The department is an unstable and confused mess and a large part of it is due to the high staff turnover. In the time it takes an ordinary student to complete a sociology major the entire staff of the department will have changed with only one or two exceptions.

As a result students get little chance to get to know staff and the continual comings and goings leave students just a little bit dazed and confused as more and more new faces appear and more and more old faces disappear.

Due to understaffing, the staff are over-worked and their lectures generally uninspiring. Those staff encouraging a questioning critical approach in students receive little support from the department. And the one constant factor—the department's head. Professor Robb—appears either to be ignoring these problems or playing a major part in their propagation.

So what's wrong?

Most of the staff for the department come from overseas due to lack of New Zealand applicants for positions. On the basis of Vic's good name (overseas that is) we get a reasonable selection of staff. They have their travel to New Zealand paid in full provided they stay a minimum of three years.

The problem is that most stay the three year minimum and then leave.

It can be seen from the box that even New Zealand staff members take the earliest opportunity to leave the department.

1975 will bring a totally changed staff from even early 1973. Mostly coming from overseas, the new staff will experience many problems settling into the country, university department etc and these problems will, en bloc, on unsuspecting students.

It would be easy to explain this away by saying that staff have put their 'careers' above the interests of students. It would be easy except that several of the leaving or left staff have enjoyed and fostered very good relations with their students. Pat O'Malley (left 1973) and Stephen Mugford (leaving 1974) are just two of those staff who enjoyed good relations with their students. They demanded a critical response to their teaching and by and large accepted the resultant criticisms. O'Malley went to the highly rated London School of Economics. While by no means perfect in their approach or acceptance of what is essentially a bourgeois science they represented a significant body of staff trying to break down the pervading concepts of staff elitism and student passivity.

Those that leave the department do not on the whole appear to be leaving for purely selfish reasons. The inner workings of the Sociology Department seem the more likely cause.

There is no doubt that students are perturbed and troubled over the high turnover of Soc. Dept. staff. Courses change willy nilly as do the expensive set lexis, adding up to a lack of a consistent approach. This can only be at the expense of students trying to master social science. Resultant chronic understaffing means lecturers and tutors too often teach theories that are divorced from current social practice because they do not have sufficient time to go out on research. This shows up in a dull and uninspiring set of courses and increased student cynicism. The bleak prospect of 1975 brings matters even more to a head and and action is needed immediately to change matters.

What needs changing

Duplication of courses within social sciences is one of the causes of understaffing. Social change and urban studies are taught by various separate departments and could profitably be combined into interdisciplinary courses cutting out wastage of staff resources.

But this is not the prime solution to the sociology department's woes. As I said before one must look inside the department to trace this.

There appears to be two main factors. One is the lack of promotion given to able staff members. Staff have been consistently let down in their expectations for promotion and no indications have been forthcoming from the top to make staff feel that they will get promotion. Overworked staff tend to become disillusioned as again and again their claims are passed by. Secondly staff advocating a critical approach earn the ire of the powers that be. If a staff member builds up good student relations then he can expect no congratulations but spite and of course no chance of promotion.

A lot of these threads appear to lead to Professor Robb—head of the Department. Prof. Robb is the only member of the department left from 1969 but he's been round a lot longer than that and naturally some of the blame must fall on him for the current state of affairs. He is responsible for presenting the case for staff promotions in his department. He could well have acted on streamlining courses and reducing staff workloads. He, too, is responsible to a large extent of meek acceptance of the same old ideas and the reification of staff into an elite, unquestionable by mere students.

These problems in the sociology department are very pressing and students will continue to suffer unless action is taken. Members of the administration of this university and those m the Department of Sociology and Social Work who have allowed this situation to occur either through blindness or conscious activity have something to answer for and a responsibility to act quickly to improve this situation and prevent it from recurring.

—Bruce Robinson