I wasn’t going to comment on this, I really wasn’t, but Twitter and Facebook feeds full of petitions and protests and posts has compelled me to act otherwise. I’ll start by saying that I have no involvement with ANU or the School of Music, I am simply commenting as someone who has a) a music degree, b) a rather vested interest in higher education and c) long-term involvement in a music community and the awareness of the politics therein.
I’m not going to start with a whinge. I’m going to start with an analogy. I’m going to tell you about a theoretical new degree in science (which will be called a degree in science even though it is in fact in chemistry). Humour me.
In this degree, students come to the program primarily to study chemistry, and only chemistry. Their goal is to become a chemical scientist who is renowned as elite in their field. In order to facilitate this, the university employs a number of staff whose sole purpose is to provide one-to-one tutorials in specific strands of chemistry for students. There’s a tutor for organic chemistry, inorganic chemistry, physical chemistry and so on, all employed as academic staff. No student is required to pay for this private tuition (which is over and above their normal unit enrolment), but they also cannot seek tuition from outside tutors. No additional HECS can be charged to cover the salaries of these staff. Students are still of course required to take general units in chemistry to make up their degree, all taught by chemistry lecturing faculty.
Students are able to do an entire degree without ever studying other strands of science. No physics, no biology. Even though careers as professional chemical scientists are extremely rare and most graduates will in fact end up working as high school science teachers, private science tutors, or in science administration, there is no obligation to ever study science more widely than chemistry. In fact, physics and biology are looked down on as being inferior, ‘easy’ sciences that sully the value of the chemistry profession. Additionally, while a separate program for lab work based on radioactive elements is available, the standard program requires students to undertake lab work only using the ‘original’ non-radioactive elements (although carbon is only tolerated, since that verges dangerously close to biology).
No university or tax payer in their right mind would support this kind of degree structure. It is completely unsustainable financially, does little towards preparing students for any sort of realistic career, and is dangerously narrow in focus (although any scientists/chemists are welcome to tell me if study of other areas of science is in fact unnecessary). Any proposed degree program in another area would similarly (and rightly) be shot down.
Except in music. For some reason, the above degree structure has been deemed perfectly acceptable (and, in fact, desirable above all other possible structures) for many, many years. And it is complete madness. For all of these years students have been flocking to conservatories to study with ‘elite’ tutors (who nobody seems to ask who is paying to fund) to strive for the fabulously unattainable (in almost all cases) goal of becoming an ‘elite’, full-time professional musician. For all of these years students have been receiving degrees in performance with little to no nod to musicology, composition or ethnomusicology, with an almost exclusive focus on Western art music written between 1600 and 1950 (or ‘jazz’, because that’s the only other kind of music there is, obviously). For all these years people have been denigrating any music that falls outside of these bounds to an unbelievable degree, on no grounds other than tradition, elitism and rather specific sense of aesthetic. It’s broken. It is completely unsustainable financially, does little towards preparing students for any sort of realistic career, and is dangerously narrow in focus. And we desperately need to start questioning it.
Maybe ANU is nuts. Maybe the ‘fire all the staff’ approach is a little too radical. But to finally take action on an untenable system is something that should at least be investigated with interest rather than media scaremongering. To me, it’s not a death knell. It’s not the end of music as we know it. It’s the beginning of a good hard rethink that’s been a long time coming. And I, for one, like the sound of that.
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