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| DARTINGTON MANAGEMENT HITS THE SPIN BUTTON - Sam Richards |
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It’s clear that some high-up personnel in the South West Regional Development Agency have been lied to – by whom is anyone’s guess. (I’d better keep my theories to myself…) If were them I’d be furious. Jane Henderson and Juliet Williams of the SWRDA both asserted, in a bugged interview with three Save Dartington College campaigners, that the college had been given notice to quit (“vacate the site”) by 2010 by the Dartington Hall Trust. This they said is “the gun to the head”, the “driver” behind the urgency to support the plan to merge with University College Falmouth. Ms Henderson admitted that there had been a change of view from the idea, supported by the first Port Report, that the college’s best option was to stay on site, to the current plan to “relocate” it.
Given that so much of SWRDA’s thinking, on their own admission, has been based on misinformation, we are surely justified in demanding where they got their wrong information from. The first place to look would be to those who have most to gain from it. Perhaps the SWRDA are now getting a taste of what the Save Dartington College has experienced since November 2006.
Now that the “gun to the head” has been denied by the Trust – had its bullets removed, so to speak - the SWRDA has announced that it will meet again in mid-February to reconsider its decision to grant £3.5 million to the plan to destroy Dartington College, one of the last semblances of independent-minded thinking in arts education in an increasingly corporate world.
The recent announcement that MacDonalds will be awarding its own accredited qualifications may seem bizarre to those of us who thought education was all about untrammelled thought, research and seeking after truth of some kind. But I recall that back in the summer of 2007 a Save Dartington College campaigner referred to the branding of Dartington as MacDartington. The two are not as far apart as they may seem.
One genuine difference between the two, however, is that MacDonalds, at least, creates jobs. They may not exactly be the jobs at the top of most people’s wish-lists, but they are jobs nonetheless – sufficient to keep body and soul breathing (just) while waiting to go to MacUniversity. This may be down to the fact that they don’t have people like Vice Principal Mark Taylor or Principal Andrew Brewerton in charge. According to these two gentlemen it is the Save Dartington College Campaign that will be responsible for job losses – if we manage to frustrate their plans to close the college. It was, in part, references to “Alice in Wonderland”, which I called “Malice in Blunderland”, which prompted the Brewerton/Taylor cavalry charge against me whereby they deprived me of 50 hours teaching and called it “dismissal”. Well, I invoke Lewis Carroll once again. If Messrs. Taylor and Brewerton can tell us how closing the college at Dartington either creates or preserves jobs I’ll award them a prize for winning the Caucus Race – which, come to think of it, is what their plans most remind me of. (Remember the passage: “…they began running where they liked, and left off when they liked…”)
How does the destruction of all support staff jobs, as represented by UNISON, suddenly become job creation or preservation? How does the current brain drain of lecturers and other officials of the college amount to preserving jobs? How does the dip in student applications for next academic year encourage or preserve existing jobs? How does closing the college impact on the many part-time jobs students do around the town of Totnes and district? How does the closure of the college represent jobs for the many hourly paid teaching staff – on whom the current college relies rather heavily – who would not uproot to Falmouth on the basis of part-time contracts with limited hours, no benefits and no holiday pay? And, if I may be permitted to be justifiably churlish for a moment, how Mr. Brewerton, does getting rid of me for the most trivial of “offences” followed by two apologies, represent job creation rather than what is really was – a vendetta? How, in the name of the Mad Hatter, the March Hare and the Door-mouse, does the closure of the college create, encourage, preserve, extend or otherwise involve itself in jobs in South Devon?
Gobbledygook, all goobledygook Mr. Taylor. Twaddle Mr. Brewerton. Or rather, perhaps fearing some success on the part of the Save Dartington College Campaign, it seems like a case of covering their backs. What if the Campaign did persuade the RDA, HEFCE et al that the plan to close the college is the deeply flawed scheme that it is, based on figures that have been subject to no Cost Benefit Analysis, dreadful misinformation, partial presentation of very dubious “facts”, appalling management, communication skills not worthy of a five-year old, and indecent haste to climb on the funding band wagon for the latest empire dreamed up by the faceless ones in the ed biz? Clearly the blame would have to be shifted from where it belongs to those who campaigned to save Dartington College from the likes of Brewerton and Taylor.
