University English Executive Committee Meeting Friday 27 June 2014 at 2.30pm Humanities Meeting Room, Chancellor’s Building Keele University Minutes present Susan Bruce (SB, chair), Linnie Blake, Delia Da Sousa Correa (DSC), Fiona Douglas, Claire Hurley, Gordon McMullan (GMc), Will May, Alex Thomson, Alison Waller apologies Natasha Alden (NA), Katharine Cox (KC), Alison Findlay, Elspeth Graham, Juliet John, Gail Marshall (GM), Jago Morrison (JM), Seamus Perry, Angelique Richardson, Fiona Robertson, Ceri Sullivan, Kathryn White (KW) NB The meeting was not quorate, so all decisions will be subsequently ratified via the executive committee e-mail list. 1. Minutes of Executive meeting of 3 April 2014 matters arising: a) AHRC postgraduate data. We have data about funded postgraduate students from AHRC, but this data would be more useful were the statistics presented by period, geography, and then theoretical/critical field; it would also be helpful to have clarification about the meaning of ‘classification by area’. We will approach AHRC to ascertain whether they can provide us with data presented in these ways. ACTION: SB b) We need to judges for the University English Book Prize. SB and DSC will serve; volunteers to be sought from other committee members. The conferral of the book prize will be deferred to the AGM. ACTION: SB 2. Chair’s report It has been a busy time since the AGM, not least because of renaming/rebranding. Thanks were expressed to JM for creating the new logo; and to NA for setting up the Twitter account (@univenglish), which has 170 followers already. 3. Our response to a Sunday Times article on the new OCR A-level Lang & Lit syllabus had been published in short form in the paper and blogged in its full form by the English and Media Centre, as well as tweeted by the EMC; the EMC and OCR were very grateful for our intervention. University English had identified and pointed out to The New Statesman that an article in a recent edition borrowed very heavily from an article written last year for THE by Eaglestone/Kovesi, which was now completely out of date. We had alerted those colleagues to the issue and written to The New Statesman pointing this out; our letter was not published, and no reply was received, neither to our letter nor to a follow up communication requesting a response. We had submitted a letter to The Observer when they singled out English in an article arguing that there were too many UK universities, but our letter was sent in too late: unlike the dailies, which can accept material up to the evening before, submissions to the Sundays appear to need to be sent of by the Wednesday before. University English played a significant role in coordinating the response to the University of London’s plan to close the Institute of English Studies. This was a huge amount of work (500 e-mails in four or five days), and resulted in a suspension of the proposed closure. The IES has a year’s grace; further interventions in future months will be necessary if it is to be protected beyond this year. University English will send in a formal submission to any consultation. KC and KW had attended the training day for subject leaders of English & Creative Writing day (run by Nicole King of HEA); it looks unlikely that HEA will run Subject Networking Days in the future (more later under Conferences). Open Access: the issues were complex and opinions of the subject community various; University English should ensure that it reports both sides of the debate, rather than be partisan at this stage Interim Treasurer’s report See attached report from JM: 51 depts have paid; some depts that have paid before haven’t paid this year. JM has created a paypal account. JM: there have been continued problems with Lloyds Bank, including several fraudulent transactions on the account; these have now been resolved. We discussed whether or not continue banking with Lloyds, deciding that it is easier to stay with them despite our reservations about their service. We minute our thanks to JM for the work he has done trying to sort this out. 4. Conferences and meetings University English/EA joint conference. and OGM (Dec, one day), AGM (Easter, two days). We discussed GM’s tabled paper on the joint conference. Bob Eaglestone and Simon Kovesi had been keen to hold the event in 2015; we thought this too soon and preferred 2016. A steering group for the conference, led by Bob Eaglestone and GM had been convened and had met; it had decided on the 2016 date, but subsequent to that meeting it became obvious that that would clash with IAUPE and ESSE conferences that year. The proposal now is to hold smaller events in 2015. It would make more sense to hold a larger even in a year that did not clash with ESSE (eg in 2017). Location for the projected University English/EA conference, possible venues mooted are Manchester, Newcastle or Leeds. Meanwhile, we will plan capacity-building events to be sure what our peers want and to establish strategies to avoid people going to their own period panels only. OGM We propose to run a day-long