Dear fellow Britannicans,
This will be one of the longer posts on this blog, but we'd appreciate it if you took your time to read it. If you're busy doing tutorial work or studying for exams or whatever, the bold parts should tell you the most important things.
It probably hasn't escaped anyone's attention that there is a lot of structural changes going on at our university at the moment. To many of you, all this decision-making probably seems distant and complicated, and it might feel like "it's not really any of our business anyway", which is understandable. However, some of the things that are going on WILL actually affect most of us in one way or another. Here's one thing that makes the Britannica board raging mad: We might lose our students' lounge. Older students have told us that rumours about this have come and gone for several years now, and so far nothing has happened, but now it's being discussed again, and it seems to be pretty serious.
HERE'S WHAT WE KNOW RIGHT NOW:
- As the new structural changes come into effect, one more subject (gender studies) and a number of new researchers are apparently going to be squeezed into Arken, which despite its numerous corridors and departments does not have an endless amount of space.
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The room that is currently our students' lounge is considered big enough to fit four researchers and therefore, we might be forced to move out of there.
- Department secretaries are considered "unnecessary" and such services are somehow going to be centralized, which means there will no longer be a department office (not in the same way as there is today, anyway) and that room will be used for some other purpose - this could perhaps be turned into a new but smaller version of the students' lounge.
- However, the department has to motivate why they want to use a room in a particular way, and there is no guarantee that the "higher instances" (i.e. the people making this kind of decisions) will consider it necessary for us to have a room like the students' lounge at all - especially if the suggestion just comes from the staff.
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These decisions are being made behind closed doors, which means that we might not get any "official" information about this before the decisions have already been made.
HERE'S WHAT WE'RE GOING TO DO:
- We need to show the "higher instances" that the students' lounge is actually being used and that we need it in order to stay sane (where else would we hang out between classes and complain about our heavy workload and drink coffee and do group projects?!).
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Next Tuesday, the 14th of October at 12 noon, we're meeting up in the students' lounge. We will have a small "photosession" in order to gather visual proof that people actually use the room. The more people in the pictures, the better, so please do come along, even if you don't consider yourself photogenic - the point is to make the photos look natural, so you're more than free to put your nose in a book for the pictures, or sit with your back against the camera.
- The board will also put together a sort of angry letter/petition to the decision-makers that we can use later, if necessary. You will be able to sign this petition-thingy during the photosession, and we'll probably leave it in the students' lounge afterwards so people can sign even if they can't make it to the meet-up on Tuesday.
- After this, we're going to contact Kåren - this is the kind of issue they should be able to help us with (at least according to a representative of theirs that we spoke to in the spring).
So basically: If you think Britannica, and by extension, all students at the English department, should get to keep our beloved room: SHOW UP IN THE STUDENTS' LOUNGE TUESDAY 14.10 AT 12.
Thanks x
The Board
