The Department I work for, the English and German Department of UAB, is very confused about its own history, meaning that we don\u2019t really know where we come from. We have not bothered so far to keep track of our main events and their chronological progression, and I don\u2019t know whether we\u2019re typical or atypical in this. The Universitat Aut\u00f2noma de Barcelona was founded on 6 June 1968 and the school, the Facultat de Filosofia i Lletres, on 27 July of the same year. Yet, there is no information online about when the Departament was founded and digging deeper means bothering a number of persons who might or might not have the relevant information. This is worrying. A new emeritus professor has promised that she will soon do this deep digging, but we\u2019ll see, as she\u2019s still very active in her research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I became a UAB student in September 1986 and learned then that the Department was originally part of EUTI (Escuela Universitaria de Traducci\u00f3n e Interpretaci\u00f3n), which is now the Facultat de Traducci\u00f3. In the early 1980s, the Department of English and German became attached to the Facultat de Filosofia i Lletres. Legislation passed in 1983 (Ley de Reforma Universitaria or LRU) regulated the old-style \u2018c\u00e1tedras\u2019 and introduced departments, I assume that in imitation of Anglo-American universities. Before that, full professors (\u2018catedr\u00e1ticos\u2019) had total control over the funding of their areas and the persons employed to teach the corresponding subjects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This was a pyramidal, hierarchical system and I can see that the transition towards a more democratic, managerial system, must have been very hard, particularly considering that it put an end to the Spanish state\u2019s direct intervention in the universities, made fully autonomous by the 1983 decree (passed by Felipe Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019s Socialist Government). My university was, in fact, together with Madrid\u2019s own Aut\u00f3noma, an early experiment of that type. The doctoral dissertation by Leonardo S\u00e1nchez Ferrer, Pol\u00edticas de reforma universitaria en Espa\u00f1a: <\/em>1983-1993<\/em> (1996), from Madrid\u2019s Aut\u00f3noma, argued that the deployment of the new departments found a number of important obstacles, and I can imagine that these came mainly from old-style professors who didn\u2019t want to lose their power. I\u2019m beginning to understand a few things in my own Department.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m writing about all this because last week, in the final Department meeting of this academic year, it was announced that the law passed in 2023 (LOSU, Ley Org\u00e1nica del Sistema Universitario) makes it compulsory for universities to reduce the number of departments, in principle to minimise expenses connected with their administration, though this target seems quite dubious. In our case, it seems we might be fused into a single Modern Languages and Literatures Department, together with the French, Spanish and Catalan Departments. This is no shock since our administration units merged a few years ago. The new legislation, however, comes at a time when UAB departments have existed for decades and after the diverse heads have made great efforts to consolidate their identities. This new legal measure has been received with very little enthusiasm and in the case of the Catalan Department with the threat of open revolt, for evident nationalist reasons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a similar process, the Universitat de Barcelona decided a few years ago to maintain the departments of Filologia Catalana i Ling\u00fc\u00edstica General and of Filologia Hisp\u00e0nica, Teoria de la Literatura i Comunicaci\u00f3, while creating a Frankensteinian creature called the Departament de Lleng\u00fces i Literatures Modernes i d’Estudis Anglesos, which gathers together sections for Slavic, French, Italian, Galician, Portuguese, German and English Studies. Being bigger than the others by far, the English Studies Department forced UB to include its name in the new macro-department before becoming a section.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At UAB we have just a Department of French, but they lost their BA degree a few years ago, after trying to keep it alive jointly with UB, for lack of student demand. UAB\u2019s French teachers are mostly employed in the combined degree English and French Studies, and in the School of Translation, which apparently they want to join. No new staff have been hired or given tenure since the loss of the BA degree, which means that when the extant staff retires, in a maximum of ten years, the French Department will be gone. Unless, that is, it\u2019s lost earlier in the supposed fusion with other modern language departments, perhaps with English.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Departments, in short, die in two ways (or three, if we contemplate sudden defunding). A department can gradually disappear when the degrees it offers are suppressed for lack of demand and the staff eventually retires, or it can be merged into a bigger unit. The French Department is about to go through the two processes simultaneously, while we, the English and German Department, a very solid component of the school\u2019s degrees offer, might cease being an independent unit. Or not. In fact, the law calls for mergers but offers the chance to establish sections with their own head within the new department\u2019s admin structure. Nobody among my colleagues, nor I, understands how this makes admin cheaper. It\u2019s not clear yet, besides, how the heads of the new-style departments will be chosen, nor who will have the right to vote in the meetings. What is at stake is not just a matter of identity or scholarly coherence, but jobs. Everyone is very much afraid that decisions about their section\u2019s positions will be made by persons outside it, and this is indeed a main concern.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is an associated matter I want to mention today. We award yearly a prize to the best BA dissertations in each area, Language and Linguistics, and Literature and Culture. When we started doing this (I can\u2019t remember exactly when), we decided to name the award after two members of our staff we lost too soon, respectively, Mia Victori and Guillermina Cenoz. Mia passed away fifteen years ago, when she was only 45, and Guillermina around twenty years ago, when she was 63. I was asked to improvise a brief speech for the award ceremony about who they were because the dissertations coordinator is a younger teacher who, besides, comes from another university. She didn\u2019t know either of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I looked at the audience, I realized I was one of the few people in the room who could remember Mia and Guillermina, and said so, feeling quite disheartened that this was the case. Each in their style, Mia and Guillermina had a very positive influence on our Department: Mia with her commitment and passion as a researcher (she was into Applied Linguistics), and her friendliness; Guillermina with her infinite kindness and qualities for mentorship (she introduced theatre and short fiction in our Department). The key question here is who are we as a collective if we can\u2019t remember the persons we have lost? We are young enough as a Department to be able to remember them all, but at the same time I became aware last week that we have recently undergone quite a generational shift, with staff coming from other universities, that needs to be addressed. Urgently, before we are merged with other departments and are demoted to being a mere section.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 You might think that perhaps I\u2019m the most suitable person to write a history of the Department, being so interested in this topic and having now reached the ripe age of 60. I\u2019ve been, besides, attached to the Departament, as a student and a teacher, for 40 years. However, I have decided not to volunteer because there is a part of that history which, if told candidly, might be too painful. A few days ago I met after many years a friend from secondary school. When I described how the Department was run when I first became a teacher, she asked whether I had done anything to make it better. I\u2019m proud to say that I have, indeed, but what I went through can\u2019t be integrated into an \u2018official\u2019 version of the Department\u2019s history, this is why I will never write it. All that is a matter for posts I\u2019m not ready to write yet, but that I know I will have to write one day. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Spanish university departments were born in 1983 and LOSU has decreed fifty years later that some should die to be reborn as mere sections; we\u2019ll see how we cope with that unwanted metamorphosis. This and the generational changes make it imperative to start writing our histories, though I wonder who can be the best historians. Not I, for sure, though I have enjoyed learning today a little bit about where our departments come from\u2026 before they go for good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Department I work for, the English and German Department of UAB, is very confused about its own history, meaning that we don\u2019t really know where we come from. We have not bothered so far to keep track of our main events and their chronological progression, and I don\u2019t know whether we\u2019re typical or atypical […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,34],"tags":[1515,1511,1512,446,1514],"class_list":["post-4572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research","category-teaching-tools-and-rules","tag-department-history","tag-ley-de-reforma-universitaria-lru","tag-ley-organica-del-sistema-universitario-losu","tag-spanish-university","tag-university-departments"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4572"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4572\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4573,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4572\/revisions\/4573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}