event of this kind as the OGM, open to nonmembers as well as members, with a differential fee structure for member and non member departments. We discussed potential topics, of general interest yet also focused enough to make sure people attend. Suggestions included: Health of discipline/are we in decline? Politics and English Unity/diversity of English Schools/universities What we believe the discipline to be. There was broad support for a focus addressing the unit/ diversity of English; and, given the proximity of the election, for the AGM to focus on Politics and English. Shape of day: exec meeting and dinner day before; business meeting to begin (one hour); two panels of short position papers to get panel debate going, short abstracts ideally to be circulated in advance, then open out to members: English across the spectrum (WM/CH); English within departments (SB/GM); plenary lecture (suggestions include Stefan Collini, Michael Rosen). OGM: first weekend in December (5/6); exec meeting & dinner the night before. Discussion of AGM to take place at OGM exec meeting. ACTION: SB, JM FD to decide appropriate fee structure ACTION: FD to book IES ACTION: WM/ CH to identify and approach participants for panel one ACTION: SB, GM to identify and approach participants for panel two ACTION: SB to write to all HoDs about event ACTION: FD to coordinate panels. Europe (document previously circulated by David Duff ‘Notes on SAES conference 2014’). Suggestions in David Duff’s paper were discussed. The meeting agreed to continue to invite individuals on the exec to attend European conferences and to invite the President of ESSE (or delegate) to University English’s AGM, and to pursue connections with Europe through other means, e.g. links on websites. Early careers event: To be held in January 2015 at King’s College London. Topics may include the landscape of English, introducing attendees to University English, EA, Subject Centre, etc. Event to be designed for postdocs and young lecturers rather than PhD students. ACTION: GM to work with other exec members to fix a date and decide the programme. 5. Membership There are 115 or so English departments; under half of these are currently members of University English although there are 44 departments that have at some point in the past participated. We hoped that opening up the OGM to non-member departments might encourage departments to join; we also discussed coordinating approaches to non-member departments. Further to an offer from AT, as regional rep, to contact HoDs at non-member departments in Scotland, we decided to zone depts and divide between us the process of making phone contact with HoDs based on an agreed list of questions, including what we could do that would make non-member departments wish to join. It was agreed that this process cannot begin until problems with the website are sorted out. Action: SB and FD to allocate institutions to exec members Action: SB to draft letter to non-member department HoDs for committeee members to send as initial approach.) Action: exec members then to send email to current Head of Depts for which they are responsible, and follow up with phone call a week later if there is no response. 6. Officers’ role descriptions; working-group affiliations working groups: These are divided as follows: a) Website/internet/social media: AW, GM, GMc, NA, CH b) Research-related (inc OA, impact): AT, LB c) Teaching-related (inc schools): SB, WM d) Communications/public relations: SB, AR, GM, FD (first port of call for PR questions as they arise) role descriptions: Action: role holders to write job descriptions and compare. We need a deputy treasurer (AT to talk to JM to find out role of deputy). We agree that we will ask an external professional to do the books. Teaching buyout for officers in major roles (two hours per week). We agreed to this in principle at last AGM; exec endorses this again, suggesting we do so for one semester and then bring to members at December OGM business meeting. Agreed to extend this to president and secretary for next semester, subject to the finances being sufficient to cover this expense, and to explore funding other time-consuming tasks, such as Twitter/ website work, and admin help for key projects. 7. Website and internet presence There were continuing problems with the website; the banner and some material has been changed, but we need a new domain name so that the website will come up when people search for ‘University English’. Paul Vetch has been asked to create new domain name, and to give access details to NA, also to migrate the site onto something we can more easily amend ourselves. NA wants exec members to tweet; volunteers needed. A Facebook page was discussed, and LB offered to set one up. (Working party should discuss with LB.) Action: AW, GM, GMc and NA to meet and make plan for website. 8. Regional reports None on this occasion. From now on this will be a starred item on the agenda. 9. AOB: none. 10. Date of next meeting: 5 Dec 2014 Professor Gordon McMullan Assistant Secretary, University English