Says Mr. Taylor: "Stopping the move would actually lead to great loss of jobs. It's the worst-case scenario.” (No, the worst-case scenario has already happened, Mr. Taylor.) "I believe what we're doing is safeguarding jobs, and the active growth of Falmouth would create jobs growth.” (That, of course, is highly reassuring for Totnes.) And finally "If we remained in Dartington, how would we maintain the buildings? What would fund it?” It’s a pity he didn’t ask this question over a year ago. Plenty of people had suggestions – or, at the very least, would have contributed intelligently to the discussion. My impression is that neither he nor any of his cohorts were willing to listen to anything other than their own recipe for a cock-up – or, as they called it, the current “high risk strategy”.
The Save Dartington College Campaign, apparently, is accused of making headlines by saying the college is closing and this has impacted on “parents of prospective students” making “recruiting all that much harder to do”. This deflecting of responsibility would be a brilliant strategy on the part of management if anyone believed it. It goes something like this: put forward a plan to close the college, then pretend its not really closing at all, ignore the total opposition, blame the people who see through it (that’s everyone) and finally claim that a bunch of trouble makers are making headlines which influence prospective students, or rather their parents, in – I don’t know where – Milton Keynes or Ballygobackwards
Let’s be absolutely clear. The Campaign to save the college did not create the climate of uncertainty. It responded to it. As for making headlines – we wish we had done so more often. And to imply that reportage in local newspapers had an impact all over the country and beyond is to attribute to them, and to the Campaign, a power we might wish we (and the Totnes Times) had, but actually don’t have. It is the plan to close the college that has unsettled people up and down the country – as the avalanche of emails and letters the Campaign continues to receive obviously proves.
What all this actually demonstrates is that a small group of oligarchs can make decisions that fundamentally affect everyone’s lives, but the rest of us, the proles, are not supposed to raise a peep about it – or, if we do, they slag us off as if we were the architects of their idiocy. After all, we’re making it hard for them. Diddums.
As for other points made by Mr. Taylor at the recent spin meeting – I mean press conference - they hardly deserve attention – such as: "The student residencies were built in the 1960s, so they're coming up to 50 years old.” I believe the student accommodation at Oxford and Cambridge is a damn sight older. No complaints there.
Then there’s Matt Griffiths: "The Save Dartington College Campaign is making life really difficult. If the funding doesn't come through, that's potentially the closure of the college.” Whether the funding comes through or not the power elite plans to close the college. Period. I know that. You know that. He knows that. Orwell would be proud of the lad.
Griffiths says: "Even if £20million were found, it wouldn't be a solution.” This is known as changing the goalposts to suit the state of play. Vaughan Lindsay, the Trust’s CEO, is publicly on record saying that £20 million would save the college. Now, apparently, it wouldn’t. So who’s telling the lies here?
Ah well, as Alice said: “Curiouser and curiouser”…
And finally we now have disappointing remarks from Tory MP Anthony Steen who has, over the past year, worked closely with the Save Dartington College Campaign. How on earth, therefore, can he maintain that the proposed closure of the college is a “sad end to an experiment that didn’t work?” Dartington College has worked superbly as he knows, and as all government and independent assessments prove. How could a college whose reputation is world-wide, which has been used as a model for other colleges such as CalArts and Mills, both in the USA, and which isn’t failing be said to have not worked? For evidence of an experiment that didn’t work I’d be more inclined to look to the current management. Has that worked? There are many people who don’t think so.
The whole point of the campaign to save the college has rested on two undeniable truths. Firstly, Dartington College IS working. Secondly, that whatever scheme may be dreamed up elsewhere for the last vestiges of the college to be tacked onto, it won’t be Dartington College. When Mr. Steen says "I am relieved it's going to survive but obviously deeply disappointed it isn't going to survive in Dartington” he is talking nonsense. If it doesn’t survive at Dartington it doesn’t survive – period.
On this basis alone – never mind all the other arguments – Mr. Steen should be supporting the Campaign’s demand for a moratorium and full, credible enquiry.
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