has given into its reason for teaching what it does has been to say that it has "certain resources at its disposal" and "certain ideas about its duty to English literature". It hasn't elaborated on the nature of either, the resources or the ideas. In other words, its saying "we can offer only these courses but that's okay because these are the courses we should offer." End of discussion. But lets look at the structure and contents of these courses to try and work out the reasoning behind it, and sec whether suitable alternatives can be suggested.